Vegetable Planting

I paused to admire the Dwarf Crested Iris on my way up to the roadside vegetable garden. Good thing I was busy and not prepared to plant during last weekend's cold snap. Some roadside vegetables do not like cold snaps.

I picked up tomatoes and peppers on my way home. It's almost May 15th and we are back to eighty degree days. I can risk that being the last cold snap.

As God as my witness, this year I will grow the sweetest cantaloupe ever know to man. Or not. What I plant and what I get are not always the same thing.

The tomatoes and peppers were neatly planted in heaping rows of dung. I buy those. Squashes, melons and cucumbers I grow from seed. Those were planted in four inch pots during the cold snap last weekend.

The roadside vegetable garden is always full of volunteers. Already there are mystery melons, random sunflowers, dill, tomato seedlings and rogue potatoes. You can never find them all and even a pea sized potato will sprout and grow.

The cantaloupe will be getting there own special section up top this year since they were a complete failure in the dung piles last year. I still have okra and parsnips to sow and whatever else I might fancy to fill the garden.

I grow vegetables just because I can. I plant them, weed a bit and eat of bunch of it. I might be more dedicated if I had a better chef.

My real interest lies elsewhere.

I feel fairly certain this is a Doll's Eyes, Actaea pachypoda that fell out of the ground and followed me home. I'll know better if it blooms again this year. That is how I found it last year. At this point I don't think it even knows it was moved.

Art made from junk gives me more of a thrill than banana peppers. The sweetest cantaloupe ever known to man might change my mind.

The biggest, the darkest and the last, Trillium vaseyi is in bloom. There is a new and quite large suspicious trillium plant near these. Has it spread by a runner?

Trillium vaseyi came from the same roundup danger zone where the Doll's Eye was found. I pointed out the dozens of Showy Orchis I found there last year in the hopes it might encourage a change of ways. It did not. The Doll's Eye is coming with me.

The Black Iris is getting ready to strut its stuff. This has become three patches now. I'm trying to increase my stock. It's slow going.

The crinum lilies have come back after two winters in a row. They were mild winters so I still don't trust them. Even if they survive, will they ever get enough size on them to bloom?

I can spend an hour easy in the wild cultivated garden, just walking through. I'm in and out of the roadside vegetable garden in ten minutes. That means something.

Rain has come to water in all this week's new plants. Thank you very much. I don't have the time or the irritation system to water things. Rain works much better.