A Patio Plant Party

by Kimberlee

Spring is finally here! Or it was, briefly, then went away and seems to be back again today.  I hope it takes this time....

Fortunately for my cousin who is visiting this weekend, we were able to move the plants out of the guest bedroom and onto the balcony to hardy them up before they have to go into the community garden.  Husband and I were really surprised about how full the garden plots are, almost all of them are taken.  It's really heartening to know that so many people from the complex are involved, and I'm excited at the thought of getting to know some of my neighbors.

The bones of the vertical garden!

 I mentioned this vertical garden in a blog post not too long ago, I fell HARD for it!  Now, see, I'm the kind of person who looks for this kind of thing on the side of the road, in construction areas and whatnot.  My husband, being much more responsible than me (this will come up again later), decided that we'd try to get one from a store - but Pallet Stores being in short supply, we went to a local home chain store to see what we could dig up.  In the back of their garden center was a pile of pallets, and after asking several employees, we were told that we could just take one. 

Now I'm the kind of person who, receiving that assurance, would just walk out of the store with the pallet.  But since my husband is more responsible than me, he wanted to take it through the aisle.  This was one of those days that had been predicted to be nasty all day long, but had inexplicably cleared and warmed up, so the garden center was hopping but the one and only checkout was being held by a young girl who had not worked in the garden section before, and didn't even know what a pallet was, much less believed us when we said it was free.  After a talk with a manager, we took our pallet home!  What I won't do for free things!  On the upside, though, getting it new and clean from a store meant I didn't have to pull one up out of the mucky muck of a construction site and get my car and myself all gross.

Shade-loving plants

We put all the other plants out on the patio to weather them, and how they have been weathered.  By all means, everything should have been put into the garden by now, but it has just been too cold.  I hope this week will present an opportunity.

The herbs are so far doing spectacularly well.  I know herbs are pretty hardy, but I've been abysmal at making things grow, so it's been awesome to get plants from seeds - who would have thought it!

The fairies watching over the younglings

The beautiful tomatoes in the foreground

I also found two of these coffee bags for 50 cents a piece - I love how they look but have no idea what to do with them!  If anyone has any ideas, I would love to hear them!

Scrabble is always implanting herself in the middle