Dahlia Bodacious, still not as full as they should be but they definitely make me smile. The frequent rainy weather has caused most of the larger dahlias to hang their heads but since Bodacious is about seven feet tall, and the bed is on top of a slope, it doesn’t matter.
dahlia bed
Clockwise, Bodacious, hy Mom (white cactus), Kidds Climax (pink/yellow blend), and Devonne Excel, which goes from lavender to pink for me. Devonne Excel has been a wonderful performer. The plant is covered in blossoms, which is the way a dahlia plant should be in October.
dahlia bed
Another group shot from a different angle, more to the right of the camera shot above and toward the front of the bed. Clockwise again, Bodacious, Yvonne (peach waterlilly), a buried and underloved Twister (fuscia). I planted too close, especially for my sun conditions and some of the middle plants did not perform. The white blossoms, center front, are Gitt’s Perfection; they haven’t turned pink yet and should get much larger, too.
To the left are the same Devonne Excel, a small Croyden’s Masterpiece and up to hy Mom again.
Below is Gitts Perfection; starting to realize it’s pink.
On a recent mid-west trip, I met my Ohio friend at the Toledo Botanical Garden. Aside from their small dahlia garden, which I may cover in another post, the gallery below contains some of my favorite plants and pictures from the visit. The mixed bed with coppery, warm colors was adjacent to the parking lot. I’ve always had a hard time seeing how to use the very dark-leaved plants, everywhere I put them they just disappear, but not here! I recognized grasses, cannas and most of the flowering plants but I had to ask the garden for help with the tall, large-leafed copper variegated plant. It’s one of a number of varieties with the common name of Copperleaf Plant from the genus Acalypha. It’s a tropical plant that’s grown as an annual in the Midwest, or taken indoors. The first seven shots are all of the same bed.
The next shots are of a green and white variegated plant with large leaves that I admired in another part of the garden and it’s the same family. Still common name of Copperleaf Plant. I love the way that it picked up the light from the deeply angled sun.
The gallery ends in pictures of a gazebo planted in white and covered with autumn clematis.
My Meyer Lemon tree was having a good summer on the deck. It liked our extra heat and put out a lot of new leaves. I bring it inside for the winter where it usually sulks and loses leaves but it does usually blossom a few times and I love the smell. One of the sweetest smells there is.
Sooty Mold on citrus
Other citrus trees that have gotten this treatment have had scale once I bought them indoors that I would have to fight. The last one gave up and died. But they’d never had scale outside and I blithely believed that with my healthy, bug-friendly back yard, they never would. They have a lot of predators to keep their numbers down. I saw the black spots, and went hmmm, will have to wash that off and procrastinated. Then I saw the ants; lots of them. Took a closer look and recognized my old citrus enemy, scale.
Scale
Did some reading; the sooty mold and the ants should have told me right away what the problem was. They are both an indirect result of the sugary substance that the scale secrets. It drips on the leaves and feeds the mold and the ants love it. The ants may even have helped deter predators as part of their symbiotic relationship with the scales.
So first, my sources said, get rid of the ants. Before these pictures were taken, I sprinkled diatomaceous earth around the stem of the plant. It may have reduced the numbers but there were still some pretty happy ants a few days later. After losing the last plant, I’d determined to use a horticultural oil before bringing the plants indoors for the winter so, after some research, I decided to try Bonide’s All Season’s Horticultural Oil, now. The temperature range should be good for the next few, dry days. Too warm or too cold and it may not work or worse, further damage the plant. And it will wash off in rain.
I also pruned the plant and took out everything beyond the bad infestation in the picture, branches that were crossed or that had no leaves. The baby scale is so small that it may take multiple treatments to eliminate the population, if that’s even possible. The horticultural oil that I chose can be used on houseplants so I will be vigilant. I’d also planned to try the LED lights with some larger plants this year, just not sure about introducing a plant with pest problems into the environment where I grow things from seeds.
This dahlia was mentioned in a few of my posts last summer, it’s so much prettier than the pictures that when I ordered it; I wasn’t planning to write about it this year. But it’s still my best performer in the warm colors end of the bed. The clump has been blossoming cheerfully for weeks now and with all of the buds, it looks like it keep blossoming until frost, like last year.
I also wanted to share this photo, taken by my Ohio friend. I sent her a couple of tubers and she’s growing them in a container, in full sun. The blossoms have almost twice the petals. I’m not even very jealous. Not very.
This and its friends are eating my beans. Do you know what it is? It has a black sheild like bean leaf beetles but I couldn’t find any pictures with this much black elswhere on them.
My biggest concern is whether it will damage the beans that I’m saving for seeds, like the bean that it’s on. And whether the damage will be obvious enough that I can discard them.
I do have more than just dahlias going on in the garden, still lots of food coming in, and today I planted hydrangea Pinky Winky in between the stumps of the arborvitae that was trying to eat the house. I had a landscaping service come out earlier this summer and clean them out along with layers and layers of vining plants that had filled in as undergrowth. Ivy competed with Perrywinkle and various other vining weeds. The worker spent all afternoon just clearing and clearing. He said he kept thinking he was at the bottom of it and then would find another layer of vines and roots. After he did as much as he could, I haunted the place where my Company puts computer boxes to be thrown away and brought home big boxes to cover the area and hopefully smother most of what’s left.
I’ve raised the hydrangea from a four inch pot and it’s still pretty small to make any impact in the area. But I visited a good nursery yesterday and looked at hydrangeas in larger pots and decided that I’d rather work with a small one, even if it takes longer to make an impact. So next I’ll cover the cardboard with maybe a little dirt and the last of this spring’s mulch pile and think about what, if anything else, I want in that space.
bad Harvey Koop
I started my morning gazing at the dahlia bed with a cup of coffee in my hand and soon shifted to cleaning and weeding. In addition to removing older browned leaves at the bottom, which develop on the bigger plants, I decided to take out some of the shortest branches that were badly shaded or leaning into other plants. I took them out at the stem. They wouldn’t have produced blossoms and it will open up the plant for better air circulation, but never having read about doing that, I’m a little apprehensive. Hope that it won’t damage the plants.
One thing I didn’t do is cull the bad plant of Harvey Koop; after months of babying it and wishing it healthy while worrying that it was virused and would affect the plants around it, I cannot believe that it’s not even the right color. Harvey Koop is variagated and this is a deep reddish purple. Because of the shape and because the darkest color in its variation may match this, I expect that the grower cloned a plant that was reverting. Reversion to a solid is often a problem with striped or variagated plants but when you buy from a reputable grower, you expect the plant to be true. It does such a nice job of bringing out the purple in Croydon’s Masterpiece, right behind it in the picture, I probably won’t pull and destroy until it’s done blossoming.
Bodacious
Another procrastination, Bodacious was not pinched back properly (my fault) and the blossoms, at the top of a too tall plant were first deformed (July heat was also a factor) and then the first one that I let blossom was single. This second one is fuller than the last but still not the dahlia that it should be. I should cut it off to give the blossoms lower on the plant a chance to develop properly. However, with it’s bright colors at the top of a slight slope up from the street and 7′ above the ground, it’s attracting attention from people on the street.
This is another well-performing dahlia that I’ll grow again next year. It has been blossoming consistently for weeks now and is still covered with buds.
However, if my plants are typical, once again Swan’s online catalogue picture was a little misleading. Showing a single blossom, they show a mostly white flower with touches of purple, even lighter than the photo above. My blossoms spend most of their life mostly purple with touches of white. Another very picky minus is the way that the blossoms open below and slightly obscured by the new buds.
older blossom dahlia Binky
But in my opinion it makes up for that with it’s compact size and exhuberance. Its dark stems add visual interest and the foliage is healthy right to the ground; without a touch of blight. It’s colors coordinate well with the bigger, darker purples like Patches and it’s just as early. This small, colorful, water lilly dahlia is perfect for the front of the bed.
Although I’ve visited many exceptional dahlia gardens, the photo gallery below is about the dahlia that turned me into a (rank novice) grower, Croyden’s Masterpiece. Years ago, I started with a mixed bag from a Michigan grower, because my main reason was to have some tubers to show as I talked to garden clubs about the dahlia gardens that I’d visited in France. Spring came and I stuck the tubers in here and there, with poor success. Croyden’s Masterpiece, however, bloomed long enough and beautifully enough that I was hooked. Toward the end of the season, the plants that looked healthy one day wilted and died the next. I have come to understand that too much nitrogen can cause weak stems and rotted tubers and I now suspect this was the cause.
However, the urge sort of simmered in my heart for a few years in spite of my failures. With my full time job, it’s hard to get away to see dahlias in public gardens and I missed them. After success with a container dahlia, Art Deco, I decided last year to try growing dahlias again. This time in a small dedicated dahlia bed. Because the bed was small, Croyden’s Masterpiece was planted in the front of the nearby rose bed that I keep richly fertilized, and the plants never did well. I got a few blossoms that I thoroughly enjoyed but the color was weak and they were never the size they should be. The tubers may also have been planted too shallowly; they didn’t look good when I dug them. With all that, I decided to purchase new tubers for this year. Properly planted in the dedicated dahlia bed, I think you will agree that I have my reward.
You may ask about it’s true color and all I can tell you is that these photos are true. While it’s classified as an orange variety, it really does vary that much depending on the light and the age of the petals. The last shot probably shows that variation the best. It’s like watching a slow motion sunset.[oqeygallery id=32]
Although a number of the larger, later dahlias have not even bloomed yet, many of them are doing very nicely. Yes, I know some of the petals look a little chewed. I’ve had a bad problem with Japanese Beetles this year; I pick them daily but they can do a lot of damage before then. I have decided the chewed petals are a badge that proclaims I like bees.
Patches
Dahlia Patches was initially a disappointment to me. The colors were not at all what Swan’s website shows, and I expected a pink/purple blend. I planted it at the end of the bed with other pinks and instead it’s a white/purple blend with more contrast than I expected. But it’s beginning to grow on me. It is a good size, it is early and the mix of purple and white does vary from blossom to blossom. As the blossoms fade, the purple does get pinker and the white does get a little pink so that I can ALMOST see the dahlia I thought I purchased. Almost.
hy Mom
Hy Mom is just what I’d seen in other gardens and Yvonne is a lovely waterlilly variety that I hope to grow year after year.
Yvonne
Dahlias Esther, Kasasagi, lil Scotty and Ellen Houston, all from last year’s plants are very happy. And I think that’s my lesson learned, in year three of dahlia growing (with a few years off between year one and two), people who save seeds say that the plants that do well in your microclimate adapt and do better, year after year. That may be especially true with dahlias and the tubers that I save. One can hope.
On Thursday, I flushed a huge frog out of the Swiss Chard when I was watering. My guess from his size is that it would be a Bull Frog. I do live near wetlands but seeing a frog this far away from water is rare. Toads used to be common but not frogs. Worried about him, I moved a container of water that I keep, hoping that if the chipmunks are thirsty they will drink water instead of eat on a tomato — don’t ask how that’s working, and topped it off from the hose.
On Friday, when I went out to try to water the chard, again, I heard a splash coming from the vicinity of the waterbowl. Expecting to see Swamp Thang, I looked around for the source and found this sweet young thing, about a third of his size. I also saw some black threads wiggling around in the water and got excited about the possibility of tadpoles. But the timing worried me; how long to go from eggs to tadpoles?
The Mrs
I googled a bit and was becoming more and more convinced that they probably weren’t tadpoles, but mosquito larvae. But that night after work she was suspended in the water, nose and eyes sticking out, along with a number of the small black things. Would she really hang about with mosquito larvae? But the next morning, I didn’t like the way she looked, now resting at the bottom of the container in water that was now pretty yucky. She had turned a dark black, too. I tipped her out to see if she was living and decided to clean out the bowl. By the time I went to work she was back in the clean water and had returned to a more normal froggy color.
So now I have a frog living in my garden bed in less than three cups of water. Finally watering the Swiss Chard, I also flushed out a toad, who seems to be hanging about, so I put down a couple more containers of water that I’m cleaning and filling with the hose when I water the garden.
I think what has happened is that our warm and dry summer has dried out the vernal pools nearby and these wetlands creatures are under preassure to find water.
The colors of this collarette dahlia remind me of when I was a child and dad bought home color chips to pick out colors for his potentially two-toned Cadilac. We were actually dirt poor at the time as we lived on a farm so dirt was most of what we owned. Dad’s day job was for Cadilac Motors in Detroit. At that time the employee discounts were so good that he could buy one from the new models and sell it a year later at a profit.
Yellow and red, about these shades of yellow and red, were my favorites and I couldn’t see why the rest of my family couldn’t see it. At my insistence, I do think someone tried to explain the meaning of “resale value” to me but I was pretty young and these two colors were the very best!
I may never have seen a car in these colors, and with my well-trained adult tastes I would probably think it ugly, but I do have dahlia “Pooh” to remind me what it is to be a child.
I promise the next post will be pretty pictures but I’d like suggestions.
Seven Sisters Rose after blooming
I am not sure how to prune Seven Sisters. I will be deadheading this, which was magnificent, and I’ll have to do some serious thinning, too. This rose is not prone to black spot but you wouldn’t know it from looking at these shots. Summer pruning will help. Here is my problem. I know that next years blossoms will grow off laterals from those new shoots but what about the old canes and laterals, do they produce blossoms again on the old laterals? Do old laterals produce new laterals with blossoms?
So I guess this kind of mesh doesn’t prevent chipmunks from eating tomatoes as they ripen. From a wine purchase, it was the easiest to apply. Just slip it on; no tying. I thought they might take advantage of the open ends. But no, they just ate through it.
I mentioned my problems with chipmunks and watching them eat almost all of last year’s tomato crop. They seem to have an uncanny ability to know when a tomato is going to turn color and demolish it the same day. When I stopped at one of our local farm stands for some 4th of July raspberries, the woman who took my cash suggested mesh bags, like the ones that onions are sold in, to protect my crop. It’s not really feasible for all of my crop, like the sprawling bunches of cherry tomatoes, but for some of my prized, large heirlooms, it may be.
I don’t honestly know if mesh will work. The woman who made the suggestion had actually used brown paper bags. She said that they’d worked well, even ripening the tomatoes more quickly, but she quickly learned that they had to be emptied and reset after every rain or they’d hold the water and rot the tomatoes.
The problem with mesh is that I know my little chipmunk friends can eat suet through the suet cage and I’ve seen them use their sharp little claws. They may be able to eat the suet through the mesh. Or maybe, the strangness of the stuff will deter, on its own. Although I doubt that. These are very tame chipmunks.
Black Krim in mesh bag
If a coarse mesh will work, the easiest to apply is the plastic mesh “jackets” that they use to separate bottles of wine when they are packed two to a bag. They don’t need to be tied, just slipped on. And their natural stretch settles in around the tomato and can easily expand as it grows.
I had a couple of different bags; the one that I purchased with limes in it had the smallest mesh. It’s all an experiment. I’ll let you know how it goes.
It’s the time of year when most garden chores change from starting things to maintaining them. Mundane tasks like mowing and weeding have taken the place of dramatic decisions about what and when to plant.
And some harvesting. I’ve let the first year asparagus go weeks ago, to get more next year and I’m picking snow peas at the rate of a pound every few days. The tomatoes are at least a couple of weeks early, which is pretty much how this season has been going. Picking even a cherry tomato in June is almost unheard of and if you look carefully at the top, left of the picture above, you can see my second ripe tomato getting redder. The first one was picked slightly green and ripened inside.
I’m playing chicken with the chipmunks, who ate most of my crop last year. The sight of this one turning red untouched had me a little hopeful that the family who likes tomatoes moved on, but I see a quarter of a ripening Black Krim has been eaten, just as it was turning color. Last year I tried Coyote urine around the perimeter of the beds and all I got out of that was ruined shoes.
Green Brandywine
Teasing Georgia and a foxglove
Focusing on happier things, a pretty shot at about eyesight where the last, slightly chewed, small Teasing Georgia blossoms made friends with the last few blossoms on a lavender foxglove stalk; making for a beautiful relationship.
This really goes with my last post but WordPress’s graphics editor is so yucky that I can’t integrate it, it overwrites one of the other pictures. This, like the shots with the clematis, was taken of the arbor in front of my front door.
Seven Sisters is the latest of my once-blooming spring roses.
Once-blooming roses are often ignored in favor of the many ever blooming roses on the market. But when I visited gardens where they were properly used, I realized that they make up for their short season with their extravagance of blossoms.
This weekend, I’ve trimmed a few bushels of spent blossoms from roses that I’ve featured in earlier posts. And I have a few more bushels to go.
The fact that clematis Jackmanii blossoms at the same time as Seven Sisters rose was pure luck, although I can take some credit for combining the colors.
About a yellow climbing rose with pictures for a gardens friend. At least that’s my excuse for another post on roses. And I’m sticking to it!
I don’t remember this rose being classified as a climber when I purchased it. But I planted it near an arbor because Austin roses do tend to throw long canes. I ordered it because I’d just lost a cat to old age, a cat with burnt yellow/orange markings, Sweet Georgia Brown. Her color; her name.
Teasing Georgia Rose
The place that I planted her has gotten shadier every year so Georgia is trying to walk down the hill toward the sun and away from the trellis. I either need to coax her back up the hill or come up with another method of supporting her.
She’s been robust and colorful every year in my zone 5b garden
Yes, there are other things happening in my garden besides roses, but can you blame me for being obsessed?
The gallery below starts with shots of the front walkway. The pink rose near the door is Gertrude Jekyll (yes, again) with a shot of City of York (white) and clematis Ramona on the walk light. More shots as it’s so pretty and it smells so good.
The gallery goes on with more flowers, the peonies that I thought I planted in front of the roses (oops), more Gertrude, golden-colored Austin rose Evelyn, rose Tropicana and two mountain laurels. No names for the peonies and white mountain laurel as I inherited them with the house, although I had to find the mountain laurel under overgrown forsythia. The red laurel is one that my neighbor planted on a strip between our houses that I think of as friendship alley.
