Mother Nature's own Time Table

It's been a grueling Spring here in Ohio! I think it was nice for about a week at the beginning, and it seems like it's been raining non-stop ever since. I'm learning very quickly that my time table is not the same as Mother Nature's. I'll learning that too much rain slows the growth of my plants and garden. It's a learning curve, non the less. But I have seen the sun (in short bursts), just long enough to get outside and get some projects done.

This is our pergola that I painted last year. We decided that it needed a removable cover. So we purchased some sun shade fabric and I made some removable panels that mount with grommets and hooks. I'm hoping that it will create enough shade that we can spend more of our summer ourdoors. One tip if you ever do a pergola, get the right paint (or should I say stain!) I asked the paint people at Home Depot what would be the best to use-they told me outdoor paint-kind of surprised me-but I figured, they are the experts! Well, it's supposed to have 8-10 year warranty-not one year later and it's peeling! ARGH!! Lesson learned-go with a stain!!

Purchased our outdoors flowers-couldn't pass up getting another hibiscus. They are so pretty!

Our garden is SLOWING coming along-too much rain just slows it down. And we have some critters that have decided to have lunch in my beds! So I've covered the beans with cheese cloth and I have a wire cage over the pepper plants.

Here's the lettuce, spinach, and cucumbers in the back. The lettuce and spinach were growing under a hoop house, but it's warm enough now that I removed it. Hope to be harvesting some lettuce soon!

These are our squash and zuchinni. Also have some loose leaf lettuce that should be harvested by the time the squash is big. One thing I learned while growing these from seed is to use a sharpie to label my popsicle sticks (that label each plant). I used a ball point pen and it actually washed off my sticks so I didn't know what was what.

 These are our tomatoes and peas. The front two tomato plants we grew from seeds (started indoors). I had four growing, but two developed a fungus so I had to replace them with store bought ones. I wasn't sure if these other two were going to make it, but they are thriving now. This is the first time I've grown peas. I planted the first row and they came up great! Then we started getting all the rain, and the second row  planted two weeks later never germinated. I actually planted the second set three times (with two different packages of seeds) to finally get them to grow. I'm hoping they will produce before it gets too hot for them.

Did a little work on the front yard. I decided that it's ok to have a little more color and "randomness" to my landscaping, lol. So I added some daylilies and geraniums to the perenials that I've had. I really like it.

And under the tree in front I added some phlox inbetween the hostas. Figured they might give it a little more color in early spring. I haven't had too much success with more flowery type plants surviving here because the tree hogs the water, but we'll see.