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More than1,000 people visit my Internet
Gardening page each month, and some ask about my personal garden. In
response, I'll post a few photos of the 2005 garden here. Each year is
different, of course. Past years are at the following pages:
Aerobic Garden 2002-2003
Aerobic Garden 2004 (read here to learn why my garden is
"aerobic.")
We were saddened this spring by the loss of our beloved cat Blaktopp. My faithful gardening companion for nearly 18 years worked with me on the spring pruning, always his favorite activity. How he loved to burrow under the piles of branches. But on April 14 he let us know that it was time for him to leave. He rests now near his favorite catnip patch. We remember him in his glory posing in one of the fine bandanas from the Humane Society of Montgomery County.
Our grandchildren arrived to visit less than an hour after Topp's passing. Elizabeth had been wandering around for a couple of hours getting reacquainted with our house and yard. Suddenly she asked, "Where's Blaktopp?" Her dad explained, and she said, "Oh, he's gone home. He's safe now." And as any 2-1/2-year-old should do, she went on about her life, cherishing her memories of the cat she had met only a few times.
Last year I taught Elizabeth to pick corn and dig potatoes. This year she visited early enough to pick her first asparagus and spinach. She's planning another visit when the Silver Queen corn comes in. And this year Katharine was old enough to enjoy my uncut grass (cutting is always a low priority in April).
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Despite the cold, wet May, I managed to get the whole garden planted by last weekend. There's nothing worth photographing this month, but by mid-June the place should look a lot more interesting.
A few weekends of out-of-town travel combined with unusually hot, humid weather and copious rain had converted my garden to a weed-covered shambles. But a day's hard work, along with my wife's help, and some extra muscle from the tiller, made the plot presentable. Then the sun came out for a couple of hours and I finally got the pictures shown here.
Technical note: Click on the pictures below to view large images of the garden in a new browser window. To see the full impact of the 2000-pixel-wide panoramas, be sure to turn off image resizing in your browser as this feature will reduce the size of the images to fit them into your browser window. Internet Explorer 6, and perhaps other browsers, have image resizing turned on by default.
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Looking southeast at about 2:20 PM. Butterstick hybrid squash are in the foreground with the asparagus bed behind them. Left of the asparagus is the potato patch, the tomatoes in cages, and the Silver Queen corn. That's my neighbor's garden barn and light pole. To the right are the peppers and pole beans. The bare patch of earth to the left is ready to receive the fall broccoli and cauliflower plants around the second week of August. |
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Looking southwest at about 2:20 PM over the top of the broccoli gone to flowers. To the left is zucchini squash and the corn. Center foreground is some leaf lettuce with Swiss chard and tomatoes beyond. On the extreme right is the edge of the red raspberry patch. |
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From the back of the garden looking northeast you can just see the roof of my garage over the top of the juniper bushes that border the garden before the hill drops off toward the house. On the left we get a better view of the asparagus bed with the ferns nearly 7 feet tall. To the right of the asparagus are two hills of butternut squash, with two hills of acorn squash further to the right. The squash are mulched with newspapers. |
My grandchildren are visiting as I write this on July 22. Elizabeth has already picked some green tomatoes, but I think she is now convinced to wait for them to ripen. She's looking forward to the corn coming in, as are we all.
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There's an awful lot of butternut squash under here, Granddaddy! |
Elizabeth is an adventurer in the garden. She was fascinated by the huge leaves and vines of the butternut squash.
Page created May 25, 2005
Updated September 7, 2005
Harry_M_Kriz, [hmkriz@vt.edu]
University Libraries
Virginia Polytechnic Institute & State University
Blacksburg, VA 24061-0434