Welcome to the garden season!! This is my favorite time of year — planting the garden, sitting in the garden, watching it grow, looking at how the blossoms turn into fruit, enjoying veggies from the garden and even picking weeds.
We decided to have Garden Week where we worked in the garden, filled our garden boxes with dirt, picked weeds and planted the garden. I also shared the progress of our shrubs and trees around the yard! Read all about Garden Week here!
Let’s take a walk around the yard, and I’ll show you the process.
May 12
It has been raining the past few days, so we didn’t finish the back garden bed quite yet.
The cherry tree is starting to blossom! It’s so pretty!
Here’s the apple tree — it’s starting to blossom and some blossoms are beginning to open up.
Here’s the plum tree. The blossoms are starting to fall off and it’s turning into fruit.
We are growing different peppers this year which I am excited for! We also have the hot kitchen lemon pepper which is not pictured here.
Here’s the Viking Chokecherry. It’s starting to flower so that’s great! These chokecherries have a strong, tart flavor that can taste bitter or dry.
Here’s the pepper garden bed and the herb garden bed. Our neighbor hasn’t yet done his landscaping. Sometimes I wish I could turn it into a garden!!
May 17
Today we planted onions — usually the onions are overtaken by worms so we put wood ash in the dirt, planted the onions and covered with a bit of dirt and scattered a little more ashes.
The purple top rutabagas are up!
The cherry tree has flowered so much in just a few days! The entire tree is covered in blossoms!
Here’s the gooseberry bush — it’s starting to produce blossoms. Yay!
Here’s the blueberry shrub which is flowering!!
Here’s our “pollinator” box mixed with mint that re-grew from last year.
Here’s and tomato
The plums are starting to grow so well! It’s exciting to see the plums growing from blossoms! I have never had these types of plums so I’m interested to see how they grow.
The chives are doing exceptionally well!
The honeyberry (haskap) bush has berries!! Yay!
“Watching something grow is good for morale. It helps us believe in life.”
— Myron Kaufmann
May 26
It’s been quite warm the past couple days, +25C/77F and cool at night, so we are having quite the storm roll in. Let’s take a quick look through the garden!
Here’s the rutabagas. They’re up and once they get a bit bigger, we’ll thin them out. When I was a kid, we ate rutabaga a lot but for some reason, we always called it a turnip!
Lettuce is up too!! The larger lettuce came back from seed from last year where the mint is growing, so we moved it to this garden bed instead.
Some of the carrots are up as well.
Peas are up too! Yay!
The Red Emmalee potatoes are coming up and leafing out.
The Queen Anne potatoes are up too.
So are the Red Apple — not all of them yet but most are. The potatoes will need to be hilled again.
Some of the Cerisa potatoes are up.
Some of the Bintje potatoes are up. We need to pick those pesky weeds again!
There’s one Yukon Gold potato up only. One kind of corn hasn’t done much yet, but the other kind of corn has sprouted which is awesome!
Here, just the Pak Choi has sprouted.
The other corn and dill has not yet sprouted.
Here’s the onions. They’re starting to grow!
The flowers are doing good. The weeds like dandelion and thistle are doing exceptionally well!! We will be picking them this week.
These flowers are looking alright and the mint is doing really good. This is the only mint that has come up after the winter — us all the years I’ve planted mint, this is the first time it’s come back! I’m thrilled!!
These are the strawberries that we had in the back corner garden bed. They didn’t do well last year, so this spring we dug them up and placed them in this flower pot just for now. They’re going so well because we have placed them in the shade. We will be making a strawberry garden bed in the front and once that’s complete, we will transfer them.
Gooseberry. My gramma had gooseberries when I was a kid and I loved picking them and eating them right off the bush, so I am looking forward to these once again! A bit of nostalgia!
The cherry tree has lost most of the blossoms and they’re turning into cherries.
Here’s the blueberry in the backyard — it has blossoms which is great to see!!
Here is the saskatoon — it’s not flowering which is totally fine because it’ll take a few years to grow and produce berries. Saskatoons take longer to produce.
We bought two strawberry plants this spring to plant in our strawberry garden bed we are going to build and now they have ripe berries! Yay! Nothing beats the taste of homegrown! We also bought another rhubarb plant.
Here are the honeyberries in the front yard. They have berries on and they’re quite large which is fantastic.
Here is the burning bush. I thought it would have to be torn out but it came back to life and look how great it is now!
Here are the raspberry bushes. There are raspberries starting to grow! I’m very excited for that!
Here’s the apple tree — the blossoms are falling off and the apple will soon grow.
The plums are starting to grow!! Yay!
Here are the blueberries. We removed one blueberry shrub that the wild rabbit ate over the winter, and it didn’t seem to grow much over the last couple years, so we decided to plant it at my dad’s instead. We planted the same blueberry shrub that we have in the backyard in its place which has helped the other blueberry shrub which now has berries!
The chokecherry is flowering so it looks like we’ll have lots of berries!
The herbs are doing well except the basil — looks like the basil is toast, but we will wait and see if it comes back.
The peppers are doing great! The rain and heat we’ve had sure helped the peppers grow! the garlic chives are doing well — these garlic chives were planted last year and didn’t do much last year, but came back really well this year! A
few seeds spilled in our seed container so my daughter scattered them here – they may be lettuce and chives but it’s a bit of a surprise! We’ll see what comes of it.
Here is our first, main rhubarb. it always does the best.
The one mint we pulled since it was totally toasted. This one isn’t looking well but it’s coming back to life which is good!
Here is the sorrel — looks like it’s doing well.
Here is the tomato plant – it’s flowering and there’s some tomatoes growing. Yay!
And that’s the garden update for May. We m looking forward to June’s gardening!
How’s your garden doing? I’d love you to share with us!
enjoy from Our City Homestead to yours