Our
Warrenville GardenOur
Warrenville Garden
Another color of lilac (a reddish French one) lives behind the house and
can be seen on the house
for sale page.
Our only crop thus far this year is asparagus. Now that it is well established, of course, we are moving away from it. Quite delicious, though. Jim eats all of his share raw. Without planting anything this spring, we have lettuce, radishes, dill, and lots of green onions coming up this spring. I have even found lots of small tomatoes coming up from my squishing them into the garden last fall.
Since it is only spring, I will report on last year's harvest.
But first, one last spring photo of my redbud trees on the north side of
our house. As you can see, our yard is very woodsy. That makes
vegetable gardening a little challenging. Even though we spent crucial
gardening time in Europe last spring 
(arrived
home May 20) we had a nice vegetable crop.
For once I splurged on "fancy" colors of lettuce instead of the ten cent a pack kind. It made lovely salads, but tasted ordinary. The volunteer plain old green leaf lettuce did really well, and I see it coming up all over the garden again this spring, no sign of the fancy stuff, although I let it go to seed. For a change the cucumbers did better than zucchini. The yellow beans were successful enough that I had some to freeze. I learned that kohlrabi can actually winter over and grow into something you can eat. The fancy red stemmed Swiss chard was a disappointment, it barely germinated. The cilantro, an enthusiastic volunteer, was great. I have learned that it doesn't freeze worth a darn, it loses its flavor totally. Dill does freeze well, but still it is practically a weed. I did give gifts of cilantro and dill at meetings again last summer.
Our neighbors who plant heirloom tomatoes from seed had agreed to give
us some (as usual). Our new garden space 
produced
a vigorous crop of tomatoes in mixed colors. The raccoons, having
good taste, preferred the yellowish ones (I do, too) and ate those almost
exclusively. We ate many delicious fresh tomato salads, and Jim canned
the tomato sauce separately by color. Yellow looks great in the jar,
but looks weird on noodles. Although the red-blushing yellow tomatoes
were beautiful, a few grew odd appendages, which we will politely say looked
like a nose.
Other neighbors reported that there was a late, heavy frost, and thus our fruit trees lost their blooms and hence we had no fruit from trees except mulberries. That probably means this year the fruit crop will be quite heavy, since the trees all rested last year. They have been blooming vigorously this spring. Our raspberry crop was bigger than ever in 2002, with friends picking some of it while we were in Milwaukee for most of July. I also picked and froze a lot of red currants. The berries are a fabulous addition to my morning fruit smoothies.
Despite the rabbits and squirrels going after our sunflowers repeatedly last year, our own homegrown variety (branching, multi-colored, and 10-15 feet tall) did pretty well. It was depressing when one would start to bloom and immediately be eaten that night. Numerous baby sunflowers are coming up now, I wish them well.
We are organic gardeners and also have a prairie area in the back.
We increase the prairie in size slightly each year, to 
restore
the natural ecosystem of this area and provide food and habitat for wild
creatures, and also to have less lawn to mow! We've seen finches,
woodpeckers, cardinals, robins, blue jays, etc. this spring.
Of course we cheat and grow some daffodils in the prairie, but they bloom
before anything else is up, so it works. Marcia loves daffodils,
so they grow in 8 flower beds, 7 spots on the prairie, and a variety of
places in the lawn. They multiply much better in the prairie than
in the regular lawn, I suppose because they never get accidentally mowed
in the prairie, and the prairie dirt holds moisture better.
back to 2003 holiday newsletter
Intersolar
water fountains. We own one of their floating solar fountains.
jmcolsmith@worldnet.att.net
recent changes: Thu Jun 17 Sun Jun 6 Sat Jun 5 Sat May 8 2004 - Wed Dec 10 - Thu Nov 6 - Thu Sep 18 - Mon May 12 - Tue Apr 15 - Sun Mar 16 - Sat Jan 25 - Sun Jan 12 2003 - Sun Sep 8 - Tue Sep 3 - Sun Aug 4 - Fri Jun 28 - Thu Apr 4 - Tue Feb 26 2002 - Thu Dec 3 - Sun Apr 8 - Wed Apr 4 2001