Inge's Garden on the Home Front

Romanseco Cauliflower

 Normally I only write about Die Weide, but Inge's garden looks so lovely this year that I decided to devote a post to the the home garden Inge grows and maintains. (I get shoveling duties...) Inge bought three cauliflower plants at Red Barn Garden Center this year but the cauliflower heads that grew wasn't your white round head cauliflower. She ended up with two different cauliflower types, the Romanesco varietal above, and the Coconut varietal below. It will be very interesting to see how they taste!

Coconut Cauliflower

 Inge grew her own potato patch in the side raised bed this year. Her potato plants look way healthier and bigger than the plants I grew on Die Weide.

Inge's Potato Patch

 In the front bed below Inge grew the cauliflower, cabbage, lettuce, onions, and some herbs. It's the first time we grew cabbage where the leaves curled into a head, instead of bolting.

Cabbage, lettuce, onions, cauliflower

We bought and planted the rose bush below because of its lovely orange-tinged blooms. This year she blooms and grows like never before. We've had it for many years, but the year we planted it we generously applied rose fertilizer in the hole and the rose nearly burned to death. It took years to recover but it looks great now! Inge, to this day, refuses to put fertilizer on anything due to the rose burn experience. We use a lot of compost and worm tea instead. I apply organic fertilizer, blood meal, and bone meal on the garden at Die Weide.

Orange Roses

This is a closeup of the orange rose bloom.

Orange Rose Bloom

The photo below shows the orange rose bush under the grape arbor. The grape vine looks really healthy in its fourth year in the garden and this is the first year it bloomed, hopefully meaning we get our first harvest of grapes!

Grape vine over and Orange Rose Bush under Arbor

First year the grapes bloomed

This bed once grew strawberry plants so thick you couldn't see the soil for the strawberries. There were blooms galore, indicating we would obtain a bounty of fruit. Then we got Penny, our chocolate lab. Within days, our cute ball of fur had dug the entire bed up and the strawberries were gone. The fence you see behind the strawberries was my solution to ensuring our garden wasn't destroyed by Penny. By next year, I am hoping that we'll again have a bed of yummy strawberries.

Strawberry patch, reborn!

Grapefruit Blossom

Lemon Tree Blossom

Lemon Tree in pot

Inge deposited all the hard-packed clay topsoil I dug up for the pathway in the triangle of trees where grass never grows due to deep shading. We planted a lot of shade tolerant plants and mulched to beautify our landscape further. We need to plant more grass up front too.

New landscaping in front of house