Specialty Gardening: Cottage Garden Seed Swap & Chat #16, 1 by bluespiral

bluespiral wrote:
Meredith, I'll send the rue seeds to you for both you and your friend. Apologies to others that it was a small amount and not enough to go all around. No need to send me anything back. I love rue in the garden for providing pretty glaucous foliage in the vicinity of other plants with great flowers but horrible foliage...Rue is also one of those sun lovers that can take a surprising amount of shade...and then, there's those cavorting hoards of caterpillars in late summer...the rue always returns nicely after a sound chomping

Nice to see all these younguns cropping up around here - Meredith and PamSue, am just thrilled for you two along with Lucy about new and imminent niece and grandbabies. Congratulations PamSue on your birthday and anniversary, too.

We managed to bring some tomatoes, mystery pumpkin/squashs and snow peas to a munchable stage. One way or the other they all got themselves hoisted up into the air, but any other attempts at vegies disappeared into the infinite maws of local furry critters - we hauled off 5 racoons and 4 woodchucks so far, but grrrrrrr it just takes forever for a critter to make up its mind to take the bait in a Havahart cage.

PamSue, sorry to hear about those disappointing apples and bramble berries. So ironic that here, where apples and berries did well this year, that the endless paving over of arable land continues by developers. I wonder if there might be some relatively unknown economically useful plants that would do well in your area...those fruits on opuntia cacti are supposed to be enjoyable...JL Hudson - http://www.jlhudsonseeds.net/ - seems to have some info on lesser known fruits/vegies...Maybe a small patch just for edibles that could get some soaker hose irrigation with punctuations of low figs and dwarf pomegranates through edgings of alpine strawberries and squares and circles of low drought-tolerant vegies...?

I think we'll hear from Suzy again...what she did as Queen Piggy had to be humongously consuming...she seems to really throw herself whole-piggelly into whatever she does...maybe it was her family's turn this summer

This was *s'posed* to be a morning glory arbor - Now, if I had planted this squash/pumpkin on purpose, you know we wouldn't have any squash around here - it looks like a critter had itself a few meals in our compost pile and wandered around dispersing the seeds over the winter. This vine just walked itself right up over the rue and a clematis with no excuse-me to the Ipomoea pandurata and settled itself up there.