This is the first year that I've grown cannas, having received a couple of divisions of the hybrid 'Tropicana' in a plant trade earlier this year.
I've noticed that recently I haven't done any posts about projects. No planting, building, even weeding. I thought about this for a moment, and realized that it's because I haven't done any of this. My gardening tasks for the past few weeks have been limited to pretty much a single activity: watering.
I don't want to say too much today, but I do want to share something that I think is quite beautiful, and it only happens once a year at most -- although I haven't seen it for a couple of years.
I've got a few cardoon plants in the ground this year, but only one of them is really thriving, showing me promise of the huge silvery leaves that I fell in love with the first time I grew this plant five years ago or so. One thing I've noticed about cardoon in my yard is they attract a nice variety of insects, all of them interesting, not all of them with the best intentions.
I've mentioned before that my wife brings home lots of fruit scraps from the baking company. Banana peels are the main fruit refuse, but recently peach peelings have been added to the mix.
I started out yesterday morning taking photos of my perennial Black-Eyed Susans, Rudbeckia fulgida 'Goldsturm'. They're in full bloom right now and looking great, but the heat and lack of rainfall will probably fade them pretty quickly, so I wanted to make sure I took photos.
This is the second year I've been growing bananas, and the first year I've put one into the ground. I'm really impressed at how well the plant in the ground is doing, and I'll probably take a look at the plants as a whole in another post.
In yesterday's post about the vines, I showed a photo of a copper pipe trellis I created that has what I consider to be a really attractive patina (the look the surface acquires due to exposure or time). I think most people know that copper will eventually age to a blue-green color when exposed to the weather, but that process takes time.
Yesterday I took a look at some volunteer vines that are starting to take over my planting beds. Today I want to talk about a few of the vines that I purposefully planted. Annual vines start pretty slowly, then reach sort of a critical mass and really take off. These have just reached that point, so although they're not huge masses of foliage and flowers yet, they will be soon.
Sure, I've said before several times that I love flowering vines. I especially like annual vines, because they let me easily change things up each year if I want to. I love the flowers, I love the foliage climbing up whatever it can find: a trellis, my pergola, the deck stairs railing -- I just love the height that they add.
Three or four years ago I planted a single blue globe thistle (Echinops banaticus 'Blue Glow'). It was a beautiful plant that produced several spiky blooms which the bees loved. As is my tendency, I let the plant go to seed and did not remove it in the fall -- I like to leave seed heads over the winter for the birds and to see if I can get any volunteer plants the next year.
Three of my coneflower plants produced flowers that were quite strange. When I posted about this earlier this year, I was informed in the comments that this was probably due to a viral-like disease called aster yellows. After researching a little bit, I sadly agreed that's what is going on with my plants.
We gardeners share our playgrounds with lots of other critters -- that's not a surprise to any of us, is it? Some of them we consider to be pests and dread seeing in our yards (unless they're behaving themselves). Deer, rabbits, woodchucks, gophers and the like fall into this category. On the other hand there are those that we definitely love seeing in the garden: various birds, frogs, turtles, butterflies. They don't cause any damage and make the place more alive. Then there are some critters that some people love and some people do not: snakes, lizards, spiders. (I personally love all of these, and am still trying to attract snakes and lizards into my yard.) Finally there are critters that we don't really care about or even notice until they do something "noteworthy". In this last category I would put mice, voles, and shrews. These smaller animals are probably more common in your garden if you have a "wild" area nearby or within your yard, such as woods or grassy fields.
This spring when I redid my vegetable garden and made raised beds, I knew the east edge of the garden would be a problem. That's because I have bronze fennel growing there, the only perennial inside the fenced veggie garden. It's growing in the east-most walkway which is minimal already, and I knew it would be trouble once it reached its mature size later in the year.
My concrete driveway is about 40 years old. Since my yard slopes down from the front to the back, the driveway does too, except for the area behind the house that is level. What happens when you put large slabs of concrete onto a hill and expect them to stay flat and in one place? Gravity laughs at you and starts moving those slabs ever so slowly. Eventually you end up with gaps between the squares -- on my driveway they are about 2 inches (5 cm) wide.
I've already taken a look at the "big picture" in the south part of my yard so you can see how the various planting beds work together (or don't depending on your tastes) and contribute to the garden as a whole. Those beds contain a lot of elephant ears, ornamental grasses, and some flowering annuals. Today I'll move to the middle of my yard and show you the patio and surrounding beds.
Did you know that I've been germinating some mango seeds? I've posted about this a couple of times before (here, and here), and it's time for another update. As a quick recap, I wrapped the giant seeds in wet paper towels, put them into ziploc bags, and placed them in a warm place: on top of my grow light fixture.
I just realized that today's post about the voodoo lily bulbs was my 500th according to Blogger.
Recently I was given a handful of small voodoo lily corms. My friend Michael has voodoo lilies growing in his garden, and they apparently produce offspring quite readily. Mike didn't know what to do with the extra corms he had, and when I commented on how cool the spotted stems and leaves of the plant were, he gave me a handful of them.
Of all of the birds that frequent my garden, I think the wrens are my favorite. Besides being virtually fearless, they're one of the noisiest birds around, their loud happy song is beautiful to my ears. They're creative nesters too, building nests in the strangest of places -- I believe it's the Carolina wrens that do this mainly, but other wrens may too. What makes wrens so welcome in my garden though is they eat caterpillars -- insects provide most of their food.
With all of the bamboo maintenance projects I've done recently (tying up floppy bamboo, controlling escaped rhizomes) you'd think I'd be done with those for a while. Nope. There's one project left that I haven't gotten around to tackling: controlling one more escaped bamboo.
Some days you just need to see butterflies. This is one of those days.
I'm getting tired of the jungle of potted plants on my driveway. Last weekend I finally got about 20 percent of them moved into better positions in the garden. Okay, maybe 25%. It's a start, and it gave me a nice fresh garden "room" to look at.
Remember last fall when I drove to Needmore Bamboo in Brown County Indiana for the "Bamboo Festival" that Brad hosted? I bought a bamboo while I was there and met a few other bamboo growers. Some bamboo growers are focused only on growing bamboo, but most of them are gardeners in general and grow everything -- like me. Apparently some of them end up with may more plants than they can use (also like me) and give them away, because I was given a few plants at the bamboo gathering.
One plant that I have dozens of this year -- more than I really want since many of them are still in pots, looking for a place in the ground or a new home -- is Agastache foeniculum, "Anise Hyssop" or "Blue Giant Hyssop". Spicy, minty, sweet leaves smell and taste so delicious, and it flowers forever it seems. Although not everyone agrees on how to pronounce it (I favor "Ag-a-stack-EE", so it rhymes with "bee"), I think most gardeners who grow it do agree on one thing: the pollinators love it.
I've remade three or four different planting beds this year -- let's call it three main ones with one minor renewal. Each of these beds had become weedy, unmanageable, and just plain ugly. When I worked on those projects I took plenty of photos of course, but one thing I haven't yet done is to show you the end result -- how they fit into this part of the garden as a whole.
Last year I tried growing plumeria (Frangipani) for the first time. I started them from cuttings, which look like bare sticks, and the two that I bought both rooted, leafed out and looked great by the end of the summer. Unfortunately, they did not survive the winter in my garage -- they both rotted. So a few weeks ago I ordered some more cuttings. I chose a different company this time because they were cheaper, and I figured if I was going to lose the plants over the winter again there was no need to grow expensive cultivars.
So this morning I was doing a little project in the garden, cleaning up a bed and moving some pots into it (trying to get my driveway cleared before the end of the summer). I needed to get this project done before 10 AM or so or I'd be cooked by the sun -- this bed is shaded until then.
I mentioned one of my unusual coneflower plants a week or two ago when I took a look at the echinacea in my garden. Since then a few more goofy examples have started blooming.
We have some cut flowers in the house right now, and this lily caught my eye.
If you read my blog regularly you know that I have deer in my yard all of the time -- like many people do.
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| What? I'm not doing anything. |
I posted photos of some pretty interesting and beautiful insects yesterday, and since I had included the names of some of them I received several requests to explain how I identified them.
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