Garden Update, April 2024

Dear Liza,

Once spring gets going here, it ramps up fast!

We headed over to Portland Nursery the other day and fetched six lettuce starts and a packets of zucchini seeds. The seed will wait for this weekend, but the lettuces are in and very happy. Look at that color! It is a variety called “Merlot”.

They will start giving us lettuce in a few weeks.

And in Tiny Green Gals news, our dahlias are coming up! Laverne and Shirley, as Bridgett has named them, are growing from rhizomes I planted last spring. They are just a few inches tall, but I have already put tomato cages around them. Last year they got too tall to stand on their own.

The bearded irises I picked up in a FREE bucket haven’t done much yet, but I’ll be patient. Near them, the lavender we planted years ago is getting lovely and green.

Stay tuned for more garden fun.

Love,

Grandma Judy

Veggie Garden Update

Dear Liza,

All this crazy June sunshine has sure woken up my veggie allotment at Blair Community Garden! The main challenge now is keeping everything wet enough.

The legacy strawberries that grow at the edge of my allotment have made a lovely snack for me.




My row of radishes, started from seed on May 19, have finally started getting fat. For more than a month they have just been sitting there; not dead, but not thriving, either. Now the row is filling up and looking like a tiny red forest.

Bizarrely, the lettuce seeds I put in just six days ago are already sticking their heads up!

The organic cherry tomato transplants are taller than their cages and some have tiny yellow blossoms.

And my catnip is growing like mad, creating the delightful problem of having too much cat-druggy goodness for Mouse to share with Maggie, Hopey, BK, Ash, Richard and Doug, and all our other kitten friends.

Summer has arrived! All I can do now is chase it until fall.

Love,

Grandma Judy