Garden Bloggers Bloom Day

I started doing a "Garden Bloggers' Bloom Day" post every month last spring, but after the summer and fall, I ran out of blooms to post photos of.  This may happen again this year, but, even if it is only vegetables, I hope to be able to post pics for the whole year - actually I just thought about this, and a lot of winter

vegetables are leafy greens, so maybe I won't be able to.  I'll cross that bridge when I come to it - here are the past months blooms.

I've had trouble with this lantana for the last few years.  It might need more water or more shade.  It's in what I used to refer to as the "desert garden", which gets full sun and drains pretty quickly.  It's doing better this spring, probably due to the fact that we have had so much rain.

You don't always think about certain plants blooming, especially when there are more interesting aspects.  Some carnivorous plant enthusiasts recommend cutting off the stem before it flowers, so it doesn't take energy away from producing more and larger traps, but I don't agree.  These are beautiful, right?

Every year these old garden roses bloom very close
to Mother's Day, early May.  We had a cold spring that just would not warm up.  It finally did and everything started blooming - late - including these roses.

I think I like the blooms of plants that you don't expect to bloom.  Some are just unusual, like these elephant ears.  They got huge last year, and they have recovered well after a mild winter.  I would like to transplant them to a more visible area - right now they are behind the chicken coop - but they are growing through some giant roots, and any attempt to  dig them up would mean their destruction.

This is one of my least favorite plants.  There are probably better varieties of Nandina that have a nicer form, or are sterile, but this one is a pain.  Amongst the switch cane that I was trying to kill by smothering it, was a number of these volunteer plants.  Birds eat the seeds and then sit in a tree and drop them, from one end or the other, and they sprout.  With the help of carpet and chickens I was able to eradicate the bamboo/switch cane, but the nandina would not die, and the chickens won't eat it.

First daylily of the year.  I got this at a plant swap last year, so I didn't know what it would look like until it bloomed.  Apparently its name is "Grape Magic".  I had all my daylilies labeled until recently when I transplanted them to another bed.  So I'm excited to see which is which when they bloom this year.

I love it when I catch a pollen-covered bee in one of my flowers.  They always look like they're in heaven.  In this case, it's one of my many squash flowers.  They're blooming like crazy right now.

This is some Rudbeckia, I think, that I grew from seed last year.  I had a number of these plants, as well as Echinacea, and I didn't know which was which until they all started blooming this year.  I also kept getting bees in the pictures of a lot of the flowers, as you can see.  No problem with pollinators in my yard!

The irises around the pond bloomed a couple of months ago, but this pickerel weed is just starting to bloom.  It has multiple tiny flowers on this plant, and it will bloom continuously for the whole summer.  I want to make a few changes to the back yard, which would mean this pond would go, but I would still have room for marginals, like this plant.

This is one that I used to see on occasion, but now I have one in my yard - Stokes' Aster.  It's beautiful and it's native to the southeastern United States, which even better!

First cactus bloom of the year.  After they are pollinated, prickly pear cactuses will produce fruit that turns a deep red in the winter.  It actually tastes pretty good, if there weren't so many seeds in it.

There are recipes for making jams and sauces and even daiquiri mix with it.  There are to many seeds in these fruit and it can be a little hard to handle because the juice stains very badly.

About the only thing I know about this plant is that it's called hidden ginger.  It produces these blooms on a short stem near the ground, while other leafy stems grow taller.  The main flower is pink, and there are smaller yellow blooms below it.

I've been trying for weeks to get a good picture of my hydrangea - thi is probably the best that it will get for now.  This is in the shade garden, and it didn't do well last year.  A few years ago, I moved it from the back yard (where it was blue) to the front yard (where it is pink).  Very interesting.

I just saw something growing out of the top of this Golden Barrel cactus the other day.  I assumed that it might bloom eventually, but not so soon!  Everything was status quo this morning, but when I left home in the evening it was blooming, and I had no idea it would happen so fast.

Speaking of the pond, this loom popped up recently.  It's a water hyacinth and it's an invasive species, if it ever escaped to another body of water.  But here in my pond it is contained.  There are too many in here right now that you can't even see the water.  They need to be thinned.

Friends dropped off a butterfly bush at my house recently.  I wasn't sure where to plant it, so it's been sitting in the driveway.  In the meantime, it put out its first bloom.  Thanks, guys!

Every day something else blooms, but this is going to have to do it for this month.  I'll get to work on next month's post as soon as this posts.  Enjoy!

2010 Vegetable Garden Planning

It seems that I am doing more vegetable gardening than anything else these days. I'd like to write about a variety of topics, but this is monopolizing my gardening time lately. It's still at least three weeks before I plant potatoes and onions and maybe more lettuce and spinach, and I'm already planning the vegetables for the summer. It seemed a little early when I was looking through my Park Seed catalog Sunday night, but as I thought about it, some of the vegetables will be transplanted to the garden in late March, after having been started from seed six weeks earlier - around the second week of February. After I realized that, I felt like I was almost late. So, these are my choices from the Park Seed catalog - most of these varieties are recommended for our area by the Clemson Extension and can be found in my vegetable garden chart.

Pole Beans - Kentucky Wonder, Blue Lake, Kentucky Blue
Kentucky Blue looks likes the best, but I've grown the other two, so I might get all three. I'll be able to compare the three and see which ones I want to grow in the future.

Sweet Corn - Early Sunglow, Silver Queen
These are regular sweet varieties, rather than a super sweet or sugar-enhanced hybrid. The Early Sunglow can be planted earlier than normal, so we'll get corn through the whole growing season.

Cucumber - Sweet Slice, Diva, Sweet Success(seedless), Salad Bush
I know we won't eat all these cucumbers, but I thought I might grow one. The Salad Bush variety looks like the one for us. The catalog calls it "a space-saving slicing cuke".

Watermelon - Sweet Beauty Hybrid
I know we might only eat a slice or two of watermelon, It's always good to have one to eat in the summer, and if I have more, I'll give them to neighbors or take one to a fourth of July party.

Peanuts - Gregory
I've never grown peanuts before, but I thought I would give them a try. I have to figure out how many plants I need to get about two pounds of peanuts. I boiled some peanuts a couple of summers ago in the crock pot and they turned out pretty well.

Pumpkin - Autumn Gold, Howden, Big Moon
I don't know if I'll grow all of these varieties. They are very different, so I thought I might try them all. Autumn Gold pumpkins are 7-10 pounds. Howdens will be 20-30 pounds. According to the catalog, Big Moon may produce 150 pound fruit. I think my brother-in-law grew some of these huge pumpkins a couple of years ago and I'm just a little curious.

Squash - Early Summer Crookneck, Enterprise (straightneck)
To the best of my knowledge these are bush type squash and I'd really like a vining type. Squash take up a lot of space and I'd like to grow these on a trellis of some sort if I can. Several years ago, I bought a squash plant from Lowes and it was a vining type. Ever since, I've ended up with bush type, and I'd rather not have that. If I can't find what I'm looking for, I think one of my neighbors grows it and probably has some seeds I can have.

Tomatoes
I'm still looking at tomatoes - I haven't decided which variety to grow yet. Everything I read about them, talks about how many diseases they can have, so I don't think I'm planting them in the garden ever again. I'm planning to use five-gallon buckets to grow them in from now on. I can put them anywhere and it'll leave room in the garden for other veggies.

Peppers
Same goes for the peppers. There's even more variety of peppers than tomatoes, or it seems like. I'm planning to get a few varieties of bell and sweet peppers for Robin.

Sunflowers
I'll probably get a mix of sunflowers and stagger plantings through the year, so we'll have them for a long time.

Coneflowers
I'm planning to get the four different varieties that Park Seed has.

Strawberries
I've got to learn a little more about strawberries before I buy any. They're sold as plants, so I have some time before I need to order them.

The End of Procrastination

I actually did some yard work today. We haven't had the money for the concrete blocks that I'm going to use for our raised beds and no one responded to my postings on craigslist for some, so I thought I would continue to prepare that area as well as others for future plantings. More than a month ago I covered the vegetable garden area with a tarp. I pulled it up today in order to use it in other areas of the yard that need smothering. I had some plastic edging that I put down around the vegetable garden and I laid newspapers and mulched the area with my neighbor's grass clippings. I definitely underestimated the amount of newspaper and mulch I would need (I always do that). I had enough to cover about half the area. I'm going to lay some black plastic over the remaining part to keep the weeds at bay for now.

(My friend Joan did something similar recently. She writes about it on the Oak Terrace Preserve blog.)

When I laid out the bed along the edge of our front yard, it was quite large - ambitious, maybe. I didn't plan to fill it immediately - instead, I figured I would plant areas of it as I got a feel for the landscaping, and as I got plants. The area farthest from the street has been the most neglected and recently I've decided that I want to make it an extension of the vegetable garden. When I removed the tarp from the back yard, I laid it over the area in the front yard where I plan to plant vegetables at a later date. Whenever I remove it, I'll use it to smother some areas in the back yard around the pond. I plan to give that area a makeover during the winter - at least that's the plan.

The desert garden in the front yard experienced an unusually busy time this week. I've been meaning to cut back our lantana. It had gotten very overgrown and it doesn't grow extremely upright, so it was beginning to take over the bed. I really just tried to reduce its width and make it somewhat symmetrical in the process. I think I did just that. (I should've taken before and after pictures!) It had completely engulfed one of my cactuses - Cereus Peruvianus Monstrosus (this not my plant-mine is only a foot tall) - after getting a good look at it again, I'm thinking I may dig it up and put it a pot somewhere instead. Speaking of cactuses, I came home from work the other day to find that my prickly pear had nearly fallen over. It had gotten overgrown during the summer since planting it. I knew I might have this trouble in the future and planned to take cuttings and plant more of it around the original plant, to make a wider and hopefully stronger base to support greater height. I didn't get around to doing this, thus the problem at hand. I got out there with my heavy work gloves and heavily pruned it back and mounded rocks and dirt around the base to stabilize the cactus. (Why don't I have photos of any of this? I need someone in my family to document these things - hint, hint.) It seems like I've lost a lot of plant material to pruning this week, but there's a bright spot - I found a yucca on the side of the road this week. It was just cut down out of a neighbor's yard - no roots - so there's a chance it won't survive, but I have confidence. Robin has been wanting some height in that bed. I expected something I planted - the cactus, lantana, or (what turned out to be dwarf) echinacea - to get tall, but nothing has. So I was glad to find this yucca that was probably six to seven feet tall. I didn't need anything that tall, but I figured I could plant it in a deep hole and cut it off if needed. I did all of that - using post-hole diggers, I dug as deep as I could, maybe two feet, and cut off maybe a foot and a half of the yucca and planted it. I'm happy with how it looks and hopefully it will live. I just remembered another plant acquisition in the past week. It's some kind of succulent - a groundcover that has nice yellow flowers. If you can see in the photo, I planted it in front of the birdbath. I'm not totally sure that it is hardy, but the person I got it from, his seems to last from year to year, possible dying back in the winter. I'll just have to wait and see.