Summer Doldrums

I've noticed recently that I haven't posted anything in almost a month.  I think it's the time of the year.  When the weather gets really hot in the summer, I do very little outside - I neglect the garden.  If the plants are lucky, I snap out of it fairly soon - which I think I have done this weekend.

In addition to the weather, there's work, and there's the ennui of summer - I think I've written about it before.  This year is a little different - I have been busy - taking care of chickens, mine and neighbors, volunteering at the Master Gardener's office, researching podcast topics, and reading about gardening in general.  I just haven't had time to write, which I miss.  I have a post about lawns that I'm working on.  I've been spending a lot of time researching organic gardening and non-toxic insecticides and fungicides.  Once I can distill all of this to a small amount of good information, I'll be writing about it.  I've found that, even on major gardening websites, the information on organic gardening is thin, unreliable or bad. 

So, look for a post about the new podcast soon, and hopefully I'll have more posts before we get around to another bloom day post.   Thanks for reading!

Garden Bloggers' Bloom Day

I'm not sure how other people do it, but I won't be photographing every bloom I have.  My two goals for these posts are to share some photos of our flowers, and as a record of our yard.  Right now, these posts are a little long - imagine if I photographed every flower?  I have been taking pictures of the first time a plant blooms for the year - that way I have a photo and know when it first bloomed.  There is an over abundance right now, but I suspect that in the future, I will be hard pressed to find flowers to take pictures of.  Or maybe not - we'll have to see.

 Let's start with the flashiest one - and also the one I previewed last month.  Finally, here is the flower from out night-blooming cactus.  It bloomed after I went to bed one night and Robin took pictures of it.  It was good she did, because we got an inch of rain that night and it was a dripping, sad, little flower then next morning.

This is a spider lily, possibly Hymenocallis caroliniana, but I'm not positive.  There are a lot of similar flowers and I got this from someone off of craigslist.  It blooms every spring with a succession of about four flowers on a single stem.

These are our American bog lilies - Crinum americanum - they like wet areas and bloom in the spring, but they have bloomed later in the year, maybe in the fall.  It could depend upon how wet they get or their stress level.  We started out with two bulbs, but they have multiplied many times.

We got our Root Beer plant several years ago.  Supposedly when you crush the leaves they smell like root beer, but I'm not so sure.  This thing spreads fairly easily.  I usually pull some up twice a year and take them to the plant swap.

I can't forget the vegetable flowers.  These are from our pepper plants.  They were really hard to get a photo of.

And here is a tomato blossom.  These have been blooming for a while now, but it was the first chance I had to take a photo of them.  No tomatoes without these flowers!

While not exactly food, I thought I would continue with this bloom from an apple gourd vine.  It has been hard getting a photo of these.  It didn't seem like they were blooming very much.  As it turns out, they are probably nocturnal, blooming at night.  No wonder I had trouble getting a picture!

These little black-eyed Susans are starting to bloom.  I didn't remember them being this small, but as the summer continues, maybe they'll get bigger.  I've got some others that are about to bloom as well.  Stay tuned.

I planted society garlic in the yard a couple of months ago and it's taken this long for them to bloom.  These, along with tomato blossoms and other small flowers, can be hard to photograph at times.

Our garden phlox started blooming.  We got these at a plant swap years ago, and they just keep multiplying.  Now we take some every year to the plant swaps.

 I got these from the plant swap last fall, I think.  I thought they were going to be black-eyed Susans, but it looks like they are purple coneflowers.  This photo doesn't do them justice - they weren't very purple when I took the photo, but they are now.

Earlier this year, someone was throwing out last year's asparagus fern.  After I got it home, I repotted and fertilized it.  It started flowering the other day and I knew something was wrong - fern don't flower.  They produce spores.  This is not a true fern.  Learn something new every day.

And now, more daylilies.  There may be a duplicate bloom from last month.  I can't always keep track.  I could just look at last month.  Anyway, enjoy!