I am thinking up ideas to create an integrated curriculum for my nature journaling classes. I would love to attract more insects and butterflies to my garden so I decided to buy some plants that would attract them. I will study them and describe them in more detail in another post (after they are incorporated in my sketchbook of course) but for now here are a couple of pictures of some of my flowers.
The bunny is waiting for places to hide its eggs. And after a full weekend of school plays, pajama parties and silent auctions we started on the garden. Sunset had a nice article about planting herbs and vegetables in an ornamental border. Since it is in the current issue the article is not online but here is a similar one.
So we picked out some plants at the local nursery and flipped the compost and put out worm casings. The border is ready for the plants, but so are all the rolly polies that were living in the compost so we are waiting for them to find new homes.
We have regular and Thai basil, blue lake bush beans, two kinds of Hungarian peppers and a cucumber. I will put in some marigolds for color too. This corner of the yard is very sunny and hopefully I will have drip irrigation soon or else these plants are doomed. I do not have the good watering habits, and my plants are the worse for it.
I also spread the fairy garden seeds yesterday and hopefully the kitties will scare off the birds till it sprouts. I frequently see birds scouring my garden for seed. I suppose if they do eat it all I will have to start the seed indoors again. Perhaps the birds could eat cheaper seed and let my seed grow outside. It really is better for the seeds. And they could eat the pillbugs and sowbugs.
ETA- I want the cats to deter the birds, not kill them! Are you listening cats? This is why you wear bells.
Here is the garden plan. I drew it and Julia colored it. She also pointed out that there should be a fairy meadow garden in it so I made sure I added that. I am pretty sure that Adam thinks this will be "landscaping" whereas in fact it will be a just for fun, semi-wild, vegetable garden. It will have a semicircular sunflower bed this year for research purposes. The great sunflower project has citizen scientist plant sunflowers and count the bees that visit it over a 15 minute period in order to track bee populations.
Last year and in years past I have always planted the sunflowers against the fence and they hardly grow. I think the birds eat the seeds, the slugs and bugs eat the seedlings and the squirrels can't wait for the seeds to mature in the flowers that make it. They run up the stalks and steal the flowers. I did have one lemon Queen Sunflower which grew but the bees did not seem interested in it at all. They were all over the lavender and buzzing around the daisies and other flowers I have in the border but they did not come to the sunflower. The one single sunflower, which was decapitated shortly after by a squirrel.
This year we will try again.
