• Metal bowl containing red, green, and yellow hot peppers, sitting on grass
    Gardening,  Updates

    July Garden Update and a Look Ahead

    July started out really well in the garden – I had a number of tomatoes forming and ripening on my plants, I’d harvested the first batch of Hungarian wax peppers (they start early and keep going until the frost), the herb garden was looking good, and the dye garden area was looking a bit less like a dirt patch. By the middle of the month, my tomatoes started disappearing. Turns out that the hawks that had taken up residence in the trees behind the house moved on, and the squirrels came back. I think one of the tomato plants ended up with leaf curl, and another with either blight or…

  • Gardening,  Updates

    Garden Update: Spring is Here (Ish)

    Spring is a sort of fickle thing here in North Carolina. It’s cold, and then it’s Pollen Everywhere. And then it’s comfy for about a week, and then it starts getting hot. But it might suddenly get cold again (very unpredictably). It can make it a bit challenging to figure out when tender plants can actually go outside and stay there. Last spring I made the mistake of thinking it was done being cold in mid-March. Yes, our last average frost is around April 17, but it was in the 70s last March. Which also meant I put in tomatoes and peppers too soon. Even covered, there was some cold…

  • Gardening

    Growing the Garden

    Outside of fiber arts and living history activities, I’ve always had an interest in plants and gardening. Between college and grad school, I even worked at a garden center near where I lived. I’ve had houseplants since college, and the number of plants in the house increased significantly while I’ve been staying close to home due to Covid. With today’s temperatures in the 70s (there’s more cool temperatures left until it’s really spring), I started reflecting on the past year’s garden and thinking about what I want to do this year. Last spring, I put in my largest garden to date. Not having events to go to, it gave me…