Green Rascal Design

It looks like all the plants are gettin' it on out there. Here we have purple kale on the left (going on 3 years old now), and dinosaur kale on the right (standing at approximately 6 feet tall).

This is our black currant bush (stick) blooming. The flowers smell exactly like cloves. They're only the size of dimes, but the fragrance is pretty strong!

Our red currant is not quite in blooming mode yet, but it is doing well.

Some of our newer berry bushes (sticks) have a long way to go yet also. But we're not worried about that. These plants are more for the future than they are for now, and there will be plenty of fruit to go around when the time comes. Those squirrels don't scare me! (muahahahaha)

Here are the raspberries and blackberries in full effect. They are large and in charge so much so that we had to weed-whack some down because they were jumping under the nice belgian block border into the grass. I may not like grass, but I would like to keep the raspberries inside their patch.

Also, I put all these little picket fences in there as support. They're so cute.

The strawberry patch came back better than before without ANY work! These little babies are even spreading out into the grass, but oh well. At least these plants are short and we won't get into trouble for this.

They are flowering profusely as well, and we should be getting strawberries by our anniversary at the end of this month!

This is our massive rhubarb returned from last year along with some new additions we planted a little while ago. The big leaves are about 2 feet across right now!

Also, some of the old bushes that the hubby cut down are making a comeback. These were the first we attempted to kill, before we started chopping the roots out of the ground.
Dang Buckthorn!

These are the peas. Since we failed so completely at peas last year, we expected to have little luck this year. So we planted TONS of them in the hopes of getting a few survivors. Well, this year is much better for peas somehow, and now we have about 70 pea plants thriving. I suppose this will be a good opportunity to perfect my authentic London mushy pea recipe.

This is mostly Amish Deer-Tongue Lettuce with a few shallots in the back. In the front are the plants that we planted directly in the ground with cold frames over them. The rest of the lettuce hubby started in the seed starting tray in the basement. Now there is very little difference between the plants, and we've concluded that if we use more cold frames next year it will turn out to be much less work!

This is our returning Swiss Chard. Last year this plant was the runt of the bunch, and this year it is the only one back after the winter. We don't know why the bigger plants last year got burnt out and didn't come back. But we have a couple little baby ones also, so we should have a good amount of chard this year. That is, as long as the bunny rabbit stays away long enough for us to get some!

And here we have some nice little white clover plants competing with the grass. We threw out a pound of white clover seeds with our hands a while back, and every bare patch sprang with life a couple weeks later. You can tell our clover from the wild kind because it has that little white ring on each leaf. This plant stays relatively short, and it also spreads well and competes successfully with grass!

Lastly, I want to talk about the Lingonberries. They're a small bushy ground cover that likes acidic soil. So when the neighbor's tree came crashing down in a storm last year, we used it as fertilizer for our then future lingonberry patch. The dark green leaves are what we received from the nursery, and the light green is all the growth since we planted them! We've had lingonberry preserves from Ikea, and it'll be interesting to get them fresh.

Also, hubby is currently writing an article about all our gardening techniques for the Dragonflyer, Drexel University's student periodical! I'll mention it when the paper comes out in a couple weeks!