Nice memento of the trip!
Catmint, you have an incredible number and variety of flowers!
FIRST FLOWERS OF SUMMER!! Early July Edition :)
thanks, Sally! :-) I do tend to go for variety and have a fondness for the cottage garden look! Give me enough years and maybe I'll get there--LOL!
Jan, if you are in Portland, try to get down to Oregon Garden in Silverton, an 80 acre garden fully landscaped into different environments. About 3/4 of the way from Portland to Salem. If you do get down there, check out Silver Falls State Park nearby. While in Portland do I hope you manage to drive up the Columbia River Gorge and experience the several waterfalls there, Multnomah Falls being the best known. Short drive from town.
Greenthumb, we have been to Oregon garden and Silver Falls before. Because of my membership at Winterthur one year I had free access to some gardens around the country. Oregon Garden being one of them. I enjoyed it thoroughly while Jeff jogged outside the gates. Silver Falls is beautiful. We have seen Multnomah before also. Beautiful country.
Jan this trip is wreaking havoc with my bucket list!
Very nice Cat! I think you're style is similar to mine. Jam as many plants in as possible :)
LOL Seq--yeah, that sounds like me! ;-)
My beds are always "Jammed full of stuff"---and that seems to be
what everyone loves about my beds....unplanned beauty.
TEach bed just all becomes one "mass" of colors. I love it too...
In the fall--I hate myself--as I have to dig and clean everything up.
Here is an example of "Masses of colors". These 3 pictures re from July, 2010.
My beds are already looking like these right now...Hey! It IS July!
edited to say----I miss all that the Impatiens contributed to the looks of these beds.
I have been tempted to grow them again. Any opinions out there?? COLEUP????
This message was edited Jul 13, 2014 7:48 PM
...sounds like me too!
Seq, no idea how tall the New Dawn Redwood is. We planted it several years ago ('05) in memory of our dog Aspen. We got a good deal on it because the trunk was growing curved... soon after it got planted it straightened up just fine and is growing quite fast. My guess is 20' or taller.
Went to a local arts and crafts fair today and they had really nice combo plantings along the walk
Yes, your beds are always colorful and beautiful, Gita!
AHHHH! The Fishnet Stockings Coleus lives!!!!
We all lost ours....I HAD a beauty--but it just vanned and withered,,,
Tried to propagate it--NO luck.
Brought it in for the winter--and that was the last blow.....Did anyone's make it?
Sept. 2-13--still looking presentable.....
Wind, that would put it at approximately 30-35'. I planted ours spring of '10 and it was 6" and now it's about 23'. It's not growing that as much this season but still looking great. They're one of my favorite trees. I was ecstatic when I saw it producing cones as this was the first year for them on it. It doesn't have many but maybe it will have a lot next year.
G: I love your beds, they are so lush and beautiful!!
1 Why is my wood poppy blooming again? The leaves were looking fried so I thought it was going dormant, then it starts blooming again.
2. My very first dahlias! Thanks, Yehudith!
3 I finally have milkweed blooming! It was a long wait! It's barely a foot tall.
4. Vinca that I grew from seed. These are do cute!
5. Front bed. The soil here is terrible and was only recently sheet mulched. I thought this area was mostly shade but turned out to be almost full sun in the middle of the summer and shady only in the spring and fall. I don't think caladiums mind full sun in our area.
This message was edited Jul 14, 2014 11:00 AM
Oh I'm such a goof sometimes. I just realized what I have is Asclepias tuberosa, not Asclepias incarnata, and A. tuberosas are supposed to be 1-2 feet tall. Oops!
I need to remove all those white hostas and replace them with more A. tuberosas and maybe more A. incarnatas.
This message was edited Jul 14, 2014 11:41 AM
SSG, I'll dmail you . I still have NC Asclepias available: pink and white incarnatas and tuberoses, They are now in 4" pots. The Swamp Milkweeds are being used sucessfully in Rain Garden plantings. How long has your blooming one been planted there? My two year olds have already finished blooming but the Tropical (currasavica) haven't started yet. I have those, too.
Pic is with Eupatorium 'Gateway'
Beautiful blooms, SSG! I love your caladiums. My butterfly weed just started blooming, too. Regarding that reblooming wood poppy not to mention the lupine--I think that in the middle of your zone 8 microclimate you have this little polar vortex that rests right over certain cool-weather-loving plants and allows them to rebloom despite the heat while the calla lily overwinters successfully! ;-) My microclimate on the other hand is zone 6 in the winter, then everything topples over and shrivels up with the first summer heat wave and thunderstorms! :-D
Weird that you Asclepias tuberosa are just beginning blooming. Mine is almost done blooming. What gives?
It's possible that the milkweed's been blooming for awhile, but I only noticed it a couple of days ago. It's hidden by a couple of taller plants. I wintersowed these a year and a half ago and didn't think much about placement. Now I'm seeing online that A. tuberosa looks best when massed in a little grouping.
Catmint, my plants are so confused! :) I think they're just happy with all this rain we've had. I've caught most of the recent passing thunderstorms.
Thanks, coleup! The other A. tuberosas aren't blooming yet.
Your Asclepias tuberosa looks like the 'Hello Yellow' cultivar rather than the straight species, which could explain the difference in bloom timing. Ex. Not all cultivars of Monarda didyma bloom at the same time.
Interesting GT. I didn't think of that.
Lucky you SSG to be getting most of the recent rain.
Hm... I grew this milkweed from seed, so it could be just a natural variation. I'm going to try my best to collect the seeds from this one and wintersow some more.
Judy--
The Tropical Milkweed you gave me is growing well in a big, black pot.
I have 2 other flowers in there..not too visible.
Here:
Not much new today, EXCEPT....
the first fully opened inflorescence on my Monarda punctata, Spotted Bee Balm. Love this plant, with its flush of lavender bracts below a ring of spotted yellow flowers. This is one of the plants I really look forward to seeing in bloom. Can you tell?
That is very cool, GT--I have heard about Monarda punctata but have not seen one--no wonder you love it! I'll bet the bees do, too! :-)
Its way cool. I found it in nature many years ago, and grew it in my yard 1 or 2 summers.
What finally happened to your M. punctata, Sally?
Excellent plant David! I'll be reading up on it. Thanks.
I suppose, Catmint, that it was just lost in the shuffle, this was way back when my kids were 5, 3 and one-on- the- way.
I tried Monarda didyma but was unhappy over the mildew problem.
Now I just have the M "bradbury's" from David
M punctata seen native/ or maybe naturalized, in Anne arundel and Calvert counties.
Of my various monardas at the moment, I am most thrilled with the M fistulosa, as it has grown so tall and full of blooms, and the pollinators adore it. No problems with powdery mildew so far this year anywhere in my yard (knock on wood), but it all seems to come down to location, and how much of my yard is plagued with this morning shade/afternoon sun combo that makes it difficult to keep so many plants happy. The M. fistulosa is enjoying a prime location, whereas the M didyma is not, and so it is shorter and less bloomiferous.
Right now I have plans to 'lasagna in' more prime gardening space for next year. Unfortunately, it's currently just a bunch of icky cardboard and mounds of plant trimmings--which the gnats seem to love. ;-)
I need to buy some kind of machine that will take the mounds of prunings/trimmings and churn them into something fine-grained and usable as compost. I'm wondering--do ordinary composters do this, or do I need some kind of other machine to grind up all the branches, stems, and leaves?
Catmint, depends on diameter of trimmings. But we rented a chipper one time, pretty hard for Mark to wrassle home, took a lot of time chipping, ended up with some thing less uniform than commercial mulch. I was not thrilled about the total effort VS end result.
Another time we borrowed neighbor's shredder and ran all our leaves through it- took hours.
My view is, it takes a pretty powerful ($$) machine to do it and a lot of time standing there feeding it in, so much as I would like, I can't justify it here.
Catmint, I have a leaf blower that has a vacuum function. That's what I use as a shredder. I can't get oak leaves to compost (within a reasonable amount of time) without shredding them first.
Ooh, I have been tempted by the idea of a small shredder-vacuum. What kind do you have ssg?
Shredding leaves helps a lot. Chipping anything woody- that needs the power. Mark doesn't like us to even run over twigs with the mower.
I got a Toro Ultra, which was rated highly by both Consumer Reports and Amazon users. I like that it's electric, so no fumes, and lightweight even for me.
thanks for the info, SSG and Sally. That's good to know about the chipper & shredder machines. Gives me much to think about. hmmm... so the thicker branches from the old rose bush are probably out... They are anywhere from slender stemps to up to an inch (or occasionally more) in diameter.
What about the huge leftover ball-heads from the Allium christophii & schubertii that I've cut off and put in my 'lasagna' trimmings pile? Do they wither and decompose on their own? What about trimmed and deadheaded blossoms, leaves, and green stems from perennials? Are they okay to put into the pile whole?
thanks! reading reviews sure gives you tips about how you'd like using a new device.
We've strayed from First Flowers, but I have had multiple technical problems posting from here, grr.
It depends. Everything has a different amount of fiber.
Yellow large DL light fragrance love it.
Red DL
Great mullein V thapsus closeup.
CM, and others, the basics principles of compost are green V brown AKA nitrogen V carbon, moisture, particle size. I've been doing it almost all my life, and science and nature are my 'thing' so I almost don't know where to begin. If you make a thread on Soil an Composting I promise I and others will help you there.
Here's a good basic article
davesgarden.com/guides/articles/view/4955/
And yes urine is a great source of liquid nitrogen but it is often not included in literature due the the ick factor for Americans
Oh, that's a beautiful yellow DL! Do you know what it is?
I have Going Bananas, which isn't cutting it. The blooms are too small, it doesn't rebloom well, isn't fragrant as advertised. I want to replace it with another DL since it's so a good at hiding yellowing foliage of spring bulbs.
Interesting Monarda GT, I've never seen that before. Is it a native woodland plant?
Sequoia, while of limited distribution in your home state of PA, Monarda punctata is found across most of Eastern North America http://plants.usda.gov/core/profile?symbol=MOPU .
Rather than woodlands, its preference is full sun in sandy soil. Our location is probably the edge of its comfort zone, both sun and soil wise. http://www.nativeplantcenter.net/?q=plants/697