flower garden

Six on Saturday | 9th December 2023

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!

Six on Saturday | 18th November 2023

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!

Six on Saturday | 4th November 2023

So this has been an eventful week, though perhaps not one I’d like to repeat. I came down with a rather unpleasant virus at the end of last week which lasted well into the beginning of this one, keeping me from participating in Halloween events with my students. I also lost my voice, so I have been conducting classes with the help of a computer-generated voice (with associated frenetic typing and pauses) and plentiful gesticulations. At least the kids seem to find it entertaining.

1. Somebody flipped the “winter” switch on the night of the 30th, and we all woke up to full-on snowy conditions on Halloween. It stayed this way for most of the week, which would have been fine except that a lot of us still had summer tires on. Any advantage to that extra morning hour from daylight savings was mostly spent on leaving the house early so we could drive on the roads slowly and safely.

2. …and then the rain came last night and we’re back to autumn again for the next week or so. Cutting garden on the left, sports lawn in the middle, vegetable garden to the right. There isn’t much left to do other than putting away some ornaments and cutting down any lingering plant material.

3. My son gave me this Thanksgiving cactus for Mother’s Day. It flowered this week! Very pretty light pink blossoms. I think there were five of them, but I accidentally knocked off one of the buds when I moved it to my classroom window sill. I’ve never had one of these plants before and am very pleased with how easy it’s been to care for.

4. Wrapping up the garden has started me thinking about what projects to tackle next year. I’ve added a new row to the vegetable garden, but that’s mostly because we’re growing more of the things we like eating, so nothing new there. The cutting garden is well on its way, so next year will be more about fine-tuning what is already there. The patch in the picture below is an area next to the garage that needs a bit of cleaning up, and I’m now thinking it’d be the perfect place to put all my shade-loving woodland plants, with a bit of soil improvement. On the list of things to be moved here are: ostrich ferns, various sizes of hostas, columbines, lily of the valley, dicentras, and rhododendrons. There should be plenty of room to bring in some other stuff, too, so I would appreciate any suggestions you might have for zone 6 hardy plants that might do well here.

5. Not from my garden, but my mother-in-law dropped in earlier with these lovely roses for my birthday and I had to take a photo. Why do I not have any red roses in the garden? This is something that needs to be fixed next spring.

6. This is Munchkin. He is a Noctuidae moth caterpillar (known to many as a cutworm). He hitched a ride inside on the last of the gladiolus flowers the night before the first frost. I found him the next morning on the kitchen table about to be eaten by the cat and took pity on him. So now he is in a Nutella jar for the winter, keeping us company as a temporary-pet-come-science-project. Hopefully we will get to see him pupate and metamorphosize, since we didn’t manage to catch any butterfly caterpillars earlier this year. In the meantime, he has been amusing us by producing candy-pink poops from eating pink flowers.

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

Garden Inventory | Rosa ‘The Poet’s Wife’

Finally, we have the third plant from my 2022 rose batch. I’m so happy that all three ended up being such healthy plants, allaying my fears about growing roses in cold climates. Why did it take me so long to get roses, after having so many in our garden growing up? A dumb mistake, really.

I made one earlier attempt to plant roses during our first year at the house, back in 2012. My bad choice of location (a sunny but rocky slope with very poor soil and heavy snow dump over the winter) led to those not surviving the year. Perhaps the lesson in this is mostly about observing your garden for a year before trying to make any long-term plantings. After that, I tried to figure out solutions by reading articles about overwintering with burlap sacks, special mulches, and complicated pruning regimens, all of which only made me more anxious. It was only after I’d built my gardening confidence with a few years of vegetable garden success that I felt up to the challenge of trying roses again, only to discover that the first try had been nothing but a piece of bad luck. I’m catching up on a lot of lost gardening time now.

Rosa ‘The Poet’s Wife’ (ruusu) blooms not long after ‘Gertrude Jekyll’ and has been absolutely prolific this year. It is also, I’ve discovered, a sprawler. It’s been interesting to see how each plant can have such a different growth habit. I think one of its stems has managed to layer itself and is in the process of becoming a separate plant. Since it’s planted in the cutting garden amongst bulbs and annuals, this isn’t much of a problem so I’m letting it have its head to see how big it will get. I might just give it an arch if it gets too tall since it’s pretty close to the front of the garden anyway.

Final count:

  • Rosa ‘The Poet’s Wife’ – one rapidly expanding shrub

Six on Saturday | 21st October 2023

Our first frost arrived this past Thursday! Maybe a little earlier than expected, but still within the normal range. All the tender plants and bulbs are either (1) sitting on a house windowsill, (2) safely tucked away in the barn to dry out a bit, or (3) already slumbering away in the root cellar. All the spring bulbs have (finally!) been planted. Vegetable and flower beds are steadily getting covered or mulched depending on what is left in them. Just about the only tasks left are to plant a few remaining shrubs and do post-frost cleanup. This is the first winter I’ve been this organized, so pardon if I sound overly excited. I might finally be getting the hang of this gardening thing.

1. Aronia mitschurii ‘Viking’ lines part of our driveway and always provides lovely color in the cold season. It is usually laden with berries until after December, but it looks like the birds got to them early this year. One of these days, I might get around to picking some for the juice, but we are usually so overrun with berries by this late in the season that I can’t muster the energy to do another round.

2. Rodgersia aesculifolia’s big leaves look like they’ve been sprinkled with powdered sugar.

3. In the cutting garden, Rudbeckia hirta ‘Prairie Sun’ and Antirrhinum braun-blanquetii are some of the last few still standing.

4. Summer crops beds, harvested and tucked in for the winter. I’m not the only one who insists on saving all the cardboard pizza boxes for this purpose, am I? The new row of beds to the left is being filled with assorted garden waste to break down in place over the winter. These covered beds will get a fresh topping of compost in the spring before new plants go in.

5. I got this set of wire towers on a whim. They’re cute but on the short side. Not sure what I’m going to use them for (sweet peas maybe?), but they’ll be nice for winter interest when everything else is covered in snow.

6. Shredded newspaper mulch! I started doing this a few years ago and it worked out so well that I’ve gone larger scale with it this year. The parts of the flower bed that I planted with spring bulbs, as well as the vegetable beds housing perennials, are covered in hand-shredded newspaper. The paper gets wet and freezes in position, leaving gaps for air under it. Then the snow covers everything, providing a nice insulating layer. The worms munch away on their paper buffet all winter, cozy and protected. The majority is broken down by the time spring rolls around, when a fresh layer of compost covers the rest!

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

Garden Inventory | Rosa ‘Scepter’d Isle’

This Austin rose, from the same January 2022 batch as ‘Gertrude Jekyll’, struggled a little starting out but has made up for it over the past year. Aesthetically, it’s probably my favorite out of the three, though it’s a close race since they have all been charming in different ways.

Rosa ‘Scepter’d Isle’ (ruusu) is the last of my roses to bloom in the spring, but it makes up for it by offering big cupped blooms on stems that don’t seem to droop as much as the others. This plant had a little trouble in the start, shriveling in its pot despite having received a good soaking upon arrival. I was almost ready to email for a replacement when a new shoot appeared from just above the planting line. It has recovered well since then, gone through two flushes of blooms, and donated flowers for several vases over this past year. This particular plant is significant also because it marks the grave of my son’s late gerbil, so it is one of the few plants that will never be moved in the cutting garden.

Not too many notes yet, since these plants are still young, but I look forward to seeing how these little roses fill out over the next few years. They have already done a lot of growing in this season alone and changed my mind about how difficult keeping roses in our climate might be.

Final count:

  • Rosa ‘Scepter’d Isle’ – one rapidly expanding shrub

In a Vase on Monday | 16th October 2023

A mixed vase this week with something old and something new. The white dried hydrangea is Hydrangea paniculata ‘Grandiflora’ (I asked the person who planted it this time to make sure since Google was giving me too many different options), and the new little pink blooms underneath it are Hydrangea paniculata ‘Living Angels Blush’. Some aronia leaves help reinforce the autumn colors and perk up the faded white flowers. Apologies for the bad lighting, the vase is sitting in the front hallway, and I’m afraid of moving it at this point in case it shatters the flowers!

This is a post for Rambling in the Garden’s In a Vase on Monday meme!

Garden Inventory | Rosa ‘Gertrude Jekyll’

The very first David Austin rose I bought was ‘Fair Bianca’, back when I was in Southern California. It was a small perky shrub, happy to live in a stoneware pot in our very sunny front yard. Although that garden had towering hybrid teas and extravagant floribundas growing along most of the walls, ‘Bianca’ was the first rose that I chose for myself. Its shape and scent set it apart from the others and I’ve been wanting to grow more varieties ever since.

More than a decade later, we bought a house in Finland with plenty of room for a rose garden. It would take a little longer still to set it up, but in January of 2022, I placed my first order for roses straight from the David Austin online store. Sadly, ‘Bianca’ would be discontinued by then, though I still keep an eye out for it whenever possible. Instead, I went with three that topped the list for being fragrant and floriferous, and those are the ones I’ll be writing about in the next few posts.

Rosa ‘Gertrude Jekyll’ (ruusu) was the first rose in my basket that year and it has been the first to flower each spring since. It’s put on a good amount of growth this year and I look forward to seeing how big it gets in subsequent years since most bloggers seem to agree that it’s extremely vigorous.

In the beginning, though, I wasn’t so sure that it would even survive. The roses arrived in March, which is still the dead of winter for us. Having never ordered bare-rooted plants before, I couldn’t help being worried by their denuded state, despite having done enough research to know they should be fine. My hot water canner got called into service as a soaking container since there was nothing else big enough after the baby tub went into storage. Then the plants got potted up and placed by the windowsill, where they stayed until temperatures were warm enough for them to transition outside about two months later.

Gertie was by far the easiest to maintain during that early period and ever since, sprouting eagerly in its pot and eventually giving me flowers before they were even planted into the ground. It remains very fuss-free in the garden as well and I cannot recommend it enough, thorns and all. I was able to cut stems of highly perfumed roses to take inside for weeks during the first flush, and the autumn flush has been just as generous. Overwintering involved nothing more than mounding up some extra mulch and compost around the base of the plant at first frost. Depending on how tall it manages to get (and based on the reports, I’ve every belief it will be quite a bit), I might be adding some more of this rose to the mixed hedge in future years.

Final count:

  • Rosa ‘Gertrude Jekyll’ – one rapidly expanding shrub

In a Vase on Monday | 9th October 2023

It hailed overnight yesterday. That’s not to say that we’ve had a frost yet — it’s been chilly at night but not quite cold enough to upset all but the tenderest of tropicals so far. The temperatures have been fluctuating like crazy, though. The hail melted as soon as the sun rose, but it was still enough of a warning to let me know it’s time to start mulching the perennials and pulling up those summer tubers.

So we’ve come to the “last call vase” portion of the year. When I’m okay with cutting just about anything that hasn’t set seed (and some things that have), knowing that they’ll have a better chance of making it a week inside than out. You can see that the ‘Moonwalker’ sunflowers below have already taken a bit of a beating from being whipped around in the wind and weather the night before. The golden birdfeeder sunflowers are doing better, but they were also on shorter plants. In my optimism, I cut a big dahlia that looked like it might still open, but have since learned that dahlias don’t do much after cutting. So that will probably get removed later today. A couple of ‘Prairie Sun’ Rudbeckia, a little red bedding dahlia, and bunches of viburnum berries round out the bunch. I’m rather sad that the dahlia won’t open, because its big orangey-pink pouf would have been a nice stepping stone between the yellows above and reds below. Maybe next time.

This is a post for Rambling in the Garden’s In a Vase on Monday meme!

Six on Saturday | 7th October 2023

These pumpkins are not from my garden. I purchased them from a local farm and they are now sitting in my classroom, waiting to be turned into jack-o-lanterns by my students later this month. I’m including them because they are such gorgeous pumpkins and I wanted to have some on this blog, even if my own vines were quite dismal this year. If you’re curious about what’s happening in my garden, here are six things now!

1. I have started cleaning up the unruly stand of weeds and baby plum trees that has been plaguing the view from my kitchen window for years. Before I expanded the vegetable garden, it was just a slight eyesore. With the new row in place, it also became a potential source of weeds and blocked a pathway, so cleanup time it was. As usual, I forgot to take a “before” picture for before/after comparisons until I was well into the task. So to the left, you have a “one-quarter into the process” picture instead. On the right, is the current situation. I will finish pruning the trees in late spring since I didn’t want to make any major cuts to the trees we’re keeping, lest they get fungal infections.

2. I have been ogling this Fiskars ergonomic bulb planter all year. My bulb order arrived this past week and I finally had a reason to purchase it! After destroying two flimsy hand-held bulb planters, I was ready to upgrade. Walking out of the store, I felt like I was carrying a medieval weapon — this thing is a meter long and made of heavy steel. It has enough heft to bludgeon any unsuspecting muggers that might come along…. while you’re planting daffodils in the cutting garden at your house in the countryside. As you do.

3. Whilst pulling weeds and planting bulbs, I found a hiding anise hyssop (Agastache foeniculum), winter sown back in January of 2022. I hadn’t seen any sign of them since, so thought that they had all died out. While two little plants aren’t a very impressive survival rate, I’m happy that they’re there and hope that they come back stronger next year.

4. In perhaps an even more dismal showing than the agastache, here is the single nicotiana that actually survived to maturity from an entire packet sown this spring. It’s having a second flush of flowers, probably because of the increased rain. While I appreciate its efforts, I’m not sure if I’ll be planting these again.

5. The corn has finally been producing ears, though I’m not sure how they will fare with the falling temperatures. Then again, the weather has been anything but predictable this year, so I’m letting them carry on until the bitter end. If nothing else, some of them will be small enough to stir fry as baby corn.

6. An experimental bed of fall-sown baby lettuce mix, to see just how late I can keep it going. I’ve got a plastic cover for this bed when it gets cold enough, but suspect the main stumbling block will be when our sunlight dwindles to only a few usable hours per day. Still worth a try, though!

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