Garden - August 2020 - second half of August

 

The second half of August brings an abundance of flowers and tomatoes.

The zinnias are almost as tall as he is!  We have as many as 7 bouquets in the house.

The front yard zinnias are in front of three rows of tomatoes.

In the foreground, the orangey-yellow flowers are calendula.

We had planted a few there last year, and these have self-seeded.

We have found calendula in all the gardens in front, back and beside the house.

I assume the birds have helped with seeding.

In the previous garden blogpost, in the first half of August,

the dahlia cage picture shows the flowers above the chest-high wire.

Here, you can see that more support, in the form of string, needed to be added, and the flowers are above his head.

The brugmansia now dwarfs the gazing ball.

We expected zero flowers this first year, so it was a pleasant surprise when several plants bloomed.

This is the only red daylily blooming this year.  We have bought more for next year and have divided some of our larger clumps.  I think we are looking forward to 83 plants for 2021 if they survive the winter.

And the joy of August is tomatoes!  

We planted four kinds, and three are shown here:

Cherokee Purple

San Marzano (a paste tomato)

Azoychka (an orange, early tomato)

Time to get going making sauce.

This tomato weighs 26.27 ounces!

And we are getting our fill of fresh tomato sauce on buttered linguini with cheddar cheese.

The sauce is simply tomato chunks, minced fresh garlic, basil, parsley, olive oil.

We found some excellent black olives on Amazon, and they go well with this.

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In the dog-days of August, Tommy finds shade under the rhododendron.

To see other garden pics:

This page.

First half of August.

2nd half of July.

First half of July garden.

Garden at the End of June

And the first half of June is here.

You can see the end of May, 2020, here.

Here is the first week of May

Daffodils 2020

The middle of April is here.

First week of April.

Garden in the second half of July

 The world is growing like mad.  

Front yard tomatoes are ripening nicely!

The orange ones are Azoychka.

By July 25, we are harvesting Cherokee Purple, Azoychka, and San Marzano tomatoes.  The green ones were not planned - either the branch broke or they dropped by mistake.  They will have to ripen indoors.

Is this the look of summer?   - barbeque chicken, tomatoes with oil and garlic, macaroni salad, cottage cheese,  It doesn't get much better than this!

Unless it's this.  A month early, on July 21, 2020.

The first fresh tomato pasta of the summer.

Chop tomatoes and add garlic, parsley, basil, and olive oil, and let it sit at room temperature.

Cook "Linguini Fini", a thin linguini, and toss with butter.  

Top with the tomatoes and add a good cheddar and good olives (These are Turkish, oil-cured.)

This daylily is new to us this year.  

Another daylily new this year.  The plant itself is tiny, but the flower is normal size!

A bumblebee enjoys the hosta flower.

We are seeing more bees and more variety of bees this year.

The butterflies particularly enjoy the zinnias:

The aconite (wolfsbane) is finally blooming on July 21.  The pink flowers are zinnias and the orange are calendula (self seeded from in front of the house!)  Notice how the plants are dwarfing the birdbath.

Can you see how tiny the daylily plant is.  I don't think it is 8 inches tall!   It's new this year and is striving to take its place in the world.

The delphinium is a powerful purple!

The structure on the right, with the Tibetan prayer flags, is a frame for dahlias.  Notice that some of the pink zinnias have gone through the second frame of wire.  Come back later to see the August pictures to see how high they really go!

The tall plant, above, left, looking a bit like Cousin Itt, is brugmansia.

The zinnia garden is filling in nicely.  This is the backyard, and this garden extends from near the green shed toward the back door.  The screen house was essential last year because there were so many biting bugs.  This year, so far, we have used it only once.  There are lots of beneficial bugs, like butterflies and bees, but, so far, no biting ones!

To see other garden pics:

This page: 2nd half of July.

First half of July garden.

Garden at the End of June

And the first half of June is here.

You can see the end of May, 2020, here.

Here is the first week of May

Daffodils 2020

The middle of April is here.

First week of April.

Garden in the Second Half of June, 2020

 

The end of June is not as exciting as high spring in the garden.  The daffodils and tulips are long gone.  Some of the allium is taking off, and there are peonies.  

The annuals are still little things without much drama, so we are grateful for the allium altopurpureum (those are the deep purple ones) and allium nigrum (the white ones - go figure!).  The giant alliums have already gone to seed.

This is the first year for the peonies, and three plants have bloomed, but with only 1-3 blooms.

In the absence of flowers, we take joy where we find it.

Can you guess what these white ones are?

They are mushrooms!

The most exciting crop of June is Strawberries - These are Mara des Bois, a French strawberry with outstanding flavor.  They are not very firm, which means they will not travel well, so they are not grown commercially.  In June, we harvested a total of 9 pints.

Spring is mud season, and lace-up boots are difficult to remove to go in an out.  

This is a handy mud remover.

This boot scraper is made of two industrial stiff pushbrooms, handles removed.  They were cut in half and screwed to boards to scrape bottom and sides of boot at once.  In the garage, it lives under a bookcase, and the string is used to pull it out easily.  Then, when not in use, it is kicked under the bookcase, out of sight.

And it's time to anticipate summer blooms.  This frame will support lots of dahlias, as well as some gladiolus and zinnias.

The Tibetan Prayer Flags make me smile as they send prayers in the wind.

We will enjoy the bench seen in the background all summer!

Other creatures enjoy the garden.  During an afternoon of reading in the screen house, I looked up to see a cardinal perched on the apple tree cage.

His lady appeared right after he left.

It turns out, we had a nest of cardinals in the hedge.  How cool is that!

(These photos were shot through the screen of the screen-house.)

This is a time to get the tomatoes staked.

Tommy just enjoys being out!

D's experiment this year is growing Brugmansia.  This plant is often called Angel's Trumpet for the large, fragrant flowers that hang down to earth.  

(That name is also often given to Datura, a closely related Genus, also in the Family Solanaceae.  Datura flowers usually point up.  Other members of this genus are Deadly Nightshade, tomatoes, eggplant, potato.)

We did not expect them to flower the first year, so this was a wonderful surprise!

At first glance, this looks like a toad - and we do have a resident toad in the tomato garden.

But if you pick it up, you see it is a nut, dropped here by a neighborhood squirrel.

You can see the end of May, 2020, here.

And the first half of June is here.

Garden in the First Half of June

At the end of May the tomatoes were planted in the front yard, since that area gets the most sun on our little property.  They will be supported by fencing as they grow.  In the immediate foreground, with a stake, is a brugmansia, which is this year's learning project.

 The beginning of June is dominated by iris.  We were surprised at the number of blooms on the yellow siberian iris.  These plants were transplanted from the farm last year.  There they rarely bloomed, and never in profusion.   The purple siberian iris are also doing well this year.  The little iris are new plantings.

 We are delighted at the number and variety of birds enjoying the birdbath.  Some just perch on the edge to get a drink.  Others flutter and bathe.  Fun to watch.

This is a powerful purple.  Especially lovely at dusk.

A year or two ago a friend gave me a large clump of chives.

We divided them to spread around the garden.  

They have been wonderful!

 We have made chive blossom butter and chive vinegar with the bounty.
Check that out in the blog post on experiments with extracts.

Pansies are such a happy flower.  D grew them from seed, and there are 4 different ones.

 We have tried a variety of alliums this year.  This one is Allium Bulgarica.  It's a kind of rangy plant.  Current thinking is that they need to be massed alone.

The white bleeding heart has very few blooms this year.

Years ago we discovered Mara des Bois strawberries.  They taste like real strawberries.  They are everbearing, which means that after a bounty in early June, we may get a few berries all summer.

Looks like we picked 180 berries.  About 12 cups of sliced strawberries.

By mid month the peonies were blooming.

We put in five plants.  Three bloomed this year.

This white one was the first to flower.  

It will be followed by two light pink ones.

This is the first brugmansia to bloom.

Actually, we were not expecting any blooms this year.

To get an idea of scale, that is not a flower pot - it is a waste basket half buried in the soil.

They must be watered at least once a day, and sometimes two or three times.

At least they droop and tell you it's time for more water!

They will be brought in for the winter and taken back out next year.

Does he look scared?  That is a huge bee in the rhododendron by his ear.