Tag: Garden

Our garden hose gets stuck to the hose all the time. Normally, I can break it free, but today it wasn’t budging. Tried soaking it in vinegar with no luck, then WD40 with no luck. Back in the vinegar it went while we went out. It came apart like nothing was wrong when we got home.

Just for shits, I stuck some of the milkweed plants I started from seeds in pots that we had lying around the other year. They’ve come back up in those pots since. This spring they seem to be doing really well in the pots.

Our pink swamp milkweed that we finally picked up last summer seems to be coming up again. We thought the original white one we got was the pink one but it was apparently mislabeled. It sucked that it wasn’t the one we got but the butterflies loved in none the less. We weren’t sure it was even going to come back up considering we didn’t buy it and plant it until August and the monarchs found it immediately.

My Nan and Pop didn’t have much money and always made what was available work for them. I was always very close to them. When I was a kid I took an interest in gardening and wanted a greenhouse. My Grandfather built one in his back yard. It was just a small wooden frame with various recycled windows he had around or got at work I guess. He built a couple of shelves in there and it surprisingly worked really well.

We have been wanting to plant milkweed for a couple of years now. We finally found some and planted it in our front yard. Last spring, we actually had monarch butterflies and caterpillars on it.

It’s always great to see unexpected wildlife coexisting with humans. Today we spotted this toad under the hose.

We spent the spring looking for butterfly weed last year. First we checked at Hostetters in Mount Joy but they didn’t have any yet. We found ourselves at Stauffers later for other plants and decided to check there. We found swamp milkweed instead so gave it a try. I grew well and did attract monarchs. It turned out to be white instead of the pink it was marked as but it was okay.

Last fall I gathered tons of milkweed sees from the pods as they dried out thinking it was worth a shot to try to propagate more plants from seeds because we had a few people ask us about where to get the flower that attracts the butterflies. I had no idea if the seeds were mature enough to harvest or anything like that but I got a baggy of seeds to try it out.

We had more peppers from our garden than we ever expected. It really surprised us. Hopefully, they taste delicious too!