Chronicaling the lunacy of taming three acres in Tidewater Virginia, one square foot at a time!

"Gardens... should be like lovely, well-shaped girls: all curves, secret corners, unexpected deviations, seductive surprises and then still more curves. ~H.E. Bates, A Love of Flowers


Thursday, July 9, 2009

Survival Regardless....

It's always interesting to me as a gardener, to see the the drive to survive and "become."

Take this pepper plant....actually all my veggies. After building the garden and filling it with compost-topsoil I lovingly put my plants in the ground and expected them to...GROW! But they didn't! They didn't die, but they didn't really grow either....they did set fruit, which was weird.

So being a diligent gardener, I called me county extension office and explained my plight to the master gardener in charge. Great news! It could have been any one of 20 different deficiencies in the soil. HMMMM!

So I started tinkering with nutrients...what seemed to work was "Tomato Tone," I have no idea why. But the tomatoes are growing and fruiting. And though the peppers are runty. they are in miniature doing there thing. Another testament to the ability to survive despite adverse conditions.... the perennial Hibiscus, after being dessimated by Japanese Beetles, grew a whole new set of leaves...(giving the Japanese Beetles the floral finger...ha!)
Not only did it grow new leaves.....but it also flowered...sorty of mangy, but beautiful...sort of like a cool colored broken seashell.


A less stressed member of the garden.....


And this Phlox....spent quite a bit of time in the plant ghetto alternatively dessicated then flooded until I got my act together and planted it, never really expecting it to do much of anything this year...and look what it did!! The most zingy orange blooms going! I should get more!!
I guess the point is just to....

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