My Gardens: Coming to Life.

Lady’s Mantle

My gardens are coming to life, even as I continue to plant seeds and add flowers here and there. Spring is always slower to come in Minnesota, and this year, it felt like it took forever.

Then today we recorded over 5 inches of rain in a 24-hour period – with more projected to come this evening. The farm fields in my area are soaked and look more like lakefront property, as my mom says. Luckily, my family, which also received way too much rain, finished planting corn and soybeans last weekend, but I wonder if other farmers are so lucky?

Since I don’t live on our family farm (and haven’t since I graduated from college 22 years ago), my gardens are a daily connection to the land for me. In my own tiny way, I love to do daily inspections – just as my dad and my brother inspect their fields – and I like to track the progress by taking photos. I haven’t taken to tracking rain totals by day or spring planting dates each year, but I do rotate crops among my raised bed vegetable gardens annually so I’m not usually planting the same thing in the same spot. (My only exceptions are my yellow beans  – I have a specific garden bed that is the perfect size for all the yellow beans I plant, so I can’t do a garden bed rotation on those.)

Prior to the rainy weekend, I snapped a few photos of where a few things are at in my gardens. Let’s just hope the sun comes back out after all this rain!

Bearded Iris – a couple of years ago, one of our brutal Minnesota winters was pretty tough on my iris plants, but these little guys made it through and continue to reward me with yellow and purple color.

Hermann’s Pride Dead Nettle: weird name but gorgeous leaf color and pattern – yellow blossoms are now starting to pop, just a couple of days after I took this photo.

Yankee Doodle Lilac – I love the deeper purple color of this particular lilac variety.

I planted six varieties of zinnias on Friday evening after I got home from work. Whether the seeds were washed away from the subsequent hard-driving rain we received remains to be seen. Fingers crossed!

Here’s the zinnia bed I planted … it’s about 8 feet x 8 feet, so not huge but I have space to make it bigger next year if I decide I like it. Teacher Man may actually build me a raised bed or two (or four!) for this area this summer. Zinnias are one of my favorite flowers so I thought it would be fun to have a garden bed dedicated just to their color!

My beloved yellow wax beans are starting to pop! Teacher Man and I love to eat these all summer long so I plant several rows, which gives us quite a harvest for two people. (I do share, though!) 

Uh-oh. That’s quite a bit of rain – especially since I emptied the rain gauge earlier in the morning after it had over an inch of rain.