My edible February garden

The weather was beautiful and warm this weekend (65F/18C), so I thought I might show you my February garden (seeing as I'm running this year round garden contest)

Even though they are most certainly NOT edible, I always love it when my daffodils begin popping up:

You can see a few lettuces that I planted last month beginning to show themselves, along with a purple peacock kale (edible).

Here are a few more lettuces, a wild garlic (to the left) and some assorted weeds (yes, weeds in February!) ...

My honeyberry bushes (Lonicera caerulea) are beginning to leaf out:

And I do have a part of my front yard which isn't either eaten to the ground or wilted from the cold:

There's a pak choi, a couple of red yuccas (not true yuccas and not edible), a row of purple kale (quite edible!), my rose bush, and some other assorted edible greens. The greenery in front of the edging is henbit (Lamium amplexicaule), which is also edible, although considered a weed around here. It has pretty purple flowers in the spring.

Something has been eating my saffron crocuses (whose stamens give you the spice saffron -- these bloom in the fall), but they seem to be happy enough where I've transplanted them.

In the back yard, it's pretty bleak, other than a few early spring weeds here and there, so I'll show you my angora rabbit Shadow, who was happy to get out of her cage and munch on some grass for a change:

Of course, today it's snowing!

I would love to see your February edible gardens! If you'd like to enter my February garden contest, click here.

My garden in January ...

Hello, edible landscape artists!

Since I'm doing a year-round edible gardens contest this year, I thought I might show off my own garden in January to get things started.

Two kinds of kale

There's not really any such thing as "usual" weather here in central Oklahoma -- any sort of weather is possible, sometimes more than one kind in any single week. But it's nice that it's gotten above freezing this week, which gives me some kind of incentive to go outside and take pictures :)

Lavender and kale

As you might expect, things are a bit scraggly -- in the front yard, my garlic plants around the pond, while green, sort of look shell-shocked to me.

Wild garlic, planted here on purpose ;)

My rosemary is doing as well as can be expected after last winter's terrible hot/cold/hot/cold run, which killed several of my hedge plants, and is probably grateful for the more even temperatures this year.

Rosemary hedge

The rest of my plants are doing about as they usually do, although it looks as if something has been eating some of my kale!

A rascal is somewhere nearby ...

 I had to brush away the leaves from my strawberry plants, but you can see that they are doing just fine and this particular one is making flowers! (which I couldn't get a good photo of ...)

Strawberry plant (which loves all zones)

In my back yard, my tea plant (Camellia sinesis) is doing just fine underneath its row cover.

Row cover is great stuff for tender plants or first winters

And it looks as if my cherry tree may be getting ready to bud!

Hopefully we won't have a blizzard next week ... you never know here.

So this is what my garden looks like in January ... if you'd like to share yours just hop over to my Garden in January contest. You'll be glad you did! :)

We got a white Christmas after all ...

... if a few days late!

Here's what I woke up to this morning:

Hope all of you are having a wonderful holiday. :)

Kale, kale, kale!!

Well, you know how much I like kale, and I even wrote about how to grow kale as one of my featured plants ... so guess what I got at the nursery this week?

The ones on the left were called "peacock kale" and have very interesting leaves.

So of course I had to plant them!

(the pansies are for another project)

 

I alternated regular purple kale with the "peacock" kale, just because I felt like it, and I think it turned out pretty well.  

One of my kale (way at the top of that picture, where you really can't see it) has been around since last year and is doing great!

 

Are you planting kale? What sort are you planting?

Harvesting my prickly pear ... (you can grow that!)

This week, I harvested the fruit from my prickly pear (with the help of some salad tongs!), following the instructions on this page (which has a nice recipe).

I found it very easy to take the fruits (called tunas) off of the plant -- they simply twist off -- but much harder to clean them properly. They tend to spin in the tongs, and I ended up having to hold them with one hand and scrub them with the other. Of course, now I'm picking tiny needles out of my fingertips, but ... ;)

If I were to do this again, I would get some different tongs (mine are like the ones in the article I linked to above) and/or wear some thick household gloves set aside for the purpose.

The fruits really are lovely once picked, and to me they taste just a bit like strawberries. I'm looking forward to making some sorbet or ice cream with them this evening.

Planting this was as easy as putting it in the ground (it was much smaller then!). I've put some landscape cloth around it so I don't have to weed it later, and eventually I'll fill it in with gravel, once I find the kind I want.

It doesn't require any maintenance, watering, or anything else. When it gets a bit bigger, I might try harvesting some of the pads and report back on them. :)

Poking around my front yard ...

With my third annual Edible Front Yard photo contest coming to an end July 31st I thought I might give you a bit of a look around my front yard! :)

My daylilies around my "crazy tree" (aka weeping mulberry) are doing very well, and have more than doubled in number of blooms from last year.

We have been eating the flowers (stamens removed) in stir-fry, along with kale, garlic, sweet potato greens, and onions from my yard.

They are tasty!

This is called horsemint -- it's a relative of bee balm in the mint family, and grows naturally here in Oklahoma. I've never planted any of this yet it pops up all over. I love this stuff!

Supposedly it makes a nice tea, but I haven't tried it yet. What I really like is how it looks -- it matches the colors in my garden very nicely.

Love my lettuces!

I went crazy this spring throwing lettuce seed all over my front garden plots, and it's been coming up really well with all the rain we've had this year.

I planted this lavender long before I knew about edible landscaping, and it's been one of the best plants in my front yard -- it looks good all year long.

I use it mostly in this one recipe for stew, but I recently ran across this other recipe for lavender syrup, which sounds wonderful :D

The edible plants around my pond are doing well also.

I stuck the mint in the very back corner of the pond so if it decided to go crazy, who cares?

It looks as though the grasshoppers have taken a liking to it, which is fine with me -- there's enough for all of us!

Here is one of my sweet potato plants -- I bought a couple dozen of them and decided to put this one in a pot that we brought with us when we moved here from southern California.

Even though the soil in this pot has got to be terrible, this plant seems to love it in there!

I can't wait to see how many sweet potatoes we get from this.

Hope all of you are doing well! If you'd like to show off your edible front yards, you still have time to enter the contest. Looking forward to seeing what you've created. :)

Prickly pear and dewberries, among other things ...

This past week has been fairly stormy, but I was able to get out into my garden some ... here are a few of the things that went on last week:

My nectarine tree arrived! This is a dwarf Mericrest Nectarine from Stark Bros.  My husband and I planted it in the back yard, between the pomegranate and the mulberry trees.

I absolutely love nectarines, so I'm pretty excited!

The flat to the left of the tree has a bunch of roselle hibiscus (Hibiscus sabdariffa) seedlings in them, which I started from seeds I got through Baker Creek. This is the kind of hibiscus you use in herbal tea.

I didn't get as good a germination as I would have hoped, but I do have a half dozen or so seedlings from the packet.  The roselle doesn't do well in zone 7, so these will be potted plants ... I'm going to put them in various places and see where they do best, once I get them put into more permanent containers. But so far they seem to be happy on my back porch. :)

My prickly pear has bloomed! I was surprised to see that this one was yellow - I had always thought that prickly pears had pink blooms, but apparently they come in a wide variety of flower colors.

This plant is quite funny - it sort of "shrinks" in the winter ... all the leaves droop, turn a dull gray-green, and curl up a bit ... then the whole plants pops back up and starts putting out new leaves once it gets warm again!

Home Depot didn't have any more of the nice colored gravel that I started this with, so I'm looking for something similar to finish filling around my plant.

My dewberries are ripening, and I spent part of an afternoon last week picking them on the front yard side of the fence. I got almost two quarts of berries, and I haven't even started on the back side of the fence yet!

And just the other day, I picked our first bit of salad from the front yard ... which was a first for us! Go, edible landscaping! :D

 

So ... how was your garden doing last week? Anything interesting to show us?