A hoe, a claw and a rake : Part II

The potager is completely cleared, the soil has been turned and amendments have been incorporated. We're ready to sow our peas! While cleaning the bed we had to pick out lots of rocks, small and not so small thanks to the plumbing work done last winter. Wing Nut found some very interesting little rocks.

Hey, those aren't rocks at all! They're purple potatoes from my little experiment last summer. They were spuds that went a little too long unused and sprouted in our wire hanging basket. I thought the little violet colored sprouts were so beautiful, I threw them in a container and threw dirt on top. We so did not follow Steve Solomon's advice in Growing Vegetables West of the Cascades, usually our bible when it comes to growing things we've never grown before. These were store bought spuds and not the garden center's certified ones. I didn't hill them up. I watered at the wrong time. It also never occurred to me to check the pot in the fall, so certain was I that there would be no potatoes in there. So imagine our surprise and glee when we dumped out the pot that you see sitting in the potager in the photo from our post "A hoe, a claw and a rake : Part I" and found about 2 dozen purple spuds that looked to be quite edible.

My mommas have melons!

The melons have absolutely nothing to do with our garden, but since Annoying Little Creature struck a pose and the title line instantly popped into my head, I decided to run with it. Melons were on sale at our grocery store this weekend.

It's a perfect sunny summer day. The Blue Angels are in town for Seafair. We heard them thundering by overhead earlier today. Seafair is a huge local summer festival that takes place around Lake Washington. Besides the air show there is also the Chevrolet Cup which features hydroplanes, the fastest boats in the world, racing along the surface of Lake Washington. They are freaky looking crafts.

Here's the weekly pepper update. They are big! I bet they'll start turning red this week. It turns out that all the varieties we put in will ripen to red. We can't get over how big the plants have gotten. The peppers we grew last year never got half this size.

Any guesses as to what's growing in the pot with the pretty lavender flowers? It's purple potatoes!

This week the hibiscus bloomed on the hillside garden. It was spectacular.

And then there is the ribbon grass... Well, we said we'd be sharing gardening fiascoes too. The ribbon grass hasn't become a fiasco quite yet. But we are planning on removing it this evening, before it does become a fiasco! It's growing way too fast and we fear it is living up to it's classification as a noxious weed. We have some lovely variegated sage to put in it's place.