A Trip to the Garden

We took a little trip to the garden today to water and weed and reep the bounties of our laboring. All we got today were these beautiful flowers and some peas. The tomatoes are growing in leaps and bounds with the warm weather that we have been having. We are trying out a new fertilizer regemine called Spray-N-Grow. It is a foliar feeding. I will be watching closely for the results. I am also trying the Bon-Neem insecticidal soap for the terrible white fly infestation that I get at this time every year. I noticed a huge difference the first day. It seemed like it took care of about half the problem. I sprayed the problem plants everyday for about 3 days and it now seems like most are gone. It will take a little time to totally get rid of them, but it is a much more environmentally safe solution than what I have tried in the past so I am willing to wait.

These little Bachelor Buttons were a total surprise to me and my favorite find of the day. I planted them thinking they would just be blue, but there is a beautiful mix of blue, pinks and white. What a wonderful surprise. I also have a lot of dianthus varieties blooming that are just wonderful, but don't seem to hold well for a cut flower. It seems that I love to plant tall growing flowers...the hollyhocks are about 5 feet tall already and a lavatera I planted was about 6 feet tall and wide, but I did some pruning to keep it from hiding a few other flowers. This garden plot is my place to experiment so I am always getting surprises and learning new things. I seem to find invasive plants quite often somehow, but it is all the learning process and I love to garden so I just keep pulling the things I don't want and trying something new!

Some of my most invasive plants that I fight with are monarda, mints, an artemesia, and my dahlias which I loved last year, but now have just spread everywhere probably because I did some changing of my garden layout and moved a lot of dirt around so I probably tranplanted the bulbs when they were dormant without realizing it. Oops! Oh well...there is always shovel pruning for things like that...sometimes I find someone around to share with so it is never wasted.