Catch up

So apparently my blogging mojo left me after I got back from vacation at the end of August.  Now here it is the end of September and I've hardly posted at all this month.  Post-vacation re-entry to normal life is always rough, but this time seemed especially hard.  I just feel wrung out.

I have been taking some pictures of  pretty things in the garden as they show up, meaning all the while to post them but never seeming to get around to it.  (I've gotta get me one of those "Round Tuits"...)

So here's a big old catch up post of pretty things that have bloomed in the past couple months.

Stargazer lilies starting to open:


Rudbeckias, 'Denver Daisy' and Indian Summer':


Rudbeckia 'Denver Daisy':


Stargazer lilies in full glory a couple of days later:


Volunteer marigolds in one of the half barrels:


Another new hibiscus flower every couple days all through July and August:


Our first potato harvest, from our potato tower.  We got 5.3 pounds of potatoes from 1 pound of seed potatoes.  Not bad for such a hot summer:


A hybrid Rudbeckia:


I don't know what the hybrid name on this one is, but it has enormous flowers.


Another hybrid Rudbeckia:


A canna lily:


Volunteer petunias in one of my amaryllis pots.  I've never bought pink petunias.


Gaillardia on the left and Rudbeckias on the right:


The half barrels at the beginning of September:


Mandevilla:


Larkspur:


Cucamelons setting fruit, finally.  This is the first time in three years of trying that we've gotten actual cucamelons.  I think my summer just doesn't stay hot enough for long enough for these to do well.  They are the cutest little things, though!  They look like grape-sized watermelons, and taste like tart cucumbers.  Very fun and tasty.  I've read that you can bring the tuberous roots inside and store them like dahlias, to get a jump start on growing next year, rather than starting from seed every year.  I'll be trying that, since we got really good growth this time around.  They are in the farthest barrel in the picture above, climbing up the trellis on the garage.


Echeveria 'Blue Heron,' with big spikes of pretty red flowers:


A bee on 'Autumn Joy' sedum, taken today.  She was a little chilly and sluggish, but determined to get these flowers.


Shasta daisy 'Crazy Daisy'.  I love this goofy frenetic flower.  I had one of these more than a decade ago at my house in Friday Harbor, but it didn't survive the move to Oregon.  I was glad to find another one this year in the dead plant aisle at Home Depot.  It has recovered well.


Whew.  So that's what has been going on in my garden.  I didn't do much in the way of veggies this year, but the tomatoes in pots on the deck have produced a little, I had volunteer open pollinated self seeded Sungold-ish cherry tomatoes in the garden bed where they were last year, and some peppers that I rescued from the dead plant aisle.

I do like the flowers.  My plants make me smile every day when I get home from work, walk from my car to the back door, and see them all blooming on the deck.

Tomatoes and potatoes

Today, July 2, we picked our first tomatoes.  Two delicious perfect Sun Gold cherry tomatoes.  These are still in pots on my deck, because I'm a pitiful slacker, but they are producing.



I would also like to show our potato tower experiment.



Emma and I planted this in the beginning of June, with the seed potato chunks on 6 inches of straw and six inches of topsoil.  As they grew, we filled in with more topsoil and straw around the edges, and the plants have now filled the entire tower and are spilling over the top and poking out the sides.

I don't know what sort of yield we'll get, but we started with one pound of seed potatoes, on sale at the farm supply store for $0.69.  I'm guessing there's going to be a net gain.

Glow

I hereby declare today to be Hibiscus Tuesday.



It's a new national holiday.



Everyone has to stop and admire this beautiful glowing flower of radiance.



It doesn't even look real.

Volunteer pansies

I have three planter boxes with pansies in them.  I only actually planted pansies in one of them, in the spring of 2015.  Since then, I have gotten a wondrous variety of pansy volunteers self-seeding into the two adjacent planters.



The ones I originally planted looked most like the three in the top row. The lavender and yellow were relatively small varieties, about an inch across, and the dark-centered blue was a standard size, about two inches across. Just normal pansies from the clearance rack.

All the rest are spontaneous hybrids that have occurred over the past two years, including that one enormous blue-purple that is nearly as big as the palm of my hand.  Such an amazing thing, gene recombination.

This is the original pansy box with stargazer lilies,



this is the other lily planter with volunteer pansies, all shades of lavender in this one,



and this is the curly willow pot, with Doone Valley thyme that is creeping beautifully and a few tiny pink and blue pansies.

White coral bells, upon a slender stalk...

This is the pot of lily-of-the-valley that I planted in 2015, starting out with just five scrawny little starts from the clearance rack at BiMart.  This is the first year they have bloomed!



They are so pretty, pure white and beautifully fragrant.



I wish I had a whole drift of them.  But the pot is filling in nicely, and my vision of the cobalt blue pot with white lily-of-the-valley is coming true.

Turns out I did, really...

Can you guess what this pile of boxes and lumber will become?  I'm very excited about it!!!

Sprung

When I went out to hang a load of laundry on the line on Tuesday, part of the yard was still in shadow.  It had been a frosty night, and this clump of violets in the lawn was stunning. The sun was on them, but the frost hadn't melted yet.

It was so beautiful.



This has been a tremendous year for violets in my yard.  Some say they are weeds, but I love them.  They only bloom for a short while in the early spring, so I enjoy them while they are out.

I have purple, lavender, pink, and white ones around the property.  The front flower bed is currently a sea of white violets.  It's a little hard to tell from this photo (it's easier if you click to embiggen), but all those white specks are violets.  I've never seen this many before.



This is the beautiful bed that I love watching as summer progresses.  It has columbine, iris, flax, daylilies, golden currants, foxglove, lavender, hens and chicks, blue-eyed grass, hosta, and I don't know what all else.  It's always changing and always lovely.

And just because, here's a shot of my favorite daffodil in the yard.  At least my favorite today.

I'm not, really...

It's 11:30 at night and I'm browsing eBay and other plant vendor websites, and thinking about ordering a backyard hobby greenhouse kit. I really need to go to bed before I do something rash.

Easter in September

Well, first I had Easter in July, and now I have Easter in September.



This is one of two pots of Easter lilies that I got from the clearance rack in the week after Easter, just because they're so pretty and I love the way they smell. The original stems that came in the pots bloomed continuously until well into May, giving me 24 flowers.

They lived on my deck all summer with the amaryllis, and put out another flush of stems after the initial lot died back.  Today the first of 19 buds from those new shoots opened.  Beautiful!

Bees

Since it's been so dry recently, I decided to make a bee waterer.  It's just a shallow lid with some gravel in the deeper spots, filled with a little water.  Very complicated and high tech.



I put it out on the patio next to my 'Autumn Joy' sedum, which is just coming into bloom, and this afternoon the bees are going NUTSO for it.

Disaster and mayhem at the Tomato Annex

O.   M.   G.

WHAAAARRRRGARBLNABBIT!



This is not a picture of the Tomato Annex from May.  This is a picture from today, August 9, 2016.

My tomatoes have had a really rough time this year.  It was so cold this spring, and has continued to be cool at night all summer (last night, IN AUGUST, it was 39 degrees at my house), and the tomatoes have struggled.  The past couple weeks, we finally had a stretch of really warm weather with daytime temps in the 80s and 90s, and they started to take off despite the cool nights.  They had grown to over three feet tall, and were covered with flowers and itty bitty fruit. I was excited.

Last night, there were apparently demonic evil deer in the Tomato Annex yard.



Sob.

Elephantine slowness

My elephant ear corm, which I planted in MARCH, has finally grown a leaf and a half. Wow, that took a long time.



It was a good big corm, and is actually showing five sprouts poking through the surface of the soil, so I assume there's been a lot happening underground. I think I'll have to try overwintering this one inside without full dormancy, and see if I can get it going earlier next year.

My reliably frost-free growing season is only mid-May to early October, and if it doesn't even leaf out until the end of July, that doesn't leave much time for growing huge!

Five little lemons

This plant followed me home three months ago.

(What, you think I immediately report ALL the plants I buy? Sometimes the frequency is just too embarrassing.)



Anyway.  It bloomed in the middle of May, with that glorious citrus blossom fragrance! And now it has five baby lemons! And they are actually growing!  Real lemons on my deck! I'm so excited!

Even if they don't make it all the way to ripening- right now, I have lemons on my deck.  And yes, I'm aware of the fact that I now own a TREE that has to live inside for six months of the year.

Tomatoes on the way!

Remember last year, when I waited F.O.R.E.V.E.R. to get tomatoes?  I didn't get the first ripe one until mid-July.

This year, though, I planned ahead better.  I started my seeds earlier, in mid-February instead of mid-April.  I'm a slacker, though.  I still haven't planted them in the ground, but hey, at least they got potted up into six inch pots. I was afraid to put them in the ground too early for fear of frost.  With the pots, I can bring them back inside if it gets too cold.  Yet here we are, with no danger of frost for at least the past couple weeks, and suddenly it's June.  How did that happen?

Anyway, today I noticed this...



Sungold cherry tomatoes!  Almost ready!  In June!

Three and a half months from seed to fruit.  I like it.

Non-amaryllis, non-orchid

I have a couple other houseplants besides the amaryllis and orchids that are blooming.  This first one is fun.



This is Pinguicula moranensis, a tropical butterwort.  It's a carnivorous plant!

In addition to looking cool, this plant helps with the fungus gnats that take up residence in some of my houseplants every year.  The leaves and stems are sticky and trap the gnats beautifully - you can see some in the picture.

The flowers were the main reason I got this plant.  They look almost like violet flowers, so pretty! I've had the plant almost two months, but it was semi-dormant when I got it and this is the first flower it's produced for me.  I noticed today that there are two more flowers forming. Yay!



The next plant is an anthurium, and is the second of two plants that I bought myself for Valentine's Day this year.  The only part of Valentine's Day I like is the day-after 50% off sales!  The yellow orchid I posted yesterday was $4, and this big anthurium in an 8" pot was only $3.



Last picture for today is this.  I planted this turmeric rhizome last April, and it did exactly nothing, nothing, and more nothing for 13 months.  No shoots, no roots, nothing.  I kept peeking at it, and the rhizome wasn't shriveled or rotted, so I left it alone.  When it started to get cold in the fall, I brought the pot inside and put it on the heat mat with my orchids, and it continued to do nothing.

But this month, a shoot appeared!  And now there are leaves! So exciting!



And oops, I guess this isn't a completely amaryllis-free post.  That plant in the purple pot to the left of the turmeric is an offset bulb from my Purple Rain amaryllis that broke off during shipping.  I am very pleased that it has rooted and sprouted leaves.

Garden sprouts

I started some seeds for the garden over the past month yay!  Left to right this is bell peppers, calendula, dianthus, SunGold tomatoes, moonflowers, cucamelons, and three rows of San Marzano paste tomatoes.



The tomatoes were started in the middle of February, and it's high time they were potted up into bigger pots.  Each of the little net soil pellets in the starter tray has two plants in it, so I carefully separated them and gave each its own 4" pot.



They look so much happier now!