Nasturtiums in the Garden

 

All my posts, to date, have involved family business.  Today I want to publish a few photos of my "garden".  I put that word in quotation marks because what I have is a couple of patches of dirt on the southeast edge of my unit, it is generally heavily shaded, and there is no outside faucet for when I need to water.

  For several years I have had a lush growth of nasturtiums in spring.  At left you can see my cat, DJ, who appreciates the greenery as much as I do.  I can't remember when I first sowed purchased seed, but that one time is all it took.  The plants drop seed like crazy and some will germinate the same season.  They also will germinate in the fall and winter.  By early spring they will be everywhere.    Nasturtiums do fine in shade, and I do get some sun in the middle of the day.  I hate to tear them up until they are fading in summer's heat, but that means it's a problem to start anything else.  The mass of greenery hides snails which nibble on the nasturtiums but it hardly shows.  But they'll also nibble on, and destroy, anything else I might plant.  At the moment I have a couple of tomatoes and gourds, which are doing OK, protected by tin cans with both ends cut out as protective barriers.
  A friend with a much sunnier garden has tomatoes with fruit already the size of ping pong balls.  Of course, she planted started plants, while I grew mine from seed and my seedlings seemed to be very slow in getting any size on them.  The sun, and not so much the size of the starts, is the biggest difference, I think.