Nature's Secret

Nature's Secret
Originally uploaded by Cesar R.

Testing a post from Flickr!

Rain Rain Rain

It's been raining nearly daily for two weeks now. Just a couple of days of nice weather then it started up again.

Vegetable Garden: Yesterday my husband weeded the vegetable garden, and I worked on the herbs and flowers. We're also learning little by little what seeds to put in the ground when. We are still pretty new at this and just expect everything to come up whenever we put it in the ground. Haha Newbie gardeners here, yep. So we'll be planting our brussels sprouts, spinach, more carrots, leeks, cauliflower and some other late fall/wintery harvest veggies later in the season. We're learning!

Herb Garden: My german chamomile did not come up. :( So I have more seeds ready to plant. If they don't come up this time around I won't try again until next year. Yesterday my husband harvested some cilantro to put in the shrimp fried rice I made. It's still not fully grown but the flavor was strong and good.


Our herb garden - the bare spots are where the herbs I planted did not make it. Chamomile, sweet basil, oregano, italian parsley and lavender didn't make it. Bad seeds? Not sure. There's a bit of shade from the nearby tree in the afternoon - I wonder if that's problematic?

Flower Garden: Wildflowers and other mixes of seeds planted last month are coming up nicely, but slowly, since there's not been much sun. I have some seeds from Burpee that is a mailbox/lampost mix. I'm not sure if it's too late to put them in or not but I'm going to try. I put in thumbergia and morning glory and wow are they slow to grow. Also most peoples' clematis are growing strong and flowering now. The one I put in is still a little vine. I guess I'll have to wait and see what it does next year.

Trip to Virginia

This past weekend I visited Virginia. Went lots of places. Gardening-wise, I visited Meadlowlark Botanical Gardens with my friend. I bought my husband a winddeva from the gift shop - it's a basic red acrylic twirly. He's been such a good gardener!

Here are a few pictures of the garden:


Entering the garden from the gift shop


From the top of a hill that overlooked the pond area


Loved the huge pond dragonfly!


There were LOTS of turtles in the large pond, with huge catfish lurking underneath, their black shadows nearing the surface


Lots of lovely flowers and grasses

The friend who took us to Meadowlark also gave me some things from her garden. I got several pieces of her jade tree - I wish I would have taken a picture of it! It was gorgeous. I got some shade plants, some other flowering plant, and some herbs - lemon balm, and some lemon basil. i split with her the peppermint plant I just bought, and the lemon thyme.

From someone else I got lemongrass and some American mint. I had bought her some peppermint herb (she'd not been able to find it).

It's fun exchanging plants!

Since it's Raining Today...

...and I have nothing to post about the garden, other than I get a free watering! :) I wanted to post this farm picture - doesn't it feel fresh and open? Just want to run through the fields.

Here's a pic of our zucchini. One day we could see nothing. The next day we saw these beautiful strong leaves already sprouted. This was last week.

- Wow pictures are just not working correctly - could be this new template. :( Here's a link for now.