i went up to the garden about 7pm, looking for things to do. i guessed that the strawberry patch and the impatiens hadnt been watered in awhile (at least a week) and so i did that with the hose. took a good long while. i decided to mulch the strawberry patch with some straw, now that it had bounced back from the post-harvest july cut down. it will at least keep the patch from drying out so quickly, especially since its in such an exposed area. put some straw down in the culinary herb garden as well.

i found some information on seedsavers.org about planting garlic -- it suggested to plant in the fall and allow it to over winter. i left a post on gardenweb.com's forum, for fall is such a broad time and perhaps the advice was not meant for the more northerly -- and people there suggested that in kentucky, we should plant the garlic in late september, and harvest in august.. that info was quoted from the UK ag college website, so perhaps we can plant another crop at that time. i am guessing we could do the same with onion and shallots as well? the only drawback would be that it would make tilling the soil difficult in the spring. or perhaps find another site for that.

i had an idea about in the future moving the pae fence and the bean fence much further apart -- as it is, its hard to harvest beween them. it looks as though some yard-long beans are coming in -- they are about five inches now.

it looks like we should do a thourough harvesting this week of everything ripe -- especially peas and beans (even the ones on andy miller's side), as it will keep the plants more prodcutive

we could also mulch the corn with straw more closely to the stalks, again helping keep in the moisture.

i spot weeded, especially around the tomatoes and the peppers. i heaped some straw more closely to the stalks.

i am thinking of getting some more of that extra rock, and putting a couple of rows on top of the row thats near the herbs. i also want to do that in the area where the black plastic is, killing the weeds. id like to draw out some specific plans i have.

and one last thing, before i forget, i want to put down some matching woodchip mulch where the "main entrance" sign is, and where the impatiens are... oh, and i want to edge everything to.

ok, now there are links on the links page . not terribly organized. i tried to stick to websites without commercial content (government, educational, non-profit). i'll update the journal home page tomorrow, so the "links" link works. also, there's commentary on each of the links, describing what you get if you dare click.

oh, i went up to the garden at 8pm. I cut down the remaining unwanted amur honeysuckle that had grown to be about 6 feet tall on the border of the butterfly garden and the lawn. also, i pruned around the thorny blackberry bush near the edge of the woods -- giving it room to grow. lots of vine around it and more honeysuckle. i don't think its that great of a plant, though. maybe we should just go ahead and get some thornless to plant elsewhere on the property so it can be easily cultivated and cared for. the problem is those brambles are just so unkempt and thorny, you kind of want them out of the way.

looks like aaron watered some.
oh, and by the way, on the 11th i watered for 4 hours.

over the weekend, i took my grandparents to the public garden at the campbell county extension service, known officially by the name "lakeside commons gardens", which to me sounds like the name of a suburban mini-mall sprawl. i found a plant there that had a varietal name of Wojo, and brought aaron back there this afternoon to take a picture of it. I checked out their veg garden. it has really cool, good looking raised beds, which would be the sort of bed i'd want for my veg gardenin my own yard, if i ever have one. it was also worth noting that their healthiest pepper plants were roughly the same size as ours. i had a fear our were stunted, and now i know that worry was irrational. aaron and i talked to a gardener at the LsCG, and they identified a few plants for us. one was "purple loosestrife" which we have growing at our garden (planted there before the honors program inherited the garden). butterflies seem to like it, so we decided to keep it. now we don't have to keep calling it "those pruple guys".

The other plant -- well, The conversation went something like this:
me: "what's that huge plant over there with the big red flowers that looks like hibiscus?"
gardener: "uh, that's hibiscus (a pause)... a variety called 'dinner plate'"
me "oh. (duh). I thought so. I never knew it could grow here. I always assumed was a tropical plant. So its a winter hardy perrenial?"
gardener "yeah. we prune it back to about 12 inches in the fall".

which is really cool, i think my grandmother would really dig having a hibiscus plant in her yard next year.