To begin...

The Cultivator* has 2 green thumbs which I feel makes up for my lack of one. Right? (Note: *101 names for my husband, all very nice names)

My goal with this blog is to spend more time researching plants & flowers in the upper mid-west so I can plant a backyard flower garden. Target date 5 years. I’ve bought a magazine Cottage Gardens.

I won’t bore anyone with all the plants I’ve killed mostly unintentionally (those pesky ferns The Cultivator had before we married).

We also have a vegetable garden, which I confess I just don’t know much about either...

Stuff like:
When is a tomato ripe enough to be picked?
How often do you pick beans?
How can you tell when tubers like beats and onions are ready to harvest?
How often do you weed a garden? (when The Cultivator starts getting frustrated is my clue)
*Note- I've been lead to believe that you don't weed until things come up initially.
How long should I water for?
If it isn’t doing well is there something I should do to help it?
What if your seed never sprouts?
Is it legal to shoot the birds eating your bean sprouts?
When I pick spinich do I pull the whole head like lettus, but cut swiss chard?
And those darn strawberries… I waited too long to plant them and watered dead stumps for 2 weeks. What a waste!

Besides the vegetable garden I have kept 1 clematis, and 1 peony alive for 4 years. I have 2 house plant for about 8 months now, and a Peace Lily I bought in March it's touch and go though, I think I need to repot it. But how do I know how big of a pot?


Anyhow after hearing a bit of complaining about my lack of participation in the garden on Friday night, I spent the weekend weeding. I was getting the grasses close to beets, when… oops I pulled up one, then two. Ok, so I will move on and get the big stuff, leaving the less established plants alone.

Then I happened upon a strange a row of nothing, hmmm and another row… and I am thinking to myself this leaf kind of looks like a pepper, but since I planted the pepper plants 1 row up I know I am wrong. Then I spot 2 plants, no idea what they are but I weed everything except those. Then the row past that is odd, it’s not marked with the usual stick, and it’s sort of random. I decide to pull it and see if it looks familiar out of the dirt. Yep it’s an onion… duh. I sort of thought it was familiar looking. So I quickly stuck it back in the hole from which it came and went inside to work in the pottery studio.