#and the bulb flowers on my porch are starting to put out blooms too which is just perfect

[sunwisecircle]

IT'S TIME

FOR THE ANTHESTERIA

[grumpygreenwitch]

Summer Gardening.

So it’s been a while, and for that I apologize to the... 200+ people who follow me. I’m sure y’all are here for the cat pics and the nekked men, but TOO BAD. Today you get to suffer through pics of my green children. Also, I do share seed. My seed list link will be up later in the year. To begin with, the summer flowers are out en force:

Echinacea Purpurea, the original echinacea. I do save yearly seed from these guys, although it’s an incredibly pointy, stabby and bleed-y job. 

Mountain Phlox. Unfortunately, all of it around the house is afflicted with powdery mildew, so I will not share seed. But it’s still pretty to look at, and the clearwings (hummingbird moths) love it. Not pictured is the white variant, who grows on the other side of the house. Look, it was hot and I was already melting.

Peppermint Balsam. This thing is basically indestructible, for an annual. It will reseed freely (to truly Lovecraftian levels) and blooms continuously from late spring until mid-fall, when the seed-pods set. There is a dormant genetic in it for double flowers, but when it pops up it’s always been sterile. It just pops up occasionally from the peppermint seed.

I may give the roommate hell over the hostas (I hate them. They’re so useful to protect toads and control weeds, but I hate them), but they do put out pretty flowers. There are several variants around the house - white-edged, blue and green, but hostas in general are very, very hard to start from seed. I will save it on request, only. We were also incredibly lucky to have a Moth Mullein sprout in our porch bed, along with some Variegated Solomon’s Seal.The SS doesn’t put out seeds, and I don’t have enough to share bulbs (yet), but the mullein has been exceptionally generous with seed pods, and it repels bugs. It repels ROACHES. It’s going everywhere. And I may be convinced to part with some seed.

Onward!

A view from a hill. Can you see the garden? That’s OK, I can’t either. Those are peach trees, on the side of the orchard closest to the house. Unfortunately a freak storm during early spring killed all the blossoms. Also, don’t mistake ‘orchard’ for ‘organized’. There’s a pear, some apples, a plum, some nectarines? And front and center are two walnuts. I’ll probably be plunking my laurel there to see if it survives winter. And someday when I have a job and money again, I would like to drop a few Chicago Hardy figs, and maybe a kiwi trellis.

This is the big garden (and fortunately not my responsibility, or I would cry). The guys are ‘handling’ it. The weeds say otherwise.

The jasmine tree and the roommate’s garden. Because of a bad back injury that refuses to heal, I’ve been helping them on and off with it. And if you thought jasmine was supposed to stay a delightful little bush, AHAHAHAHAH. Yes, that’s a light-post next to it. For size comparison.

MY CHILDREN. Please ignore the dead soccer ball. That’d be a dog toy.

Lemon balm, amaranth, and a new bed that I’ll be finishing off during fall, for use next year. The lemon balm is a permanent row - it will overwinter just fine, and it will even keep growing through the mildest part of December. Mine didn’t die back until a few solid days of sleet in January. Unfortunately the weed fabric under the amaranth turned out to be an old roll, and fell apart on me (no big, the whole point is for it to fall apart eventually), so the weeds have kinda eaten it alive.

Unfortunately, both cucumber beetles and blister beetles love the amaranth. Fortunately, it does not seem to give a damn. It’s an incredibly resilient plant, not minding weeds, bugs, flood or drought. We’ll see what the grain actually tastes like, but so far it’s looking like a good candidate for continuous growing.

The lemon balm is lemon-balming. Planted on a lark, it’s proven to be a fantastic wind-breaker - because it grows so early and so quick, it keeps the colder winds that come down through the hollow from my more fragile seedlings, like the lettuce, dill and cilantro. You can see here where the spent flower-heads are dying but there’s new growth underneath; I really have to get in there and behead it. It makes nice hot tea, meh cold tea, and hanging fresh bunches of it around the balcony keeps the skeeters off. It also seems to be a decoy for cabbage moths.

Canary Zinnia. The seed was sent to me as a gift with one of my seed orders, and this is my first year growing it. -If- I can save some, I’ll definitely be sharing and growing again. It’s a lovely plant, very sturdy, and the bees love it.

Dwarf Castor Oil. I don’t think there’s anything dwarf about it, but then I’m a short green witch myself, so maybe it’s all about perspective. Don’t let the pods lie to you, until they dry the spikes are relatively soft. However, it being castor oil, I don’t recommend it to anyone with ducks, chickens, goats, or anything that might accidentally try talking a nibble or pecking at the beans. I do, however, recommend them from jewelry if you know how to pierce things and so on. They are a gorgeous tiger-stripe pattern.

Say hello to the chard! Say goodbye to the chard! Nothing else, absolutely nothing else since the limas, has given me so much trouble. The deer love getting into my chard bed and destroying it (ergo all the forks). And once I managed to chase those off, the blister beetles showed up in force. This will be the last year I grow it - we just don’t eat enough of it to make it worth my while, and it only occasionally sold at the Farmers’ Market.

Red lettuce - Merlot and Lollo Vino, a combination of bought and saved seed. I planted a red romaine of some sort, too, but unsurprisingly it bolted in the heat. The darker reds of my favorites, though, keep bugs off them, keep deer from noticing them, and keep them from bolting. It’s just now threatening to, and at this point its kind of allowed. I need more seed for next year. Seed for this will likely be shared by the teaspoon-ful.

Calendula! I searched for a long time to find the plain ol’ calendula officinalis ancestor, rather than a cultivar where I would have no way of knowing if the medicinal principles would have been sacrificed for looks. It’s supposed to work well as poor man’s saffron (color, no taste), and I’m going to be soaking the heck outta my feet on it during winter. The plant is... not pretty. It gets leggy and the leaves get grotty very quickly. But it’s very sturdy and as long as you cut the flowerheads off as fast as you can, it’ll keep blooming until well into winter. I usually leave it to go to seed around late September.

Green cilantro seeds. You pick ‘em when they’re brown, but before they drop off the plant. Or you pick ‘em when they’re brown-ing, and put them in a paper bag so they’ll finish ripening there and you don’t end up with fifty wild cilantro plants in your garden >_> Most of the row is already gone, and I’ll be putting in a late dill crop in its place. No such thing as too  much dill!

Don’t let lemongrass lie to you. Unless you tie it up, it will not grow up neat and tidy, as most grass does. Instead it will sprawl like a dramatic wilting Elizabethan lady and do its best to end up under your feet so you’ll feel bad about it. I just tie it up with a half-blade of grass; it dries up and withers away before it can hurt the plant.

I ordered pennyroyal seed because... Well, because it’s something one should have on hand, considering the way the world is going. What I got was Creeping Pennyroyal, which doesn’t care if you step on it (mint family), smells absolutely delightful, and has the most adorable, tiny purple flowers. I plan on harvesting, drying and sprinkling it everywhere in the crawlspace under the house. Making war on cave crickets, wood roaches, and other such sundries, me.

The thyme and Spicy Oregano took a beating in the heat, but they’re slowly bouncing back. The bed behind them is more pennyroyal, desperately in need of weeding, but there’s only one of me, y’know.

SIGH. Just. You absolute, ill-mannered monster of a creature. That would be horseradish, gloriously happy to be alive, as horseradish should be. Also, NOT IN ITS BASKET. Because never mind the rules, I guess.

I don’t even know how I’m gonna dig that up come winter. With some construction equipment, I GUESS. 

Decorative gourd! It’s the only one producing so far, but being the seed was 10+ years old, I’m very pleased.

And an apple gourd (I think?), from a mixture of drying gourds that was only slightly less ancient. Snake, apple and birdhouse gourds. There’s a bunch of them competing in the basket at this point, we’ll see what we will see.

And this, I think, is a great use of a dead canopy frame (the dogs ate the canopy. No, I’m not making it up.) I hope to coax the gourds to grow me a lil’ roof so I can sit in shade, surrounded by pennyroyal anti-skeeter barriers, eating my maters.

My Peter Peppers (nrehehehehe) aren’t producing yet - it takes them a while. But my Chinese 5-Color are getting started. It’s a lovely pepper, both edible and ornamental, with (so I’m told) about four times the heat of a Jalapeno. They’re tiny, with deep purple undertones to the plant. They’ll go purple-white-yellow-orange-red.

The bullhorns, on the other hand, are fairly sizable SWEET peppers on very tiny plants, and I honestly suggest staking them while they’re young so they grow a sturdy trunk, else you might end up with all of them growing at a slant.They’re just now beginning to turn colors. Keeping in mind I’m virulently allergic to peppers (less so sweet than hot, but allergic to all of them), the roommate loves ‘em.

It’s a small pepper bed - mainly to refresh my seed on the hots, and to grow sweets for the roommate. Pardon the nekked bed, the autumn lettuce hasn’t sprouted yet. And yes, that’s a mixed basil/dill bed next to it. My basil grew in patchy holes (NEVER buying from those seed people again), so I filled the holes with dill. Unfortunately, dill seed heads are so fine that they’re hard to photograph well.

The tomato row. After arguing with them for this long, I went the extra mile. Every plant has a metal stake. There’s also a double line growing at the top supporting the stakes so they don’t fall over. And they still fell over. Because why not, you unruly children, why not.

Green, white, pink and brown cherry tomatoes. Delicious!

Two kinds of cucumbers, some of the only decent shots of the dill seed-heads, and a special guest hiding in the shade. I usually plant dill as soon as the cucumber sprouts, to keep cucumber beetles off it. Otherwise I’d have no cucumbers and a lot of fat beetles.

The Muncher is a small cucumber, somewhat delicate. It’s very sensitive to temperature changes, and it’s candy to cucumber beetles - basically, it’s impossible to grow it without a heavy curtain of dill, or a heavy duty decoy. This year I got lucky enough to have both. It’s also delicious pickled, keeping its crunch and getting a good ooomph in flavor.

The Japanese Long is, as the name implies, long. It’s also incredibly bitey, and absolutely scrumptious. It’s sweet! And unlike the average cucumber, it does not go metallic when salted.

And now for the SPECIAL CHILD OF MY HEART. Seriously. I have been lusting after Blue Tea Peas since I first saw them offered, and every single time they’d be sold out pretty much the day of. This year I finally got some and... remember me mentioning that freak freeze that killed the peach blossoms? Yeah. Guess what it also killed. But two plants soldiered on. I have them heavily shielded by the cucumbers, dill and chamomile, and really I have no words for the blue. Pics don’t do it justice. I won’t have the tea this year, I’m saving as much seed as I can, but I am so pleased to have it at all!

 Last, but not least, and it’s a poor shot of it, the chamomile. I cannot drink chamomile to sleep - it does put me to sleep, but it also gives me bad dreams. I plan on using it as a skin wash for all the bug bites, along with the calendula, and to give me some respite from dry skin during winter.

Stay green! See you in fall! Now back to our normal schedule of frogs, cats and nekked men!

[thomasreedtn]

Garden Update: Late Summer Colors, Crops, Kundalini and Moldavite

I’ve been waiting for the asters to bloom before putting up a new garden update. Finally, they did this weekend! Last Friday brought such chilly temperatures that I actually needed to turn on the cozy fire while writing in my morning journal:

Those cold temps meant one struggling tomato plant gave up the ghost and got replaced by more chard, spinach and golden beet seeds. The lettuce I planted a couple weeks ago is also enjoying the cooler weather — good thing, too, because all my other lettuce has gone to seed!

In addition to those glorious mums, the nasturtiums have filled their beds with gorgeous hints of autumn:

The impatiens look so much happier with some cooler days, as well. You can see them here next to more mature beet greens and some parsley. It’s been a bumper summer for parsley! I’ll need to figure out how best to freeze herbs, because the parsley this year has gone gangbusters.

The lone Autumn Beauty sunflower stowaway from Goshen so wants to bloom, but continues its shyness even today:

When it finally does bloom, I think it will match that purple maple, with hints of red, as well. The asters finally bloomed, so I have high hopes for this sunflower, visible right from the front window, too.

Wildlife continues around here, but I’m happy to report no groundhogs. The day I posted about the cat napping with me on the back porch, the larger groundhog, Kalamazoo Kal, reappeared after 10 days of no show. At first he just ate clover, and I thought, “Oh, should I just let him nibble?” Just at that moment, he glanced up and apparently noticed the backyard hostas for the first time ever. I could literally hear him think, “Hostas!!!! Yum!” and he immediately ran faster than you’d think a groundhog could run, directly towards the hostas, right under our back window.

And so, Kalamazoo Kal got the boot. Or in this case the window. I opened and closed the window, and he dashed away, never to be seen again. The cat came back the next day, and this morning I noticed we have a second, smaller kitty patrol for the days when my black and white friend makes rounds elsewhere. In any case, I’m happy to report that the pepper and coreopsis plants Kal had previously decimated have both recovered enough to fruit and/or flower:

That hummingbird mint above is also true to its name: I saw a hummingbird on Friday, as well as an eagle high above a native plant garden across the street. I also heard an owl land on our roof right above me last week, along with frequent flyovers of crows, hawks and geese. No shortage of wildlife here!

The front yard garden temporarily attracted a young bunny, but Ms. Rabbit got a little too aggressive with my tomatoes. Really?! Just one bite out of five of them? Gross. Soooo, I asked the cat to scent the front garden again, and I’ve not seen anymore damage to my crops. The bunnies are welcome to nibble on dandelions and chew down the grasses that I really need to weed out of the vinca/strawberry/thyme/clover beds. Really, have at it on the weedy ground! I just draw the line at sampling my tomatoes to the point of un-usability. Our counter currently has about 20 green ones pre-harvested just so we get some.

In any case, life continues transitioning from late summer into fall. The air feels crisp, and the backyard pots have sprouts of arugula, chard and lettuce, too. Garlic season approaches, along with daffodils, ornamental alliums, more irises, day lilies and fritillaria. I’m not entirely sure how I’ll get those hundreds of bulbs planted. In addition to the groundhog guidance to grow a smaller garden, a bizarre injury/kundalini expansion/magical discipline has reined in my normally huge garden ambitions and “forced” me to get a jump start on major research for future novels. It’s a neck injury, but it expresses as pain in my higher dimensional heart chakra.

I’m fine, so long as I avoid three particular motions, all of which get used frequently when gardening. Meanwhile, I can work out on exercise equipment in our basement with no problem, walk around the neighborhood with no issues, and do anything related to writing. If I get over-ambitious with the gardening, though, whammo! I get a huge ahem from my neck and chest. My chiropractor friend tells me that it’s a deep tissue injury that normally would be causing a lot more issues than it is. I attribute the minimal impact to the HUGE transition this move has been and continues to be for us.

David and I had set very clear intentions of how our lives would shift. I even made sigils to encode and support those intentions, and the level of guidance and synchronicities during this whole process have been off the charts, including all the shamanic gardening experiences. We are still in process of a great sea change. Anything I do moving in the new direction feels fine, strong, supported. Anytime I make a habitual turn towards something lovely that no longer serves a purpose in our lives, the “injury” stops me in my tracks.

I can feel my higher heart chakra — the area between the usual heart chakra and throat chakra — getting a complete reboot. In fact, the main thing that provides relief is wearing moldavite, a potent stone I also needed to wear for several months straight after a kundalini “injury” to my sacrum back in 2010, when I was also making a huge life change after my divorce but pre-David. I was painting portal doors in Chicago then, and our recent move feels like another huge revelation of how those doors have opened to real life. My biggest shift seems to be from urban farming to kitchen gardening, transitioning all the newly available time and energy towards research and writing.

I’ll share more some other time, as I’m also in the midst of some yet to be determined physical changes, including appearance. In one of those winks from above, my “injury” has forced David and me to switch sides of the bed, which means I literally wake up on the other side of the bed each day. From big to seemingly insignificant but symbolic shifts, we both feel carried along by change that flows steadily, though incrementally on. Whenever we catch our breaths, we realize just how fast the water’s moving and feel ever so grateful for this journey!

Blessed Be … and be the blessing.

  from Thomas Reed https://laurabruno.wordpress.com/2017/08/28/garden-update-late-summer-colors-crops-kundalini-and-moldavite/