Tag Archives: zinnias

November is here.

my garden, nature, , , ,

Nothing could be more pleasing than to have rain in the night and morning, followed by sunshine and blue skies. The cold air smells delicious.

I walked in the garden to cut zinnias and pick up pineapple guavas from the ground. I cleaned all the redwood twigs out of the fountain, which has been turned off for a couple of months, and filled it from the hose. It’s now bubbling and the garden sounds normal once more.

There have been years when not one guava got ripe, but this year I’ve had many, and big ones. Usually I just scoop with a spoon out of one at a time, but yesterday I took all the flesh from ten or so into a bowl, and ate the lot with cream.

November is here!

More figs and flowers.

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It is a joy to have sunny days in which to work in the garden that is heading into its quieter winter months. This is the season for harvesting and cleaning up, often at the same time.

I don’t know if there is any good solution to the overcrowding of the Fig Tree Corner of my garden. There are no plants that I am willing to remove, so I guess I’ll have to just try cutting them back a little harder this winter.

Only the pomegranate bush is a little prickly, when I try to push in next to it to reach a fig. The salvia on the left I just push aside, when I stoop down to enter under the tree’s canopy and then stand up again as straight as I can to reach the fruit up high in the center… or not reach it, which is often the case. The hopbushes (dodonaea) between the tree and the fence don’t actually have a lot of width to trim back. There is the olive in a pot, lavenders, yarrow, and lithodora almost completely hidden under the tree for most of the year.

Birds have been eating many of the figs this summer. They take a big hunk out of one the moment it is beginning to be ripe, and then the wasps come along and gorge on the sweet flesh for a few days, before it is left abandoned in shreds, still hanging.

I was introduced by a mutual friend to a fellow gardener who lives on three acres not too far from me. Rosemary had more figs than she could use this year, so I went to her house and we picked side by side for a half hour; I brought home slightly more fruit than she kept to share with friends that very morning. Her figs were a more standard variety than my dwarf Black Jack type, maybe a Mission or Brown Turkey. They were awfully sweet and tasty, with more concentrated figgyness than mine typically have. I dehydrated most of them.

Yesterday I stood on the edges of my planter boxes to harvest the Painted Lady runner beans and cut down the thick vines that have hardened to sticks. It’s tricky to pull the long stems back over the fence from behind my neighbor’s woodpile, where I know he won’t be making use of the attached bean pods.

While I was standing up there, I got a fresh view down under the zinnias, and saw that I had three beets ready to pick. I didn’t even remember that any were growing there, next to the eggplant where the pumpkin vine had been encroaching. But when I harvested the  pumpkins, the beets were exposed. Also an eggplant that had been partly eaten… but when I cut off that part, half of it was intact and lovely.

Four little pumpkins got ripe, and there is one more that might possibly. These are the ones I grew from seed collected from a decorative pumpkin last year, because it turned out to be the sweetest of all I  had roasted. I’ll let you know if these prove anything like that tasty.

I’ve been trying to get calendulas to thrive in my garden again, the way they seemed so effortlessly to do in ages past. I think back then they received more water and sunshine; this year they are finally, happily blooming in the planter boxes, after taller (shading) plants have been removed, and I got the watering schedule corrected: those boxes were getting less than half the amount of drip irrigation they needed.

Most of my garden is pretty dry, with minimal irrigation, so anytime I have a plant that needs more than that I put it in the boxes. Right now most of the space is given to zinnias, the last sturdy stars of summer.

The flowery gifts of August.

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Nodding Violet

Right in the middle of a very busy week my oldest daughter Pearl and her youngest Maggie came to visit, and that gave me a lovely and relaxing day. They had been camping for four nights from Wisconsin to here, on their way taking Maggie back to college in the southern reaches of California. It had been a long time since I’d had some focused time with this grandchild; we did a lot of catching up on face-to-face time and hugging.

And she suggested baking cookies together, and even suggested which kind of cookies. She would like the chocolate macaroons I make at Christmas; it just so happened that for some reason I’d bought almond paste last week, not really knowing why. So we made those marzipaney treats that I’ve never before made at any other time of the year.

The recipe calls for egg whites but not yolks. So we made Key Lime Cookies to use up the yolks, and to use a few of the big bag of limes I’d bought recently, I also can’t remember why. I sent Maggie on her way with most of the cookies this morning.

We three made a feast of a dinner together and Maggie went out to gather flowers for the table. 🙂

As for tomatoes, an unrepeatable sort of agricultural science experiment has been going on here. I have a few plants in the back yard that I intentionally planted and fed and have been watering…. I staked them and have so far picked about fifteen delicious Sungold cherry tomatoes off of one spindly vine.

By contrast, growing out of a crack in the sidewalk in front is a Green Doctor cherry tomato plant, looking hale and hearty, on which are growing bunches of tasty fat fruits. That plant is living proof of what I have known for a long time, that in our climate at least, tomatoes love heat more than they love water. The only water the sidewalk tomato received was one light rain in July. But its roots, wherever they are, are kept warm all night by the concrete that soaked up the full sun during the day. I’m thinking about scattering more seeds in that crack next spring.

I need to divide my Dutch Iris this fall, so I had my helper Alejandro remove most of them, and here they wait, on the side of the driveway:

Today a cord of firewood was delivered right next to them; the arranging of that was one of the many business calls I made this week. I’m amazed at how many tasks were completed (trash removed, garage door serviced, Household Hazardous Waste disposed of) or projects started.

I was waiting in a lab and saw these signs on the wall. This way of using the word love is a pet peeve of mine, which I began to acquire in the days of the toy named Care Bear, about whom it was said, “Care Bear loves you.” Ugh. I don’t like to trivialize love by lying to a child about what a toy can do, but I also find the use of the passive-voice “You are loved” to be false.

True love is not something that just happens; even falling in love requires something human from us. Who is that unnamed somebody who loves me, that the sign seems to know about? Of course it’s all too inane. Let’s look at flowers instead. Try not to look too long at the distracting hose in the next picture. Here you can see the sneezeweed starting to bloom behind the zinnias.

My vegetable garden is quite skimpy this summer, but I am thankful to have zinnias everywhere; I will plant some greens again next month, and take my joy from the flowery gifts of August.

 

Waiting for Queen Lime Orange.

my garden, summer, , ,

 

After seeing the beautiful zinnias that several of my fellow bloggers have showed on their sites, I was plotting  through the winter how I could create my own display, featuring my favorite colors that I rarely find in the local nurseries anymore. Others have told me that they have had a similar experience to mine, of ending up with mostly magenta flowers, when they buy a mix of zinnia starts in a six-pack.

So I bought four packets of seeds, and started most of them in the greenhouse. When many of those seedlings mysteriously died, I bought single plants in the nurseries, 4-inch pots in which the buds were beginning to open, and didn’t appear to be magenta. Two coral colored to begin with, and later, true orange. And I planted seeds again, at the end of June, directly into the ground or pots.

The seeds I planted the most of were called Fruity Beauty mix. They came in a clear cellophane packet, but online they are advertised to look like this:

Now various of the seed-started are beginning to bloom.  I’m not sure which are which, I think I got a little mixed up, and lost some tags. Maybe when they have fully opened and all bloomed I will be able to tell more. But I think I am still waiting for the Queen Lime Orange ones. Every day there is a new flower to look at and rejoice over.

I’m also thrilled to have eggplant this summer; and true Echinacea Purpurea, Purple Coneflower, which flourished for years and years in my old garden. The interesting subspecies of echinacea in various colors that were installed in my new landscape have mostly died out. It took me a few years to find good plants of the “regular” type at the right time, but now I those are in bloom, too.

The white echinacea are very enduring, too. They are in the front garden, and faithfully grow up tall and elegant every summer. They seem to make more flowers every season.

This last picture I think of as Lovely Layers. There is a whole community of plants at their peak here, from the echinacea on the right to the volunteer sunflower poking out from under the asparagus fronds on the left… yellow abutilon against the fence and golden marguerite in front of that, and even lamb’s ears and salvia sticking up. My cup runneth over with these sunny gifts of high summer.