Flowers and Fruits and ... Ugly Bugs?

Sweet Summer Cherry

                There is a moment in summer when the gardener spots that first gleam of red hidden beneath the foliage. She stops, maybe squats down to look more closely.  The ground is warm beneath her feet, and the scent, that unique raw smell of growing tomato plants surrounds her. (If you've smelled it, you'll understand. If you never have, the closest I can come is the flavor of a green tomato mixed with sunshine and fresh flowing water.) The fruit slips into her hand at the lightest touch, and there it is, gleaming tantalizingly in the sun: The season's first tomato. 

Needless to say, immediately after photographing it, I consumed it!

Buoton De Rose Begonia

In the flowerbeds, my "Shady Garden" out back is turning up begonias and lilies. I just seeded a whole heap of China Aster around the birdbath, too, so hopefully we'll have some late summer color coming on.

Sadly, out front, the poor gladioli are having a fairly short season and between the afternoon heat and the ravages of the katydids, aren't looking so good.  Where is my mantis! He saved me last year, but I've seen neither hide nor probiscus of him this year!

Gladiolus- Prosperity

My favorite pink/white bi-colors are going now, with the yellow and purples coming into bloom right behind them.
The most stunning gladiolus in my current collection is the white Prosperity from American Meadows. Simply GORGEOUS! White with just a hint of peachy yellow blush. It was supposed to be blooming with the Ravens right now, but the katydids have chompedchompedchomped up the poor Ravens so I don't know if they'll bloom at all.

But the big thing today was this...

These funky leaf-blisters are all over the poor manzanita bush. It looks like something rolled the edge of the leaf up to create a bubble (which I now know is called a 'gall') with sickly reddish color and livid nasty pink veins. Now maybe I watch too many alien horror movies, but these things look like they could start breathing on their own at any second!

Curious, I broke one open and about a gazillion little greenish-black bugs crawled out!  EW! BUGS! (Okay, 'gazillion' is a kind of wide estimate. Maybe not so much with the accuracy there.)

Okay, what are they?  I thought hunting them down would be hard but a quick Google-hunt refined down to "manzanita leaf bug" found them. And sure enough, they are... TA DA!  "Manzanita leaf bugs".  Needless to say, that was somewhat anti-climactic.  They're actually called Manzanita Leaf Gall Aphids, aka Tamalia coweni.

Nothing I'm seeing says that they do real harm, but I'm not feeling overly generous to them at the moment. In fact, I think I see a wonderful career in Green Waste Management in their future.

In the Veggie Garden

Veggie gardening in limited space is always a challenge. I grew up with vegetable gardens that covered half an acre tilled into a perfect rectangle, with neat long rows of plants side by side, so when I first started looking into urban gardening, I was impressed that people were growing food in such small spaces.

My vegetable garden is about ten feet by sixteen feet, sloped at an angle. Before we took it over, it was covered with nasty flowering shrub, which, fortunately for us, had done much to mulch and protect the soil beneath it.  I was pleased to find good loamy soil under those hideious shrubs, but I was still hesitant when I planted those first seeds this spring. In fact, I was feeling downright brave when I purchased tomato plants. They looked so small and fragile, and I was going to just stick them into the dirt?

Fear and hesitation has given way to pride and joy when I look at my little urban garden! It surpasses my wildest dreams. The snap peas and the pole beans are unbelievable in their profilic attempts to take over the rest of the garden. The zucchini has already gotten out of control, and the tomato plants are four feet tall and covered in blooms and burgeoning fruits. Planted in amongst everything else are onion and garlic starts, bush beans and dwarf peas, radishes and carrots; I just tucked the seeds wherever there was an opening.

It seems so silly now to have worried so much!

Gladioli!

I like to pretend that glads are the cavalry vanguard of the garden army.  As soon as the soil warms they gather for the fight, waiting for the sun to hit the earth. And then they shoot straight up, their long and slender leaves arrowing towards the sky like a sword held aloft. When they draw their stems, waving burgeoning green buds like standards, it serves warning to any interlopers in the garden that they are about to charge. The blooms gallup up the stems, first the lowest flower, and then the next, and so on, until as the first blooms die, the last ones burst to life for one last show of courage.

Last year, I purchased a bag of mixed bulbs from American Meadows. It was my first time ever growing gladiolus and it was love at first sight.

This year, I wanted something really bright and intense to 'hide' the vegetable garden from the sidewalk. I jumbled up two sets of bulbs and planted them in batches of five throughout March and April. VOILA! AMAZING!


Orange Flame

So bright and shiny!
These were on sale at Home Depot, so I figured 'why not'? I thought these were supposed to fade more to yellow, but who cares! They're HUGE and they just glow when the sun hits them.  For a special surprise the flower-seed mix I tossed down over the bulbs put up a huge explosion of baby's breath, giving a wonderful white backsplash to accent them.







Black Walnut

Absolutely spectacular!
These are my absolute favorite so far! Keep in mind that I've got four more varieties waiting to open, and I'll probably say the same about them all. The petals are dark red with almost black stripes on the tips of the satin-like petals. The pictures don't show it, but the texture of the petals is like velvet and the sun makes them glow.

First Produce!

Sparkler Radishes

I harvested my first produce from the veggie garden today! Just a few radishes,and a green onion, but  hey! Look! Radishes!  I'm planning to make a cold pasta salad to go with dinner. After all, if I picked it, we should eat it, right?  I sampled and these are juicy and sweet with just a hint of bite to them. YUM!

Food or Triffid?

After weeks of cold wet weather, then a few hot sunburst days followed by hard rains, the garden is suddenly showing some promise!  We should have our first zucchini in a few days, and the first peas planted are all blooming while the second batch are just sticking their heads up out of the ground. 

Snap Peas

The tomatoes aren't doing much, but I expect as soon as we get some really warm weather we'll be dealing with a 'mater explosion, At least that gives me some time to cage the last couple additions, with huge thanks to Xhin & Dhin at Trurealty.Net (yellow pear) and to Spider & Eli, (Mister Stripey)!



Gonna celebrate "Fresh From the Garden" with Radish Pasta Salad tonight!
The Recipe

2 cups penne rigate pasta (or pasta of choice, cooked, drained, cooled)
Dressing-
2 large radishes: chopped
1 green onion: chopped finely
2 celery stems, de-stringed and chopped
1 tsp celery seed
1 tsp poppy seeds for extra crunch
Lemon juice
1/4 cup mayo or sour cream (I use half mayo & half sour cream)

Mix all the dressing ingredients and refrigerate while the pasta cooks.
Fold the dressing into the pasta and tuck into the fridge to chill and let the flavors mingle.
Serve chilled.
For a great main dish you can toss in Dungeoness crab or bay shrimp, too, but I don't have either of those, so I'll be serving it with oven-grilled pork chops instead.

Naked Gardening Day!

So, today is May 14th, Garden Naked Day!  I'd link to the webpage but it has nekkid people on it. Most of the pictures are wonderfully tasteful, but there are a few that are full-monty, so I won't be sharing. You can google it if you're that interested.
The point is, I was rather looking forward to it! I was gonna garden naked! But today has dawned with 56 degrees and a chill breeze, with a severe thunderstorm warning, downpours, possible hail, etc, looming overhead. Since I love being cold about as much as I enjoy bowling with frozen turkeys, I had to revise my plans somewhat.

Hot Tub

They start here in the oh-so-yummy hot tub, where I will get toasty warm.

Rose in need of deadheading

When I feel I'm warm enough,  I shall leap out of the hot tub and assault the rose bush that's about six feet away from the hot tub with clippers.
THEN I shall leap back into the hot tub, where I will get toasty warm again.  This, I think, is a good plan, so let's execute it, shall we?

 Ooh! A bit chilly, but not bad. Let's deadhead the roses! Quick! Una, are you gonna help me? 

        Pasha? What about you?         
                     No? Didn't think so.




Ooh! Gotta hurry! Getting cold! 
                         
                                                           ... Okay! DONE! 

 

Dead Roses

Well, mostly done.  There were a few that were a little too dangerously located for unclothed gardening. (And you can see here I cheated a bit and slipped on my flip-flops to protect my toeses from prickly things.

And then, HOP BACK IN THE HOT TUB! YAY! SUCCESS!

So, what did we learn this Naked Gardening Day?  First, always check the weather. They should hold this in, oh, August. Maybe July.

Also, cats do not care about gardening, whether it be clothed or unclothed. They also don't care about rose bushes or dead flowers, or, well, much of anything really unless it involves food, bugs, food, birds, food, clean laundry, food, and their food.

 The biggest lesson I learned, too late of course, is that when naked gardening, if you intend to, oh, say trim the rose bush? Make an exception for gloves!

Overall, I call it a successful Naked Gardening day. Now, I'm going to rush out (fully clothed!) and cover my delicate plants before it actually storms, and do the other gardening chores that fall into the clothed category. 

Oh, one final note. I actually filmed a little vid in the hot tub after, just me saying all these things I was writing, but I've chickened out of actually editing it up and posting it. What can I say? I'm a coward!  For those expecting the iris farm post, I'll have it up sometime over the next couple days.

Madness, I Tell You

Purple Iris a/Callas

Spring makes me a little crazy.


I've been thinking of ways to grow things in spaces we don't really use for anything. For example, we spent a goodly amount of the winter looking at different growing vines to plant along the front porch, researching clematis and morning glories and kiwi vine and Trumpet vine...
So what happens? We're at the gardening store, looking at vegetable seeds, and realize that Scarlet Runner beans are the far better solution. Non-permanent, non-invasive, and edible! Edible, of course, being the operative word.  I seeded a whole handful of scarlet runners in front of the porch, and hopefully we'll get nice shade over the railing and some tasty snackage!

I've asked Scott to make me a salad table like the one on the University of Maryland, College of Agriculture, website, with the hopes that we can move it from spot to spot as light changes in the backyard through the year.  We have terrible snail and slug problems, and hopefully by putting it on a table, we can use copper tape around the legs to deter the nasty slimies. 

Squash Bed
(Zuchini, Crookneck & Butter)

If he can't get to it in the next few weeks, I might try another method I learned about on DavesGarden.Com where you cap the ends of gutter pieces, drill drainage holes, and then hang them. I figure I can hang four or five lengths from the fence, and then it's easy to tack up bird-netting over the whole thing to keep the squirrels and birds out.  Or if anyone has any spare used gutter laying around they want to get rid of, message me.  Otherwise,  I can maybe find some at Urban Ore.

Caged Tomatoes
BEWARE 'MATO!

Other nutty ideas I'm toying with include growing potatoes on the driveway in burlap bags, building wooden frames to hang upside-down tomatoes in on the sunny side of the house, and building raised beds in the front yard.  I'm kind of hesitant to de-suburbanize the front, but it can't be any worse than our current shaggy lawned, tree-leave covered landscape, can it?

Garden Grumpies!

Grrr. Wet clay soil. Grrr. Stupid overcast cold days. Grrr, need to plant and my back's not letting me get any work done. The roses have rust and something's eating my baby basil plants. The flower seed I planted to take over when the ranunculus finished didn't take. There's not a single spot of green poking up amidst the dying ranunculus.

It's just not a good week for gardening! Okay, grumping over.

Two weeks ago, I started tearing out the mess that was the bedroom window garden. We still don't know what half of what we tore out of there was. The bulbed thing growing in the corner had probably a hundred and sixty bulbs crammed into a two-foot space. Bulbs were growing down under the concrete lip of the raised bed, squashed so tightly they were almost disk shaped! We still don't know what it was. The sweet broom, which I'm allergic to, came out, as did the tangled and overgrown mat of lambs ear. I have a feeling that the lambs ear is going to be akin to the calla lily catatastrophe. It's never really going to go away.

But now the FUN part starts!

I purchased a beautiful rose at  Evergreen Nursery in San Leandro  this weekend. They're having a 25% off sale through the 23rd. I went looking for Hot Cocoa but fell in love with this Double Delight. It's  probably the most amazing smelling rose I've ever caught scent of! If I can just baby it into settling in, it's going to be spectacular. Of course, after I got it home and started researching, I learned it's very susceptible to black spot.  One day I'll learn that impulse is BAD! (But maybe not quite today...)

Hopefully by mid-summer, I'll be looking out the bedroom window into a glowing bed of red and white gladiolus flanking my sweet and stunning rose bush, with double winky columbine and baby snapdragons poking out here and there! Hey, I can dream, right?

The other good news is that the vegetable garden seems to be doing quite well, what's planted in at least. The peas are loving the cool weather, and the onions and garlic are peeking their tops through the soil. The squash are being a bit slower about things, but I think they're just waiting for sunshine.