Tiny Garden Update VI

Welcome to the sixth and probably one of the last tiny garden updates this year. Autumn is closing in fast. How do I know? Yellow flowers are blooming, peppermint is blooming and apples and plums are beginning to fall down from the trees. Summer is still lingering in the air, but not for long I am sure.

Month has passed quickly since the last update and I have harvested few things leaving some empty patches of soil here and there. So today I would like to share some of the things I’ve harvested and prepared for conservation and the plants that are still going strong in the tiny garden.  

Marigolds are one of my favorite flowers since they stay pretty for quite some time in comparison with other flowers like Zinnias for example. It is a bit heartbreaking. Every time it rains it seems the flowers are suffering some damage. Last year flowers were absolutely miserable and it was raining almost whole summer. It is lovely to cut some fresh flowers and place them in the room sometimes. It changes the whole vibe of the place.

The little bumblebees and bees are still happily munching on the basil flowers. I absolutely love the scent of basil. I consider cutting some of the flowers and mix them in with little bit of lavender to create extra awesome scent bouquet.

Not sure if these will fully grow in time before it gets too cold. It has grown twice the size since the last update. I am not sure if it is supposed to be fully grown in the first year. Probably not.

One observation this year was about bees and bumblebees. On one side of my tiny garden are my lavender plants and on the other side peppermint. Bumblebees and butterflies were all over the lavender while all the bees were all over peppermint. I think I saw only few bees around lavender when it just started to bloom and peppermint wasn’t fully blooming yet.

This was the first time I harvested lavender after failing for few years in row. I did not want to cut all of it at once, so I did it in three parts instead. I also did not want to take all the delicious noms away from bumblebees and butterflies. Last couple of weeks I noticed decrease of their activity though, so I decided it was time to cut rest of the flowers. No more food here, time to team up with the bees on the peppermint!

Spinach was one of the first things I removed since it was overgrown, but only after it was fully dried up and some of the seeds fell back into the soil. So hopefully I will have plenty of spinach again for salads and other noms soon unless it gets cold really fast and it stops growing for some reason.

I sow these month ago. At first it looked really hopeful, but now these tiny buddies are not doing so well it seems. Maybe it is the change in the weather from really warm to a lot cooler temperatures and rain.

This one sneaked in from neighbors side of the fence, but since there is plenty of empty spaces for it to go I really don’t mind as long as other plants are not harmed or overshadowed.

I was taking some shots of the tiny garden and then I look over the pile of compost and there it was. Wild hemp appears. Made me giggle. For someone who doesn’t know very well, it could cause some good confusion.

Most of these will be used for consumption in form of tea. However, I really hope to get my hands on the ingredients and tools for soap making. I also would like to use some of the lavender in sauna. Make tiny lavender pillows to place on the face during sauna or meditation since lavender has very calming effect on nervous system.