I have various markers for the changing of the seasons.  Some of them are about me - the first day in summer I wear sandals; the first day of autumn I wear a winter coat - and some are about the world around me:  the first day for corn or last day for strawberries at the market, the first ninety degree day, the first snowfall.  A big one for rainfall is what needs watering.  We’ve had so little rain in July that even the weeds have started to wilt here in the city.  The plantains edging the asphalt strip next to the house look like they’re dying.

The front garden is decimated on this especially hot day that alternates between furious hot gusts of wind and completely still air with the sun beating relentlessly down.  When I got home this afternoon, almost every plant had started to wilt.  The pineapple sage, which usually looks healthy no matter what the weather, was bent over, limply half-lying on the ground.  One of the euphorbias had started to wilt!  I didn’t even know euphorbias could wilt. So I did what a good water conservationist would never, ever do:  I watered in the middle of the day.  I always imagine that every conscientious gardener knows you’re supposed to water in the early morning or the late afternoon (which I’ve always taken to mean “Two or three hours before sunset,” since the time till sunset changes so much over the growing season in more northern latitudes such as mine).  I worried that if I waited that long, some of the plants would actually die instead of just looking like they were contemplating it.  The one smart thing that I did was that when the hot gusts came up, I would stop watering till they ceased.  (Watering in a strong wind is another no-no, unless you have soaker hoses.  I would LOVE to have soaker hoses, but having such easily damaged things sitting there in a shared yard seems a recipe for disaster, so I am biding my time.)  Now comes the reckoning, when I go back out and see if anything has started to recover after the watering, or if the garden looks as pathetic as it did earlier.

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I’m back and pleasantly surprised; the front garden seems to have recovered about as much as it can.  It looks like some of the pansies and violas have died, but I’m not really surprised about that.  Last year some of the ones planted in the northwest corner of the front garden survived all year, but that was it.  So I was more surprised that they’ve survived this long.

More later.

For those of you that are newer to the blog or found this page through a search engine, let me refresh you:  This spring I switched from a hand-aerated composter (an Earth Machine, which my town sells at a discount to residents) to a rotating kind (a Jora composter).  In May I posted a photo of it, which I’ve reposted below:

As I said at the time, the black tray beneath it is to catch compost tea, which drips down out of the not-quite-fully-sealed composter at a seemingly random pace (some hot days there’s none; some cool days there’s a lot).  Like most rotating composters, it produces compost an average of 4-6 weeks after the compartment is filled.  Unlike some rotating composters, it has two compartments, so you can add composting materials to one compartment as the other is busy creating compost.  Unlike almost all other rotating composters, it can be put away flat when it’s not in use.  It’s originally from Scandinavia and the US distributor has a very small presence so far.

In retrospect I suspect that the English translation of the Scandinavian materials aren’t the greatest or that the US distributor didn’t write their pages carefully enough, because the distributor’s list of what can go in does not jive with my own experience since buying it.  (At the time, the US distributor didn’t have a link to the main company on the page, though they do now.)  They said that pretty much anything can be put in because it gets hotter than other rotating composters and therefore the materials compost before they can emit odors.  This has not been my own experience with certain things, most notably dairy, eggy things, and oils.  (I imagine meat would be the same if I ever ate it.)  If I lived in a rural area with no close neighbors I would compost those things despite the smell, but here in urbania I stopped after the first batch.

Despite the materials’ shortcomings, the composter itself produces compost quickly and excellently.  If I had a pet rabbit or other vegetarian animal, I would compost its waste and bedding, but since I have a cat, I don’t do that (cat and dog compost needs a special separate composter in which one only puts certain other compsting materials that don’t react badly to the cat/dog manure [and in my own opinion only indoor cats should ever have their waste composted at all, and in some other peoples' opinion cat waste should never, ever be composted under any circumstances]; the materials mentioned in passing that you could include cat waste, and again, I suspect it was simply a poor translation).  Because of this, I need to buy an absorbant material to help keep the compost tea from running amok because I don’t produce enough absorbant-material waste on my own.  This is the biggest drawback of this composter.  I believe it would be true of any rotating composter though if you were composting more than kitchen scraps and yard waste and other low-compost-tea-producing things.  I don’t like having to buy something to add to the composter and I don’t really like that some of it is acidic which tends to create a more acidic compost than the hand-aerated piled composter did.  However, I do really like how much easier it is to aerate/mix than the old composter and I really, really like how much faster it makes compost.  I’ve only had it since the spring and it’s already made three batches of compost.  My friends who still have the town’s composter or who built their own compost bins tend to be disappointed at how it takes about a year for that style of composter to produce much compost.  Me, I’ve got enough that I’m giving some of it away to friends, since I know that the composter will soon finish producing another batch.

For those of you looking to buy more conventionally available tumbling composters here in the US, I found this blog entry of pros and cons of some of the most common ones.

I use BioBag’s compost pail liners with a compost pail.  In a rotating composter, the rest of the composting materials turn to compost faster than BioBags, and they have to be sifted out and readded to the next batch to fully degrade (they turn into tattered bits of ex-bag in the first batch).  I agree with BioBag’s website that the best kind of compost pail is the open kind that they make themselves, but since I have a very curious cat (who has tipped over the kitchen trash can to explore an interesting smell) and am a renter, instead I use a closed, latched compost pail with a carbon filter to mitigate both the cat’s curiosity and the smell.  I got my pail at the same place I reorder my BioBag liners, Lee Valley Tools.  Though they are a Canadian company, they have a US distribution center across the border in New York and things get here to New England fast and cheaply. They also have some of the highest-quality gardening tools I’ve ever had the pleasure to use, as well as lovely selections of gardening books and kitchen accessories.

I was pulling weeds this weekend in the back garden (always much weedier than the front due to not yet being planted nearly as thickly) when I noticed something that did not, in fact, actually look like a weed.  I crawled over and peered down at it in disbelief.  It looked like a salvia - and yet it couldn’t be.  Could it?  I kept peering.  It looked like a young Salvia patens.  (Last year I grew S. patens in the back in my continual quest to judge what is most important to each plant:  Is it more important that it get lots of sun, or that it be in a more protected, less harsh spot with more compost in the soil?  It didn’t do very well in the back, so that’s why I decided to plant it in the front this year.  I planted it in front of the tallest, thickest bearded iris leaves, and it is doing wonderfully sheltered from the worst winds; it currently has three bloom stalks going.)   I peered at it some more, still in shock.  I went into the front garden when I finished up to compare my memory of the little plant in back with how the growing S. patens in front looked.  Yes, it most definitely seemed to be the same plant.

This after a calla liy survived (it also sprouted very late, probably around the end of June) in the same bed in back and a creeping snapdragon survived in the front (sprouting in May, a bit later than the rest of the front’s plants).  None of these things are supposed to survive winter here.  I’m amazed.  Salvia patens and calla lilies both sprout from tuberous roots, and I wonder if that helped them survive.  Perhaps they both sprouted late because of some cue in the soil warming up once our weather turned more consistently hot in June.

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In unrelated news, this morning I walked out to a scene of carnage:  The dwarf sunflower ‘Big Smile’ had been beheaded and its big glorious bloom (nearly as tall as the plant it was on) was in tatters on the retaining wall, the least ripe bits and the petals left behind in a messy pile.  I had no question about what had done it; I’m sure it was a grey squirrel.  I abruptly remembered that the same thing had happened twice last year, and that the sunflower started to struggle each time it was beheaded and eventually simply abruptly died.  I hope it doesn’t die this time.  It’s such a beautiful sunflower, with huge cheery flower heads on tiny plants (compared to the size of other sunflowers). It also made me glad that in this garden the squirrels have yet to figure out a way to reach the taller sunflower heads, and they have the luck of going to seed for the birds to eat.  In an old garden of mine, the squirrels would do what they’ve done to ‘Big Smile’ to all of my sunflowers, even the five foot tall ones!

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Yet more sweet peas have bloomed and budded since my last entry.  The newest bloom is a rich pink that looks so striking with the pewter blue blooms and the blooms in a hue of pink that’s a little lighter and edged in white.  I’m so curious to see what the other budded plants will bloom in.  I planted mixed sweet peas this year (one was ‘Old Spice Blend’ from the seed company Botanical Interests; another was ‘Perfume Delight’ from Renee’s Garden Seeds; I think there was a third, but I cannot remember it at the moment) instead of specific cultivars like I’ve done in past years, so every bloom to open is a delightful surprise of color.

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I’m still working on fixing my camera issues.  My apologies for currently having a low-photo gardening blog, which is certainly not ideal.

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This morning I’ve done some more weeding.  I hope to get to some planting on this beautiful day, hot but not too humid, mostly sunny with a sporadic breeze.

So typical of gardeners, today I went to the nursery, ideas in my mind of new plants to add to the improvements I just made with yesterday’s plantings, and curious as to what was there in the week since I’d last stopped in (and just looked, not bought) - and of course ended up finding new plants to bring back with me.  The front border is so full now that there’s not really much room left for large-pot plants, just on the back and one side (the other two edges are the hard edges of the retaining wall).  I’ve got an idea in my head to make a second, much smaller border against the house perhaps with hostas and astilbles (that area is both shady and hot, a difficult combination, though I’m not sure if it’s as windy as the rest of the garden), but that’s just a fragment in my head so far.  It would be bordered with rocks dug up from the garden like the current front bed and I generally think it would make a nice complement, and better unify the garden and the house, but it would mean almost all the grass in front would be gone then and I don’t know whether my landlord would really like that, and it would also leave a narrower path to the back yard, increasing the likelihood that people other than me would unintentionally damage plants near the path.

Anyhow, my original point was that the size limits matter more at this time of year because there are so many fewer plants in smaller pots at the nursery.  I ended up getting some more annuals (a number of the ever-shrinking tiny section of small-potted annuals; almost all the remaining annuals at the nursery are in big clumps in big pots) and two more herbs, a third catnip - this one just the straight species rather than the two ornmanetal cultivars I’d already planted, one last year and one this year - and oregano ‘Hopley’s Purple’.  Both of the herbs were in full bloom and the catnip was being wildly attacked by hungry pollinators, whereas the ‘Hopley’s Purple’ was just so pretty to me (looking at my garden, anyone can easily see my weakness for flowers in purpley hues).  Don’t listen to sources that say ‘Hopley’s Purple’ is hardy to my USDA zone or above; I’ve read from reliable sources that it’s only hardy to around USDA zone 7, dying if temperatures dip near zero.  Despite this fact, it blooms from early or mid-summer into the autumn, huge clusters of beautiful tiny purple flowers on deeper purple stems, with tiny leaves brushed with purple until they age, and it’s a lovely addition to a decorative herb garden. This brings my oregano total to six:  hardy marjoram (really an oregano), Greek oregano, sweet marjoram (a tender herb in the oregano genus), ‘Hopley’s Purple’, and the two ornamental oreganos I planted yesterday, ‘Amethyst Falls’ and cascading oregano.  (Despite being called Cuban oregano, my Cuban oregano is neither an oregano nor originally from Cuba.)

The largest potted thing I got was an agapanthus, which according to the tag blooms longer than other agapanthus.  It’s got beautiful white clusters of bloom (I believe it is ‘White Ice’).  Though it’s quite pretty, the reason I really got it was because it was wildly popular with pollinators, the most popular thing in an entire aisle of annuals.  It was so popular as I set it down upon reaching home, a flower fly was already hovering, waiting for it to stabilize so the flower fly could start eating.  I’ve never grown them before (they aren’t hardy here) and after reading about their super thick root system at this page I am thinking it might be good to place in in the sparse, especially windy, especially erosion proof section at the edge of the front garden.  Hopefully the page is right about how even gales can’t topple their bloom stalks, because that section of the garden sure does get some gales.

One of the pea plants has died and a second one is dying.  It looks like the fava/broad beans might have dropped some of their beans but there are some that are getting close to picking size (finally).  In what seems like overnight, the filet beans have gone from half-inch baby beans to near picking size.  I planted a Renee’s Garden Seeds mix I bought last year but didn’t grow, the ‘French Duet’ mix, which consists of yellow filet bean ‘Ramdor’ and green filet bean ‘Emerite’, which Renee’s says they get from a French seed house. I’ve not grown them before and so far ‘Emerite’ has been doing very well; it’s got a lot of developing beans on it.  If ‘Ramdor’ has any, I haven’t seen them yet, but the bean plot is kind of, well, messy. Between the garden beans, lima beans, akira beans (though they prefer cooler weather and I planted them late enough that I suspect they will die before producing) runner beans, garden peas, sweet peas (planted at the edge of the patch), hyacinth beans, and extra stakes to help keep the fava/broad beans and soybeans from toppling in the wind - there are easily thirty-five stakes in the patch!

Speaking of the sweet peas, I eat my words:  A second bloom appeared today, the rich pink of a summer sunset, edged with pure white.  The pewter blue bloom from yesterday is still there, and it’s visually the same height and about an inch over, so they look pretty interesting together.  It looks like each plant has one or two more buds already formed, but I don’t see buds on any other pea plants, be they sweet or garden.  Whether it’s dry or muggy, most days now it’s at least eighty, sometimes feeling like it’s about a hundred, and that’s just too hot for peas to generally really do very much. (And the front garden always, always feels hotter than the back, since it’s got a concrete retaining wall and is by a sidewalk and a road.)   I’m growing scarlet runner bean again, but this time I’m growing a different cultivar, ‘Dwarf Bees’, and it’s been blooming every day now for several days.  Hopefully it will keep up till frost as supposedly happens with this cultivar.  I’m pleased with this one; last year it took the other cultivar significantly longer to flower, though in fairness, I hadn’t added as much compost to the bean patch and there  weren’t as many other robust plants in the bed to help break the wind and cool off the roots.

The first two hollyhock blooms finally opened overnight after weeks of buds. They’re on one of the fig-leaf hollyhocks (which are supposed to be much more rust-resistant than the standard hollyhocks).  They are a rich magenta, deeper of hue at the center than edges, and are ruffled around the edges.  I never knew you could eat mallow family flowers and leaves (though presumably not EVERY mallow family member) until I met someone who’d lived in Cyprus for several years and said young mallow leaves are eaten as a vegetable there and the flowers are sometimes used for, say, holding dips at parties.   I’ve noticed that a lot of plants adapt to life in a windy site.  My perennial garden phlox, for example, are shorter than most of the other gardens’ phlox around here.  So far this is true of the hollyhocks as well (although they were planted last year, this is their first year blooming/budding); they often reached six feet in my old garden, and so far in this one the tallest is only about three feet tall.

I finally got to garden again today.

I moved:

• Rosemary ‘Arp’ again - it wasn’t getting enough sun in its second spot either
• One of the sunflowers I got at the farmers’ market - it also wasn’t getting enough sun in its spot and wasn’t growing nearly as fast as the others I planted at the same time.

I planted:

• The Greek oregano (finally!!)
• Summer savory
• A second Gold Coin (Asteriscus maritimus)
• Two Cape mallows (I never did find ‘Elegant Lady’ this year and ended up buying one labelled ‘Pink’ at the nursery)
• Two ornamental oreganos - Cascading Oregano (Origanum libanoticum) and ‘Amethyst Falls’
• Three gaillardia/blanket flowers - ‘Oranges and Lemons’, ‘Fanfare’, and ‘Arizona Sun’
• Two more Salvia nemerosas - ‘Caradonna’ and ‘May Night’ (I’ve grown ‘May Night’ before)
• An allegedly hardy-here hybrid salvia (in the S. greggii style), ‘Ultra Violet’
• Silene regia ‘Prairie Fire’ - I planted it with the Maximillian sunflower and the ironweed hoping they would provide a late-summer trio of tall splashy color: purplish-red, yellow, and brilliant red.
• Greek yarrow (Achillea ageratifolia)
• Another creeping bellflower (Campanula portenschlagiana ‘Resholt Variety’)
• Creeping germander (Teucrium aroanium)
• Prostrate rosemary ‘Irene’
• A third hyssop - this one is ‘Black Adder’
• Kniphofia hirsuta ‘Fire Dance’ - a dwarf red-hot poker plant better suited to small gardens (it’s done poorly in a pot; the root system was still good though, so I’m hoping it will recover now that it’s been planted)
• Soapwort (Saponaria ocymoides) ‘Alba’ - I planted this at the base of the Maximillian sunflower, ironweed, and Silene, hoping its creeping nature will help act as a natural mulch for these three plants that prefer more even moisture than what the front garden provides.
• Morning glory ‘Mini-Bar Rose’ (mentioned last entry)
• Two horehounds (Marrubium vulgare) - I recently read an article that they’re an especially excellent food source for bees, so thought I would try them out in an especially dry, windy section of my dry, windy site (they are supposed to love poor soil).

I also did so much weeding it was ridiculous.  The seeded-in zinnias have been coming up really nicely.  I didn’t even realize it till today because they were mixed in with weeds of similar heights!

There were an incredible number of pollinators in the garden while I was working today - all kinds of bees and small wasps as well as flower flies and other flies and a lone Cabbage White butterfly that nectared on a couple of blooms of tall verbena (Verbena bonariensis) during a low-wind period before fluttering on.  (My old garden used to get so, so many butterflies; it’s been so strange this year-plus in a very windy garden where even when they try to nectar or rest, they often give up after moments and fly on.)  I saw the highest number of honeybees I’ve seen in one place all year!  They especially liked the ‘May Night’ salvia (one started nectaring at it seconds after I finished planting it), the globe thistle (I think mine is ‘Blue Glow’ but I’m not positive), and the blooming sunflowers (’Velvet Queen’ and ‘Vanilla Ice’).

And lastly - late this week, the first sweet pea FINALLY bloomed.  I find this really funny.  Sweet peas are supposed to hate heat, and yet here they dither about till mid-July.  I wouldn’t be surprised if this - a lovely pewter blue - is the only sweet pea bloom I see this year.  Some of the garden pea plants are already dying.

Started on 8 July

3-H (Hazy Hot Humid) weather has returned.  Temperatures are in the low 90s F today in my area of metro Boston with heat indices around 100 F.  Walking outside from A/C is like slamming into a brick wall.  I’ve watered the smallest pots three times and still they droop, just like yesterday.  It’s been a week and a half since I did more in the garden than water or deadhead or fuss.  I miss working in it.  I’m so tired of hot and humid weather.

[More photos from mid-June follow; however, I think I'm close to fixing camera/computer problem]

Another salpiglossis (AKA “painted tongue”)

I know most people in the US don’t grow these and I still don’t get why.  They’re such a pretty summer bloomer in a climate like mine, they come in interesting colors and patterns, and the petals feel like velvet turned into a flower.  They are rather a pain to grow from seed, but it seems like not too many American gardeners start anything from seed any more anyway.  Many of the people I know here even buy their nasturtiums pre-started, even though they’re just about the easiest plant in the world to grow from seed.

Sundial lupine

This was its third bloom (it’s fading in the heat).  There are lots of raindrops on the leaves in this shot.  Lupine leaves hold rain so well!

Buds on sunflower

This is the gift-plant sunflower that adjusted fastest to transplant out of all the gift-plant sunflowers (it was pictured in my entry “Sunflowers, Reborn”).  It turns out to be the cultivar ‘Vanilla Ice’ (which is, to me, a rather unfortunate name, but I’m guessing whoever named it didn’t have the musical associations I do).  According to what I’ve read, this is in a separate species called cucumber-leafed sunflowers (Helianthus debilis), which explains why its leaves don’t look like those of the common annual sunflower (Helianthus annuus).  The rest of my annual sunflower cultivars are in the latter species.

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Continued on 11 July

The hot weather broke yesterday.  Wednesday (the 9th) was the farmers’ market but the plant sales are winding down since the flower farm is no longer in business (they used to sell perennials into autumn) so it’s the first week this year wherein I did not buy a single plant.  Last week I bought another six-pack of the marigold ‘Honeycomb’ since the first six-pack has done so well, and I got a morning glory with beautiful marbled leaves that look more like ivy leaves than typical morning glory leaves.  I had forgotten its name but I just looked it up online and it is ‘Mini-Bar Rose’.  It is a Japanese morning glory, Ipomoea nil.  (Ipomoea sure is a huge genus, isn’t it?)

I think I’d best post this now since it’s taken me so long to write any more in it.  I’m hoping to make another post later today with what I did in the garden today, the first time in a couple weeks that I really got to get down and dirty in it for a good while.

Cuban oregano (large plant on left) with culantro (below) and Aztec sweet herb (winding around on top/right)

In this shot are three herbs I’ve never grown before.  I’ve talked about Aztec sweet herb in another entry.  Cuban oregano (also known as Spanish thyme) is a very popular Latin American plant, so much so that according to Ethnic Culinary Herbs you can’t find plants of it for sale at markets in rural Latin America because every single garden already has one.  This shot is from a couple weeks ago.  It has been happy as a clam beside one of the largest rocks in the rock border, the heat radiating back to it.  Culantro, also known as recao, spiny coriander, and Mexican coriander, amongst other things, has been harder to situate here.  I first planted it at the front of the border beside the retaining wall, thinking the heat would please it, but instead it merely tried to bolt a second time (it was already trying to bolt when I bought it; I cut off the bud stalks, as recommended).  In retrospect, I think it may have been in too little sun for its liking in that spot.  I moved it up beside the Cuban oregano and it’s been happier, putting out new leaves instead of trying to bloom a third time. A nice article on culantro/recao is over here.  I have two other Eryngium species in the front garden, sea holly and rattlesnake master.  The genus members tend to be great for hot, windy sites.  (At the very top, in the center, you can also see a little bit of the sweet marjoram.  Like the Aztec sweet herb, it’s been winding its way around other plants.  I have them closer to the beans because they like more compost than the others.  Near the bottom, on the right, you can see one branch of the French tarragon.)

• Cuban Oregano - Plectranthus amboinicus
• Culantro - Eryngium foetidum
• Aztec sweet herb - Lippia dulcis
• Sweet marjoram - Origanum majorana
• French tarragon - Artemisia dracunculus var. sativa

Winter savory (Satureja montana)

Hollyhock leaf on the left.

Peas forming

Baby’s breath bloom

Retaining wall in the foreground.

Bean climbing a pole

Pea plants and fava/broad bean plants behind it.

Silver thyme, blooming, in front of Small’s penstemon and variegated catmint:

Creepers galore:  Creeping snapdragon and creeping thyme

This is the creeping spandragon that survived the winter!  The creeping thyme (AKA ‘mother of thyme’) is wandering around everywhere.  There are seeded annuals growing up out of the snapdragon - stalks of a poppy and some sweet alyssums. That’s a viola bloom on the far right.

Sedum, budded

This is an unknown sedum I bought (untagged) from a stall at the farmers’ market last year.  Oddly, it is the only sedum that survived the wintertime trampling of the garden by workmen, even though numerous other perennials survived.

Agastache ‘Apricot Sprite’

With lamb’s ears ‘Silver Carpet’ (fuzzy silvery leaves) and a cranesbill/hardy geranium I got at this year’s estate sale (pink blooms in background) and foliage of California poppies (at the edges on the left, right, and bottom).  Some sources say ‘Apricot Sprite’ is hardy in our average winters (USDA hardiness zone 6B) and others say it’s not, so we’ll see!

[Photos are from mid-June; camera/computer issue still not resolved]

Sundrops bloom

I know this plant as Sundrops (mine is the species Oenothera fruticosa, native to the Eastern and Midwestern US), but when I was on a local garden tour last weekend I saw a very similar one and asked, “Is that Sundrops?” and got the response, “It’s Evening Primrose.”  (Just goes to show, once again, why common names aren’t the best to go by.)  I then saw the same plant at a few other gardens.  I noted one difference between the one in those gardens and my own is that the bud sheaths on mine have two little horns sticking up (you may be able to see them in the above picture) whereas the others did not have them.  When I got home I poked around online trying to figure out what plant everyone else had.  It is unlikely to be the wild species of the wildflower known as Evening Primrose, Oenothera biennis, as it is a biennial and as far as I know opens its flowers in the evening, which is how it got its common name.  I’ve seen cultivars around, but most of those seem to be mounding yellow-flowered or pale-pink-flowered ones.  So who knows, maybe it is some short-lived-perennial version of O. biennis.

The garden tour was very interesting - there were lots of very divurgent gardens on it - and it also helped to show me again that my own personal style is very different from that of most of the other people who are actively gardening in the area.  Most of the other gardens focused on perennial flowering plants (some of them having mostly perennials with a small bed of annual veggies/herbs) and generally planted the perennials in large clumps, which is something I’ve often seen recommended in articles and books on landscape design.  I think the look of large clumps is a nice one, and I appreciate the beauty of it in other gardens, but personally I don’t like to do that in my own garden.  I feel like monoculture in perennial flowers is similar to monoculture in agriculture - something that invites trouble and discourages diversity. On a more practical level, I also like so many plants that if I planted in the “large block of the same plant” style that many others here do, I would only be able to grow a tiny fraction of the plants I actually want to grow.

Wednesday was the farmers’ market, as always.  This time I got three more sunflowers (the three I already got there are doing so great!) as well as one more cardinal climber and one more six-pack each of the zinnia ‘Oklahoma Mix’ and the lisianthus.  Despite a reputation as being fussbuckets, so far the lisianthus I’d already planted are doing just fine, so I thought I’d get more.  Some of these new ones already had buds!  The new sunflowers didn’t come with tags, but I remembered that one of them was ‘Ring of Fire’ and one was ‘Sungold’ (that’s how it was identified on the sign, but it seems to most commonly be called ‘Giant Sungold’ and also sometimes ‘Giant Double Sungold’).  I did not realize until looking them up that ‘Ring of Fire’ is pollenless.  In the past I have tried not to plant pollenless sunflowers (popular in the cut-flower trade) because I grow sunflowers mostly for the wildlife and pollenless sunflowers are much less useful in that regard.  However, since this year the cut-flower farm quit the business, ‘Ring of Fire’ can be another cut-flower supply for me.  (The ones I’d already planted from the market were ‘Velvet Queen’, dwarf ‘Big Smile’, and an unknown third one.  I also seeded some in, it looks like some self-sowed, and I got some from a gardening acquaintance; the last look to me like they might be ‘Vanilla Ice’, though she did not recall the cultivar herself.  One of the ones from my acquaintance is blooming, and all three of the ones I previously bought at market have large buds.)

On Wednesday I did a lot of planting and moving things around.  As things grown and change (and the autumn-blooming crocuses go dormant for the summer) that’s always necessary in this bed.  This time I moved more gazanias, the rosemary ‘Arp’, the purple sage, and at least another thing or two I’m forgetting.  In the morning I also planted another lavender, ‘Jean Davis’, as well as the curly chives and the grey-leafed lavender cotton (at last), which I finally decided to plant with the lavenders at the recommendation of some herb book - complementary foliage/shape with a similar bloom time and pleasingly different bloom styles/colors, and liking similar conditions to boot.  After market I planted the zinnias and lisianthus and one of the sunflowers and a friend helped me by planting the other two sunflowers, the new cardinal climber, and the cardinal climber I’d bought the week before but hadn’t planted.  (I’d already planted one cardinal climber.)  I’m growing two of the cardinal climbers up sunflower stalks and the third, which had three sprouts coming from the one little peat pot, up poles beside one of the plantings of pole beans.

The clarkia have come into full bloom this week and are looking so great whenever we have dry weather (all these storms we’ve been having tend to flatten them).  In a past garden I grew them in a moist, humus-rich part of the garden that got sun early and late in the day.  This time I seeded them around the front garden to see what conditions they’d like best, though I concentrated the most on an area that was also partial sun (it gets morning sun and then sun again from mid- to late afternoon).  Literally every seed seems to have sprouted.  They are growing in a thicket in the partial-sun spot, and growing scattered around the rest of the front garden, peeking up from the base of the sedum, poking out of the thymes, wobbling beside the main vegetable patch.  Everywhere you look, there’s a clarkia bloom.  And they are much shorter in the drier, windier, sloped garden than they were in my old low-wind, high-humus, no-slope-at-all garden, though they are still very floriferous, the flowers just crowded more tightly together on their shorter stems.  The main strain I seeded this time was the “Mountain Garland” strain from Renee’s Garden Seeds, which blooms in colors such as  peach/melon, pink/rose, lavender, and white.  I’ve yet to see any white ones this year, but I’ve got heaps in peach, melon, pink, red, and rose and a smaller amount in shades of purple.

…

Two days later

A white clarkia finally bloomed - a lone one amongst all the pinks and reds and purples.  Some of the annual poppies have been blooming this week too, which is really amazing given I didn’t seed them in winter like you’re supposed to, but rather in midspring.  They’re much shorter than they were in past gardens, but that could even just be the site.  The sweet alyssum I seeded in is going crazy too, blooming in tall tufts (much taller than the seedlings I planted in spring), and more annual baby’s breath has been blooming. The nasturtiums (which I mentioned sowing in a recent entry) seem to have had a pretty good germination rate and many of them are at least a few inches tall now. One of the China pinks (annual dianthus) that I seeded in very late was blooming a few days ago, the tiniest one I’ve ever seen, a regular-sized bloom on a plant that was only a couple of inches tall.  Some of the beans are already blooming!  It’s a crazy world we live in.

I’ve been very bad at finishing and posting entries lately, so I suppose I will just go ahead and post this as-is, or who knows when anyone else would see it.  Yet another hot, hazy, humid day today (warmer and more humid than most of the Southeast’s weather today), no fun at all for gardening in.

We sure aren’t having last summer’s dryness.  It is thunderstorming and absolutely pouring yet again as I type this.

I’m sorry it’s taken so long for me to post any of the promised photos.  My computer and my camera have been having abrupt issues communicating and I’ve only been able to upload some of the photos so far.  Here are a random selection of a few of the uploaded ones.

Rudbeckia ‘Toto’ and dill (the latter grown from seed)

On the right is one of a copious number of lavender buds.  I wish I could share some big impressive trick about the dill, but really all I’ve ever done with dill is just take a handful of seeds and broadcast them in a general area, and then repeat it a couple times if I want to seed it in various places.  This rudbeckia was one I got at the farmers’ market this year.  It has done the best out of the six ‘Toto’s; some of them seem to have totally died.  Let this be a stark reminder to you that if you purchase rudbeckia after it’s already warm out, plant it promptly and keep it well-watered while it’s settling in.  Rudbeckias, especially the cultivars that tend to be grown as annuals, don’t react well to stress, and in particular, have a habit of reacting to hot, dry weather by developing mildew on their leaves.  Not only is it not pretty, but if the plants are still small, just a day or three is enough time for it to spread enough to kill them.  (And I even watered them more often than other plants, moreso after they developed mildew; apparently it still wasn’t enough.)  At least my ‘Toto’ tragedy has led me to be more vigilant of the ‘Indian Summer’ rudbeckias (also purchased at the market) and they’ve all survived so far.

Dianthus ‘Inchmery’ blooms with pansy blooms

California poppy foliage on the left; agastache ‘Acapulco Orange’ foliage on the right.

Lima beans and garden beans with lemon verbena

The limas (a bush variety, I think ‘Henderson’s Bush’ but I can’t remember for sure right now) are on the bottom of the photo, the leaves with the rounded dip in them.  The garden beans (vining kinds; I’ve always primarily grown garden bean varieties that are either pole beans or vine well enough to grow on poles) are the leaves that look somewhat similar but are less rounded in appearance, to the left and above the limas in this photo.  The lemon verbena is flopping around in this shot.  This year’s lemon verbena has had a lot of trouble staying horizontal.  I’ve tried putting a stake in the middle of it and it still seems to flop over even with the stake there.  I suspect it’s because last year I bought one that was leggier and that seems to have actually made it adapt better to a windy site than the one I got this year, which was shrubbier (more like lemon verbena’s natural form).  On the far right are some leaves and a bloom stalk of the sea holly, which develops new buds every single day but still hasn’t opened any of them.

One of my many beloved salpiglossis plants (center), backed by pansies, violas, a ‘Tangerine Gem’ marigold, and a California poppy:

The salpiglossis (AKA painted tongue) pictured here was the first to bloom; these were its first blooms.

Pansies and creeping snapdragons:

The coloration of pansies and violas is so fascinating to me.  The blue and yellow one varies in how much yellow it has depending on some factor I have yet to determine (amount of sunlight? temperature when the bloom is forming? I don’t know).

Chive blooms starting to fade:

In the background are a ‘Profusion Fire’ zinnia bloom (orange on left), two buds of a pinkish California poppy (right), and a bloom of ‘White Lily’ verbena (upper left).  ‘White Lily’ turns out to be fairly susceptible to some kind of mildew; one of my two plants has a pretty bad infection and the other has a mild one, and they developed it so fast that the bad infection sprang up literally inbetween times I checked on the plant.