Yesterday I asked who had started working in their garden. One can approach gardening as a chore, a necessity if you are a farmer, or a way to relax. It’s not going to be relaxing if you don’t enjoy it. For some reason, one of my favorite parts of gardening is composting. This past year we even saved compost in the dead of winter; I tried to put it outside right before a snow storm, because at least then it would be covered in snow. In the warmer months I cover the compost with dirt, but as gardeners know, you can’t shovel frozen dirt. I use a composting method that I call Lazy Composting. I like the idea of recycling my kitchen waste back into nature. My other effort toward gardening has been to order peas, inoculant for the peas, and other vegetable and herb seeds.

Do you have a garden? What is your favorite and your least favorite part of gardening?

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Last week for the first time in almost ten years I had the opportunity to go cross-country skiing while my daughter and her friends were sledding. The red hydrant behind the skis is what qualifies this photo for Ruby Tuesday, a photo meme where you post any photo with some red. And this was before our bigger storm that dumped over a foot of snow. Strangely, the Boston area, which I visited this past weekend and is over five hours drive north of our area of New Jersey, had very little snow.

I learned a good gardening tip on Saturday night while driving from Newton, MA to Marlboro, MA (we were invited to a laser tag party). If one of your small trees gets a lot of snow on it, brush it off with a long broom as soon as you can. Otherwise, the snow may permanently bend the tree into an unhealthy shape. If that does happen, you may have to trim the tree and wait years until it gets back a normal shape.

For more photos with a little or a lot of red:

My block is full of beautiful summer flowers: these echinacea are in the front of my neighbor’s house (two doors down), and the yellow “splotches” you see in the photo are the many rudbeckia (black-eyed susans) blooming in front of my home. I had echinacea growing in my backyard, but they were chewed up, either by deer or by our resident ground hog. Yesterday morning I yelled “get out of here” at the ground hog. I just bought a solar mole chaser. We might buy a love trap. My neighbor down the block caught 11 last year. What can I say, the ground hogs love living in Highland Park.

For more Summer Stock Sunday posts, visit Robin at Around the Island.

Call me impulsive. Or a creative gardener. A risk-taking lawn owner?

I’m sick of grass. I don’t much care for weeds, either. So I pulled up some of my grass in early spring and planted some chamomile seeds on my front lawn. The seeds took a while to germinate, and now I have these pretty, leafy green plants (pictured on right side of photo, under the rudbeckia leaves), but no chamomile flowers yet. While playing with my daughter in the front I pulled up some more weeds. After a while, I had more space to plant in front. My intention was to plant flowers, ideally perennials that would grow back each year. I put in a few, such as creeping phlox, speedwell and Mexican primrose (at left in photo). But there was still room for more. If you recall from an earlier post, I had planted a lot of basil seeds. So I had a lot of basil plants. Since the groundhog or the deer had eaten my dill and chomped at my marigolds and nasturtium in the backyard, I thought my front lawn might be a safer place for my basil. I now have little basil plants in both my backyard and the front yard. And some parsley, too. A few oregano seedlings.

What’s going on naturally where you are? Visit Michelle’s Nature Notes:

Love this new blanket flower, Gaillardia, that I planted in my garden this spring. Such brilliant red and yellow colors in one flower.

Soon I will have many, many of these black-eyed susans or rudbeckia growing all over my garden. Luckily, the animals (ground hog? deer?) don’t seem to eat them. They have already eaten my cone flowers, dill and marigolds. Discouraging.

Lambs ears produce these ultra-pink flowers; you either love ‘em or you pick them away because they are a bit too brilliant. My snapdragons are beginning to show their colors, white alyssum are happily blooming in the front, and a few petunias reseeded themselves from last summer.

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Growing from seed can be so satisfying. My favorite part is when the little seed germinate. Germination is when they pop their little green heads out from the soil (or whatever the substance in which they are growing, some planting material is described as soiless).

Pictured are probably mostly radish seeds that have germinated in my garden, although there might be a lettuce seed that has germinated as well. I saved these seeds in my refrigerator from past years; in a few rows behind these smaller seeds I planted peas. Those I ordered new this year, along with inoculant that is supposed to help the peas germinate.

If you have never planted from seed, two seeds you might want to try are radish and marigold. Radish is quick to germinate, so you can plant it with other spring seeds, and the radishes will come up first. But radishes prefer soil that is a bit on the sandy side (our soil here in Highland Park is naturally full of clay; one needs to mix in other organic elements for better results), and it make take a while to get the actual radish. Radishes grow in the ground, but after a while you may see the bright red head of the radish popping out, requesting you pull out the radish. Marigolds are long, straw like seeds, so they don’t get lost in the soil like some tinier flower seeds. And once they germinate, they already look a bit like the fancy leaves of the marigold. And then you can watch them grow, grow, grow, and you will have fun marigolds all the way until the fall frost.

Have you planted anything from seed?

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