…and then hopefully a bigger post, say, finally that photo post maybe. It had been so beautiful here after all the dreary weather that I’ve spent much more time outside enjoying it than indoors typing at my computer! (Yesterday it was extremely rainy again, but I started this post two days ago. Today is cloudy and sporadically rainy, though right now it’s just crisp.)
I harvested my first “wild blueberry” (lowbush blueberry – it’s not really wild if it’s in a garden, is it?) this week, and was very excited about it! I planted a lowbush blueberry at my old garden, but I got something off about the cultural requirements – possibly too much sun, possibly the wrong soil, I don’t know for sure – and it never produced a single berry. There are very few of them on the one bush, and none on the other one, but given that they were both still in their nursery pots at flowering time and that blueberries often don’t produce berries till the second year or beyond, I am pleased to have any berries at all. I had never had wild blueberries till my first visit to New England and they’re something that still charms me after all these years living here. The taste is so different from the “cultivated” blueberries.
Some of the peas look to be yellowing. Unfortunately they started to do so after I’d already harvested the last peas I think are forming on those plants, so I don’t know as I’ll get to save seeds from those plants. Others of the pea plants look just fine, though. ‘Golden Sweet’ is still putting out pods regularly (I’m definitely keeping that one around in future years and future gardens!), and some of the other cultivars are putting out smaller numbers. The fava/broad bean plants all still look healthy as of now. Today it is quite cool, in the low 60s with a strong breeze, and it was the same yesterday (plus regular downpours and some thunderstorms), so I’m a bit surprised the peas would pick now to quit, but so it goes. The beans that are up to flowering size are mostly putting out flowers like mad, and super early bean ‘Yellow Arikara’ still has cute little pods forming on its plants (I haven’t seen it put out any more flowers this week). It’s interesting that most of the purple-podded beans seem to also have purple stems and flowers that are some shade of purple. The first scarlet runner bean has reached the top of its five foot pole. It’ll probably loop around back down another one; that’s what they usually do. The scarlet runner beans haven’t started flowering yet; I don’t know if they’re waiting for a string of sunny days, or…
The peach-leaved bellflower ‘Telham Beauty’ has put out a fresh flush of blooms after all this rain, even though I didn’t deadhead it. The coral-flowered penstemon is still making the bumblebees go crazy (and still putting out a rather unbelievable amount of flowers and buds), and the gaillardia ‘Tokajer’ is proving quite popular with the smaller native bees. (The latter two plants are new this year. So far I’ve been quite pleased with both, and the bees don’t seem to mind their tendency to flop over on my windy site [they were both already starting to bloom by the time I planted them, so they didn’t have as much of a chance to adjust to the windy site, which perennials often do by not growing as tall as they would under less windy circumstances].) The cup plant budded up quite abruptly and its big buds look like they will bloom soon. The sweet alyssum I seeded in myself has finally begun to reach flowering size, and some of the plants have their pretty little white blooms now. (Still no annual candytuft blooms as far as I’ve seen; typically they start to bloom around the same time.) The sweet alyssum cultivar that the nursery carried this year smelled like honey, as the white ones seem to always do, but it was a total dud with the bees, who just LOVED last year’s nursery cultivar. So I’m happy to finally have sweet alyssum flowers that they actually like. (As I’ve posted here before, since sweet alyssum is quite cold-hardy for an annual, I always start out with nursery seedlings and seed in my own sweet alyssum to take over with their blooms as the nursery seedlings get straggly in early summer.) Elsewhere in the world of direct-seeded annuals: The nasturtium seedlings (oh, how many there are now! with leaves in so many beautiful colors!) are growing fast with all the rain, and the love-in-a-mist has budded up with it. The clarkias are still putting out new flowers (though not as many as a week ago), but the annual poppies, corncockle, and baby blue eyes seem to be about through.
Today I planted the two perennials I bought at the nursery on my way home on Monday, a second sea holly – this one with psychedelic lavender-y stems – that I planted near the original (which has been in my garden since my first year here, two years ago), and another anise hyssop. Sea holly and anise hyssop are two more plants that the bees go crazy for. Just make sure that you buy hybrids that aren’t sterile. One reason I like going to nurseries is to see what plants the bees are attracted to – both to find new plants they like, and to see which cultivars are most popular of plants with numerous cultivars. With the perennial salvias, for example, there are some cultivars they definitely prefer to others.
That was a small bit of planting (though they were in big pots so it took a while to dig the holes!), but since I last updated, I’ve done heaps of other work in the garden. I’ve transplanted some things that seemed unhappy or that I just thought could be happier elsewhere, and I’ve planted a lot. I planted the rest of the tender(-here) salvias and agastaches, the lemon verbena (I eventually gave up on the farmers’ market having it this year and bought one at the nursery; it’s a good thing I did, as nobody has plants there as of today, and nobody ever did bring lemon verbena – this is the first year I can recall in my eight years going to this market that nobody sold it), the little celosia plants (a dwarf variety that will never get much taller than it is now), the variegated Felicia, the last tomato (‘Black Cherry’), the flowering tobaccos that I bought in Select Seeds’ sale to plant in the front garden (two ‘Mirabilis,’ one ‘Bella,’ one lime-flowered, one ‘Crimson Bedder’ – the last two are significantly shorter than the others; ‘Mirabilis’ is a mixed-color cultivar, and I received one white one and one that’s a medium pink fading to palest pink – the rest of my flowering tobaccos are in back, which is where I’d always planted all of them till this year), the last petunia ‘Rainmaster,’ six hardy lavenders, three echinaceas (the ones that have been in my garden for two (2 of them) or one (1 of them) years now are heavily budded with the first bloom about to open), three gauras, a Santa Barbara daisy (not hardy here, and something I’ve never grown before, but it came in a mixed plant pack that was super cheap so I thought I’d give it a try; it’s in the fleabane genus, which tends to be another one that bees adore), and… other things. I also finally planted the poor gladiolas; I’d been afraid they’d rot in the cold, wet soil, and waited for a warm, sunny day, but unfortunately now the soil is cool and wet again! I’d hoped to also finally plant the poor dahlias, but ran out of time. I did most of my work over the long holiday weekend.
I also finally planted that gorgeous handmade pot that I got as a gift earlier this summer. On the two ends (it’s sort of rectangular), I planted the two tender-here sweet violets that I bought expressly to put in the pot, and in the middle, I put the yellow rain lilies (AKA Mexican lilies, as they are native to the Yucatan). Potted rain lilies are supposed to do well in cactus mix, so I edged the pot with regular potting soil for the violets and filled the middle with cactus mix. The violets are so thrilled about their new home that they’re creeping into the center of the pot and cascading with abandon down the edges of the pot, nearly to the ground already! I also, also finally brought out the tuberoses that had overwintered in their pots in an eastish-facing room, figuring once it was warm and sunny it was finally good weather to bring them out. The room had been getting sun finally (on our rare sunny days) in the early morning and evening, and to my surprise, the tuberoses had already sprouted in their impressively dry pots (they hadn’t been watered since they finished flowering inside shortly after our first frost). I put them in a sunny patch in the back yard and the sprouts have quadrupled in size just in the last few days. (The glads and dahlias had/have also sprouted in their paper bags)
Yesterday I finally planted some of the beans I hadn’t planted before for the same fear as the glads – that they’d just rot in the cool, wet soil. I’d intended to plant them all, but a downpour started so heavily so abruptly that I was soaked in the time it took me to run up the stairs to the porch with the seed packets and things, run back down, and crouch to plant the handful of seeds that I’d been holding, their tag having already been stuck in the ground. In the past I’ve grown mostly green beans, wax beans (which I suppose some people consider interchangeable with green beans), Roma beans (which I tend to think of as a marriage between a green bean and a shelling bean), and shelling beans, but this year I’m trying some dry bean cultivars, which I haven’t done in ages. In some countries dry beans are all that are grown, and there are some dry beans that are still quite popular here in New England, especially ‘Soldier’ and ‘Cranberry’ (the latter of which some people use as a cultivar name, others as a particular shape of dried bean with multiple cultivars). I planted some ‘Soldier’ this year.
Slug predation of my bean seedlings has been so, so bad this year that I put more seeds of each cultivar in than I normally would, assuming some of them will be lost to slugs. It’s too bad birds don’t much like the front garden since it’s so noisy with traffic and pedestrians, as they’ve been eating a fair portion of the slugs in the back garden. In happier news, though, I regularly see ladybugs in the front garden now. The aphid population has definitely been more sharply declining. I also saw a winged insect eating a green aphid. I think it was an antlion, but I’d have to check in a book to be sure. It looked so ferociously cool sitting perched atop a leaf, holding an aphid in its front legs, the bright green aphid so stark against its black legs and body. I’m always telling other gardeners here to have patience when a pest with natural predators comes – that there have to be a certain number of the pests before the predator(s) will come, as otherwise it’d just be a waste of time, you know? But gardeners here see their plants being attacked and just can’t not do anything, so very often, they just go ahead and spray. Be they organic or not, sprays still tend to kill insects rather indiscriminately. I wish more gardeners had the patience to wait for nature to take care of its own. As the book I’ve been reading points out (and which both I’ve heard and experienced many times before), insects tend to attack the weakest plants first, and “solving” it just by spraying doesn’t do anything about whatever underlying problem brought the insects in in the first place. (In fairness to slugs, though, they really DO seem to attack plants indiscriminately! I suppose there’s something different about their strategy at least in part because they aren’t insects and because they can’t fly like most pest insects can. By the way, did you know that slugs spend the majority of their lives underground? For all the destruction they can visit upon plants, they also create tunnels, helping to aerate the soil just like earthworms.)
A Bee in the City 
Recent Comments