My Montana Garden

This post is in reference to Jill's post about her beautiful Iowa garden. Mine is not so beautiful. As you can see, it's mostly brown. Unfortunately this is just what it looks like in June in Montana. Many things are coming up...peas, beets, carrots (if I can find them under the weeds), and beans. My flowers are very slow and I'm hoping they're okay....this will be the second year in a row without them and I will be sad if it's true! My sweet peas haven't come up, which is perplexing b/c they are a pea, and my other peas look great. Notice the green things with the red plastic? Those are my tomato plants. Remarkably they look marvelous, and I have a full-grown cherry, though it needs to ripen, but it's b/c they're so well-insulated in the green water walls. The red plastic is an experiment. I read it's supposed to reflect the proper wavelengths for tomatoes, plus keep the ground warm. I know it's early in the season but I swear my tomatoes look awfully nice for this time of year, considering the weather. So all in all, you can garden in Montana, it's just more of a process, not an immediate reward!

My flower beds are doing much better. I have some penstemons:

And gobs and gobs of geraniums. I overplanted geraniums. I'm wondering if some of them are going to have to go bye-bye and be replaced with something else in coming years:

These are geums, but I think they're just balls of hair. Jill, these are the ones I was talking about! I like them, they're a conversation piece if nothing else:

This is a random photo. This is what I found last night when I checked on Reder before I went to bed. Guess he made a mountain out of his "babies."

Today was a busy day and I'm ready for bed, but unfortunately this place is a complete disaster so I have to clean up first. Poor Jason has been working non-stop this last week, so we haven't seen too much of him, though he did stick around quite a bit on the weekend while the kids were awake. I think he's having trouble getting by on 5 hours of sleep. Good thing this project will be done soon!