Autumn Garden Decor

Today we cut the cornstalks out of the raised beds and I made some corn shocks so I could continue to enjoy them.

It is Autumn weather here now.  One of those days where it is bright and sunny one minute and then dramatically stormy looking the next.  The key to keeping a shock of corn standing on a blustery day like today is to drive a T-post or place a shepherd's hook in the middle and tie the stalks around it with garden twine.

I have begun cutting the pumpkin vines and bringing out the pumpkins that have cured.

I still have three similar pumpkins in the garden in the process of turning orange on the vine.

I have also brought out some of my ornamental pepper plants that I grew from seed specifically to bring out in the autumn.

This Black Pearl pepper plant is very dramatic with its deep purple leaves contrasting with the bright green new growth.

It has very shiny black peppers on it that will ripen to bright red.

Black Pearl

I have kept the pepper plants in the garden or on the potting bench where I can enjoy them each day.

I grew three varieties in total.

Hot Pops

Acapulco

The Dahlia beds are looking nice.

Viney Things

 Below is an excellent example of the Cucumber support trellis letting the fruit hang down so they are perfectly straight and easy to find.  Those three are all on the same vine.  I always buy my Cucumber seed from Johnny's Seeds because they seem to have the best disease resistant hybrid varieties.  These are Gateway.

Two years ago I saved seeds from a Pumpkin I bought at the store in October.  I didn't get around to planting them last year, but this year I found a spot.  The largest has gone past basketball size and is starting to turn orange.

The next two are approaching basketball size.  Oddly enough, because the Ppumpkin I bought was undoubtedly a hybrid, some of the Pumpkins are coming out yellow.  There have been more yellows at the base of the blooms, but this one is the only one that has set and stayed.

My second generation "Compost Queen Cantaloupes" have produced a dozen fruit.  

They are looking more smooth than segmented.  We'll see....

The first blush of color on the slicing tomatoes.  It may be hard to see, but I am looking closely every day and I see it.

Today was a colorful harvest.  Cherry Tomatoes, an Eggplant and some orange Bell Peppers.

The Candy Onions are beginning to fall over showing that they are done growing and ready to cure.  I put them in the shade every day until the green leaves dry and turn brown.

Dahlia of the Day:  Happy Single Date 

One petal has dropped off, but the Bumble Bees still love it.

Expectations

 This is about the time of year when you find out whether or not your garden will meet expectations.  Mine is doing better than average I would say.  Some things are missing the mark by a little bit, but most are meeting or exceeding my expectations.  Below is my favorite view of my garden.  I sit in a chair beside the Apple tree, under a striped umbrella if the sun has come 'round the tree and consider what needs to be done.  Everything here is neat and tidy with no incomplete jobs.  And just look at that Sweet Corn!

The Corn on the left is Gotta Have It.  I have grown it quite a few times and it has never gotten this tall.  It is only a couple of inches short of nine feet. Over the years I have decreased the number of rows I plant in a raised bed.  I know that "they" warn you that you cannot grow just a little bit of Corn in beds and to get proper pollination you are better off growing it in blocks than one long row.  Well... I've kept decreasing the number of rows in each bed.  I started with five, and the past few years I have decreased until now I am down to two.  Obviously the Corn is doing that much better with less competition for resources.  The Corn on the right is Solstice and is about seven feet tall.  According to the catalog, Solstice should be about six to six and a half feet tall and Gotta Have It only seven feet tall.

Over in the flower beds, the Dahlias are starting to shape up to my vision.  The bed below is a color scheme of dark red, white, deep pink, and some light creamy pink.  Almost every variety is blooming and they look great together.

The Marigolds and Celosia on the edge are not doing what I want.  The Marigold variety turned out too tall so I've pruned it back hard to keep it from overtaking the Dahlias and the Celosia was proving difficult to get through the spring (not unusual) so I replaced it with a different store bought variety.  It's in there... but you can only see one in the picture.

I Photoshopped the photo to show what my vision was.  I'll get it right next year.

Across the walkway is the Orange/Peach/Copper selection.  Less than half of the varieties are blooming but they are looking great together.  It is fun looking forward to each new color.

Bloomquist Pleasing

Bloomquist Pumpkin

Summer's End

Ice Tea

Stop and Smell the Flowers

 This is one of those rare days when I didn't do any real work in the garden.  I watered the vegetables and some containers and I picked some cucumbers. And that is it.  But I still walked around everything looking for potential problems and just enjoying the flowers.

Below are some of the Coleus cuttings that I overwintered under a grow light.  There are four plants in the 16 inch container.

ColorBlaze® El Brighto Coleus

The Celosia in the fire pit planter have reseeded themselves for two years now.  I've included a photo below of the original planting of the First Flame Celosia.  You will see that the plants are getting taller and he flowers narrower.  I don't know how much of that has to do with growing conditions.   I need to raise the soil level in this planter next year which will cover the tiny seeds too deeply.  It will be a good year to start with a fresh batch of seed.

This Year

2023

The Coreopsis that I planted to replace the dead Lemon Squeeze grass has bulked up and put on a nice show of flowers.  This is my first time planting Coreopsis.  I like them and next year, provided these survive the winter, I am going to replace two of my least favorite Daylilies in this area with some taller varieties of Coreopsis.

Coreopsis Uptick™ Cream

There are still a couple of late blooming Daylilies looking nice.

Orange Smoothie

Sundried Tomato

Dahlia of the Day:  Bloomquist Pleasing

Tomorrow afternoon it is supposed to rain.  We need it badly.  My 500 gallon rainwater tank that I use to water the raised beds with is half empty.  I will need to go out in the morning when it is cooler and get some more cutting back done.

Dahlias from Seed

 I have always liked Figaro Dahlias as an annual.  This year, on a whim, I ordered a pack of seed because I was also growing out my Bee's Choice Dahlias from seed I saved, and I wanted something to compare it to.  I found that I had a poor germination rate, or poor seed viability from my own saved seeds but that otherwise they grew about the same.  The Figaros are way ahead of the others on flowering time which is probably influenced a lot by the time they were taken out of their pots.  The others had to wait for the Peas to be finished while these went in the ground in early June after the weather sorted itself out.

I put them in corners in front of my white Marigold and Ageratum combination.  I am getting a good range of color but I would like to get some deep pink or dark red.  This is the drawback to growing your own from seed.  Had I purchased these in a nursery, they would have been weeks ahead and I would have seen hints of what color they would bloom.  Still, it is a good experiment and I will do it again.  I have six plants still to reveal their colors.

Another seed experiment:  Last year I started a tray of Citrus Blend "Panolas" (a cross between Pansies and Violas).  I love the Orange, Yellow and White color combo and they are hard to find in stores.  So I grew them myself and saved the seeds last year.  I didn't have anywhere to plant them.  But, while waiting for the bare rood Seascape Strawberry plants to take off, I realized that the strawberry bed would probably be a good spot.  The Pansies will grow early in the spring before the Strawberries put on a lot of growth.  Then they can reseed themselves and die back while the Strawberries are doing their thing.  So a few weeks ago I scattered my saved Panola seeds in that end of the Strawberry bed and now I have a nice little crop of color in there.  All I had to do was remember not to weed them out when I was maintaining the Strawberry patch.  This bed gets so weedy with Oxalis.  I need something nice to take up the space and fight with the weeds.

Dahlia of the Day:  Brown Sugar

The Brown Sugar Dahlia is supposed to be a rusty, brown or copper colored flower.  The one I got several years ago has proven to be a deep burgundy red with no color fading at all.  It is, in my opinion, a poor example of Brown Sugar so I have renamed it "Sugar Brick" 

Things to Always Keep in the Garden

I was thinking the other day that there are always a few things that you should keep easily to hand in the vegetable garden.  I was doing my morning check before my walk and found two fresh blooms on the zucchini.  Not the first by any means, but I had snapped the results of the first three off because they were not fully pollinated and were developing lopsidedly.  When you have a whole lot of something, it doesn't make sense to try to save imperfect results.  So they went into the compost.  Although there was a bumble bee in the flowers, I decided, to be safe, I should hand pollinate them.  There are two ways to do this.  I could pick the male flower, strip the petal off, and stick it into the female flower, transferring the pollen.  Or I could go to the garden shed for a small paint brush.  When I was done, I stowed the paint brush in my tool box inside the gate for quick access later on.  I had neglected to move it this spring when I transferred necessary items out there,

Many people keep a simple mailbox in the garden.  It holds plenty of tools and is weather tight.  My garden tool box is a gas station island windshield service box from the 1950s.  We had one kicking about, excess to requirements of my husband's gas station collection.  It is also weather tight and has the added advantage of having a paper towel dispenser in the bottom.  It holds the flimsy paper tri-fold towels which are perfect for drying your hands from washing in the garden hose and go right into the compost where they dissolve quickly,

The next most important item is a weed pan of some sort.  This doesn't have to be a large trug for major weeding but just somewhere to drop a few weeds you might not otherwise pull if you didn't have a place to put them,  For this I have an old enameled strainer.  A second hand colander would also work.  You want something that is going to drain rainwater and not make weed soup.  Mine stays in the corner by the gate post all year round collecting strawberry hulls and windfall apples and paper towels.  When it fills up I dump it in the compost or the weeding trug.  Whichever is most appropriate.

The rest of the list of necessary tools is as follows:

• Shears and/or knife
• Clips
• String
• Gloves
• Trowel
• Dibber
• Small Paint Brush

The trowel and the gloves are self explanatory.  The scissors and/or knife are for quick snipping of a tomato or zucchini so you are not tempted to rip it off and damage both the plant and the fruit.  Planned harvests might require a hod and a pruner, but I often see something that either needs to come off because it is rotting or as a last minute lunch idea.

The string and clips are for tying things up.  Maybe you see a stray cucumber vine or you have a few minutes in which to add another layer to your Florida weave.  You might put it off if you had to go get the supplies.  The final item is a dibber of some sort.  I always have a short piece of bamboo or something stuck into the corner of a raised bed.  This is for poking a seed under the soil, or even uprooting a stubborn weed.  There are many occasions where I am looking around muttering...

 "where did I put that stick?"

Those are my essentials.  Other things tend to migrate there through the season.  Clothes pins for securing row covers to the fence to dry or a measuring cup for mixing deer repellent.  I usually have a few different hose nozzles rattling around in there.  Cable ties.  A bungee cord.  Scrub brush for pots and fingernails.  The important thing is to have a box or at least a wire basket to collect weather proof items.

Daylily season is coming to and end.  It is time to start switching over to 

Dahlia of the Day:  City Lights

Morning is Blooming

 Morning is the best time in the garden because you get to see what all is going to happen today.

Clarimore Zucchini
Both a male and female flower.  Yay!

Pickling Cucumber.

Little Prince Eggplant

Hootenany Dahlia

And for work - the peas are coming out and the Bee's Choice Dahlias are going in and English cucumbers are being sown.