Each month I like to share my plant observations. This can be our yard, our garden, the neighborhood, parks, beach, and more. This year we are really trying to pick up our garden game and I think it’s progress is going to require it’s own feature each month.

Although we had high hopes to start our garden super early, May came and went with little activity. We did prep the garden, started verbally planning, moved a few items around and let Tom visit as garden foreman.

Our first garden bed, which is our front yard and last year housed tomatoes, started popping up with plants. We had to discern what each plant was and either leave them or transplant them. We had a lot of tomatoes come up from seeds that dropped off the plants last year.

This strange plant popped up and grew like crazy. We did some research and discovered that it was an invasive plant called Japanese hops. It’s so pretty and we interested in seeing if it was going to grow hop like cones. Unfortunately it was growing like nuts and we had to re-home it so it did not choke out our new tomatoes. We were sad to find that the hops couldn’t handle the move and died pretty quickly. We think the hop seeds were dropped by visiting birds!

The kale that we planted last year also over wintered. We had to clear it out of our back yard bed, but put it in a pot to see what it would do. In May, it flowered and started making seed pods. Kale flowers are lovely! We have collected the seed pods and plan to replant from last years growth!

On the last day of May was when we really started planting and reseting the garden. In only a few weeks we’ve transformed the garden quite a bit. We look forward to seeing where June takes us.