Beautiful iris from my garden

My garden makes me aware that there is beauty in everything, from a tiny earthworm wriggling its way through the earth, to a honeybee drinking water from the birdbath, to the lovely flowers that are blooming en masse now. I have become aware of colors--all shades and hues of colors--because they are in abundance in a garden. The different greens in the leaves of different plants and how they reflect the sun's light shining through them, the varying shades of blues and violets, the brown color of the earth and what that tells you about the quality of the soil. The list is long. I could post many photos of the different flowers that are blooming or have bloomed this year, but I've settled on posting one today, because suddenly this year, my iris plants produced many flowers, and they are beautiful. So here is one photo of a lovely iris bloom.....it's just a pity that they don't last very long.

Mid-June garden update

We've had wonderfully warm and sunny weather for the past week, which the garden just loves. The daily growth spurts are amazing. From one day to the next, I come to the garden to find that the flower buds on my physocarpus (ninebark) plant have bloomed; the leaves of the plant are a deep red color, whereas the flowers are white and fuzzy--quite pretty. The kaprifol (honeysuckle) plant right next to it is blooming and happy. The zucchini plants have also grown larger in the space of a couple of days, and yesterday they had begun to flower. The pumpkin plants have also begun to spread out. My mini-cucumber plants are producing some really good-tasting cucumbers, ditto for my radish plants. This year will be a banner year for strawberries, raspberries, and black currants, also gooseberries. The red currant bush produced thousands of berries last year, so this year it's taking a well-deserved rest. One of the two blackberry bushes developed cane rot, so I had to cut it down, but it's already coming back and seems to be in good shape. My perennial garden is blooming--oxeye daisies, carnations, and cranesbill (a hardy geranium) so far. My coral bell (Heuchera) plants have spread out and are quite healthy, and my irises this year are just beautiful. The pachysandra plants that I planted under one of the larger trees at the entrance to the garden have grown taller and are beginning to spread out. So things are moving along as they naturally do in the garden. Here are some photos of the garden from this past Saturday--you can see for yourself!

oxeye daisies

ninebark flowers

zucchini plant starting to flower

left side of the flower garden (mostly perennials)

right side of the flower garden--check out the crane's bill plant with blue flowers

the coral bells perennial garden--they are just gorgeous plants 

my rose bushes that cover the arch entrance to the garden have started to bloom 

my irises are blooming this year--so many of them 

Two weeks makes such a difference in a garden

My last garden update was on May 11th. Since that time, the weather has gotten warmer (almost summer-like), and the garden has just taken off. It's like someone turned the switch to 'on'. I have bought a number of new plants for my flower garden--a Japanese maple that will be the new centerpiece of the garden, surrounded by hosta, cornflowers, asters, carnations, and more lavender. I also planted wild ivy along the iron fence behind the greenhouse, in the hope that it will take off and cover the entire fence so that we will get some privacy. That whole area, from the fence to the greenhouse, has been planted with flowers, pachysandra, and hosta, among others. The magnolia tree has bloomed, and still has six buds getting ready to bloom. The wisteria tree is also doing well. My garden neighbour gave me a dogwood tree last autumn that is also doing very well. I have sowed out grass seed, and the grass is starting to spring up, but it takes time before there will be a lawn to speak of. I planted sunflowers behind the compost enclosure, and they are coming up. Behind the greenhouse itself, I have planted sweet pea flowers, which are lovely. Sweet pea plants are climbers, and produce lovely red and bluish-purple fragrant flowers.

My vegetable garden is also doing well. The radishes are finished, so I am harvesting them and using them in salads, and they are very good. My potato plants (Folva type) are also doing very well; I have about thirty plants, each of which will produce about three good-sized potatoes, plus some small ones. The small ones will be used for next year's plantings; I store them in the crisper during the wintertime and they develop eyes and sprouts--perfect for planting. This year I bought three sweet potato plants to see how they do. Otherwise, I've planted two types of pumpkins that are now starting to take off, and four summer squash (zucchini) plants, which usually do very well. I've decided to plant all of my tomato plants outdoors this year; the greenhouse gets so warm that even though they do well inside, they are constantly in need of water.

The Japanese maple, like hydrangeas, needs low pH soil, so I bought hydrangea soil and planted the maple tree with it. So far so good. I am curious to see how the hydrangeas will like this soil as well. I have had major problems with them coming back each year. The panicled hydrangeas that I bought last year have come back without any problems whatsoever, so I don't know why regular hydrangeas are so problematic.

Here's how the garden looked two days ago; compare the pics to those from May 11th. Again, the miracle of gardens--they grow and do what they do without making a big deal about it. They're amazing, majestic, awe-inspiring. I could live in my garden the entire summer. Love my garden...….

Blackbird in the birdbath

I've been wondering why the birdbath is nearly emptied of water when I come to the garden many days. I think I know why now. I caught this little fellow enjoying his bath, and he wasn't afraid of me at all. So I captured him on video. In addition to him, there are the sparrows that alight on the edge of the birdbath to drink water, and sometimes to bathe. I'm just super-pleased that they are using it--makes me so happy to see them!

A garden update

I've been working in the garden since mid-March, about the time lockdown started here in Norway. Apart from working at home and remaining indoors, the garden has been the only free space available to me when I am outdoors, and I am immensely grateful for that. I have taken the occasional walk around the neighbourhood, but ran into too many people for there to be safe social distancing. And that's not so strange considering we live in a city. So it's been nice to escape to my garden, and there's been plenty of work to do since March--raking, clearing away dead twigs, turning the soil, cutting back a number of trees and bushes, spreading grass seed, sowing out vegetable and flower seeds in the greenhouse, cutting away the dead canes in the raspberry patch, weeding the raspberry and strawberry patches (this can take hours), and transplanting some bushes from one place to another. Plus I've bought more plants, mostly perennial flowers, to round out the garden, and they needed to be planted. It may not sound like enough work for a couple of months, but it is, especially since I am not in the garden full-time. If I was, it might go faster, but since I'm still working full-time, it all takes time. And that's ok for now.

We finally got the roughly 12 square meters behind the greenhouse 'returned' to us last summer, and I decided to make this space another 'room' in the garden. Last autumn, I planted allium, tulips, scilla, spring snowflakes, grape hyacinths, regular hyacinths and narcissus (a type of daffodil), all of them bulbs, and they have all come up. We also bought a wisteria tree and a magnolia tree and planted them in this space, as well as a lilac bush. The magnolia tree is blossoming now, and its blossoms are a lovely reddish-pink color. I decided that I wanted a stone path leading from the vegetable garden area up to and behind the greenhouse, so I bought some slate stones and embedded them in the soil, and sowed grass seed around them. I bought pachysandra plants and planted them along the path, in the hope that these hardy plants will begin to thrive and spread out.

There is always a new project to work on in the garden, and I love each one--both the planning and the execution. Whenever I think I'm 'finished', I realize shortly thereafter that I'm not, and never will be. Gardens are works in progress.

A look back at this year's gardening season

And suddenly, just like that, summer is over, although you can't call what we had this year, summer. It was just a temperate rainy season with very little sun. In previous years, there has been a gradual movement toward autumn, with September days that have a hint of autumn in the air. Not so this year--just rain and more rain. Temperatures during September stayed mostly in the low 60s, so I cannot complain about that. But there was no real summer this year, and there has been no real autumn either. Now it's just cold. In some places right outside of Oslo, it's already snowed. This year's gardening season was less than stellar due to the rainy summer. The outdoor tomatoes rotted, as did three of my ten pumpkins. The string bean plants did not do well either. Too much rain and too little sun will rot plants, since the roots never have a chance to dry out. Or they develop mold, as did my outdoor tomato plants, producing tomatoes that were mottled and mealy. The greenhouse tomato plants did fine; that's how I know that the amount of rain we had this year was no good for the outdoor tomato plants.

We got the allotment garden in 2016, and since then, not one successive season has been the same. It is impossible to predict from year to year how the next season will go. I imagine that causes farmers much consternation; a farmer's life is far from idyllic or romantic, that's for sure. Last year, the summer was very warm and there was very little rain; that was true for most of Western Europe. But it was a banner year for the garden. Looking back, the 2016 gardening season was the best in terms of a good balance of sun and rain. I know that because the pumpkins grew well, and to a good size. This year, I've gotten one large pumpkin; the rest are small to medium-sized. The only plants that produced well this year were the zucchini plants--six large zucchinis from three plants. But zucchinis grow fast and for some reason were not affected by the overly-moist soil as were the pumpkins. Strange, because together with other types of squashes and pumpkins, the zucchini belongs to the species Cucurbita pepo, and you might think that they would all react similarly to the weather conditions. The berry plants all produced fairly well this year; berry plants seem to be quite hardy. The only problem was a blister aphid infection on the red currant bushes that sucked the juices out of the leaves so that they ended up looking wrinkled and blistered, hence the name. But the infection did not affect the actual berry production, which was something to be thankful for. 

The Folva potatoes did well this year, so next year I will plant more of them. Based on this year's experiences, I've decided that next year I will plant potatoes, zucchinis, pumpkins, and will try string beans again. If they don't do well, I'll skip them in the future. I'll only plant greenhouse tomatoes. In the end, you end up planting what works, because in truth, it is heartbreaking to watch what you've nurtured from seed end up dying due to frost, too much rain, too little rain, slugs, or mold. I know that how I feel pales in comparison to what farmers must feel when the weather is unpredictable. For example, this past April was a warm one, and the apple orchards started to bloom early. Then came May, with several weeks of cold temperatures, and the resulting frost killed the apple tree blossoms and killed the chances for the trees to produce any apples. The farmers who were interviewed were heartbroken. This is the ruthlessness of nature. It doesn't care what lives or what dies--there are no feelings one way or the other. It is us humans who feel sadness or elation at watching our plants die or grow, depending on the unpredictable weather. You either develop a thick skin and continue to plant the same things, or you learn and plant only the things that work.

Our garden in mid-August

I haven't posted many pictures of our garden this year, but that's because it took so long for it to really take off. But during the past several weeks, it has grown like wildfire--the pumpkin plants have long trailing vines now and the pumpkins are looking good, the zucchini plants have already produced three large zucchinis, the greenhouse tomato plants have produced a few tomatoes, the dahlias look lovely, the gladiolas and hollyhocks likewise. The marigolds, cornflowers, and sunflowers are also doing well. My bean plants are producing string beans, and the carrot and potato plants are growing well (hopefully they'll produce well). It's been a banner year for berries of all sorts--strawberries, red currants, black currants, gooseberries, blackberries, and blueberries, but strangely enough, not raspberries, at least not in our garden. I planted two panicle hydrangeas, which are hardier than the usual hydrangeas and which seem to bloom for quite a long time, and two potentilla shrubs, which produce lovely small yellow flowers. They also seem to be quite hardy. I hope the warm weather continues into September so that the tomatoes, potatoes and carrots can grow to full maturity.

Here are some photos of the garden that I took yesterday and a few days ago......

Cinderella pumpkins growing happily

Lavender, gladiolas, dahlias, and Coreopsis flowers

one of four giant sunflowers 

Cinderella pumpkin patches

entrance to the garden

panicle hydrangea

tomatoes growing on the outdoor tomato plants

The garden in June

It is a pleasure and a privilege to have a garden. It is also a manifestation of faith in the natural order of things--that the cycle of life, death, and life again will continue each year, unchanged, predictable, orderly. There is peace in knowing that.

The tomato plants in the greenhouse are already starting to grow tomatoes, and the pumpkin and summer squash plants are starting to flower and take off. The green bean plants are pushing themselves up out of the soil and starting to grow. The potato and yellow onion plants have been growing well for about a month already, and the carrot plants are showing their green fronds. The dahlias and gladiolas are quite high already; the hollyhocks are also doing well. The lavender and celosia plants are blooming, as are the carnations and Dianthus. The hydrangeas are also blooming, as are the panicled hydrangeas (syrinhortensia in Norwegian--translates to 'lilac-like hydrangeas').

I was in the garden yesterday and took some photos, as I always do, to document the garden's progression from one week to another. Enjoy!

One of three rose bushes that is blooming

Once a cherry tree, now covered in wild ivy, with coral bell plants and pansies at its base

Green beans, yellow onions, carrots, and potatoes growing. In the background, pumpkin and zucchini plants, sunflowers, and cornflowers

Outdoor tomato plants, royal geraniums, different hydrangeas, and my ninebark plant that has grown a lot this year

Lots of lavender plants, gladiolas, Cock's comb (celosia), carnations, hydrangea, dahlias, lilies, peony, and Dianthus ('pinks')

Pachysandra planted under the Emperor bush 

Strawberries from the garden--so good! There is nothing quite like them. 

Pansies 

Pansies

Pansies and coral bells 

Garden layout for 2019

Here is the garden layout I designed for the 2019 planting season. There's always a new challenge each year--new flowers and vegetables to plant or a new project waiting in the wings. This year we'll be getting back the 2 meters that was taken from us about one and a half years ago when Oslo's city planners started to do necessary road work on the steep road that parallels the garden. The nice thing is that we'll get back a lot of soil, and that means I have a new area of the garden to plan. So I'll be planting trees: magnolia, lilac, and plum. And planting wild ivy so that it will grow up and along the garden fence to provide privacy. I have English poppies waiting to be planted in that area as well. I'll be posting photos during the summer, but for now, this is the planting plan, and I've already planted most of the seedlings that were in the greenhouse. I'm hoping for a warm and sunny summer.