Working On The Garden To-do List

Now that the dahlia garden is all planted, I can turn my focus to all the other things that have piled up on my ever-growing "to-do" list. I started by completely weeding the big flowerbed. Then I raked it smooth. I had a few "odds & ends" dahlias that were left over after my big planting. I couldn't throw them away so I planted them in this space. It doesn't get a ton of sun here but they should still do alright. If the deer decide to eat them, that will be ok. If not, we will have some nice late Summer color and I will have a bonus of some big sized tubers.

Then I moved back to the kitchen garden. As you can see, I needed to corral my tomato plants and add the second tier to their cages about 10 days ago! You can't tell were one plants stops and the next one starts. So, I began grabbing wayward shoots and trying to stuff them all in the next level of cage. It was much harder than it would have been if I had done it weeks ago. 

After a lot of struggling, and getting coated in the strong stench of tomato, the top tiers were on and the tomatoes look a little more orderly. I was able to get all of the shoots back into the cages but two. These I will grab with tie-wrap and they can grow just outside of the cage.

As I was wrestling with each plant, I was excited to discover that three of the four plants have set fruit. Here are three little "Early Cascade".

A nice cluster of "Sweet Million".

And a small, chubby "Black Krim".

I also discovered my first open "Nicola" potato blossom. The plants were covered with clusters of buds a week ago. But during our 5 day heat wave, most of the unopened blossoms just dropped off. I don't think that this will affect potato production, but I am not sure.

I also discovered today that my morning glory plants have started to bloom. I am quite surprised to find that at this point, the majority of blooms at purple. Last year almost all of the blooms were "Mixed Color" pink. I did add two "Feringa" plants last year that had purple blooms. Since all of this year's plants are volunteers, I have no way of knowing exactly what variety they are - "Mixed Color" - which is suppose to be pink, purple & white or "Feringa" deep purple and white. Either way they are cheery and it won't be long before the whole trellis is smothered with color.