I have to say: 25-30 coleus...

... is NOTHING when you see them spread out in a garden! Next year, I'm going to aim for something like 40, at least!!! This is basically what they look like, lost in the mulch. Plus, the really nice dramatic pinky kong coleus you see in the upper-middle were an impulse purchase at Plant World. Hopefully, I'll manage to clone and nurture a few more of these through the winter. I am definitely using the windowsill propagators to coax a whooooooole bunch of them along.

Anyway, guess what we're eating? Well, starting to eat...! Here's a picture I took a few days ago. Since then, the garden has produced two edible yummy-red strawberries. It took all I had not to pick any and eat them the last two days (Shavuos). Tomorrow, first thing, we're heading out and those strawberries had better be there!!!

Garden high:
~ Too many to count, including petunias that I grew from seeds with such lovely pastelly flowers and a delicate candy fragrance

Garden low:
~ Continued poor nutrients in one SFG bed. The leaves are yellow, the plants are sad. My container tomotoes (in a power-mix of worm castings, city compost (oops), peat and Black Earth Topsoil) are taking off like crazy, but the ones in the raised bed are still struggling... waah. And both SFG beds are overrun with potato/sow beetles. Supposedly they don't damage living plants, just eat decaying matter, but it makes me think maybe the melange of organic materials I loaded up the beds with needed another season to compost before planting in it... quick spraying with kelp tea helps muster them a bit, but I don't want to be out spraying every other day. I read in a garden book today, it's about healing the soil and choosing plants that will thrive, not standing over them, force-feeding them to keep them alive. :-(((

Oy! Can our lawn count as today's "garden low"? Haven't said much about it, but the clover has pretty much taken over. Ha! I could make a clever rhyme out of that if I weren't so sad... last year, I was so smug, I even said at one point that we had the best grass on the block (it's a pretty scrubby-looking block!). And now: 90% clover. Waah! At least it hasn't needed mowing - Ted will mow off the clover heads tomorrow, I hope, so at least it will look better.

More pics tomorrow if I survive another round of swim registration.

<3 J

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