The State of the Garden

The state of the garden is not good.  The rosemary is the only thing looking well.  The kitchen sage and the lavender both look rather peaked.  I believe I mentioned in an earlier post that I didn't get everything done in the fall like I should have.  As such, the ornamental salvias and the mints and bee balm all have dead growth on them that I should have trimmed off at the the end of the season.  The garlic needs weeding and I need to take a really close look at the greens.  I had hoped they would last through the winter, but was not counting on such heavy snow that stayed on the ground for so long.  They're mostly wilted and dead, but I think some pruning might reveal some lettuce, and maybe even bok choi, that has survived.

2010 in Review

Last year, I started out strong, but really fell off near the end.  The World Cup finals and then the birth of my son combined to keep me from doing as much in the garden as I should have.  In the picture above, you can see okra in the front middle and back left.  That's zucchini on the right, with sweet potatoes between them and butternut squash in front.  The poles and cages indicate tomatoes.

I planted dill, parsley and borage and they all did fairly well.  I was hoping for the chamomile and marigold from the previous year to self-seed.  What I had thought to be a chamomile turned out to be a weed, but I did get one marigold plant:

Even though this was primarily an edible garden, there were some beautiful flowers.  The okra is in the same family as the hibiscus:

The sweet potato is in the same family as the morning glory:

In addition to the ornamental salvias, I also had an ornamental pepper:

The borage flower is also nice:

Probably the best surprise of the year, though, was when butternut squash started growing out of my compost.  I hadn't planned on growing this, but definitely enjoyed it in the garden and in the kitchen.  One came up with my zucchini and I transplanted another one from the compost pile:

While not the year I had hoped, I did learn many valuable things.  I'm going to plant more herbs from seed this year, and rely less on them self-seeding.  Also, the okra and the vines of sweet potatoes and butternut squash did not work well in the limited spaces of this garden.  The okra limited paths in and out of the garden and the vines spread to interfere with other plants.  I'm going to have to find another place for them.  This year, I will also increase the numbers of tomatoes and peppers to fill up the spaces left by the okra and others that get too big.

Herbs and Nightshades

The basic concept of my garden is a collection of nightshade vegetables (mostly tomatoes and jalapenos) mixed with herbs that are good companions for them, as well as some other perennial herbs.

The structure of the design is four circles of eight stepping stones each.  These circles are about five feet in diameter.  In the center of each circle, there is a smaller circle of about one foot diameter that is devoted to a perennial herb.  For these inner circles, I cut the bottoms off of large planting pots and buried them, in an effort to contain herbs that are invasive.  Currently, counter-clockwise from the bottom left, I have peppermint, spearmint, oregano and bee balm.  The others have done fairly well, but the bee balm tends to get eaten by some garden pest.  I thought I was going to lose it last year, but when the borage bloomed around it, it was left alone.  I wasn't too concerned about it anyway, since it isn't a food crop and I figured that it was keeping these pests from eating other plants for which I had more use.

The area between the four circles, in the center of the garden, is also devoted to perennial herbs.  The centerpiece of the garden is a rosemary bush that we have had for about six years now.  My wife (who claims not to have a green thumb) bought it as a seedling and planted it in her herb garden at our last house.  I brought it with us when we moved.  She got the kitchen sage which is blooming next to it at about the same time and I brought them over together.  To complete the circle around the rosemary, I got three ornamental sages.  Actually, I got three different colors of meadow sage: light purple, dark purple and white.  There is also a small thyme plant in the shadow of the rosemary.

The picture above was taken last spring when the sage was in full bloom.  Last year was the first time our rosemary bloomed, but it only had a few flowers.  I am hoping for more this year.  The bamboo poles in the picture indicate where I planted tomato seedlings and you can see garlic on the left side of the garden.

The companion herbs that I plan on planting this year include marigold, parsley, borage, cilantro, dill and chamomile.  I am also interested in trying to grow cumin since I've been cooking with it a lot recently.

White Christmas!

A garden diary

So, I've decided to start a blog to be a place where I can obsess about my garden.  At this point, it's mostly just a venue where I can bounce ideas around for myself.  If anyone has any comments or suggestions, I'd be open to hearing them.  I will talk about my plans, desires and dreams for my garden.  Ideally, I would love to grow most of what my family eats in the garden, but that is still a long way off. 

The title, Shamba Yangu, is Kiswahili for "my garden" or "my farm."  In Kiswahili, there isn't a distinction between these two concepts: garden and farm.  The word shamba is used for both.  This seems to fit very well with my gardening ideals.  I would like to work toward farm-level production in the space limitations of our yard.

I've been gardening for about eight years now.  I have worked in four different gardens in that time.  Some years have been better than others, but I have been slowly adding to the variety and quantity of what I grow.  I am now planning my third season in my current space.  It's just under three hundred square feet and is primarily an herb garden.

I am seeking to mix formal and informal elements in this garden by combining a rigid design shape and perennial herbs with re-seeding annual herbs.  Over the past few years, I've done a good deal of research into companion planting and have focused on herbs and vegetables that grow well together.

In the future, I would like to expand into edible landscaping, growing food all over the yard and not just in my current garden.  I'm not sure how much of that I'm going to do in this coming season.

Thanks to anyone who may have read this!