Of late in the garden 7 June 2009

One of my epimediums, blooming last month

Epimedium 'Lilafee,' blooming last month

As I type, a baby robin is in one of the back garden beds trying to figure out how to catch insects.  It’s so cute!

I had my first four alpine strawberries of the year from the garden today.  (Note that these definitely may not be THE first four alpine strawberries of the year, as they started blooming during our late April heat wave and have been blooming continously since, and the squirrels and American Robins are more religious about checking for strawberries than I am.)  They’re so good and they’re quite literally impossible to find in markets or stores here.  I love how low-care they are (about as close to “no-care” as a perennial hardy food plant can come) and how well they tolerate partial shade and competition from thirsty tree roots. I feel that they are woefully underplanted here in the US.

Ever more of the peas are blooming, and by now there are at lesat two types forming, one of them green podded and one of them ‘Golden Sweet’ because it’s the only gold podded one I’m growing (at least two ‘Golden Sweet’ plants have pods forming and they all appear to have flowers). One of many things I love about heirloom/heritage peas is their interesting flowers.  I’ve got flowers right now that are purple fading to blue, magenta fading to paler pink, cream, and double-toned in red and palest pink.  Like fava/broad bean’s white blooms with the beautiful black blotches, I think the pea flowers are pretty enough to grow as ornamentals even if they didn’t actually produce yummy peas.  Another thing I’ve noticed about them is that a lot of the heirloom pea plants have a reddish circle on the leaves near the stem.  I believe there is a botanical name for this, but I currently can’t recall what it is.  In addition to being visually interesting, it would be an interesting comparison to grow out some old ones by some possible counterfeits and see who’s who.  (While I do think some people deliberately profit off the aura of heirlooms, I really do think there are more who simply don’t realize that what they have is an imposter.)

There are also many more sprouts in the baby leaf pots, the giant lettuce pot, and the giant greens pot, as well as the first sprouts in the root pot!  (I assume the latter is radishes, though I suppose I could be wrong.  They’ve not got true leaves yet.)

The peach-leaved bellflower FINALLY bloomed overnight after being budded since the aforementioned heat wave (yes, over a month ago!).  It is the cultivar ‘Telham Beauty.’  I planted it as a young plant about this time last year (I got it from Select Seeds, yet another plant they’ve stopped selling after just a year!) and this is its first year flowering.  Its flowers are gorgeously huge (they appear to be a fair size larger than the other PLBs I see around here) and in a gorgeous satiny pale blue that gives the impression of something delicate and breakable (like a precious handblown glass bowl, perhaps) yet are held on seemingly impossibly strong stems, still not bending at all despite now beginning to be laden with giant blooms on a very windy day.  The blooms look like a huge, bluer form of the lavendery-blue Scottish bluebells and the two pleasingly echo each other.   The comfrey is doing superbly, and has even sent up yet another flower stalk that’s now loaded with buds.  The first two foxgloves are also blooming, two of the ones I seeded in last year, and two of the perennial-ish ones have buds (it appears that the true biennial one did not survive the winter).  The baby blue eyes are doing stupendously in the comparably colder weather we’d had in recent days (till today, when it got to about 80 F) and more of them have bloomed, with most of the ones that already had one bloom having added more blooms and buds in the past few days.   The Siberian iris bloomed this weekend, one bloom at first, now a second opening.  It is a kind that’s so rare that I can’t find a source for it online.  I got it from the flower farm that used to come to the farmers’ market, and the farmer got her stock from an old farmer nearby who had kept it going in their garden their whole life.  I love the toughness of plants that have stood the test of time.

Speaking of irises, I was so pleased with the heirloom bearded irises’ performance this year that I went online and found some more bearded irises to add.  I ordered a one from one seller (‘Honorabile’) and two from another (‘Rameses,’ which my grandmother grew, and ‘Princess Beatrice’; while I was writing this post, I got an email from that seller that they were going to ship them tomorrow).  From the first seller, I also got a cutting of an antique rose and a few rhizomes of woodland plants.  I know a lot of people regularly buy things like seeds, roots, and bulbs online from individual sellers, but it’s not very common for me.  I hope that they arrive soon and in good condition.  The rose is supposed to be more shade tolerant than most, so I am planning to put it by the fence in the back, which gets maybe half-day sun, and see how it does.  It is supposed to be ‘Banshee,’ a rather legendery antique rose that has entire lengthy articles devoted to it on the web.  I also took advantage of Select Seeds’ sale on (most of) their remaining plants to buy a second African foxglove, a few more flowring tobaccos (I’m planning to plant a few in the front garden and see how they do; previously I’ve only grown them in the more sheltered back garden here since the old-fashioned ones, which I strongly prefer, have such huge bloom stalks, sometimes 5 ft.), and a handful of other plants.

I cut my first bouquet from the garden of the year, one stalk of the ragged robin (a double-flowering cultivar of the emphatically-pink-flowered plant ) and one stalk of the one dianthus ‘Rainbow Loveliness’ that’s blooming so far (it’s an old mixed-color variety, and this plant has flowers that fade from palest pink to white and have a pale green eye) – its perfume is heavenly, and though there are too few flowers to scent the entire room, walking by it is like walking through a cloud of antique roses.  The fringes of the ragged robin and the dianthus also pleasingly echo each other, and they are looking quite nice in my new little handmade blue clay vase.  I try to pick only things that there are a lot of flowers and that the  pollinators don’t much seem to like, or things that already have a broken stem anyhow.  In the garden, by the way, a clump of ‘Rainbow Loveliness’ is so loaded with blooms that you definitely do not have to be near it to smell it!  I can smell mine the whole way from four feet away, even with all the competing smells of being outdoors in a city.

More calla lilies have sprouted!  I still can’t believe they overwintered for me.  They are most definitely not supposed to be hardy here, and the only reason I didn’t dig them up the first winter that one survived was because we hadn’t had a hard frost yet when I went on a trip that November and then had a blizzard while I was gone that left the garden buried under snow for an entire month.  I guess my choice to plant them all in the area of the one that survived the previous winter was the right thing to do (the previous year they had been scattered around the bed and only one of the three made it).  Not only does it appear that they all survived, but there seem to actually be even more sprouts than I remember having plants!  I wonder if a couple of them developed offsets that have now sprouted.  At last count I had seven calla lilies in various stages of awakening.

Long Time No Post 22 May 2009

I’m sorry it’s been over a month since I updated.  The thing about spring is that you’ve got so much to do in the garden that’s it’s often a choice (at least for me) between updating the garden blog and actually being out in the garden!  I have some partially finished posts saved on my computer and hopefully I will be able to finish those and upload them soon.  I also have a lot of photographs to upload, hopefully also soon.  In the meantime, here is a brief update on things here in the past month-plus:

*The shade/partial-shade garden in back is doing really well.  Spring is really its best season, I think.  There have been bulb blooms, woodland phloxes, epimediums, primroses, and violets, and now the columbines and wild native ginger and the alpine strawberries and the last bulb (Silver Bells)  and the new lowbush blueberries and new mourning widow cranesbill are blooming, and the foxgloves and comfrey are budded. The foxgloves I seeded in last year have survived the winter with pretty good germination and most of them are budded (in addition to the foxgloves that I had last year; all but one of those have come back for another year). The comfrey is doing unbelievably better than its sad start when I first planted it last year (if I hadn’t watered it regularly, I think it would have died) – it is huge and has several bud clusters and looks like it is forming new ones as well.

*More improbable winter survivors: In the back garden, the Salvia patens has survived another winter, and this year not just one calla lily has survived, but five (so far)!  In the front, all the agastaches appear to have survived, even the ones that weren’t supposed to be winter-hardy here.  Additionally, the two hardy begonias finally sprouted over the past day, rewarding my belief in them.  That means that all but two things survived in pots in the back garden – the ones that didn’t make it were one epimedium and one sedge.  Even the other stuff in tiny pots did, like violets and lyre-leafed sage.  My incredible experience with this last year led me to take more risks with it this past year, and I know I’m lucky my risking paid off.

*Self-seeding: There has also been some nice self-seeding.  I always appreciate plasnts that are tough enough to be able to self-seed in my harsh front garden.   The sundial lupine (Lupinus perennis), in particular, has pleased me so.  I’ve counted at least five seedlings, some nearish the parent plant but others farther afield in the garden.  Sunflowers have again self-seeded and/or been seeded in by birds.  It also looks like the tovara (‘Painter’s Palette’) has self-seeded this year (something it is notorious for doing, and how I first got my plants – a friend gave me their self-seeded seedlings), and it looks like there may be at least one baby echinacea as well, which would please me so.  The squill, muscari, and glory of the snow have all developed seedheads, but we’ll see if that results in actual self-seeding (I hope so).

*Overwintered plants: I carried out most of the overwintered plants today, another hot and sunny day here.  The brugmansia (‘Charles Grimaldi,’ now with me for two years), Cestrum (‘Orange Zest’), and lemongrass have done the best over the winter, all growing significantly from their size in autumn.  The sweet violet and fuschia (sharing a pot) and the tweedia and snail vine have also done decently.  The bay seems to still be alive but is continuing not to seem particularly happy, still about the same size it was when I got it several months ago.  I saw that the nursery is offering bay laurels that are larger and look more robust than the one I got from them last year, and am considering trying a second plant to see if it does better than the first one has.

*Blooms in front: We are up to the stage where the heirloom irises are blooming or budded.  ‘Eleanor Roosevelt’ was first (as she is well-known for being even in gardens with dozens of irises), with just one bloom so far. ‘Gracchus’ is blooming now, with several more buds spread over two bloom stalks, and there are many buds on ‘Quaker Lady’ and ‘Mme Chereau,’ which were the two irises to bloom their first year here (last year).  My other three irises have yet to show visible bloom stalks, but I haven’t given up hope yet.  All seven are growing more robustly than last year (when I think the trauma of having their roots stomped on, having heavy things dragged over, etc. by the workmen really damaged them), so I think there is definitely a possibility they will yet develop bud stalks. The wild native columbine is also blooming (I planted that this spring) as well as the Mt. Atlas daisies, and there are buds on the (parent) sundial lupine, the false/Carolina lupine, the peach-leaaved bellflower, the dianthuses ‘Rainbow Loveliness,’ the chives (which have been budded since the last heat wave in late April), and one each of the perennial salvias and the cranesbills.  There are also a lot of blooms on annuals I’ve planted – pansies, violas, bacopas, heliotropes, snapdragons, Swan River daisies, stocks, Felicia heterophyllas (that beyond-gorgeous blue-on-blue daisy that I planted last year, not realizing it was a different Felicia than the species I’d grown the year before until it bloomed), an alpine calendula I’ve not grown before, …  Lots of success with direct-sowing in front, as usual.  There are a ton of clarkias (nearly 100% germination, as last year) as well as smaller numbers of many other things, such as California poppy, annual poppy, corncockle, calendula, and love-in-a-mist.

*Crops: The fava/broad beans have started blooming!  The garden peas are growing like mad now.  Some of the garden peas had poor germination in the first round, so I recently seeded in a second batch of those and they are catching up now (‘New Mexico,’ ‘Tall Telephone (AKA Alderman),’ and ‘Mammoth Melting’ are the ones I can remember off the top of my head).  I don’t know if it was a difference in placement (perhaps different amount of sunlight/different intensity, different texture to the soil, etc.), if perhaps they happened to be more prone to rotting before sprouting than the other cultivars, or what.  The fava/broad beans seem to have had pretty even germination rates amongst them, even though they are planted in a row westish to eastish like the peas are.  The lentils, meanwhile, have had very uneven germination.  (If you forget, this is my first year growing lentils.  See a recent post for more details.)  ‘Spanish Pardina’ germinated first and to date has germinated best (I think it may have had 100% germination).  ‘Black Beluga’ germinated second and has similarly had overall second-best germination.  The other three haven’t done as well, with a handful (‘French Blue,’ ‘Petite Crimson’) to none (‘Urid Dal’) up so far.  I’ve also had no srpouts of the garbanzo ‘Black Kabouli,’ but my beans ‘Yellow Arkiara’ (the earliest garden bean to plant) have sprouted and are growing nicely, and now with the heat and sun, the runner beans and purple-podded beans are coming up as well.  (Purple-podded beans can be planted earlier than other beans because there’s a special chemical in them that both gives them the purple coloring and makes them less prone to rotting in cool, wet soil.)  Aphids turned out to have sheltered over the winter on the fuschias and decimated the majority of my seedlings in just a day.  After they had mostly died out, I started a second batch of seedlings.  I’ve got lots of young plants again now:  26 cherry tomatoes (nearly 100% germination), 20 regular-sized tomatoes, 12 tomatillos, and 2 chiles (the chiles survived the onslaught better than the tomatoes and tomatillos, so I didn’t seed as many new ones in).  I’ve never had aphids on indoor seedlings before, and it’s really a serious pain.  I also got a cherry tomato plant at the living green festival my town held recently.  A non-profit that does gardening work locally was selling them to raise money.  They said it was an heirloom hand-selected by their main grower (and indeed, it appears to be named after him), but the two people staffing the stall couldn’t tell me more about it.  When I tried to ask more detailed questions, they just kept shrugging and saying, “It’s a cherry tomato,” as if that explained everything.  So I figured I’d just grow it and see for myself what the answers to my questions are.  There are also shallots, parsley, cilantro, French sorrel, thyme, and sage growing in front, and the scallions, chives (or as the person that gave me the Chinese leek division two years ago calls them, “American chives”), lavenders, winter savory, and Chinese leek/garlic chives have all survived the winter and are doing excellently.  I also finally planted the bare-rooted highbush blueberries in front since my last post, and after initial shock, they seem to be adjusting well.  In the sifted compost, I found a squash vine, and transplanted it to the main crop area.  I’ve also got melon seeds to sow.  Today’s a ‘fruit day’ in biodynamic parlance, as is tomorrow, so I should do that while the time is right.  Perhaps I should seed in my edamames today too, and give them a chance to get going before the pole beans shade them out (which seems to have been their biggest problem the last two years).

*Compost: Yesterday, in anticipation of yesterday and today’s heat, sun, and wind, I mulched all the back beds and the main crop area in the front bed with compost.  I also top-dressed the front’s plants that I know most like it – the Oriental poppies, peonies, scallions, and chives – plus I added some compost around the blueberries, stocks, and alpine calendula.

*Caterpillars: I found a caterpillar in the crop patch recently, the first I’ve ever seen in the windy, hot, high front garden!  It was so convincing at playing dead I thought it really might actually be dead until I gently poked it with a twig and it freaked out.  I also found a couple caterpillars in the back garden yesterday, one green and hanging out on the sifted-compost holder and the other munching the comfrey.

*New plants: I mentioned some of the new plants above.  I’ve also gotten more new plants from the nursery and mail-order.  I’ve planted some of them and others are awaiting planting. Some of them, particularly much from my Select Seeds mail-order, are meant to go in pots:  a datura, petunias, fuschias, tender (‘zonal’) geraniums.  I’ve also got flowering tobacco, salvias, tender vines,  coleuses, and more from Select Seeds.  I’ve already planted lantanas and some salvias and a double-flowered feverfew and a silver foliage plant from them. I’ve also got some tender “bulbs” to plant – dahlias and gladiolas and a rain lily from Old House Gardens and a few cannas from the local hardware store (Old House Gardens had already sold out of cannas by the time I placed my quite tardy order).

I think that’s plenty for today!  More another day.