Three Cheers for Daylilies!

I like for my garden to be attractive to people and pollinators, so I always mix flowers and vegetables together as much as possible. I've learned a lot about my flower priorities over the last few years, mainly that I like perennials that are easy to grow, able to handle our extreme North Alabama weather, and colorful. I don't have the energy or talent for fussy flowers when I'm trying to keep the tomatoes alive and it's 100 degrees outside. Luckily I found daylilies, thanks largely to some friends who offered us all we could transplant from their yard. Daylilies are basically the perfect flower, as far as I'm concerned. They come in all shapes, colors, and sizes, they're almost impossible to kill, and they look wonderful in clusters around the kitchen garden.

If you're afraid to start growing flowers because you don't have a "green thumb" and have had bad luck with houseplants, then daylilies are there for you. You can buy very inexpensive ones at your local garden center for less than $5 each. Plant them this spring once they show up at your area's stores and watch them thrive. They spread over time, which means you'll eventually have a robust cluster you can divide after 3-4 years to add to other parts of your garden. Other than that, they won't ask much of you, just a sunny spot in the yard. They're drought tolerant but won't mind a rainy week, either, and they aren't picky about soil types. Just make sure they get enough sun; my only daylily failures last year were in too much shade. The plants survived but did not bloom well, and we've now moved them to a sunnier spot in the new garden.

As I mentioned, I started with a few truck loads of free daylilies from a friend, and if you can get free ones then go for it. They survived and bloomed even when transplanted in the heat of July, and they came back stronger the second year. Most of our freebies were the commonly seen orange blooms sometimes derided as "ditch lilies"; they're all over neighborhoods here in Huntsville through the summer months. I was delighted to have them but soon found out about the breathtaking diversity of daylily varieties and wanted more. (Warning! Daylilies are habit forming and addictive!)

We headed to the local Lowe's and found another popular daylily, the yellow rebloomer Stella d'Oro. This is a solid first daylily if you are buying yours at a chain garden center, where you should get them for under $5 per pot. You will find other varieties as the season progresses; Happy Returns and Purple d'Oro both turn up at stores in our area, as well as a few others. Independent nurseries and garden centers will offer a wider variety; our local favorite is Bennett Nurseries, which stocks a wonderful selection of daylilies and other plants throughout the growing season. Many of the nicer daylilies at independent stores will run about $10 each, but they're worth it because they'll grow and thrive and spread without much fuss, giving you years of color and enjoyment.

Oakes Daylily Festival in Tennessee

Once I had exhausted the options at all of my local, physical stores, I started looking at daylilies online. Behold - a world of glorious daylilies is just a keyboard and a credit card away! Specialty growers can offer hundreds of varieties tailored to meet your specific garden needs. You can get short ones, tall ones, spider blooms, rebloomers, giant blooms, tiny blooms, and all in every color imaginable. My favorite online daylily company is Oakes Daylilies based in Tennessee. They even have an annual daylily festival at their farm, which we attended in 2019. It was really amazing, and we came home with lots of new plants for our garden!

The daylilies have become such a passion for us that we made sure we brought the best of them with us when we moved in October. All of our Oakes daylilies were dug up and moved to the new garden, and I'm eagerly waiting to see them bloom. We've interplanted them with daffodils and tulips for a long season of color, but there's room for more daylilies. We left the freebies and most of the Lowe's purchases at the old house to bloom for new owners, and I hope they'll enjoy them. I already have my eye on some new daylilies for 2020 and some new places to put them!

Learn more about daylilies!
American Meadows
Burpee
Gardener's Path

Garden Wishlist for 2020: Squash

Harvest early and often!

In my last post I tackled the massive topic of tomatoes, but squash is much less complicated for me. While there are many, many varieties out there to choose from, I have to be practical about squash because my small family can only eat so much of it. Last year I definitely went overboard with six plants - 3 yellow squash and 3 zucchini - that produced so much my kid was actually relieved when the vine borers appeared. For 2020 I'll be sticking with a smaller quantity of squash that we'll enjoy until the pests inevitably take over.

Yellow Squash

The first year I grew squash I chose the most traditional Southern version, the yellow crookneck squash. This is the yellow squash I remember from my grandfathers' gardens when I was a child; it was usually destined for a casserole. I never liked them as a kid but was tempted by the starts at the garden center and brought a few home. Boy, did they grow! We found a couple of recipes we all actually liked and ate lots of squash for several weeks before the vine borers showed up. I had to learn the hard way about the predestined end of all Southern squash, and eventually I pulled up the riddled vines and called it a day.

Squash plant in May 2019

Aside from the pests, the only problem I had with the yellow crooknecks was their shape. That crook was always growing around a vine or otherwise getting itself caught so that picking the squash proved tricky. So, in 2019, I chose the Early Prolific Straightneck Squash from Baker Creek Seeds and planted three hills in my raised beds. They grew quickly and produced abundantly, so much so that we had soon eaten as much squash as we could handle and had run out of friends who wanted more. This time I planned for the vine borer arrival and pulled the plants once their presence was obvious so that cowpeas could grow in that space instead. Changing out crops turned out to be a great tactic, and I will definitely do that again now that I have a smaller garden.

This year I still have plenty of Early Prolific Straightneck Squash seeds to plant, but I think I might have just one hill instead of three.

Zucchini

Monster zucchini!

Last year I opted for the Green Bush Zucchini from Baker Creek Seeds and had good luck with them, although I think we ultimately got more yield from the yellow variety. For 2020 I'll be sticking with the same type because I still have quite a few seeds in the packet. My family actually seemed to like the zucchini better than the squash, so I might plant two hills of zucchini and just one of the squash. We'll see if my smaller space has room for these fast growing vines! I did find out that these zucchini will grow into monstrous baseball bats if you don't keep an eye on them; I came back from a vacation to find that a friend had missed a few of them when checking my garden. They were huge but not worth eating by then, so they went straight to the compost bin.

Squash and Zucchini 2019 Record

2019 planting date - March 24
2019 sprout date - April 3
2019 first harvest - May 14 (yellow), May 26 (zucchini)
2019 pull date - July 1 (vine borers)

We'll see how the weather does here in North Alabama for the 2020 planting. Our last frost date this year is April 2, but we might well warm up before then!

Do you plant squash in your garden? How much and what kinds? I'd love to try some different varieties once I figure out the spacing in the new garden and find spots for everything, so let me know what you recommend in the comments!

Garden Wishlist for 2020: Tomatoes

Tomatoes! The one vegetable I absolutely have to grow every year is tomatoes. We eat tons of them! I prefer cherry and grape varieties because they're better suited to our needs and are more prolific, making it less nerve wracking to lose a few to the local wildlife. Last year I experimented with growing tomato plants from seeds that I bought at Baker Creek Seeds. The results were mixed. Heirloom varieties were pickier and more delicate than sturdy starts I bought at Lowe's, and some of the specialty tomatoes disappointed us in terms of flavor, but others were really tasty. I also got a huge thrill out of growing them and having so many different kinds. This year I'm still interested in growing from seed, but with less experimental space I want the tomatoes I grow to be tasty, disease resistant, and prolific. I'm considering some determinate varieties in addition to my usual indeterminate types so that I can expand the container garden effort on the patio to include more tomatoes there.

2019 Tomatoes

Hartmann's Yellow Gooseberry

From Baker Creek Seeds -

Barry's Crazy Cherry (husband thought they were bland, but we had a lot of them, very prolific and small)

Russian Purple (critters got almost all of them and yield was low, but they were delicious, plum size, juicy)

Purple Bumblebee (yielded less and succumbed to problems faster but quite tasty)

Hartmann's Yellow Gooseberry (Tasty and good yield - definitely the winner of the Baker Creek picks! They were larger than the usual cherry but excellent in a variety of dishes and salads.)


From Lowe's (Bonnie Plants brand)

Bonnie Plants cherry tomatoes

Husky Cherry Red (solid producer that grew well and survived better)

Sweet Million (early producer and grew as well as Husky Cherry Red)

Volunteers from the previous year also popped up in some surprising places around the yard (thanks, chipmunks!), and I transplanted several of these to the kitchen garden. None of them produced a lot, and they were an odd hybrid of the cherry types I grew in 2018, but we still got some bonus edible produce. I wasn't going to turn down free tomatoes!

In all I had about 14 tomato plants for 2019, which was probably way too many for three people. I gave away lots of tomatoes and froze several bags of them slow roasted with olive oil.



2020 Tomatoes

Of the Baker Creek seeds, I'm most likely to grow the Hartmann's Yellow Gooseberry again, especially since I still have plenty of seeds. Other Baker Creek varieties I'm considering include:

2019 got tomato crazy! Let's do that again!

Black Cherry
Isis Candy Cherry
Pink Bumblebee
Sunrise Bumblebee
Orange Hat
Micro Tom

Bonnie Plants are the most widely available brand where I live, so I'll also be looking at these indeterminate types for starter plants later in the spring, in addition to the two types I had last year and liked:

Black Cherry (the Bonnie version)
Braveheart Cherry
Candyland Cherry
Chocolate Sprinkles
Midnight Snack Cherry
Sakura Cherry
Sun Sugar
Tidy Treats
Yellow Pear

Because I'm planning to have more containers this year, I also want to consider these determinate types:

Taste the tomato rainbow.

Red Robin Cherry
Tumbling Tom Yellow
Tumbling Tom Red
Sweet n Neat Cherry
Yellow Canary

Obviously, I've got way more contenders than space, but not all of the Bonnie varieties are likely to show up at my local garden centers, so that will limit my choices a fair bit before I get there. My goal is to have 8-10 plants in all with a variety of types and colors.

Which tomatoes will win a spot in the 2020 kitchen garden? Stay tuned to find out!

New House, New Garden

As I mentioned in my introductory post, I decided to start this kitchen blog because I moved to a new house in October 2019, which means I have a whole new garden to build and develop! Our new yard is much smaller than our old one, but with good planning and efficient use of the large patio area I should have plenty of room to grow quite a lot of vegetables and flowers.

The Challenges

This new house is less than five years old, which means the soil in the yard is pretty poor, with quite a bit of construction debris in the mix. Luckily, raised beds and containers are my preference, and the flowers I'll be planting directly into the ground aren't fussy. The small backyard has uneven ground and a long dogleg section, and other areas for planting are partial to full shade. I'll be learning a lot about shade loving plants this year!

The blank canvas in September 2019.

The Benefits

At our old house, we spent a lot of time on grounds maintenance in the very large, woody backyard that we could have spent growing flowers and vegetables. Our new yard has just enough space to grow things I want to have without the intense upkeep of a big yard with lots of trees and lawn. I like to think of it as more British allotment size than American yard size! The new backyard is also a blank canvas that I can plan and develop from scratch. We'll be working to make the established beds with the builder's usual suspects (dogwood, azalea, generic shrubs, liriope) more interesting, too, but there's also plenty of opportunity to develop those because we don't have a lot of old growth to clear first. I have a large patio area at the new house that I can fill with annuals and container gardens, and I have a lovely back porch where I can sit and enjoy the view during the warmer months.

Getting Started

The beginning of a garden in November 2019.

Our first job after moving was to transplant our beloved Oakes daylilies to the new yard and move some of the nicest of the garden boxes for the future raised beds. I brought over the big pot of mint and some rosemary plants grown from cuttings of my old rosemary, but the previous owner already planted rosemary in the front beds, so I'll have to think about the herb garden priorities come spring. We also bought about 100 daffodil and tulip bulbs and planted those in both the beds and the most sloped part of the backyard. We interplanted daffodils and tulips with early, mid, and late spring blooming seasons with the equally varied daylilies, which should mean that we have a colorful show for people and pollinators from early spring all the way to fall.

Garden boxes in January 2020 - late afternoon.

We also transplanted a beautiful Lady Banks rose from the old house, and so far it's doing well. Ideally it will grow over the naked fence and spread - we put up wiring to support it as it does. Our weird winter weather might wreck some of my plans; we've had cold and then spring like warmth and now a very cold snap again, just as all the plants had decided it really was spring.

We found a collection of leftover fence posts tucked behind the carport and upcycled them into raised beds along the back section of the yard. That area gets good sun but has buried cables under it, so we don't want to dig or plant anything with deep roots there. Those beds will be for the pollinator patch and other sturdy plants that don't need a lot of watering but do want more sun.

Current Progress Report - January 2020

It's now mid January of 2020, so much of the work is on hold until March, but I've got 4 raised garden boxes for vegetables, 3 long beds for pollinator flowers and various herbs, and two areas in the backyard devoted to daylilies and daffodils. As we wait for spring I'll be collecting containers for my patio garden, ordering seeds and bulbs, and drawing up plans. In my next post I'll talk about the vegetables and flowers I most want to grow in the new garden!

Welcome to Jenn's Kitchen Garden!

Summer 2019 in the old garden

Hello! My name is Jenn, and I'm an amateur backyard gardener in North Alabama (Zone 7). This blog is meant to serve as a record of my gardening journey and hopefully provide some insights and fun posts for friends, family, and anyone interested in growing vegetables and flowers in a small backyard space.

I'm starting this blog now - January 2020 - because I just moved to a new house with a completely blank space as far as the backyard garden is concerned. Over the next year or two I hope to make this space special! I'm moving from a much larger yard with two years of kitchen garden experience behind me, but I still have a lot to learn as a gardener and expect to make plenty of mistakes along the way.

I'll be letting you know about my successes and failures as I work to transform the new space into a small kitchen garden with lots of flowers for our pollinators and my own enjoyment. Please leave comments whenever you have questions or advice!