How time flies, regardless of whether you're having fun or not!
Seems like we were just celebrating apple blossoms, and now we are well into late spring in the Laughing Dragon Garden. So, we are well past due for a garden journal update!
I started rescuing "volunteer" pansies out of our lawn a couple of years ago, and now they are all over the garden!
Although we got a bit of a late start this year — thanks to a couple of late cold spells and busy personal lives — it looks like we're on our way to having a great season!
Our raised beds underwent considerable soil improvement and "refreshing" from having several bags of enriched soil added to each, along with some chicken manure. Everything was thoroughly turned over and mixed and allowed to "settle" before planting and sowing began.
Meanwhile, the roses are starting to bloom, and one of them actually offered us up a surprise.
We had a lovely pink rose which got severely knocked back by a hard freeze, and in 2025 it did not flower at all... producing only lots of greenery. This year, however, it is full of buds and is setting lots of deep red flowers!
Our formerly pink roses
Our best guess is that it died back all the way to the root stock and it is now the root stock that is coming back up and flowering in the form of a deep red climbing rose. We are planning to "train" it to grow all over the fence behind it.
Meanwhile, the herb bed is jumping!
Herbs have consistently been the biggest success story in the Laughing Dragon Garden. They pretty much take care of themselves and keep growing and coming back year after year, some through self-seeding, and some simply because they're perennials.
Some marjoram that was on the property when we moved here has become one of our favorite forms of deer resistant ground cover.
Although we're not really "supposed to," we let the chives Bloom because they attract lots of bees and other pollinators. Besides, the flowers are pretty and we can collect the seeds and get wild chives to grow all around the property. Which is a good thing, because they are also deer resistant!
I am particularly happy that my tarragon plant is doing as well as it is, having died back completely during the winter. Tarragon tends to be rather fickle and doesn't necessarily do well in our gray and damp northern climate.
Meanwhile, what was some extremely feeble and anemic winter spinach has suddenly decided to take off and grow with a vengeance, and now we suddenly have lots of fresh spinach this early in the season.
In fact, there will be some for dinner tonight!
It's a little old and woody for salads, but definitely worthy of being turned into cooked spinach as a vegetable.
The strawberries are doing quite well, and hopefully we should see the first ripe berries by mid-June.
We used some of the old plants, removing them completely from the bed, improving the soil and then replanting them, a technique that has been quite successful for several years.
We did add a few new plants in this year, as the "parents" are starting to become five to six years old, which is stretching our luck a bit. However they still seem to be producing quite well.
The thing about strawberries is that most of the modern hybrid varietals tend to revert to their "wild" state after about 3-4 years.
Meanwhile, this year's tomato plants are doing quite well! Unlike the ones we have gotten in past years, they don't seem to be suffering from "transplant shock" which is certainly a welcome change!
We grow primarily Roma's which are really good for sauce, we're just a couple of plants providing the more conventional "beefsteak" tomatoes.
We have actually cut back on the number of tomato plants we keep, following the great tomato overflow of 2021, where our 12 plants yielded something on the order of 120lbs (50+ kg) of fruit!
We're not big tomato eaters/users because we both have allergies to anything from the nightshade family.
So, those tiny little Sprouts in the pot (above) are my attempt at once again growing red peppers!
The last time I successfully grew hot peppers was in 2014, and they grew in virtually pure chicken manure and were extremely successful. Then our neighborhood association next the idea of people keeping chickens and nothing has been the same since.
I have tried growing them numerous times, but the end result has been a couple of small wrinkly peppers. Maybe this will be the year...!
We have a few winter squash plants that we purchased a small plants from a nearby nursery, and I'm also trying to grow acorn squash from seed. The latter are taking their sweet time but they have finally started sprouting.
Next, we have the beginnings of some fancy purple spotted pole beans that we bought on a whim while buying the plants at the nursery. We're growing these from seed. It's completely new to us, so we'll see.
Sadly, our regular green pole beans — which normally are incredibly bountiful — all appear to have had the seeds rot in the ground without germinating. So we get to start over and the bean harvest will be a bit late this year.
As always, we have a large volume of arugula (also known as "rocket" in some parts of the world) and salad greens happening. At upper right you can just see some of the self-seeded arugula from last fall (which is still going strong) and although it's very peppery it adds a nice extra spice to our salads.
Although we had lots of flowers on our apple trees, it's still a little early to be able to tell whether we're going to have a good apple crop this year. In fact, the tiny green apple pictured above was the only one I could find so far. Hopefully more will develop as the weeks and months roll on by.
On a more fun front, we're growing more flowers this year. The picture above shows a long row of sweet peas that are going to hopefully be trained to climb up some netting on the side of the garage. It's a nice sunny location so they should give us some nice and fragrant flowers!
Normally, we have sunflowers in this bed... but those will have to be made a new home, this year!
And here we have lots of seedlings in the starter pots, which are going to hopefully become some colorful zinnias!
Most of the rest of the garden is not far enough along to make for interesting content, but we should be ready for the next update within 7-10 days, especially if we have some more sunny and warm days.
Thanks for visiting — till the next one!
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All photos are my own!