Bulb vase

The composition of these photos isn't great but you can see what I am trying to do. This is my best thalia bloom this winter. I really like this vase and though I have had it for 2 years this is the 1st time a bulb I attempted to force in it has graced me with a bloom. This time I get 3! Thalia tend to have multiple blooms but this winter all of mine have had just 2 per bulb. So right now this one is at its peak.

Spring is coming soon. I will have natural blooms soon.

More Bulbs

These paperwhites are almost ready to bloom. A few days ago spring seemed near. Now I am comforted by my bulbs.

I love this hyacinth vase. It has been blooming for about a week, perfuming the air.

At the base of the stalk is another flower and...

another flower stalk. 2nd flower stalks are generally smaller and strangely shaped but they are still a bonus.

Houseplants

It is snowy out. I have changed to a mac instead of PC and everything looks different. I wonder if my old computer was dim. Anyway, this is the green in my life right now.

This goblet has Thalia narcissus. I forced these last year too. I actually forced a lot of them last year. This winter I didn't go as crazy with it.

Here's one of the garden plants, lemongrass, I am wintering indoors. Some are out while others are in the basement in the cold room.

This is a narcissus, unknown variety and a hyacinth. I really like this hyacinth vase. And this bulb has cooperated by rooting nicely. We'll see how well it blooms. I'm always on the look out for hyacinth vases at thrift stores. This one is unusual.

Hops, Tulip Bulb and a Cute Kitty

It's getting hard for me to come up with titles. Given that these posts are photo driven rather actually about any specific gardening issues.

The cascade hops are growing fast. I might expand the area I have for them to climb on. The salad ball is still filling out but some stuff is getting past its prime like the mizuna. I have nibbled on a couple flower stalks so far. I'm not sure if I want to let it go to seed or harvest the whole thing. It would leave a large bald spot right now. When the nasturtiums fill in I might pull it. The lettuce hasn't bolted yet.

Should I be explaining stuff here? See, I can say a bunch of random things about whatever, but it's sorta easy for me. Once I talk to people, especially new gardeners I'm struck by how little they know.

I'm not a tidy gardener. I groom this ball and my saladbowl, and my beds actually by kinda grazing. If I see a leaf overshadowing something else, I'll pull it and eat it on the spot. If it's a whole plant I generally save it for later.

I pull a few plants up by the roots and put them in a glass of water on my chocking board. Basically, for the past few weeks I have made a series of 'salad bouquets' Really, they are quite pretty.

The bouquet on the right is from a month ago. That's mizuna and fennel. They must be 500% bigger now, especially the mizuna.

I am pretty happy with how my tulips turned out but now I am a bit confused by this recent development. What you see here is a tulip bulb forming just bove the surface of the soil. There seem to be 6 of these growing.

Does this mean my tulips are really happy, or are they very unhappy? It does look like the healthiest tulips are the ones doing this but what do I do with these bulbs?

I tend to treat tulips like annuals, something I pull up and compost when they are done, but these were so pretty and so many passers by commented on how lovely they were. Should I dig them up in a few weeks and store them till September? I will decide soon, won't I?

Sally is a ham for the camera. This is her response to "Sally, do something cute." Need I say more?

Morning

Just a random post here with eyecandy.

My posh saladbowl planter is filling in nicely. I rotate it slightly clockwise everyday to ensure even daylight for all sides.

I am very happy to see these tulips gradually bloom. I got them late last fall and they were marked down considerably. A few of the 40 bulbs were rotten but I planted the rest here in a single spot. A lot of the bulbs have more than one bloom. They are smaller but wow! I'm easily impressed. Another thing about this planting is that it is elevated about 2 and a half feet above the sidewalk next to it. Everyone walking by may look closely at these tulips.

When I looked out my window this morning on the 3rd floor, this is part of what I saw. I am showing what is currently the prettiest part of my yard. You'll recognize the tulips and the swan, but then there's the bonnie artichoke I saved from last year. It grew huge but did not bloom. This year it should bloom if I don't eat all the artichokes. There is above the bed a shepard's hook with a robin hanging out and a hummingbird feeder. I haven't seen any yet, but somebody claims to have seen one around here on April Fool's day. Maybe that was a joke. Below the feeder next to the tulips is a patch of fennel that braved the winter. That should be pretty nice eating soon.

Mizuna is a very nice green. I like to let it get bigger but I enjoy thinning it. The more feathery leaf is a fennel seedling. There's a bunch all over my front yard. I still haven't decided if I want to let any grow up.

Planning your garden

One thing that's nice about a vegetable garden is that in most cases, every spring you have a clean slate. You may rearrange your garden in new ways. Indeed it is often better that you do so. If you grow tomatoes and brassicas in the same spot year after year, it is highly likely that they will be afflicted with various diseases as pests settle in.

Last year was the 1st vegetable garden in front here and I had a lot of weeds and english ivy slowing me down. It started out being fairly structured but that didn't last. I don't seem to have any current full bed pictures this year. I guess there's a reason for that but these 2 '08 pictures were probably taken in late April. Maybe in a few weeks I'll have some idea of what I am doing.

I got trigger happy when I was uploading and lost track of an image. I guess I'll reload it. This one is my lovely 'stage left' garden bed. What looks pretty sparse here rapidly filled in. One thing that is different this year is that I have more stepping stones.

What you see here are 6 red cabbages, lots of lettuce, various onions, some pansies to pretty it up, and some tulips to pretty it up. When the tulips faded I ripped them out and planted tomatoes.On stage right I planted some strawberries in a nice diamond. They barely resemble this shape now but I think I'll let them be. I should have kept the runners in line but strawberries are so cute. This year I have taken the ivy back a bit more. Last year I spent a long time ripping it out of this bed. Sure, it's great groundcover but I like other things more and I just don't have much space. Again, I have put in more stepping stones.

I don't do rows but I try not to walk anywhere in my beds unnecessarily. It does not take long for them to become covered as I tend to overplant.

White House Vegetable Garden I exclaim!

Wow! They are doing it! It's about the scale I'd hope for really. All right, off the top of my head I do not have much to add to this news except that I hope it will encourage more people to grow their own. With that excuse I will talk about my own garden.


This is the only fennel that seems to have wintered. There were 4 left last fall that seemed to die off one by one with each deep freeze. I hope this produces some nice fennel bulbs.


Here's some red mustard seedlings that are self seeded. I'l have to thin them.


This is something I found in a neighbor's trash. It was just the metal frame. I wove in this brown cord to serve as a skeleton and lined it with felt. I wanna grow salad greens in it and maybe try out a little mushrooms. Now that's a whole new can of worms but in contemplating the synergy of bokashi, I have contemplated how useful fungus can be to a garden's fertility.


Artichokes don't generally survive the cold of Pittsburgh so I wintered this in my coldroom in my basement. This one did not bloom last year. It should this time. In the background are some tulips shooting up. I just couldn't resist getting some deeply discounted bulbs late last season.

My Terrace

This is the aftermath of dealing with the hedge, a muddy little bare slope. My sensibilities are pretty simple and primitive but this was ugly. Plus I always liked terraces.


The hedge ended where the railroad tie wall begins which left a weird gap between the wall and the slope. The shrub I removed there was so large and overgrown, it was like ripping out a tree. I thought about putting in a more standard sort of wall but considering my neighborhood, and the general look of my yard to begin with, I went with found material.
I have decided to plant some nice perennials in each terrace. The bottom one has siberian iris which should grow pretty tall and cover a lot ot the railroad ties. The 2nd terraces has bee balm, also called monarda, something I had kept in a pot last year because I had not broken enough ground for it. Beebalm is beenip to bees. I really think they get stoned when they re around it. Hummingbirds love it too.

One thing I thought might be nice is to plant my spent thalia bulbs. I planted them below the bee balm. Thalia is apparently the oldest (1610) known hybrid narcissus. I don't know if they'll do well considering that I forced them in water rather than soil and that I did not let them stay green for the 6 weeks post-bloom recommended, but it was plant them or throw them away. In planting them I have cultivated the soil to a deeper depth than I would have otherwise.

They were lovely in my house. I forced them in various vases and these gigantic sherry glasses in clear glass marbles, hydroton, and white glass disks.


Here's the finished (for now) wall. It is sturdy enough to hold a cat. I hope humans will not try to stand on top of it. Anyway it isn't so much of an eyesore and will be less so as the plants grow in.

Wintry Things

1. Cat with freshly spun true black alpaca.

2. Faded hyacinth blooms in flourescent light packaging

3. Frozen soap bubble; hard to make in this climate

4. Forced bulbs; hyacinths and thalia narcissus, image slightly doctored by oversaturation.

Summer Garden

Sally sits on the stepping stone. She sits and stares as the carrots and radicchio sit before her.











Raindrops drip off the rosa bianca eggplant.













The porchmelon chose to grow on the porch wall. This is a good thing because otherwise I would have had to make some kind of sling.






This is a close up of an artichoke bloom. It's larger than lifesize but not by as much as you'd think.









Here is sungold cherry tomatoes co-mingling with scarlet runner beans.








I rather miss this.

Indoor Things

When you move things inside, you've got to look them over. I moved this small bay laurel tree inside a month or so ago and noticed just a couple weeks ago that it was just coated with scale.

Scale is the leech of the plant world. They attach themselves anywhere that they can suck the life out of your plant. In this instance they were on the stems and leaves.

If it is feasible, a q-tip dipped in rubbing alcohol is effective at removing them. The photo here shows my partially de-scaled bay laurel. This was a couple weeks ago.
Yesterday I found MORE scale on it, not as bad as the last time but I needed to descale it again. I am glad at this point that my tree is still quite small. I think I'm going to find a few more in a couple weeks. I sorta like KILLING these nasty creatures.

Next we have Abe the cat hanging out in his spot. I geririgged a shelf over a radiator so he could sit by the window in a warm spot. The plant hanger next to him has catnip growing in it, but it's always been anemic. The vines climbing up it are he shou wu. Behind him is some wheatgrass. I planted that because he had been eating my lemongrass and he does now seem to prefer the wheat. I do however need to trim it every once in a while, thus the dish there with freshly trimmed grass on top of various dead leaves I've pulled from other plants.

And finally my forced hyacinths. I just took them out of the refrigerator and after a week in the dark of the basement, I'll hang them in a window. I understand that it's a good idea to make a gradual transition from cold and dark to warm and light with hyacinths. Sometimes the blooms bust out of the bulb, splitting it, before the leaves come out. I've never had this experience, but I hear it's not pretty.

I found a picture of a prematurely blooming forced hyacinth. It's lovely but preferable to have the blooms a few inches above the bulb with well formed leaves below. Actually last year I did have one or 2 hyacyinths that did this. I was less careful last year to do a gradual transition. Maybe I won't have this problem this year.

Kitchen Bulbs

Here's my kitchen window display.later 2 then even later 3. OK, the window
First there is one bulb, later 2 then even later 3. OK, the window I am having a really hard time editing this. I want to post these pictures sequentially and to have my words go a certain way but I can't see what is going on until after I publish it.

I want quite simply to have the picture with 0ne bulb 1st, 2 second and 3 third.

Right, so where are they? I can't see in this weird window that is almost twice as wide as it is when finally published that gives me just 2 inches or maybe 15 lines of typing to look at and not even a complete image.

What the eF guys? Well anyway, notice how quickly these paperwhites grow. The roots don't take long to fill out. I am guessing that these probably won't last up to Xmas but they'll probably bloom Thanksgiving.

These pictures also give you a tiny glimpse of my backyard and the burning bush shedding its leaves. I'll show more of it later but only in a way that allows a fantasy idea, no messes back there, nope, not for you to see!

I think instead of starting a new post later, I'll just add more pictures here with links from whatever current post I do. I'm sure there's people out there who'd like to see my paperwhites bloom.

Hmm, this last photo is a little blurry but there they are. A bud is opening. Also the tallest one fell over so I ended up tethering it to the strings with some breadbag ties.

I will have some blooms by Thanksgiving. I posted the 4th photo on the 25th.