Shopping

I spent a lot of time "gardening" yesterday but that mostly meant visiting the local nurseries and checking out their pots. I needed three pots for my mints and one pot for my front steps. I wanted a really pretty pot for the front, but I wanted plastic as it won't crack and won't suck out water like clay does.

The first stop was actually a hardware store. They didn't have any plastic pots, but they did have a large bag of vermiculite which I snapped up. I also looked at their plants and picked up a bleeding heart. I have a shady spot in the corner of the fences where it would be perfect. And I love bleeding hearts. I'll have to plant a hosta in front of it eventually. Bleeding hearts die out early and the hostas comes up later. So they ought to be happy together. But the hosta will be from a split of one of the hostas that we are already buying so it will be a year or two before I plant it.

Then it was off to Mahoney's. I had a good time looking at the plants they had, but bought nothing. I didn't like their cheap plastic pots. I liked the faux stone one they had, but I knew Pemberton Farms had one the exact same one. So I bought all my pots at Pemberton Farms as I liked their cheapo pots for the mints. While I was there I looked around for plants to put in the big stone one. I bought a pretty variegated yellow sage for height. I'll put one mint in that pot too, but I'm not sure which one yet as they haven't come. I also bought a couple of small yellow dahlias and some purple petunias. They call the petunias blue, but really I think they look more purple. The mint will have some competition.

The side undisturbed by the birds

I also got to pick the first of my lettuce. No heads were chopped off, but a leaf or two from all the plants were taken. In addition I took some chives, some Fun Jen, mizuna, and tatsoi. Not much from anything, but enough to make a nice salad. While I was under the row cover, I thinned out the turnips. I ate them as micro greens, but they weren't heavy enough to weigh.

As I was picking the lettuce I noticed that the birds had been in to it. I also noticed they had plucked up a few of the cilantro seedlings. The birds are back. The birds in my neighborhood are vicious. There is a flock of European sparrows that are like locusts. A neighbor a few doors down keeps a constant supply of bread for them on the road. Well bread is a boring diet and they love to come to the garden and mow it down. I loved the birds at my last house. As I was telling Villager the other day, at my old house my birds were nice. They ate the insects. They never mowed anything down, and only occasionally stole things like a cosmos seedling for their nests. Here we don't have a nice mixed flock of birds. These are city birds. They hear about a sale going on in Daphne's Dandelions and brawls break out.

Needless to say I had to do something and I was really worried about them finding the peas before they were big enough to withstand the attack. So out came the netting and the old tent stakes. I covered most of it up. I hope that saves my poor plants. They can still get to some of the peas and can get inside the netting if they try, but I'm hoping it is enough of a deterrent. I want to make sure to get the netting off before the peas start climbing though. I would hate to have the netting tangled in the pea vines.