But with a little bit of effort a few weeks ago, I am able to make a pot of chili today using fresh tomatoes!

The day before we had that really cold night (not just the first frost when we covered our tomatoes, but this time it was going to get below  freezing so we knew the covering up wouldn’t do much good) it went to 28 degrees where my garden was.  I had picked all the tomatoes I could.  This was just a few days after that total day long rain that made the tomatoes start cracking , they swelled up so much.  I picked the red ones with a little cracking and all the green larger ones, some with a tinge of red and some that were totally green but otherwise perfect with no blemishes.

My goal has been for many years to have fresh tomato salad for Thanksgiving dinner. Some years a few tomatoes make it, some years they don’t .  So the perfect green tomatoes are wrapped carefully in newspaper and put gently in a cardboard box, then placed in a cool dark place.   They need to be checked every week or so. Take out any that show mold or black spots.  Put them on a sunny window sill and they will redden up after a few days. Cut out the bad parts of the tomato and use the good .

So, today I sorted  the tomatoes I kept in the garage and made a pot of chili with them.  This is the second time this fall that we have sorted through them . There’s still 1/4 to1/3 of them left for Thanksgiving.

Well, the tomatoes are simmering nicely.  I’d better get back to my chili making…  it smells delicious!

bye now, Judy

We have a  graveyard here!  It’s not the scary  Halloween type of graveyard, but a flower bulb graveyard.

In this area outside, we plant all of the lily bulbs we grow out of season in the greenhouse that are left over from various projects or those that get returned to us after they are done flowering.

I just can’t bring myself to throw them away or even compost them, so I give them a  “decent burial” in the bulb cemetery that’s located in an out of the way corner. Since it used up most of its energy blooming while in a little pot, some times it takes a couple of years for a bulb to build up enough strength to bloom again. I’ve been doing this for at least 4 years.  It’s always fun to see what new flower will be blooming from one year to the next. 

Even  now, during Halloween season, the old Easter Lilies are still blooming!

They seem to have shook off the frosts we have had so far. It won’t be long until they finally give in to the cold weather and take a long winter’s nap.

Bob

You can do your part to spread the good news about Aloe by dividing your plants and giving them away to folks who don’t have an Aloe yet. It’s very easy to do.

As an Aloe plant grows, it forms small plantlets or off-shoots around the base of the main stem. They may or may not have roots. These can be gently pulled apart from the main plant and transplanted into new pots.

In this post I’m using an old Aloe that needed to be renewed. The same process is used for making divisions of an Aloe that might not be this far gone. Here we go…

Start by getting a potting mix together. I like to use  fairly coarse potting mix to which I add sand, fine gravel and other grit to help the mix drain water well.  Aloe doen’t like to be in a soggy pot.

In this example, where the plant has grown too long between re-potting, the Aloe has developed a long, undesirable stem with a lot of dead leaves.

Fix this by cutting the stem an inch or so below the green active part of the plant. Peel off all of the “onion skin” until you reach the stem itself. Also, remove  any dead or dying leaves. The stem has dormant root buds that will sprout to form new roots to support the newly separated plant. A dormant bud can be seen just below the pencil point. If you rub your finger over the stem, the bumps you feel are the root buds.

Then just fill a pot (be sure it has a drain hole in the bottom) with your potting mix and insert the prepared Aloe cutting into the soil. Water the new plant and that is it.  You now have a new Aloe plant that will soon take hold in it’s new home. Here is An Aloe I transplanted a few weeks ago.  Look how nicely the roots are growing.

You now have a plant that can be given away as a gift.  Everyone loves Aloe !

To use Aloe as a treatment for an injury, cut a leaf from your plant. Slit the leaf open and apply the jelly-like juice to your injury. You’ll feel relief immediately.

It’s medicine you can grow right on your window sill!

Bob

She had almost a basketful when out of the corner of her eye she was startled by an alarming sight, a hornet’s nest just inches away  from her head!

After regaining her composure, she realized there was no activity around the nest at all.

Apparently an animal, most likely a skunk, had torn into the nest looking for hornet larvae to eat. By now, all of the hornets were long gone.

Look at both photos and you will see that the hornets built their nest right on a grapevine.  As the nest grew larger, it engulfed the grapes until the grapes themselves became part of the nest.  You can see the grapes ripening both inside and outside of the nest!

Working outside in your garden, you never know what wonder of nature you are going to find next!

And, yes, we did go on to make a couple of batches of jelly.

Bob

One of the annual flower color combinations that did well together this season is a blue and gold patch in a skinny bed two feet deep and ten feet long.  It has a medium dark blue Salvia with the varieity name of ‘Gruppenblau’  (which is German and must mean some kind of blue) in the back of the bed.  With a medium green coarse leaf and tall  (24 -36 inch) wand like spikes covered with small two lipped petaled flowers, this blue salvia is at the top of my list of favorite flowers.  Last year we saved seeds from it from plants that were taller than the rest and had slightly bigger flowers.  That’s what I planted in this spot and was rewarded with all of these plants being about 36 inch tall.  Even the stems of the flower are tinged with blue.  It is very striking.

In front of the salvia is another favorite flower called Melampodium ‘Showstar’.  this is the combo to plant if you want no maintenance!  Healthy, full, rounded, 20 inch tall, lots of yellow gold 1 inch daisy blossoms.  It has no disease and a great shape.  The salvia’s tall and spikey shape complements the round full and shorter Melampodium.    Both of them are still at peak bloom , have never needed deadheading and the leaves of both are still looking fresh and bright green.  These colors look great with the goldenrods and the purple asters of the fall season.

Behind me as I sit on the bench is a Monarch nectaring on a white phlox called ‘David’.  This is one of the best phlox - it’s resistant to mildew and is always upright with a clean green look.  Behind the phlox is a patch of Joe Pye Weed 6 feet tall.  Bees and butterflies love Joe Pye, too.

White Phlox 'David' is at the top of the photo.

Today since it is almost October would be a good day to go out and pull any poor looking plants and compost them.  we have been cleaning up around our beds and cultivating the bare patches when we pull anything out.  It makes this rest of the bed look even better.

That’s it for today.  I am going to go out and enjoy this beautiful weather while it lasts!

bye for now, Judy

I was watering the outdoor potted plants this afternoon and noticed the bees “working” the flowers of our Leonotis (Staircase Plant).  Usually I don’t see any bees on this plant but today was different.

The honey bees were seaching for nectar. Some were flying franticaly from flower to flower, while others were spending some time at each blossom.

Looking closer, I noticed that the “frustrated” bees (the ones flying from flower to flower) were trying to get nectar from the tip of the elongated flowers. (Please excuse the out of focus shot, it’s pretty hard to convince a bee to stay still for a picture)

While those working calmly and deliberately were gathering nectar from the base of the flower.

Looking closer at the flower, I discovered that the petals of a Leonotis flower are wrapped in such a way that it forms a funnel shape.

If a honey bee tries to get nectar from the tip, it finds that it can’t reach the base of the flower where the nectar is stored.  The flower is too long for the bee to stretch her tongue that far.

A smart bee learns that where the flower petals overlap, a small crack is formed at the seam near the base of the flower. This is where she inserts her tongue and is able to easily gather the nectar.

This was a very intriguing display of honey  bee behavior.  I could have watched it for hours, but I was running out of time and had much more watering to do.

 So, I just continued on with my work and let the bees carry on with theirs.

Bob

One of our favorite flowers is Verbena bonareinsis.  It doesn’t usually have a common name listed, but I think Purple Haze would fit very well.  It’s three feet tall with only a few leaves near the base of the plant, and stiff, wiry stems with a cluster of smaller purple flowers on top.  Butterflies love it, since it’s not very full looking or thick with leaves , we let it grow where ever it seeds itself.  The flowers behind it can still be seen very well.  It adds a dusting of purple to the garden.

Each bed has a stand of sunflowers in it this year.  The one that looks the best in the beds is ’sonja’.  Only 3 to 3 and a half feet tall, it blends in with the other flowers quite well.  Another bed has a sunflower in it that turned out to be 6 ft,  that one looks out of place with the other flowers.  ‘Sonja’ has a small flower head, 3-4 inches wide and dark yellow petals with a dark brown center.  Bloomed for quite a while, still is. Plus it attracts, like all other sunflowers, the goldfinches at this time of year.  They add alot of excitement to the garden, while they cling to the hanging sunflower heads and jab away at the newly formed seeds.

The bumble bees are buzzing around the cleome now. They push their way into the funnel shaped flowers to get to the nectar.

On the other side of one of the beds I can see the pale greenish tubuar blossoms of the Nicotiana ‘Lime Green’, a 18″ -24″ tall flowering tobacco.  I think I will under plant the cleome with this nicotiana next year.  The cleome gets bare at the bottom of the plant and the green and purple will look good together.

Butterflies and bees are all over this garden now that the morning has warmed up.  It makes it so alive in here.  So much to see. It really is a satisfying garden.  Sight, sound, smell and the warmth surrounding me totally make the work that goes into this garden worthwhile.

Happy Gardening, Judy

A couple of days ago I noticed an unusual growth developing on our asparagus plants. It looked like a tuft of new green ferny leaves growing randomly on  the stems. Due to its distinctive shape, I knew immediately that it was Asparagus Witch’s Broom.

Witch’s Broom is a generic term used by plant pathologists to describe  growth of this type.  It can occure on plants ranging anywhere from potatoes to trees and have many different causes depending on the plant affected.

In the case of Asparagus, the feeding of a small insect called the Asparagus Aphid causes this abnormality.  If left unchecked, your Asparagus yields can be dramatically reduced. 

Many garden insecticides will kill this pest.  Organic gardeners can use rotenone and/or pyrethrum to help control these aphids.

Only the first several plants in one row of our Asparagus show signs of Witch’s Broom so now would be a good time to “nip this problem in the bud” before it gets out of hand.

No playing “Quidditch” with this stuff.

Bob

Though with nighttime temperatures in August in the low 50’s , I wouldn’t be surprised if we had temperatures in the low 40’s in September and frost before October this year.  Be ready to cover your tomatoes!

The flowering annuals are all in good shape.  I haven’t noticed much downy mildew this season, which is usually a big problem for this garden.  And the Zinnias are only now starting to get a little browning of the bottom leaves.  That’s a disease called  Alternaria Leaf Spot.                 .

I am vey pleasantly surprised that the 12 ” tall reddish orange Cosmos called ‘Cosmic Red’ are blooming very heavily.  We’ve deadheaded them three times this summer.  So, they take a lot of work but each plant has 30 blossoms on it and looks quite stunning. 

Next to it is the tall blue Ageratum ‘Blue Bouquet”.  The colors do well together, plus I like to use some blue in all  my gardens.

Next to it is a short 10-12″ bushy Zinnia called Zinnia ‘Profusion Apricot”.  It’s full of 1 1/2 - 2 inch single daisy-like blooms of various shades of apricot.  Just a little deadheading keeps the zinnia profusion series blooming well into the fall.  The description in the catalogs says it doesn’t need deadheading at all but I do a little just to freshen it up.

A King Fisher just “chuttered” overhead.  He flew so close and turned his head to look at me so that you would think that he was trying to figure out what a human was doing in that garden so early!

On the other side of this bed in front of  me is a new marigold( to me anyway).  It’s called ‘Fireball’.  It is 18″ tall, orangey yellow with a little bicolor shading it it.  It’s done very well and is full of blooms.  Marigolds are another flower that don’t need deadheading but we do  a little.  I probably planted it 12″ apart so it’s nice and thick. 

That’s all for now.  I’ll tell you about some more annuals  in my next blog. 

Bye now, Judy