One year later and here we go again! A video taking you around the raised beds to see what’s growing in this year’s veg garden. It’s been fun to compare how much has changed since last year’s tour. I hope to do one of the flower garden as well, after I clean it up next month.
Happy Midsummer weekend! With last week’s rains, several days of clear sunny skies and only a couple hours of twilight to call night, our garden has been growing at a breakneck pace. We are absolutely inundated with leafy greens at the moment and I have already started showing up to friends’ houses bearing whole lettuces. Not a terrible plight to be in, but funny all the same.
1. The last day of school was this past week and one of my students brought me this little beauty. There were a couple of other plant-themed items as well. My kids know me too well. Does anybody know what that is in the bottle? I’m not very good at identifying houseplants.
2. Paeonia herbaceous hybrid ‘Lemon Chiffon’ was the first of my peonies to bloom again this year. Well, the first of the ones I planted myself, to be precise. The very first is the big pink-flowered shrub that came with the house, which I featured last week. But anyway! ‘Lemon Chiffon’ flowers are supposed to have more petals as the plant matures, and this one does look fluffier than last year’s.
3. ‘Rosamunda’ potatoes have started flowering, and they are a very pretty lavender with white edges. The potatoes themselves are maincrop with pinkish-red skins. It’ll be fun to see all the different colors of potato flowers since I have six different varieties.
4. Lots of broad beans on the way as well. I rarely see black and white flowers, so find these quite cool. I only tried a few plants last year but liked them so much that they got their own bed this year. Figuring out a support system was probably the trickiest part since I didn’t expect them to get so tall so fast. They’re currently being held up by a grid of twine zigzagged through wire supports along the edges.
5. Rodgersia aesculifolia, whose tropical-looking leaves and giant flower spikes surprise me by returning year after year, despite our not giving it a bit of protection or care. It really is the most reliable of perennials and I’ve grown very fond of it.
6. Last Sunday I attended our local garden society’s plant sale. Yes, of course I signed up to become a member as well. It never even occurred to me to look, for some reason, but after a year of being around the SoS crew, the idea of hanging around with more gardeners in real life seemed very appealing. I came home with three large scented pelargoniums and a baby peach tree (‘Reliance’) as well! More updates on that after it’s been planted.
Thanks for visiting and please do check out what the other SoSers are doing over at Jim’s page!
I am determined to actually do this on the proper day this week, yes I am! The clear weather today after a week of thunderstorms (some of our friends had localized hail!) made it a very pleasant day for photography. Sadly, I will have to wait until next week to share whatever I pick up from the university seminar garden’s plant sale tomorrow. Did I mention I haven’t attended a garden event for almost two decades? I’m very excited.
1. Paeonia officinalis ‘Nordic Paradox’, the midsummer peony. Named so because it usually flowers around midsummer. Except, like the midsummer rose from last week, it has also started a bit early. These have a habit of shattering pretty fast, so they might very well be gone by midsummer this year.
2. Actinidia kolomikta, the variegated kiwi vine. For the longest time, I was worried that the white tips on this plant’s leaves were from sunburn or indicative of some other problem. Then I finally got around to looking it up and discovered it was just doing what it was supposed to do. This became more apparent as it grew larger and more obvious variegation appeared, rather than just the random few leaves we used to get.
3. Aquilegia atrata, dark columbine. These self-seed along the walls of our house and barn, and just about nowhere else. I love the dark wine coloration – they look almost chocolate-burgundy on dark days – so different from the pastel columbines I usually see in seed catalogues. I’ve seed-traded these with quite a few friends over the years. I’m considering growing other colors next year, but they would have to be positioned far away from these clumps so that they don’t get diluted.
4. Tragopogon porrifolius, salsify flowers. I planted these last spring and didn’t get around to harvesting them over the cold season, so now I’ve got a bunch of these cute purple flowers. The entire plant is still edible, so I will probably pull up a few later this week for dinner. If nothing else, I’ll be set for vegetable seed for a good long while.
5. Vitis vinifera ‘Zilga’. A nice juicing grape that I didn’t get around to cutting back earlier in spring. It has now gone wild and escaped through every opening in the greenhouse. I’ll have to give it a pruning next week so that it has more room to breathe.
6. Herbal tea tubs! I mentioned having lemon verbena for tea last week but didn’t show the other two herb tubs. The one on the left has Moroccan mint, strawberry mint, pineapple mint, grapefruit mint, and chocolate mint. The one on the right has lemon balm, sage, catmint, oregano and yerba buena (Clinopodium douglasii).
Thanks for visiting and please do check out what the other SoSers are doing over at Jim’s page!
I had the photos taken for this post back on Saturday but wasn’t able to post until today. Still, I’m not ready to throw it out yet, since it’s not quite next week’s post yet! Just have to hang on for one more week, and then there will be much more free time to catch up on blogging stuff.
1. Rosa pimpinellifolia ‘Plena’, also known as the Midsummer Rose. Well, it used to be known as that but it might need renaming if weather patterns persist. The unseasonably summery conditions of May had this thing blooming an entire month earlier than it was supposed to. Of course, the flowers are welcome at any time, and I hope that it will continue blooming all summer since we’ve been getting a healthy amount of rain this month. As you can see, it is very overgrown and will need to be cut back after it’s finished flowering so that we can use that emergency ladder again.
2. This is a self-seeded lilac that landed in a perfect location on a sunny slope next to our swinging bench. I keep on questioning if I perhaps bought and planted it, and then forgot about it, but I’m pretty sure no such thing happened. It has grown to a very manageable height of 1 meter with a couple of sturdy trunks, where I would like it to stay, so I will try to groom it to look like a standard in the next few weeks. It does seem that the temperatures made this year’s lilac bloom period very short, which is unfortunate. They’re one of my favorite spring flowers.
3. Rhododendron ‘Helsinki University’ has offered one small set of blooms this year, which I wasn’t even expecting, given the neglected state of that part of the flower field. It’s my oldest rhodo and has been looking a little droopier than the others all this spring. The entire area needs a good weeding, mulching, and feeding still. Happily, the summer holiday is only a week away, then there will be much more time to give everything the care it deserves.
4. Just like last year, the spinach bolted! This might sound not so surprising to many people, but you have to understand that up until a couple of years ago, my spinach beds lasted for most of the summer. When you’re close enough to the Arctic Circle, bolting from warm spells isn’t something you usually worry about. Except… yeah. Here we are again. Looks like spinach is officially moved to autumn crop status now. This time, I wasted no time in harvesting every single plant right away. They were pureed and frozen, for future use in sauces and soups. The bed is now hosting a few rows of rainbow chard.
5. A visit to my favorite nursery resulted in a couple of new herbs I’d never seen before. I got them more out of curiosity than anything else, and am still trying to think of ways to use them. The one with the small thin leaves on the left is Olive Herb (Santolina rosemarinifolia ‘olivia’) and the one on the right with the fat glossy leaves is Mushroom herb (Rungia klossii). They both smell exactly how you’d expect, it’s so cool. Two lemon verbenas destined for tea-making round out this bucket.
6. Finally, a shot of my dicentras taking over the front steps. They are getting bigger and bigger every year, just as I’d hoped. Not shown, but there are more on the other side of that little pine on the right, too. They pretty much take over the entire area for a while in spring, before dying down when the heat gets to them.
Thanks for visiting and please do check out what the other SoSers are doing over at Jim’s page!
Well, if today isn’t an auspicious date to begin this year’s SoS posts, I don’t know when is. Being mostly a garden blog, I went dormant last December when the polar nights of Finnish winter made it pretty much impossible to do anything else. I’d meant to start back up earlier when I started sowing vegetables in the snow in April, but various other spring projects (like participating in an amateur theater production) ended up taking precedence. Here we are at that perfect moment of late spring/early summer, though, when everything is fresh and growing, and I just have to share it with my fellow gardeners!
1. I am excited to announce that this is the first year I have been able to harvest from our asparagus bed. Both ‘Gijnlim’ from store-bought roots and ‘Mary Washington’ grown from seed are in this bed, so I have no way of telling which is which at this point. I only took the first four fat spears to pop up (sauteed in lemon and butter, served over toast), but am delighted to know that there will be a much larger harvest next spring. Perhaps even enough to share with the rest of the family…
2. The apple trees are in blossom! As are the plums and pears, but the apples are the biggest and most floriferous by far. The garden smells amazing right now. That’s the ‘White Transparent’, our oldest apple tree, in the photo. I love how the entire tree sounds like it’s buzzing, from all the insects gorging themselves on nectar. Hopefully, this will shape up to be a good year for fruit, since the usually fickle May weather has been warm and calm enough to keep them on the trees for a long time.
3. Forget-me-nots (Myosotis sylvatica)! Not to be confused with blue-eyed Mary, which we have plenty of. These were winter sown in early 2023, then transplanted out to the flower field that spring, where they sat forgotten for a year. I didn’t realize that they were biennials so was puzzled as to why they never flowered. Well, they most definitely made up for it this year. They all opened overnight early this week and now there’s this pretty haze of light blue amongst the tulips that is very noticeable even from the road. I hope that they self-seed, so I won’t have to wait two years between flowers in the future.
4. First stinging nettle harvest. I used these youngest leaves to make a lovely cream soup with the last of our homegrown onions, parsley root and potatoes. As the plants grow, I snip off leaves every morning to mix with other fresh herbs for a pot of tea. It really helps my asthma and allergies!
5. Cheating a little, because I couldn’t resist putting in some photos from earlier this month when all the spring bulbs started popping up in the flower field. This was one of my major reasons for having a dedicated flower field in the first place. I only put in varieties that can naturalize, so they will hopefully spread and return for a bigger display next year.
6. The vegetable garden is 90% planted and sprouted. It should’ve been done by now, but the high temperatures burned up two beds worth of baby Chinese greens. They shall be replanted this weekend with the addition of sun protection tunnels.
Thanks for visiting and please do check out what the other SoSers are doing over at Jim’s page!
I’ve been waiting later and later every Saturday before writing these posts, hoping that I might snap a picture of something that will make its way into the collection. It’s made a little difficult by the fact that I can only take pictures on the weekend since it is dark when I leave the house and dark when I come back during the week. Today’s sunrise was at 9.33 with sunset at 15.18, with usable light being something less than that. That’s still luxurious compared to the northern part of the country, though, where they saw their last sunset on November 25th and won’t see a sunrise until January 17th. Yep, for nearly two months, the newspaper just prints a date for sunrise instead of a specific time.
1. Snowy viburnum berries that the birds haven’t gotten to yet. They already polished off the ones on the older shrub, but this is a newer plant and the berries are kind of hidden by surrounding branches.
2. A bargain amaryllis I got with my spring bulb order. I think three stalks are coming out of it! Hopefully, it will bloom in time to be on the table for Christmas dinner. I wonder what color it will be?
3. Cascading cymbidiums blocking my view of the veg garden over the winter. One’s white and one’s light pink. They really *really* need repotting after they flower this spring, pretty sure I’m going to have to cut them out of those pots by then. They seem happy, though, so that’s good.
4. I always thought staghorn ferns were these dainty things, more difficult to care for than other plants. This one, however, barely asks a thing from me and is increasing in size so steadily that I’m starting to think it might need a bigger pot. It doesn’t seem to have any issues with the lower winter humidity, either, while the Boston fern next to it has once again started to shrivel. Mental note, humidifiers must be brought out this weekend!
5. A Tale of Two Pothos. These two pots are only separated by a few feet and receive the exact same care. The one on the left is a pot full of cuttings taken from the one on the right, which just up and shriveled last month. I need to take it down and figure out what to do with it since it looks like it’s not actually dead but just extremely unhappy. It is the first plant that I got in Finland, as a cutting from a friend when I moved here more than a dozen years ago. It has managed to come back from looking worse and having been horrendously neglected, so I’m still holding out hope.
6. Finally, the resident furbeasts. I might as well draw the angel wings and devil horns on these two. The one on the left is not interested in plants at all, barely leaves floor level unless it is to attain lap level, and just likes to keep us company. The one on the right is the reason all of my larger plants, fish, and other small animals reside in my office instead of the house.
Thanks for visiting and please do check out what the other SoSers are doing over at Jim’s page!
I was going to skip SoS this week since I’m still catching up on reading the last couple of weeks’ posts from everybody and didn’t think there was much to share out here other than more snow. Yet here I am again because I realized that I’ve never tried documenting winter in the garden before and even if I do nothing more than post pictures of the snow getting deeper, it’ll be useful for looking back on for next year. So here I am, with a garden that is growing a prolific layer of snow if nothing else! I also apologize to those of you who will get random late comments in the coming days.
1. We hit our lowest temperature so far this past Tuesday, -13°C. It might reach that again tonight, but it’s been mostly hovering in the -5°C range the rest of the time. I was going to walk around and see how the cutting garden was doing, but the snow was so deep that it started getting into my boots, so I’ll probably have to strap on snowshoes next week if the weather keeps up. Hopefully, I’ll be able to get good photos of animal tracks for next week at least!
2. A closeup of snowy plum trees.
3. Little feathered friends are constantly coming and going now that their favorite winter cafe is open for business. The first to arrive after a refill are usually the fearless tree sparrows (Passer montanus). There’s a family that builds its nest in the eaves above our front door every spring, so we hear cheeping babies whenever the door opens. They’re so used to us that I’m not surprised they don’t flinch at me coming over with a camera on the other side of the kitchen window.
4. After I stay still for a while, the great tits (Parus major) usually arrive in a mob and start pushing each other about because obviously, the seed that’s already in their friend’s mouth is always The Best One. One particularly cheeky one had a staredown with me for a good several seconds!
5. The shyest of the bunch are the blue tits (Cyanistes caeruleus). They’re also the smallest, so tend to get pushed around a bit in the frenzy. They manage to get in there when the others aren’t looking, though, and get their share. I also put up tallow balls on several of the trees, so that they have different places to eat if the main feeder is too crowded. I hope that we’ll get a few more different birds this year — I’ve seen one with a bit of red come by in past years but haven’t figured out what it is yet.
6. With darkness arriving by 4 PM, we’ve got plenty of hanging lanterns outside. The candles last two evenings if I time it right and look pretty flickering from various points in the night.
Thanks for visiting and please do check out what the other SoSers are doing over at Jim’s page!
The snow I promised to photograph arrived this past week. Today was a clear and crisp and very brisk -7°C, so I crunched around outside in my biggest pair of boots to show you the current state of the garden.
1. Standard view of the veg garden, winter edition. The ground is frozen and it’s best to avoid disturbing the snow so it insulates what’s under it. If we get a normal to decent amount of snow this year, you will not be able to see the beds by March. I must strap on the snowshoes by that point, to avoid sinking hip-deep with each step. Any crops still out there (just the salsify and experimental lettuce) are on their own until spring melt.
2. The chunky Norway spruce which I would personally like to remove completely because it’s casting an awful lot of shade and most likely killing the nearby fruit trees. It’s not like we don’t have an entire forest of them already. The husband is fond of it, though, and even I must admit that this one has a particularly pleasing shape. Our compromise was that he would keep those bottom boughs trimmed so they allow a bit more light through and don’t keep thwapping everyone who walks past.
3. A limber young birch arching gracefully under its load of snow.
4. And we’re back inside again! I got this little olive tree a couple of years ago and it started putting on a good amount of growth this summer. I was very relieved since it lost a lot of leaves last winter when it came inside. This year, I put the grow lights closer to it and the leaves are looking much perkier. Now I just need to read up on how to prune this thing, since some of the branches are getting long.
5. Pelargoniums got brought in for the winter because I read somewhere they make good houseplants. I always thought of them as needing a lot more sun, but they seem to be growing well enough. With some luck, they will be big by spring and ready to flower when I put them out. Considering how slow they were to start as little plug plants last year, it’s worth a try.
6. Two Camellia sinensis that are overwintering in the kitchen. I hope to eventually plant these outside in a sheltered location with winter protection since they are supposedly hardy to zone 7. They seemed a bit too tiny to try that with this year, though.
Thanks for visiting and please do check out what the other SoSers are doing over at Jim’s page!
First post of winter, brrr! Our nights have consistently been dipping below 0°C now, though not very far below most of the time. Enough to justify a fire in a woodstove and candles everywhere, though! There are about six hours between sunrise and sunset at the moment, though that’s closer to five hours of usable light on a good day, and it’ll drop to four by next month. It’s dark when I leave the house in the morning and dark when I get back from work, so the first time I’ve seen the garden all week was actually Friday afternoon. It keeps me from dwelling too much on outdoor chores, at least.
1. The last of those chores was to dig up the Jerusalem artichokes for storage in the root cellar. The bag I got wasn’t labeled, but I believe these are ‘Red Fuseau’ after reading some descriptions online. I planted only one tuber in the spring, so didn’t know what to expect. That resulting plant has given us a little over 20 tubers of various sizes, so that worked out pretty well! I plan to cook half of them in some sort of soup and plant up the rest this spring in their own bed. In the meantime, they are safely snoozing away in a root cellar bin.
2. Speaking of the root cellar, I was asked for specifics about carrot storage, so I thought I’d show you what I did. I’ve found that carrots and beetroots will survive the winter just fine in a mesh basket in the cellar, though they start to get wrinkly after a few months. Packing them with damp-ish material is supposed to help, so I chucked my first crop of carrots into a big bucket with sterile bagged potting moss. Potting moss mix is made from sphagnum moss (not peat!) which stays nice and airy, absorbs moisture well, and also seems to inhibit microbes. It serves as packing material in the winter and then is used for potting up plants in the spring!
After calculating the amount of space I needed for the rest of the root vegetables, I bought some stacking plastic feed bins to store the rest. Since I harvested the carrots during the wet season, I didn’t bother to dampen the moss, and let it instead suck out any excess moisture from the carrots, to be used later. Roots are placed in the moss so they don’t touch, with a layer of moss separating each layer of carrots like a giant veggie lasagna. Anything else that’s prone to drying out got similar treatment.
3. A walk in the garden this morning found everything covered by a light layer of snow. Not enough to make for pretty landscape photos yet, though. These rose hips have colored up well and provide welcome relief from all the brown and white. I’m leaving them for the birds, who are currently more interested in emptying the feeder under the kitchen window. That’s been refilled with oil sunflower seeds, which always attract a party. Speaking of sunflower seeds, I shall have to buy new packets for spring because the heads that I harvested last month got eaten by sneaky mice in the barn whilst they were drying! Lesson learned.
4. Back inside we go to visit some green friends. Here are two baby brugmansias. The one on the left is a white one I started from seed. The one on the right is a cutting from a local gardener and should have peach flowers. They will both take a few more years before they are mature enough to bloom, so I am happy that they have adjusted to life under a grow light on a windowsill.
5. Back at the beginning of 2021, I saw this thing on Pinterest about growing your own lemons from seed and decided to try it. They said to go buy a nice organic lemon from the store because those would have the best seeds. So I came home with this big, beautiful lemon from the fancy fruit section, which I let sit on the counter for a few days until I could have some uninterrupted gardening time. I dreamt of a pot full of fragrant little seedlings from this plump paragon of a lemon. Then I finally cut it open to find… it was all flesh and no seeds. Not one. Nada. Oh, the disappointment. It made great lemonade, though.
I still had a pot with a little greenhouse dome prepared for planting, so I rummaged through the fridge drawer and pulled out one of those six-in-a-plastic-net-bag bargain lemons from Lidl and cut the seeds out. They all sprouted and I was giving out baby lemon trees that spring to anyone who wanted one. Here is the one I kept, 2.5 years later.
6. One of our current propagation projects. My son’s Echeveria disintegrated this past summer. Whether it was due to overwatering, underwatering, or some other factor (probably cat-related), we are not certain. He was upset. This kid loves his succulents. I told him not to worry, we could plant them like seeds and get more plants! Thankfully, I was not proven a liar. Look at all the baby Echeverias!
Thanks for visiting and please do check out what the other SoSers are doing over at Jim’s page!
It’s supposed to rain for most of this weekend, but I’ll be ducking out during the lighter portions to harvest what I can because winter officially begins for us next week. The nighttime temps will be consistently below 0ºC, the snow will fall, and the ground will be frozen solid after a few weeks. I’ve left more vegetables out later than I normally would this year and I must say that it’s worked out rather well! It’s given me a lot more time between harvesting each crop to prepare them for storage, which is just as important as growing them if they’re to be usable for the next six months.
1. The first time growing kohlrabi ‘Azur-Star’ has been a success. It was sharing a bed with golden beets and still produced a basketful of good-sized bulbs to use for the next couple of months. I’ve also really enjoyed using its leaves and stems in soups. I plan to give a whole bed to kohlrabi next year and grow both colors to see if there is any difference in flavor between them.
2. First time growing Hamburg parsley, which suffered a little from my mistakes. Which is a shame, because after nibbling on some of those tiny roots, I think I rather like the taste. The problem came when I didn’t thin them out and ended up with many tiny baby roots instead of bigger ones, much like what happens with carrots. I intercropped them in rows with radishes since those were pulled out much earlier on. Perhaps next year I will just mix the two seeds before sowing so that the spaces created when the radishes are harvested will be more uniform. I love that this is a twofer crop, providing fresh leaf parsley through the summer (which I also dehydrate for winter use after harvest) and nice mellow-tasting roots.
3. The salsify and scorzonera are still in their bed, being very cold-hardy. I put a thick fleece over them to keep the soil from freezing for as long as possible and will see how long I can harvest them this winter like that. I haven’t pulled any up, so don’t know how big they are yet. If they do get frozen in there, we might just have to wait until spring to taste them!
4. The baby lettuce bed with its plastic greenhouse cover is alive but doesn’t seem to have any interest in growing. I’m guessing the waning light is to blame. We’ll see how they do for the rest of the winter.
5. My biggest surprise this week came when I started harvesting my son’s carrot bed. I planted a bed of early Nantaise 2 carrots before the last frost and although it had a very healthy amount of green growth, the root harvest ended up being mediocre at best, perhaps because of the very dry spring conditions. We ended up with one large basket. The Berlicum 2 carrots that my son planted a month later had much less greenery, were growing in a shallower bed, and had been grazed on by local herbivores at some point, as you can see in the picture to the left. We figured that between the two beds, we’d have enough to last a couple of months, used sparingly. And yet.
So I went to pull them out this morning, mostly out of guilt because I had left his carrots too long last year and they’d all frozen to mush. And I kept pulling. And pulling. And pulling. There were tiny carrots and good-sized salad carrots and big old soup carrots and everything in between. I ended up having to turn over my stool and use it to carry carrots. Then went back and got another bucket to carry more carrots. It started raining heavier and I was. Still. Pulling. Carrots.
The moral of this story? I’m not sure, but this kid better not be lying about liking carrot salad.
6. Last of all, an update on the herb cuttings I took last month. The mints all rooted easily in water, as expected, and are now moved into their pots for growing out over the winter. The main plants are still in the garden, but these are backups because the ones outside don’t always survive. The three thymes also rooted amazingly fast and are now sitting around my olive tree like kindergartners at storytimethyme.
Thanks for visiting and please do check out what the other SoSers are doing over at Jim’s page!
Little Blue and White House 