Month: July 2023

Garden Inventory | Malus domestica ‘White Transparent’

Having just talked about our plum trees, it seemed the right time to segue into the rest of our fruit tree collection. Unlike the plums, which went unnoticed for the first few years, the apple trees were impossible to miss. They are all large, mature trees growing in clear areas with little to obstruct one’s view of them. We often use them as landmarks when we’re trying to explain where something is on the property.

One of the main reasons I wanted to buy a home with more history was the high likelihood of mature apple trees being in the garden. You know what they say about fruit trees — the best time to plant one is 10 years ago. The next best time is today. Or better yet, just move somewhere where someone else planted them more than 10 years ago.

This particular tree is a cultivar called Malus domestica ‘White Transparent’ (omena ‘Valkea kuulas’), also known as ‘Yellow Transparent’ in North America. It was very popular across Europe in the 19th century and is still sold in some nurseries today. Its main claim to fame is being a very early variety that will provide ripe fruit by the tail end of summer in most places. This makes it especially nice to combine with the many soft fruits and berries that are usually ready to harvest around the same time.

The tree, like most of the other heirloom plant varieties in our garden, was planted in the 1950s. By all accounts, it should be nearing the end of its lifespan (50-80 years). It doesn’t seem to have realized this and has provided us with a glut of apples almost every year that we’ve been here. We only recently started learning how to prune fruit trees and thin fruit, so I am hoping to help it stay in good form for another few decades.

We usually start picking the apples when the first few turn pale yellow to creamy white. We eat those right away since they don’t last long when that ripe. The greener ones can sit in boxes awaiting processing for up to a week. The fruit is juicy, with a nice balance of sweet and tart that you don’t find in most supermarket apples.

Apples are useful for such a wide variety of recipes that I doubt I’ll remember all the ways I’ve cooked them over the years! I bought an apple coring and peeling gadget and a steam juicer specifically to get through the glut more efficiently — one season of doing everything by hand was more than enough.

About 3/4 of the apples are peeled, cored, then run through the steam juicer. The white flesh of these apples makes a beautiful clear golden juice that is easy to mix with other drinks. The remaining pulp is made into applesauce, apple butter, and apple leather. A good portion of the apples are also sliced and frozen for use in baked desserts such as apple pies, apple crisps, and apple brownies. I just saw a video on how to make apple cider vinegar, so it looks like I will even have a use for the cores and peels this year as well!

Final count:

  • Malus domestica ‘White Transparent’ – 1 elderly but productive tree

Garden Inventory | Prunus domestica ‘Victoria’

That’s right, two Victorias in a row. Different genus, but still in the fruit category. This does make me wonder just how many plants were named after that particular queen at the height of her popularity. Surely enough to make an interesting garden collection, given how long she reigned.

Names aside, the other reason I loosely associate these two plants is that, much like our rhubarb, our plum trees are also very old and prolific. The oldest one might very well have been planted when the farm was first built, but we had to cut that down a few years back because it was 80% dead wood. It had spawned several saplings from the copious loads of fruit it produced, though, so we still have two overgrown stands of Victoria plums that need severe pruning.

Prunus domestica ‘Victoria’ (luumu) came to Finland by way of Sweden, where it was a popular garden variety throughout the late 19th century. It’s still sold in stores, though I’m not sure how many people need them these days. I know I’ll happily give away as many as anyone can take. Did I mention that these things self-seed like mad?

Also, this tree grows annoyingly tall. I usually only notice that it is flowering when I see the upper branches covered in foamy white from my second-story bedroom window. Since all those flowers are so high up, all the fruit are very high up too, and the only way to get them is to wait for them to drop at the beginning of autumn. Before I began developing the vegetable garden and food forest, we didn’t go into that part of the garden much at all. This explains why I never even noticed we had plum trees until we had been living here for a few years.

Yes, you can tell I have a love/hate relationship with these trees. The fruit are really sweet and bountiful and I’m quite happy to have them… when we can get to them. My new tactic for next month will be to prune and harvest simultaneously, so we can start cleaning up all those wild branches and tame these trees into something more garden-friendly.

A large number of these plums are eaten fresh off the tree. They are smaller than the round supermarket plums — more like large grapes — and sweeter, too. The perfect size for school-aged kids, who can eat an entire bowlful in a single sitting if given the chance. When the glut inevitably overwhelms even the most ambitious of frugivores, I pit and halve them with a handy little kitchen gadget and freeze them in 1-liter bags for processing later in winter. In recent memory, I have made plum cobbler, plum juice, and plum jelly.

Final count:

  • Prunus domestica ‘Victoria’ – 2 large and prolific stands

Six on Saturday | 15th July 2023

We have now reached the stage of summer where there’s enough sun and rain for everything around us to turn an aggressive shade of green. You can almost see the plants growing while standing in front of them. Despite having experienced this jungle-like state of affairs every year for more than a decade, I’m never quite ready when it hits. So please excuse us if you notice that the backgrounds of these photos are starting to look like more wilderness than a garden, we’ve reached the point where weeding is on a triage basis, and for the most part, we’ve accepted that’s the way it will probably always be.

1. Fuchsia hybrids ‘Dark Eyes’ (with the purple skirt) and ‘Elma’ (with the white skirt) have bounced back from a sulky June and are putting out plenty of blooms to decorate our front terrace. This might be the year that I will manage to overwinter them, now that we have a functioning root cellar.

2. A before and after picture set! Sort of. I forgot to take the “before” picture until after we’d cut down several of the young saplings in the weedy patch at the end of the vegetable rows. Hence the picture of all of them in a pile on the ground. The “after” shows the two young fruit trees that are living there now! Unlike most of our other fruit trees, I’m determined to keep these at a manageable height (8 feet or so). Family pear tree on the left with ‘Tohtori’ (Doctor), ‘Pepi’, and ‘Souvenirs’. Family apple tree on the right with ‘Zemzyshnaja’, ‘Vuokko’ (Anemone), and ‘Keltakaneli’ (Yellow Cinnamon).

3. Achillea millefolium ‘Summer Pastels’, winter-sown in early 2022, is in its second year and starting to put out blooms in a nice variety of shades. We’ve got wild yarrow everywhere too, so it’ll be interesting to see if any hybridizing occurs over time.

4. Oriental poppies, winter-sown early this year, have started flowering this week. They seem a bit smaller than the ones I’ve had in the past, but they still have time to catch up over the summer. I’d love to have a huge patch of mixed poppies, so here’s hoping they make it through the winter this time.

5. Austin rose ‘Scepter’d Isle’ is the last of my 2022 trio to bloom and it has the most adorable cupped shape. The aphids were going to town on these buds last week, but the predators arrived just in time. We’ve been very fortunate to have enough local wildlife to help keep things balanced.

6. Last but not least, my first harvest of garlic scapes! Pulling them out is oddly fun, though I’m still perfecting my technique — 75% of mine snapped before I got all of the stalk out. Now, if only I can figure out how I’ll be using them…

Thanks for visiting and please do check out what the other SoSers are doing over at Jim’s page!

Garden Inventory | Rheum rhabarbarum ‘Victoria’

Today, I’m going back to cataloging our oldest plants, if only so that I can have all their information in one place rather than bothering my poor friend (who lived here before us) whenever I forget. Possibly some of the oldest plants we have, this rhubarb patch dates back to the 1950s when the farm was first built. It was one of the first things I noticed when we did a tour of the property since the buds were just breaking the ground and looked like bright red dinosaur eggs. It’s still one of my favorite spring sights, and I usually end up taking a picture every year.

Rheum rhabarbarum ‘Victoria’ (raparperi) is another one of those things that just doesn’t exist where I grew up. As a kid, I’d always try to imagine what rhubarb must be like from descriptions in books, but seeing it for the first time was a total surprise. Watching them grow from shiny crimson eggs into plants taller than me was quite eye-opening.

I have since learned that most rhubarb plants do not grow large enough to engulf small buildings every year, but we do have some very large specimens of a vigorous variety planted in a spot where they are very happy. There’s something about the mild and endless light of northern summers that does it for them because another friend mentioned how her grandmother in Alaska also grows gigantic rhubarb. ‘Victoria’ is the most popular variety in Finnish gardens, and I’m guessing this is one of the reasons why.

Although I was excited to harvest and taste rhubarb that first year, I was also nervous because of all the warnings about their poisonous parts. While I’m still cautious about thoroughly removing the leaves, I’ve become much less wary over the years. Especially after one of the neighbor’s kids, during a birthday party, casually asked to pluck a stalk to snack on raw. This has actually become something that I rather enjoy doing as well, though I prefer to dip it in some sugar to temper the sourness.

Aside from eating it straight off the plant or making desserts straightaway, I also harvest several stalks every summer to freeze for using over the rest of the year. Some of our favorite recipes are rhubarb pie, rhubarb cake, and rhubarb vanilla jelly.

Final count:

  • Rheum rhabarbarum ‘Victoria’ – 2 large and ancient clumps

Garden Inventory | Paeonia lactiflora ‘Garden Lace’

One more peony before we go back to the older stuff! This young lactiflora was planted in autumn 2022 and shot up really fast in the spring. It produced two huge buds in its first spring, which makes me hopeful for what it will do in the future.

Paeonia lactiflora ‘Garden Lace’ (lactiflora = kiinanpioni) opened just a day or two after ‘Sarah Bernhardt’. It has a Japanese anemone-type flower, which makes it stand out amongst my collection of frilly doubles. Sadly, I didn’t get a picture of the flower while on the plant because I was running around doing emergency thunderstorm cutting. Since this was the first year this plant flowered, I wasn’t certain how it would cope with rain and thought I’d err on the side of caution. I will leave some on the plant next year and see if they really do stand up to water as well as Google is telling me.

Not much in the way of observations yet, since it’s early days, but look at the size of those flowers! Each one was nearly the size of my fully opened hand. I first arranged them in the vase when they were still in bud and kept on having to shift everything around to make more room as they unfurled. The little yellow pom-pom in the middle is just too cute. It’s super fragrant, too!

Final count:

  • Paeonia lactiflora ‘Garden Lace’ – 1

Garden Inventory | Paeonia herbaceous hybrid ‘Lemon Chiffon’

I’m taking a break from cataloguing the older plants today because I wanted to share one of my favorite debuts this season. This peony was planted out late summer/early autumn of last year and you can see what it looked like in the slideshow below. All I ever saw of it were two tiny leaf stalks, while the other three varieties I planted at the same time produced several shoots. It was a bit disconcerting.

What I found out this year was that although I wasn’t seeing much happening above ground, Paeonia herbaceous hybrid ‘Lemon Chiffon’ was industriously building its root system below. This spring, it once again produced just one large stem but it easily outdistanced all its neighbors in height and leaf size. Although it’s labeled as a lactiflora hybrid, I suspect there must be a tree peony somewhere in its lineage. It also produced a very large and very fragrant creamy yellow bloom — the first peony in the cutting garden to do so. There’s just something so refreshing about yellow peonies. The flowers are supposed to grow more doubled as the plant matures, so I’m looking forward to increasingly spectacular displays from this little one.

Final count:

  • Paeonia herbaceous hybrid ‘Lemon Chiffon’ – one promising ingenue of a plant

Six on Saturday | 8th July 2023

A week of mellow rain and sun has made a world of difference in the garden — flowers are popping up everywhere and the vegetable garden is looking lush but not yet overgrown. It’s a nice, if short, interlude. I took a walk through our adjoining forest this morning, hoping that the chanterelles might have started. No luck yet, but the bilberries are ready for picking. Next week will almost certainly feature a full basket of those. Now, onwards to the garden!

1. These Antirrhinum braun-blanquetii were winter-sown at the start of 2022, so this is their second year. They made it through the winter well and have produced many more flowers this year. I’m hoping that they’ll form an even bigger clump by next year. Snapdragons have always been hit-or-miss for me, so I’m happy that these are hardy perennials (though short-lived). Still, I’ll probably be collecting some seed this autumn as insurance, knowing how variable winters have been lately.

2. This Sambucus nigra ‘Black Lace’ was just planted last month, but seems pretty happy in its spot! Despite being barely up to my knee it has already put out two flower heads. I’m looking forward to making pretty pink cordials if there are enough of them next year.

3. Papaver croceum, winter-sown at the beginning of this year and transplanted out far too late. They seem awfully tiny to be flowering and I hope they’ll manage to come back next year.

4. Linaria maroccana ‘Licilia Peach’, looking very dainty. It’s my first year growing toadflax, so I’m not sure if they are supposed to look that spindly or if it’s a result of the abnormally warm weather when they were transplanted. Very happy with the amount of flowers they produce, though, so will definitely sow some more next year, perhaps spaced more closely and in a bigger drift. They look adorable alongside the bigger snapdragons.

5. Austin rose ‘The Poet’s Wife’ has sprawled in its second year and produced many, many blooms. Unfortunately, the rain has not been kind to them and half of them have flopped to the ground. This just meant that I had to cut them and take them inside, though, so no great hardship there.

6. This is my first year growing red-skinned potatoes (Mozart) and they surprised me with pretty little bunches of lavender flowers! I’ve only had white-flowered ones before so these have been so nice to see bobbing above the masses of green in the vegetable garden.

Thanks for visiting and please do check out what the other SoSers are doing over at Jim’s page!

Garden Inventory | Paeonia lactiflora ‘Sarah Bernhardt’

You know what they say about making the most mistakes with your first child? It applies well to plants, too. I grew up in southern California, zone 10. We were at the edge of possibility for heat-tolerant roses and peonies were not even a remote possibility. So when we moved into our house (zone 5/6 border), I had plenty of garden experience that ended up being absolutely useless. I killed at least five young roses that first year, planting them in a completely inappropriate location, having not had time to observe what the area was like over the year. I also planted one peony with them, which I’d bought on a whim because it was on sale. Guess which one is still alive and kicking?

Paeonia lactiflora ‘Sarah Bernhardt’ (lactiflora = kiinanpioni) was my first peony. I’ve got a good collection of thriving peonies nowadays, but back in 2012, Sarah was a complete novelty. It happened to be sitting on the shelf next to the roses and it looked like it might go well with them, so it came home with me.

Since I knew that roses and peonies had similar soil and light requirements, I then made the mistake of treating it exactly like a rose and planting it relatively deep. All the plants grew well enough their first spring and summer, only for everything to be flattened the first winter because the location I had chosen happened to be where our roof sheds the majority of its snow for half the year.

The roses did not return. The peony did, but I didn’t even notice it because it was just green foliage that was rapidly engulfed by the large bank of weeds that sprung up around it. Also, it never bloomed. The first few years, Google assured me that this was probably because of transplant shock. By year five, I was pretty sure there was another explanation and that perhaps it should be moved. However, I was dealing with a young toddler by then and not at all tempted to go wading through the jungle to find one ornery plant.

So there it stayed. For another four years. Yes, this thing sat in one place for nine years, neglected and throwing out nothing but leaves in a pile of weeds. I’d pretty much given up on it.

Then, three years ago, I saw something utterly unexpected — a big pink powder puff of a flower amongst the rampant horsetails and bergenias. Sarah had somehow managed to produce a flower. Last year, she gave us two. This year, there were four buds. Something had obviously happened. I hypothesize that the small maple (one of those weeds that never got pulled) growing next to it finally grew big enough that its roots pushed the peony upwards to a more comfortable depth. Some soil erosion possibly helped, too. Whatever the case, it has now achieved some sort of balance after nearly a decade of hanging tough.

Happy ending, more or less. Stubborn as this plant is, though, you can expect that there’s a twist. For the past three years that it has flowered, Sarah has inevitably managed to do so on the day of the first summer thunderstorm. I learned the first year that heavy rain will shatter double peonies faster than you can blink. It’s like she’s sitting there with a timer, waiting for the most inconvenient time to unfurl those flowers in some sort of cranky protest, willing the rain to get to them before I can.

Still, I’m glad that she’s still around, even if I have to run out before the storm every year.

Final count:

  • Paeonia lactiflora ‘Sarah Bernhardt’ – one stubborn but beautiful plant

Garden Inventory | Rosa pimpinellifolia ‘Plena’

Today we are continuing with the theme of old-fashioned garden plants that are particularly associated with Finnish midsummer! This rose is more common than the peony in my previous post and is still sold regularly in garden stores. It’s more surprising to see an established garden here without one than with. Ours came with the house and I wouldn’t be surprised if it was one of the original plants in the garden.

If there’s one thing I can say about Rosa pimpinellifolia ‘Plena’ aka the midsummer rose (Juhannusruusu), it is that it does exactly what it says on the label. By the second half of June every year, it is reliably covered in pretty little semi-doubled flowers that perfume the air for several meters in every direction. The pollinators go nuts for them and it’s magical to see the better part of an entire wall covered in creamy white roses.

Except. Of course there’s an except.

Except that, this thing is a very big, very mature specimen. We have shorter fruit trees. It’s also wide. Sprawling. The plant description states that it should be between one to two meters tall but I’m pretty sure ours is just short of three. It’s about that wide as well. I saw one webpage that described it as “thicket-forming” and might have snorted laughing. My only consolation is that it has most certainly reached the upper limit of its growth potential.

Also, it has an annoying habit of turning crispy and brown by July and then sitting around looking very sorry for itself for weeks on end. It’s amazingly tolerant of all kinds of weather, though, and is back to its lush self within a week of good rain.

To be fair, the complaints I have about this plant are mostly our fault for never having pruned or cared for the thing since moving in here. If you had something that big and spiney, though, you’d have second thoughts about going near it without heavy-duty tools and armor too. This is problematic because we now have a giant hedge of thorns, a la Sleeping Beauty’s enchanted castle, blocking the emergency exit ladder. While I’m sure none of us would have qualms about kicking aside a spikey shrub if there was a fire, it’s still not a situation I’d like to find ourselves in.

I suppose what all this comes down to is that my to-do list now has “cut back monster rose thicket” on it. It has just finished flowering, which is supposedly the best time to be doing this task. Armed with heavy-duty hedge trimming shears and a pair of leather gardening gauntlets, I will hopefully have this thing tamed in a future update.

Final count:

  • Rosa pimpinellifolia ‘Plena’ – one absolute unit of a shrub

Garden Inventory | Paeonia officinalis ‘Nordic Paradox’

Last week was Midsummer (Juhannus in Finnish) and it’s a pretty big deal out here. The entire country goes on holiday to enjoy the endless sunshine and balmy (especially this year) weather. There are a few old-fashioned garden plants that are particularly associated with midsummer here because they tend to flower around that time. Now seemed like the best time to showcase them!

Meet Paeonia officinalis ‘Nordic Paradox’ aka the midsummer peony (Juhannuspioni). I’m not sure if it that’s an officially recognized name, by the way — it just appears in a research paper that I keep seeing online. They call it Nordic Paradox because it seems to be very common and recognized in Nordic gardens, but doesn’t exist much outside of them. I can’t weigh in on the subject, since I only got into peonies after moving out here to begin with.

But yes! The midsummer peony truly is something straight out of everyone’s Finnish grandmother’s garden. I don’t know of anyone who purposely planted one, but they got it with the house and there it will stay for future generations as a sign of just how old your garden is. In our case, this used to be my friend’s grandmother’s garden, but the same idea applies.

Our plant is doing quite well considering it’s seen half of the last century. It puts out at least a dozen large blooms every spring in mid-June, lasting right through midsummer, and marks the beginning of our peony season.

I used to take these flowers in to make bouquets in the past, before I had a cutting garden, but prefer to leave them on the plant these days. This is mostly because they seem especially prone to shattering within a couple of days of opening, which leaves a huge mess on the table for a very short period of enjoyment. They also don’t have much of a scent, which I remember finding quite disappointing the first year. Still, those vivid pink frills are something I look forward to every June, a bright burst of color after spring’s subdued pastels.

Final count:

  • Paeonia officinalis ‘Nordic Paradox’ – one very large and well-established individual