Gardening challenges

Aside from the usual gardening challenges - this year, that includes a cold, wet spring immediately followed by 90-degree days - this is one of my gardening challenges I am attacking this year. That's the strip of dirt between our front walk and the garage. In the past, I've done the usual thing and planted flowers. Unfortunately, this strip receives very little rain due to the eaves overhead. Since I don't use the front door much, I often forget about the flowers baking in dry dirt between double heat-sinks of building and concrete. It doesn't help that I don't get terribly excited about flowers; they just don't excite me like growing something I can eat does.

My goal this year is to avoid this turning into bare dirt with a few dried-out plants to shame me. My efforts started last fall, when I planted a bunch of daffodils. Flowers that come up year after year when it's still cold outside do excite me, so that worked out well. I was so overjoyed to see something green that I kept checking on them, and therefore remembered to water. But, as you can see, their time is over, with just a few leaves lying about now.

Now we are in phase 2 of the Front Walk Challenge. I've planted a few herbs which are supposed to handle heat well. Starting from the right, we have thyme, then purple sage, globe basil, and golden sage. The golden sage has been heaved out of the ground twice so far by moles, so it is struggling a bit, but the others seem to be doing well. At least, they aren't dead yet! But I still have quite a bit of space, so I'm thinking of other things to put in there. I've ordered some Egyptian walking onions, which sound interesting. The only thing is, nothing I've read tells me how tall they get. I hope they don't look too crazy once they get going. I think it would be really cool to harvest tiny little onions from just outside my front door. And, of course, I'm more likely to remember to water cool, edible growing things. I'll post additional pics as the season progresses.