Rudbeckia 'Goldsturm'

:-D

>>Plants next door must be wishing they could pull up roots and slip over into your yard in the middle of the night!>>

Good one Rick.

I know that all MY plants have have been jealous, since they heard how good her plants have it!

This Pacific Giant Delphinium has been blooming it's heart out this year, and I just took 4 more big spikes inside. The leaves are as tall as I am, and the spikes went up higher than I could reach.

But he's the only survivor out of many trays of Delph seeds I started over the last several year, while I learned to start seeds indoors. And many of his siblings went to feed the slugs. Last year I colelcted a lot of seed, so I shouldn't call him "him".


This message was edited Jun 23, 2012 12:45 AM

wow, that delphinium is amazing...will you be getting some more started? do you know if it grows wild any where? and that fir tree in the background is gorgeous...i know they are everywhere in the pacific northwest so maybe you don't even see it anymore, but it is truly grand.

no, no, no...your plants aren't really jealous. they are just messing with your head and playing with you to make you think they are and then getting a good giggle out of it. you know how they make you do lots of work, double-digging the soil, etc? it is the same thing. humans are a never ending source of entertainment for them. they are rascally alright. :-D

>> they are just messing with your head and playing with you

Yeah, them and my cat! That cat PLAYS dumb and innocent. But after cats take over the world, I knows it will turn out that he's been a conspirator all the time.

Some comic book presented the idea that someone gave his cat an artifical hand ... but once it no longer needed him to open cans of cat food, the cat kind of pushed him asidee and took opver the comic book.

We are "the Evergreen State" and yes, grand pines, fir and balsam are everywhere. It's great. They stand like sentinels, in a circle around the parfk I live in and watch over us. The wind through their needles is wonderfull (when I can hear it over traffic noises).

I don't know if Delphs grow wild anwhere. I have heard that the Pacific NorthWetg climate is good for them. I'm not in a hurry to start more from seed, just because I have so little ROOM here. And I have been much too busy for much gardeniong lately. This guy is spreading very slowly, but within a few years I will have to (or want to) divide him.

Maybe I should take this to the Pacific Northwest forum, but pine trees are kind of like Rudbeckia, right? And no one is complaining yet about thread drift.

My yard: Rhododendrons and one white azealea..

I wish I could find the series of photos taht show how big the pink Rhodie iks, or how it turns from red to pink to pale pink to near-white every spring.

Where my best firend used to live in Oregon: Crooked River Ranch, within earshot of a deep gorge or canyon with a small rushing stream in the bottom (The Crooked River).

Mount Shasta, California

One cool thing about evergreens out West compared to New England: in NE, pretty much every tree was cut at one time, and replaced by generic , common trees like White Pine.

A tree identification book I read had one chpater for all of New England: short and simple.

But West Coast evergreens alone had hundreds of varieteis, each specialized to compete over millenia for slightly different climates and elevations. When you drive around out here, every tree has character and peculiarities and style. The lumber industry here in the PNW did try to clear-cut as much as they could, but they only had some decades to try to erase the wonderfull variety of evolution, instead of the hundreds of years that NE had. Mother Nature was smart enough to put plenty of trees on mountians too stepp for the lumber industry, and now there is some degree of protection of nature in Washington state.

This message was edited Jun 24, 2012 8:46 PM

Sunset at my friend's new place in Oregon.

thanks for the beautiful photos...all of these scenes are very familiar to me having spent most of my years in the pacific northwest...oregon, southwestern alaska, northern california, and washington state. most of my leisure time was outdoors...hiking, skiing, boating, fishing, bird watching, exploring as PNWers tend to do. so i have an appreciation for the beauty there. nice to see rhodies and azaleas again. all the photos brought back happy memories. i wonder what is the mountain in the background of your sunset photo...is it mt. hood? or one of the sisters? "the evergreen state", yes i remember and seattle is the "emerald city"...is that right?

my husband and i were driving from seattle to olympia to visit friends when mount st. helens blew. most of the people on the highway, including ourselves pulled over to the side of the road and stopped. we couldn't imagine what had happened...it looked like a mushroom cloud from an atomic bomb.

to avoid thread drift...junior says "hi". he is doing really well and is regularly making new leaves. something ate one of his smaller leaves but didn't do any real damage. i think it was the little cricket i've been seeing around. I asked the cricket to eat something else, but not to bother junior and so far nothing else has taken another bite out of him. in maybe a week i'll start transplanting the r. fulgidas to a place where they can grow up to be flowering adults. i found the last of the r. hirta seeds and tossed them a couple of days ago.

>> the mountain in the background of your sunset photo...is it mt. hood? or one of the sisters?

I'm almost surfe it is one of the Three Sisters.

I'm glad they brought back memories!

>> seattle is the "emerald city"...is that right?

I didn't know that! I had heard the name "Emerald City" before, but wondered which WA town thought it was from Oz.


>> and tossed them a couple of days ago.

Tossed onto some hard, dry soil, I hope, not "tossed them away"!

I had many Bok Choy seeds emerge over the weekend. Happy, Happy! No snow peas yet.

oh no, i would never toss them away...perish the thought. alas, i have no hard, dry soil so i had to toss them on the same soil mix that i used for the fulgidas which is quite good composted soil to which i added lots of gravel for good drainage and then covered with a light mix of earthworm humus and peat moss. still i will have to transplant them because now they are growing under the protection of a growing areca palm. i have their own pot ready for them when they are big enough. i read or heard once that if a gardener has one dollar, 90 cents should be spent on good soil and 10 cents should be spent on plants. some cornutia grandifolia seeds (tropical lilac, a verbena) also recently arrived and i have them germinating (i hope, i hope) in a pot outside. this plant grows wild in the cloud forest area of costa rica and is virtually unknown, but i have high hopes for this plant and the butterflies are supposed to love it. if these germinate i will be delirious with joy and then i will take a rest from germinating for awhile. germinating seeds can take a lot out of a person. i'm about germinated out.

congratulations on the bok choy seedlings! :-D. when nice surprises like this happen, it seems to make all the work worthwhile. you know, i really don't know what bok choy is....somehow i think it is from the cabbage family? it is very strange considering i am a vegetarian (except for seafood). i don't even know if it is in the markets here. how is it generally prepared? i'll send good thoughts for the snow peas.

do you know that in the old apple orchards in eastern washington, the farmers used to plant asparagus between the rows of trees and the asparagus grows wild now in places where the orchards have long been cut down. comes up every spring. the most heavenly asparagus you can imagine...you can eat the tender young shoots right out of the ground. i hope the developers didn't build condominiums on top of all that wild asparagus.

>> i read or heard once that if a gardener has one dollar, 90 cents should be spent on good soil and 10 cents should be spent on plants.

The version I heard was that we should always put a 10 cent plant into a 50 cent hole.

Wild asparagus! Cool!

Many people call Bok Choy "Chinese cabbage", but "real" Chinese cabbage is heading and looks like Romain lettuce* : varieties like Napa, Michili, Soloist and Tenderheart. Latgin name Brassica rapa (Pekinensis Group) .
Like this, but supermarkets sell it as tighter heads:
http://davesgarden.com/guides/pf/go/105986/

Unfortunately, DG Plant Files uses the common name "Chinese Cabbage" to cover both Napa and true Bok Choy.

Bok Choy (same as Pak Choi) is Brassica rapa (Chinesis Group). The stems may be tall and white like big wide sweet celery with no strings, or short and green like Asian soup spoons.
http://davesgarden.com/guides/pf/go/106018/

One nice thing about Bok C hoy and many Asian Brassica greens: you can eat tghem at ANY stage and cook them ANY way:

seed sprouts
microgreens raw in salad
baby leaves in salad
sliced stems in salad (I like to crunch stems raw, even old stems! But younger is sweeter and more tender)
medium-size stems and leaves steamed like turnip greens
medium-size or large stems and leaves boiled in soup
medium and large stems and leaves stir-fried or sauteed.


* Romain lettuice is also called "cos" or Lactuca sativa L. var. longifolia". Tall, barrel-like lettuce.

This message was edited Jun 26, 2012 4:06 PM

Here's some old Bok Choy bolting to seed. Nice flowers!

(There are spoecial strains of Bok Choy bred and raised just for their small, young tender pre-flowering shoots. Yu Choy Sum, I think. Those need a little stir-frying and seasoning, but are said to be delicacies.

edited - Sorry about the duplicate photo! I don't see how to remove one once it is sent.

This message was edited Jun 26, 2012 4:07 PM

great article! sounds like you know everything there is to know about bok choy and all it's relatives. sounds like it should have its own forum or maybe its own website. i'm going to look in the markets here to see if i can find it, but i am not too hopeful and am pretty sure it won't grow well here. hey, how about a trade? you send me some bok choy and i'll send you some limes? that should add some excitement to the hum drum days of the customs agents, both usa and mexico...they would be having fits :-D bok choy sounds like something commonly used in chinese cooking? there is a chinese restaurant here, authentically run by a family from china who are fluent in spanish, maybe i'll ask them.

Bok Choy is surely Chinese ... but I think there are names for it in every Asian language. I think many of them mean "white vegetable".

The problem with trading is the same problem as getting it from a supermarket: wilt. Maybe the leaves would be kind of OK for a few days, but the stems go rubbery pretty quickly.

Hmm, they are "cool weather crops" like broccoli. Where I live, "cool" includes all of whole spring-summer-fall. But Mexico away from mountains would be pretty hot.

If you want to try some that you might have to eat young, I have some varieties that claim 35-40 days to maturity. They will bolt if hit by frost, but otherwise growing in late fall is a very good plan.

And some of the "fast" varieties claim heat tolerance ... but they are probably not thinking of "heat" the way a Texan or Mexican would think of "heat".

Do you have 5-6 weeks between frost and hot weather? If you even have 3-4 weeks, you can try fresh baby Bok Choy in salad. Or let them go to seed, collect the seed, and have sprouts like broccoli sprouts.

I'm just a big fan of Bok Choy! I can crunch the stems raw, and that is exactly the amount of cooking I like to do!

well, i was just kidding about trading bok choy for limes. and guess what? we do not have frost here. in the "winter" (december and january) it might get down to 50 degrees F one or two nights (but never that cold during the days which are in the mid to high 70's). and 50 degrees is very very chilly for us here and it is unusual for it to get that cold. we have 2 volcanos, one is active and is about 13,300' above sea level. because this volcano is active, snow may fall up there but it won't stay for longer than a few hours. the inactive volcano is about 14,300' altitude above sea level and there is often snow on that volcano for 2 or 3 months of the year but not very much and soon it turns to ice and only looks like snow from a distance. i live at about 1,800' above sea level (just about half way between the volcano and the pacific ocean) ...no snow, no frost and during the winter days, we still have between 10-11 hours of sunlight because we are so close to the equator (about 19 degrees latitude compared to your 48 degrees). i garden all year round. i am thinking we have strayed quite a distance from the rudbeckia thread although i've enjoyed our conversations but if you would like to continue, perhaps you would want to use dmail so we don't get busted. I can tell that you are a big fan of bok choy...who else knows so much about it? it would probably be good in soup too?

Soup is how I eat most of it. The rest are raw stems that I crunch as appetizers.

No frost? For you it would be a Fall/Winter crop. I'm always eager to give away Bok Choy seeds - I guess I'm a prosylitizer or pusher.

Well, it seems that no one else is posting to this thread ... hmm, 4 views per post ...
... if the thread is drifting, there are not many people in the lifeboat drifting with it ...

okay so you don't think an arrest is immanent? you don't think these 4 views per post are the forum police? okay. ha ha ah HA HA HA snort whoops.

do you put leeks in your bok choy soup? boy, i think leeks would be good.

i wonder if i could grow it in a very shady space, like under a tree. about how long between seed and something edible? we really don't have fall or winter here so there are no fall/winter crops...just the dry season and the rainy season but all year the day temps are in the 70s and 80s. generally in february i start seeds outside. i have noticed that even though it is warm enough and there is plenty of daylight and sunshine, most seeds do not want to germinate in december/january (cosmos will and asclepias but that's about it). i think this must be due to genetics. bok choy seeds are not really big are they? I mean you could send them in a regular envelope (wrapped in paper or something so they would not rattle around and make noise), regular international mail for somewhere between $2 - $3. and i could send you some seeds you might like that are perennials here but would be annuals where you live. want any seeds?

i don't know, i don't think bok choy seeds would be happy here at all. i am going to look for some bok choy at the market. i mean we have cabbage and broccoli so why shouldn't we have bok choy too?

i have achieved my final germination hurdle and now i will take a break from germinating for awhile. i found cornutia grandifolia (tropical lilac) seeds and the first one germinated today after just 6 days in a peat pellet. hopefully tomorrow it will get its head out of the dirt. i also have some of these seeds planted outside. this bush or tree is mostly unknown outside of the cloud forest in costa rica where it grows wild. it is a verbena and a good nectar plant for the butterflies and other nectar lovers and i really think it will be super in the garden.

>> (tropical lilac)

Wow, sounds nice!

>> all year the day temps are in the 70s and 80s.

Hmm, that's a little warmer than my summer. I have had Bok Choy grow well in the summer, and sometimes it goes to seed. Everything I read just says "cool season crops" like broccoli. I would try the heat-tolerant varieties.

>> i could send you some seeds you might like that are perennials here but would be annuals where you live. want any seeds?

Actually, I'm swimming in seeds and have no, none, zero room left in my beds. It's frustrating! But if you might try them this fall or next spring or anytime you have some idle soil, I woujld enjoy sending them. I usually use a bubble mailer becuase the local post office runs everything else through the high-spped roller-sorter-crusher even if you pay extra and mark it "hand cancel only".