Birthday Entry

On Tuesday, my husband finished making the third box frame, which is going to be dedicated as the 'corn box' with nothing but corn (the box on the right with no visible green in the picture above).  We've decided to plant two different varieties 2 weeks apart.  One that I planted yesterday is a hybrid "Early Choice", which matures in 66 days.  It's an early maturing, yellow corn.  I planted the seeds in the 8 squares of the northern half of the box.  In 2 weeks, I will plant the other variety, hybrid "Honey & Cream", a very pretty yellow and white corn, which reminds me of my grandparents' garden from childhood in Japan.  This variety has 78 days to mature.

Speaking of childhood memories, my grandmother once had this funny garden incident.  She used to plant and grow a good-size garden in the backyard -- mainly vegetables and some flowers.  She had a compost pile in the shady corner, too.  One spring, she planted her corn and beans, and they usually come up in a week or so, but nothing was coming up.  Suspicious, she looked at her rows of corn and beans and decided to investigate by digging them up to see maybe the seeds got hit by some fungus infestation and died or failed in some ways.  She couldn't find any seeds in the soil.  They magically disappeared!  "Maybe some kids were playing pranks", she thought.  Being an ever gentle and patient type she was, she went ahead and planted the corn and beans again.  Few hours later, she was sipping tea, looking and admiring her handiwork of freshly sown rows of vegetables and she spots a pigeon.  This pigeon would stick its head into the ground, find the corn seeds, eats them, then hops forward twice to pick at another spot in the ground to find more seeds.  The bird had figured out the spacing and was eating away in a remarkably efficient manner, working the rows!! XD
With the mystery solved, my grandmother had to make sure no birds were watching her this time.  For the third round of sowing that spring, she planted in the dark.  Luckily, this time, everything came up and she was able to have a wonderful harvest.   To this day, I always look around when I plant my corn to make sure no doves or pigeons are watching me. ^_^

The Mesclun salad mix square.  They were the first to germinate.  Still small though. ^^

A closeup view of one of the four Swiss chard seedlings.  We can already tell that this one will have red or magenta coloring.  I have 2 like this one and 2 bright yellow ones.

Soy beans (9 in a square) have finally popped up.  They look really large, but took longer to germinate than anything else in this box. ^^;

Found a tiny strawberry -- so cute.  Some of the plants were already having flowers and berries when I bought them last Saturday.

One of the irises in the front flowerbed.  This one is pure white with lacy frilled edges on the petals.  Flowers are really large this year.

Another clump of irises.  These guys hardly had any blooms last season, so I was given up on them, but they came back beautifully this year.  The colors -- maroon and gold -- happen to be my college's colors.  So I have a certain fondness for these guys.  This was one of the rhizomes I got from a friend years ago and I have no idea what the variety's name is.