My "Garden"

First, I apologize for not posting last week. I was on vacation in sunny California. The hubby and I were touring wine country in Napa and Sonoma County!

On to today's entry....

So my garden isn't exactly a garden. It's really just a bunch of pots on my deck. We started our "garden" when we moved into our house a few years ago. One of my co-workers told me she grew vegetables on the deck of her apartment and I thought I'd give it a try. (I don't know why I was so surprised that you could grow vegetables in a pot because they aren't any different than ornamental flowers. They're all plants.)

So now you get to meet this year's crop.

First we have our raspberry bush.

We've grown lots of berries on this bush. We haven't been able to eat any of them because the birds eat them first. I actually saw a mocking bird hop up next to it and take one of those delicious looking berries and fly off! Alas, there are no more berries on my raspberry bush so we have nothing to show for our "hard" work. Really all we have to do is water it and fertilize it with an organic fertilizer.

(If you notice it says liquid fish and, yes, it does actually smell fishy)

Here are our peppers. We have cayenne peppers (they're the skinny ones) and jalapeno peppers (they're the plumper ones).

The cayenne peppers are new this year. Last year we tried to grow red peppers without much success. They kept getting blossom end rot. After some research I found that this was a calcium deficiency. After more research I found out the calcium deficiency was caused by inconsistent watering (yep that sounds right). We thought we'd wait until we were more responsible gardeners before trying to grow bell peppers again.

These are our strawberries. The one that's huge and overflowing is an "ever bearing" and the other one is "June bearing."

The June bearing plant had one strawberry. That's right, ONE. June came and went and we only had a single strawberry. Like the raspberries, we didn't get to eat that beautiful organic strawberry. Something mysteriously happen to that berry. We can't imagine that a bird could have carried off that big red berry. We suspect that Lola (our dog) got the berry because she is now very interested in the strawberries we bring home from the market.

Did you notice that a lot of the leaves had lots of holes in them? That's due to a rose gardener's worst nightmare called a June bug. Here's one of the buggers now...

We also found out last year that they like raspberry bushes. They've stayed away from them this year though.

Our last specimen is one that an idiot could grow. It's mint!

Mint is actually pretty invasive so most people grow it in pots even if they put it in their garden. They basically just bury the pot with the very top of the pot above ground so that it doesn't spread. We are particularly happy to have it in our "garden" because my husband makes a fabulous mojito.