Ambers garden :)

Whew! What a productive week it has been in my garden. I am officially done with planting, now I just have to focus on making sure all of my plants are watered thoroughly so they can grow and produce as many fruits, flowers, and vegetables as possible. I've enjoyed being outside all day tending to my plants despite how outrageously humid it's been.

I added a couple of vegetable plants to the garden this week such as, banana peppers, zucchini, tomatoes, lettuce, carrots, and beets (which are for my Papa, as I am not a fan of eating something that taste like dirt). In reference to my previous blog post, where I talked about companion planting and what it is, I've added another pair of plants that are companions, I planted green beans next to my sunflowers (which started as seeds and are now thriving being over 3 feet tall)! I waited for my sunflowers to be tall that way I can use them as a natural trellis for the green beans to grow up onto and use the sunflowers as support. Supposedly, the nitrogen from the sunflowers is good for the growth of green beans, on the other hand though, some say that sunflowers produce too much nitrogen therefore killing any surrendering plants. Guess we will find out the outcome, together!

Another thing I did this week to some of my flowers/plants was something called deadheading. Deadheading is when you take off dead blooms to help encourage new growth, when you leave the dead blooms on the flower, they'll start hogging the energy to try and keep the dead blooms alive, but you want the energy to go towards new blooms instead!

No matter what age you are or how long you've been gardening, there will always be something new to learn! Sometimes too, you might accidentally place your plant in the sun when it actually needs to be in the shade. For instance, I was so confused about why my Netja Dark Begonia was struggling, I had it in the sun but it still looked dried up, but I was watering it enough, but of course, not too much! Well lucky for me, I always keep the tag that comes with the plant right next to the plant when I pot it, that way I can remember the name of it and the type of care it needs. I looked at the tag the other day and realized it needs to be in the shade or part sun, which I had it in full sun, so it was "leaf burned". After being in the shade for just a few days, I already noticed a change in the Leafs and some small blooms were already starting to pop up, I was so happy to have found out the problem.

I love gardening, it brings me peace, and I love how intentional you have to be when gardening. I also love seeing differences in my plants/flowers overnight, it's so fascinating to me!