Dahlia Photography

It is still Dahlia season, and because all of the big gardening jobs are done now but the weather continues to be warm, dry and sunny, when I putter around out there I get to spend time enjoying the Dahlias and taking pictures that will get me through the long winter months.  I still have a few small chores like planting the daffodil bulbs that I dug to relocate this spring.  And I am placing wire cloches over the perennials that are evergreen through the winter.  I have Primrose, Heuchera and Penstemon that will keep their leaves and must be protected from the rabbits and deer.  The other annuals are looking tired and I'm pulling them out, but the Dahlias are at their prime.  I still have several plants that have not bloomed.

Summer's End Dahlia

Only the second bloom for Peaches n' Dreams

Ice Tea Dahlia

Bloomquist Pleasing Dahlia

Beautiful from any angle

Bloomquist Pleasing Dahlia

Bloomquist Pleasing Dahlia

Bloomquist Pleasing Dahlia

Mai Tai Dahlia
looking like a pinwheel

Cornell Bronze Dahlia

Ice Tea Dahlia

Bloomquist Gordon

City Lights Border Dahlia

Happy Daze

Happy Daze is one of my Bee's Choice crosses with Junkyard Dog.  It opened red and yellow then faded to pink.  And the collar petals turned in a way I've never seen.  

The bees absolutely love it

Even the back.

My one and only Bee's Choice in orange.

HS Date Lookalike

Every morning these Dahlias are just covered in bees.  For a few weeks they were working on the wild golden rod and asters but now they have developed a taste for color!

Cosmic Pink

Cherubino Lookalike

This lavender Dahlia's is unique in that the petals stay turned into a cup shape from beginning to end.

My Summer Lovin' Dahlia attracted a Viceroy Butterfly this morning.  Every time a honey bee approached the Butterfly would flutter its wings to scare off the bee, but this one was determined,

Bee's Choice Dahlias

Last year, because all of my varieties of single and collarette Dahlias flowered well, I saved seeds to see what sort of new crosses the bees had created.  Usually, I grow Dahlias from tubers so you are guaranteed an exact copy of the same traits year after year.  When grown from seed, you get new traits based on what different pollen the bees (or the breeder) are bringing to the mother plant.  This is how new varieties of Dahlias are created.  You can choose the parentage, or you can just let the bees choose.  I grew out a dozen plants from my seeds, and they have been opening for the past few weeks.  Not all of the plants have flowered, but I have some fun new blooms to report.

The first one is one that I call Summer Lovin'.   It is a large single bloom and the plant blooms better than average, putting out three or four blooms simultaneously.  Some of the petals are tipped with white.  The blooms actually look a little frumpy to me.  Sort of like someone wearing baggy, unironed clothes.  But there are a lot of them so they are a happy, bright spot in the garden.

I think this is a cross between Wishes n' Dreams and the large, showy Junkyard Dog.  It is larger than Wishes and the size and number of blooms both remind me of Junkyard.  Plus the occasional white tips.

Wishes 'n Dreams   x   Junkyard Dog 

Then there are three that remind me of Cosmos flowers.  The white one is actually pale pink and fades to white.  The medium pink one has double rows of petals.  The stems are dark, but the leaves are green.

    

Its just about anyone's guess what the parents are.  The dark stems and compact height say Wishes to me, and the dark color and double petals suggest maybe Hootenany.  Because they remind me of Cosmos flowers I call them Cosmic Red, Cosmic Pink and Cosmic White.

Wishes 'n Dreams     x    Hootenany

Then we have a very tall, leggy one that is pale yellow with some shading.  While it is a single, the color and height is like Apple Blossom.  I have just about had it with Apple Blossom.  They are beautiful blooms if insects don't ruin them before they open.  And insects just love pale yellow so they have ruined every bloom this year either in bud stage or as soon as it blooms.  I won't keep this one and I am not keeping Apple Blossom anymore.

 

Again, the stems are dark like Wishes n' Dreams, so that is probably the other parent.

Wishes 'n Dreams and Apple Blossom

        

Now this is an Apple Blossom child that is a winner!  The bloom is large and flat.  The petals are pointed.  The stems are dark and the plant is short. But the color and collarette form is close to Apple Blossom with added deep pink streaks.   The insects are leaving this one alone.  

Probably a cross between  Apple Blossom and Junkyard Dog.  I call it Afternoon Delight and it is a keeper.  My favorite in fact.

Apple Blossom and Junkyard Dog

And lastly I have one that might be a Cherubino self pollinated.  It appears to be an exact copy.   Except - note the "forked" tips on the petals.   It is very tall but is blooming better than Cherubino does.  I think I will keep this one as a replacement.

Cherubino Lookalike

I still have three or four plants that have not bloomed.  Hopefully, they will be something completely different.  I still do not have any that I think could be a product of my favorite dark foliaged and orange petaled HS First Date, but one that is budding up looks promising. This year I am going to save some seeds from my Ball and Informal Decorative varieties and see if I get anything interesting from those.

Autumn Odds and Ends

 I am puttering along doing seasonal things.  It is difficult to realize that we are only two weeks away from our average first frost date.  It feels like June!  The plants don't look like June though.  They are tired out.  I took cuttings from my Coleus plants to over winter indoors.  I am also experimenting with Marigold cuttings.  You can root them in water, but I mix up worm castings and vermiculite and use a rooting hormone powder.  I put the cells in a solid tray so I can bottom water them  I had great luck with these last year.  I have turned four Coleus plants into dozens.

Let's take a moment before I pull this Thai Basil plant out to admire its amazing growth habit.  This is Thai Towers.  Last year I grew Emerald Towers.  These two varieties are specifically bred to be slow to bolt.  Both varieties made it through the entire gardening season with no flowers.  Of course when Basil plants flower they begin to taste bitter, and they stop putting out fresh leaves.  This plant is 43 inches tall.

We have started our biggest fall landscaping chore - cutting down ornamental grasses.  We whittle them down to size by looping a rope around them and cutting them off with a Stihl gas powered scythe much like a hedge trimmer.  It makes short work of them.  I have already done all of the Daylilies and Hosta and have started on other plants like Echinacea.  I like to take my time dividing and transplanting and removing things over several weeks, but grasses are a team effort.  Now I have to go through the dry creek bed, cleaning up stray blades of grass and pulling all of the weeds that the grasses have been hiding.

The grasses are showing their fall colors.  Below is Cheyenne Sky Panicum.

Can you guess how delicious this Seascape strawberry was?

Seascape is an everbearing variety that I just planted from bare root plants this past spring.  They are getting well established now and have recently begun blooming again.

Slowly Prepping for Winter

 We are continuing to enjoy perfect summer weather....  If you don't mind dry.  The daytime temperatures are warm with a lot of sunshine and no humidity and the nights are cool.  I only recorded 1.25" of rain in August, and in September we have had one rain totaling just over .25"  I am starting to carry water to some of my favorite shrubs just to keep them alive.  The perennial and annual flowers don't seem to mind the drought.  

A few days ago we fenced the front shrubs off to keep the deer away from them this winter.  The deer have never tried too hard to get to these, but tracks in the snow indicate that they stop by to check them out just about every night.  We usually put woven wire tubes around them, but the shrubs have finally outgrown everything we have made up.  The safety fence was the easiest solution.  You can hardly see it from the road.

I am still getting a few things out of the vegetable garden.  The fact that I almost never watered this Belstar Broccoli all summer did not deter it from trying for a second crop.

This Little Lime Punch Hydrangea bush put out some really nice blooms this year.  I planted it in May 2024 and last year I got a few blooms.  This year it really cranked them out.  The deer ate two blooms under the netting.  These loaded stems will not hold up to snow or wind, so I need to deadhead this before winter.

I decided I may as well enjoy the nicest blooms.  Hydrangea flowers dry very well and hold their color.  These blooms will last for months in the house. I used the opportunity to shape the shrub a little.  I will remove the rest of them later and do a final shaping prune in the spring..

When you cut Hydrangea blooms to dry, you should put them in a little water so the petals do not wilt before they start to dry.  In a few days I will poor the water out of the vase and let them dry slowly.

For now, since the weather is so fine, the bouquet can stay out on the deck.

Success in Succession Planting

 My Clarimore Zucchini plant is finally getting tired.  This plant has pumped out dozens of zucchini.  There are usually two or three getting big on the vine at any one time.  But now you can see that the base leaves are yellowing and there is some powdery mildew specs on the leaves against the ground.

If you look at the growing end of the vine, the new blooms are slowing down and the last one did not get pollinated.  It's time for the plant to come out.

Back in July, after a rainstorm, one of the base leaves wilted and I feared it was a sign of a squash vine borer or some viral disease, so I planted a few seeds in a pot and set it aside and in due course I transplanted that resulting plant to a gallon pot. On August 11, after I had pulled the main crop of cucumbers, I set that plant out in the empty space created.  I have already picked the first zucchini from this plant a week or so ago, and there are two new zucchinis just about ready.

Out with the old - In with the new.

Apple Pie Season

I have been picking up useable windfall apples for several weeks already, but now the Northern Spy apples are starting to ripen by the basket load.  These are hard, tart pie apples that do not keep well at all.  By the time they soften and sweeten enough to be tasty to eat on their own, they are too soft for pies.  And then they get mushy on the outside so that they are impossible to peel anyway.  I have already given away several bags to people who look forward specifically to having the old fashioned and hard to find Northern Spies.

  We have two trees and I bag the apples to keep them from getting Sooty Blotch.  Oddly enough, over the years I have noticed that the unbagged apples show less and less of the blotch to the point that this year I don't really see any at all. I wonder if that is a result of bagging so many of the apples each year.  Have I killed it off?  Starved it out?  Or is it more to do with our dry weather?   I usually bag about 130 apples on this tree but this year I bagged 150.  The cool, wet June meant that I had almost no June drop at all.  The few bagged apples that dropped, I just reused those bags on remaining apples so that I went into harvest with a record 150 bagged apples.

The second tree is rarely as productive.  This year I did not bother to bag any apples on the second tree, but it still produced pretty well.  All of my apples survived two significant hail storms. There are a few scabby spots or mishappen apples.  Lumpy and bumpy.  The bagged apples showed the least damage.

The better tree is underplanted with thyme which cushions any windfall apples well enough that they don't bruise.  But once they start to color up well, I go out each morning and put a little pressure on the ripest looking ones to see if they want to come off.  If I let them all fall, the rabbits will have ruined most of them by the time I get out there in the morning.  This year I thinned and bagged those 150 apples without even getting out a step ladder.  But, there are still good apples high up in the tree.  I put my apple picker head on the 12 foot telescoping handle for our roof rake and now I can reach anything.

I have often weighed in apples over 16 ounces, but the more apples you leave on the tree, the smaller they are.  I still get a few really large ones around 12 to 13 ounces.

I have already run a batch through the dehydrator and made one apple pie.  It looks like I will be processing some of these for pie filling the freezer.

Putting Raised Beds To Bed

 As we are now most of the way through pulling out vegetable plants, I am also prepping the beds for winter.   About half of them had leaf mulch in them already, but some of the heavy producing beds (Sweet Corn, Beans etc) did not have mulch, or in the case of the Beans, relied instead on living mulch in the form of Marigolds or Lettuce.  

My favorite winter cover is shredded leaves, but if you just fill them up with shredded leaves, a good portion of those blow all over in the winter winds.  In the past, we had an Oak tree just to the west of the garden and the west wind would dump almost all of those leaves right inside the fence.  We took that tree down last year and last fall we had a MUCH easier time rounding up fallen leaves in the garden.  But we still use the blowers a little to clean things up so having loose leaves on top of the beds is a bit self defeatist.

So what I do is put down a layer of leaves and then seal it in as best I can with a layer of compost.  The compost pile that I dumped out of the tube in March has been turned throughout the summer to finish it and was ready to sift and use.  At this point most of the worm activity had moved from the compost pile over to the fresh scraps in the compost tube which is verified by the worm juice coming out of the bottom.  These compost tubes function more as a worm farm than a hot compost pile.

There were still a handful of worms left in the bottom of the cold compost pile.  I sifted the compost one day and then loaded it in the wheel barrow to use the next day and found that the worms had taken the hint and relocated overnight.  As you can see, they congregate in the cracks of the pavers.  I wonder if they have a worm highway under there that leads six feet over to the fresh food?

While sifting the cold compost, I found quite a bed of worms red wigglers

There were still a few worms left over mixed in with the compost but they got shoveled into the raised beds where they can feast on leaves and leftover roots all winter.  On a positive note, for the first time in about three years I encountered no Asian Jumping Worms anywhere in my landscape.  I wonder if the constant snow cover helped to kill off the eggs over the winter.  I have never seen them in the raised beds or the compost area, but I was finding them fairly often in the landscape and Dahlia beds,