Day lilies and Death Day...

The past week or so sure slipped away from me fast!  I can't believe how long it's been since I've posted.  This is a tough time of year for me in the garden, it's so darn hot and there's not a lot going on at this point.  The peas are all done and pulled, the lettuce is all pulled, I've picked one little tomato (though there are a lot of green ones right now), I've picked and pulled 2 of the 4 cauliflower, and the onions are getting large enough I could probably pull them any time now.

The big highlight of the past week has come not in the vegetables but in the ornamental garden - day lilies are blooming!  The Stella d'Oros have come and gone a while ago, but the rest of them started blooming in the last week.  I have lots of 'My Sweet Rose' blooming, and my favorite day lily of all, 'Golden Illusions'.  It's a beautiful golden yellow color with a large flower with ruffled edges.  Of course it is the slowest at multiplying, but the clump will get big enough to divide eventually - maybe in the next couple of years.  What's your favorite day lily?  Is there a "must-have" I should look at getting down the road?  There is a master gardener in Cincinnati that is know for his day lilies - he has probably pushing 200 varieties in his yard, and he hosts an open house every year.  My mom and I went back when Kate was about 18 months - he had a little play house for kids and a large electric train set.  It's perfect.  I don't forsee my yard becoming a regional draw for day lilies, but I do love them!

My Sweet Rose

Golden Illusions

I also was super excited yesterday (the first day of weather in the low 80s in over a week) to go out to the garden and find a bloom on one of the eggplants!  It's a standard Black Beauty, which I love because they're so reliable and usually are the first to produce.  I also have an Ichiban, which has a bud but no flower yet.  And the random tomato that sprouted out the drain hole of a pot that I put compost in has a tiny tomato on it.  I left the plant go, mostly to see what would happen.  It's growing out of the drainage hole of a cheap 1 gallon pot I got with some perennial I bought long ago.  With nothing but water when I remember, it's produced a tomato.  And people say they can't grow things!

Black Beauty Eggplant

The tiny tomato on the plant growing out of the drainhole...

Finally, there are two things I want to share - first is in honor of "Garden Blogger's Death Day" over at Gardening without Skills - my pathetic blueberry has finally kicked the bucket entirely.  It's all brown and shriveled and very much dead.  I attempted to amend the soil in it's pot to make it more acidic, and I thought I followed the directions on the elemental sulfur VERY closely, but the blueberry definitely did not appreciate it.  I am really sad about it, as I don't want to start over from scratch and wait another 2 years for blueberries!  :(  I don't have a picture and it's already dark out so I'm not sure one I took now would do the dreadful looking thing justice.

Lastly, our crazy neighbors.  When we bought our house 4+ years ago, it was our first house and therefore we didn't think much about neighbors.  Well, we got the crazies.  I take that back - they're very nice for the most part, they just have no business living in a suburban housing development.  The siding blew off a large part of their house in a big windstorm we had in February and they are just now getting it fixed.  And they are using vinyl siding that looks like fake cedar shakes.  But I suppose it is better than the half-missing siding they had before.  And their 4 ft deep temporary-type backyard pool sprung a leak, which drained entirely into our yard, and then the empty pool blew over against our fence in another strong wind we had last week.  Plus in the winter they have 4 golf carts and a 4-wheeler living on their back patio - and no, they don't golf.  We had new friends over one night last month and someone asked if there was a golf course near us.  Mark and I burst out laughing.  Again, they are very nice, but they need to move somewhere with some acreage so that this is not right in the middle of regular suburbia.  Though the neighborhood would have much less to talk about if they left!

Our neighbors backyard - down to 2 golf carts, the 4 wheeler, and the half-missing siding.  Also not the dying/dead spot of grass where the pool was blown over for a week.  Good times. :)

Hope for the Blueberry?

After a rough start this year where I was threatening drastic measures with my blueberry plant (like throwing it out), the little guy has decided to flower and I'm hopeful of actually getting some blueberries this summer!  Last month I complained about my pathetic blueberry bush, and here it is a few weeks later and there are a couple of very tiny blueberries growing on it (though it still looks pretty pathetic).  So now I am thinking that I lost track of when I got the bush, and this may actually be it's third summer and not it's fourth, which would be right on track for producing blueberries from what I've read.  

I am also thinking that I need to start filling the raised bed I'm going to put it in now and start working on adjusting the pH of the soil now - our soil definitely alkaline, and the blueberries ideally want a soil between 4.0 and 5.0 - Yikes that's a lot of adjusting, which I have never officially done before. And I now want a 2nd variety of blueberry, but don't ask me where I'm going to put it!  Hopefully they don't have to be right next to each other.

The Pathetic Blueberry

So I'm sitting on my patio while the girls play in the sandbox, and I need to share about my pathetic blueberry bush.  I have a blueberry bush that my mom ordered for me about 3 years ago as a very small plant from some catalog - Burpee, maybe, I'm not entirely sure.  At the time we didn't really have a good space worked up to put it in, so I planted it in a large pot - one that came with a fairly substantial tree we planted that year.  Three years later, the blueberry is still in the same pot, but it is rather pathetic and I can't quite figure out why.  The pot is plenty large for it - I haven't taken it out of the pot to check it's roots, but it's still a fairly small plant and I can't imagine it being root-bound in the pot it's in.  Every year I give it a couple inches of compost on the top of it, but I don't fertilize it with much else.  Before I converted to solely organic gardening last year, I'd give it a weak dose of synthetic fertilizer every so often.

We finally have the small (3'x3') raised bed built for it, and as soon as it dries out enough to work the ground up I'm going to be digging in compost, mulch & peat moss in the spot it will go.  However, I'm a wondering if this thing is ever going to really take off and produce fruit.  This year I gave it a hearty 2-3 inches of compost in the top of the pot, and some hollytone since blueberries are acid loving.  At this point we'll wait and see.  Kate absolutely loves blueberries, so it would be really nice if this bush would actually grow and produce fruit!