Poison Ivy Progress

 No more berries from these guys.

Purple Clematis

This is the prettiest thing in the garden this week. It is the third place I’ve had it planted and its third year in this location. This is in the evening light.

Like a Heat Wave

 

Nice forecast for June.  We may get a pop up thunderstorm now and then which we really need because it is so dry again.  And with all of the gravel the vegetable garden is up to 10 degrees warmer than the ambient temperature and holds heat over night.  That is very useful during cool spells, but during a heat wave it can be extreme.  

So I broke out the shade cloths.  I usually use these in spring when I am putting out tender transplants.  I know the peas and even the tomatoes could use a break during the hottest part of the day. Especially because they are all flowering now and tomatoes do not set fruit in temperatures exceeding 90F.  I also hope this will conserve some much needed water lost through transpiration as the temperatures heat up.

This lowered the temperature about four degrees.

WE are ready for the heat.  I hope this is not the trend for the whole summer.

Now I'm off to give everything a good soaking to prepare for the day.

**Footnote:  This afternoon cooked up a good summer thunderstorm.  We got half an inch of rain that topped off the rain water tank and dropped the temperature 20 degrees

Daffodills

 The only downside to having a beautiful spring garden full of daffodils is the shaggy phase while you are waiting for the foliage to die back.  With all spring bulbs, the longer you leave the foliage the better chance you have of having abundant blooms the following spring.  You can do clever things like braiding or knotting the foliage to make it look tidy but that takes time too.  If you leave them until they are completely dead then it is so much easier to pull them out.  When they are in their bead-head stage they don't pull and they don't cut well either.  Later blooming varieties stay green longer into the summer.

I leave them as long as I can stand them.  These are not the last of them.  I started cutting a week or so ago and I am half done.  Cleaning them out transforms a bed from a rambling mess to neat and tidy.  It can also make things look a bit bare.  This would be the time to add annuals to the empty spaces, and many years I do.  But this year they are just going to have to stay with the clean and tidy look.

As I was crawling around my tomato beds yesterday transplanting Nasturtiums, I finally found the first large tomato to set.  This is on one of the dwarf plants.  I am really loving the idea of the dwarf varieties because I can start them indoors so much earlier than indeterminate varieties knowing they will not be as tall and hard to handle when the weather allows me to set them out.  And that means earlier tomatoes!

It's Wilting!

 The poison ivy pruning is a success!

Poison Ivy

I am very tired of Poison Ivy.  This vine pictured below is our main culprit in spreading it everywhere because it is so mature and is covered with berries every fall.  Then the birds eat them and poop the seeds all over the place!

Not a day goes by that I don't find a bunch more seedlings to pull or spray.  It is my number one most prevalent weed in the landscape.

Its in the mulch

Its in the ground cover

Its on the deck.

And those are just what I found walking around in five minutes when I realized "I need some photos to illustrate this"...  after pulling and spraying all week.

That vine doesn't look like such a big deal until you put a person beside it for scale.  It has engulfed the entire dead Ash tree and forty feet up.  Luckily the next door neighbor is not allergic to it (yet).  So he gets elected to deal with it whenever we are cutting trees.  Neither my husband nor I will ever pick up the neighbor's chain saw.  And just watching gives us the heebie jeebies.

About the only thing you can do with a vine this big is try to cut off its food and hope it stops thriving and eventually dies.  The main root has a million little hair roots that cling to the tree bark and get moisture from the surface.  We decided to try cutting out a section of the roots to see if we can at least discourage it.

That's not the only dead Ash tree we have that is covered in Ivy.

We had a go at several others.

Neighbor Mike pulls out a section of root.  And it looks like there is a hunk right out of the tree.  But that is just Ivy root.

Poison Ivy is pretty hard to discourage.  I'll let you know if the leaves ever begin to wilt. 

The First Signs of Food

 

Belstar Brocolli

Penelope Peas

Havasu Pepper

7 Bosc and 3 Bartlett Pears

Dahlias Early June Update

 Dahlias have become a large component of my annual plantings.  They could also fall into the category of perennials because I save them from year to year.  They satisfy the collector in me because I have curated my selection to have a certain variety of forms and colors.  It can take a few years to build up an area to match your vision, and you have to be very disciplined about the volume you keep and plant.  This all started with a random selection of dinner plate dahlias back in 2018 and I still have my Cafe Au Lait dahlias from that first season.  The rest of my collection has changed quite a bit.

My main dahlia bed is about eight feet square.  It is right next to the garden shed so I walk past it many times a day.  It is sheltered a bit by the apple tree to the west which reduces wind and late afternoon sun.  I plant my tall decorative dahlias here.  I have gotten away from the Dinner Plate size flowers and prefer 4" to 6" blooms in shades of copper and oranges.  The dinner plate flowers are difficult to support, and in cut flowers are your goal, they unnecessarily dominate a bouquet.  They are fun to have now and then.  I like to have a few other colors for accents.  I put the plants I know will be the most robust in the center so the shorter plants surrounding them can lend some support. 

 My one new dahlia purchase of the year is the Bloomquist Jean.  It has an unusual, turned back form and is difficult to obtain.  I bought it during "the dahlia wars" over the winter, where mid-sized growers put their extra inventory up for sale and it is sold out in less than five minutes with items disappearing out of your cart while you spend critical seconds making shopping decisions.  That was the only tuber I wanted and I was able to log in, check out and be gone in about two minutes.

Lady Darlene and Spartacus in the back row
Center Court, Gitt's Crazy and Mai Tai in the center
Peaches n Dreams, Bloomquist Jean and Summer's End in front.

My main dahlia bed was becoming too crowded, so rather than cull varieties, I moved the ball style blooms over behind the strawberry bed.  The ball flower structure is my second favorite, but beautiful in their own right.  This is the first time I have planted them on their own and I think it will be quite nice to have them on their own. 

Unfortunately, two of my Oh Honey tubers did not come up.
Rather than fill in with a spare decorative, I left a blank space.

These three varieties all appear to be close to the same color and form at first glance, but when you watch them grow in person you appreciated the subtle differences. 

Oh Honey, Cornell Bronze, and four of the Ice Tea

The space along the bank next to the sidewalk has always been my flex space.  Originally the "Tater Patch", a large portion of the bank is now taken up by an apple tree making it less suitable for potatoes.  Over the years I've also grown Zucchini, Sweet Potatoes, cantaloupes, herbs, and probably some other things that I've forgotten about.  This year it is hosting my single flowered dahlias that for the past two years were over where the ball dahlias are this year.

My Brown Sugar dahlia is very red and not the rusty copper that it is known for so I separated it out from the other ball dahlias and made it the backdrop of my single flowered and collarette dahlias.   The singles are compact with smaller flowers on long stems dancing happily above the foliage.  They are fun and easy to care for but it has taken several seasons for the tubers to gain any size and produce more than just a few flowers.

Opposite the large, decorative dahlia bed is a layout I developed to make use of my many Cafe Au Lait tubers and an odd ball, dark leafed, purply burgundy border dahlia left over from my original scheme to fill the fire pit planter.  Last year I purchased another purply colored border dahlia and some little hedge dahlias with bright pink and white flowers to fill in the layout.  Last year I had to fill in with marigolds, but it looks like this year the little pink and white ones are growing well.

I think it will look quite nice this year.

Cafe Au Lait, Sayonara and City Lights Burgundy and Binky border dahlias.

The Cafe Au Lait plants are compact but very productive.  And there are a lot of them!  They don't fit in with my other dahlias but it is pretty difficult to cull something that tries so hard year after year. The very large flowers range from pink to a cream coffee color and are easily overwhelmed when mixed in with my tall, showy decorative dahlias.  They are quite stunning in groups though and planting them in a row really showcases them.

I am very much looking forward to the show.

Annual Flowers Early June Update

 Today is cool and windy and rainy.  The sky looks like October.  Not much fun for gardening.  But I did get a few plants added to my annual containers.  Here is an update on how my annuals are looking.

Proven Winner El Brighto Coleus

My fun shade containers are turning out well.  The shamrocks are surviving the morning sun and the coleus is taking off and should be pinched back to shape it.  The fountain grass hasn't done much.  The limited sun will probably keep it in check.  You can see I have constructed deer guards for all of my annual planters.  I clipped bird netting to the grow thru grids.  This will not last when the plants get larger, but in the mean time it is saving me a ton of time, money and frustration as I am not having to spray these containers and can concentrate that effort on plants that can not be covered, like clematis vines or elderberry bushes.

I would never use this plastic bird netting on berries or anything to specifically keep birds out because they would quickly become entangled, but it works great to keep the deer from ruining everything.  I have a square of it laid over each hosta and heuchera plant (over 25 plants) and that will work wonders until the bloom stalks begin to come up.  This saves me gallons of expensive spray and at least an hour a week.

The heuchera planters (below) aren't annuals, but I wanted to include a photo to show how well these three types of planters coordinate.  I have two of each in the shady area around our firepit.

Since we spend most of our outdoor time back by the garden and firepit, I have spent more effort back there and very little around the house and driveway.  The only planters I filled were the ones that couldn't be stored.  Yes, I suppose I could have hoisted this concrete planter into the wheelbarrow and moved it out back to store, but it seemed like less effort to stick two extra coleus plants in it.

But, it looked a little pitiful so I finally added a spike and an ivy.

The whisky barrel was a little more fun to plant because I found calibrachoa in the same colors as my geum, daylilies and verbascum.  The color palette on that side of the house is peach and rose with splashes of yellow.

Yesterday when we were in the next county I stopped by a beautiful, big nursery and picked up a few more plants to fill it in.  I had been looking for these Proven Winners Double Vintage Coral.  Score!  And reasonably priced too.

Superbells Double Vintage Coral

Whimsy Orange Sunset Nemesia

That's better!

Vegetable Garden Early June Update

 It has been a nice warm spring and the vegetable garden is looking good.  The end of May was cooler and we had two very cold mornings on May 30th and 31st.  The garden temperature at 6am was 38F and there was some light frost on the roofs, but I had covered everything for several days because the night time temperatures were below 55F and warm season plants don't like that.  There was no evidence at all of cold damage.  But we only got 2.8" of rain in May.  On Tuesday I was digging in the landscape beds and there was no moisture left in the soil.  Everything was powder.

Penelope Peas planted April 15th beginning to bloom

Cucumber bed prepared for transplants and carrots and celery

First seeding of pole beans were crisping around the edges in the hot, dry days. 
Second seeding under burlap.

Early Girl Tomato and Dwarf Tomatoes

Dwarf Tomato Project Adelaide Festival plant putting out tons of buds

Broccoli, Cauliflower and Cabbage

Indeterminate Tomatoes
I am trying the Florida Weave method of support this year.

Bell Pepper Plants

Havasu hot pepper plants

Butterfly Herb Garden
Sage, Feverfew, Valerian, Parsley
Dara beyond tall parsley

Dill
I want to try some fermented dill pickles this year and the butterflies can have the rest

Sweet Potatoes

Honeoye Strawberries year three.
Producing very well but may need to be replaced next year.

I left some parsnips in the ground to bloom just for fun

The apples are thinned and bagged.  105 so far and that is most of them.
The other tree has very few.

My method and reasoning for bagging apples in this older post.

Bagging Apples

I took all of these photos yesterday before it began to rain.  Thankfully we got over an inch of steady, gentle rain last night.  That will top off the water tank which was only down about eight inches.  We have more cool and drizzy weather coming for the next few days so the plants will have plenty of time to enjoy the water without getting steamed in sudden heat.  Over the next few days I will go through and give everything a good dose of liquid fertilizer and then relax and watch it grow for a few weeks.