Good morning, and happy summer! Welcome to Saturday Morning Garden Blogging.
Denver had a little taste of summer-like weather this week: on Tuesday, as predicted, we went hit 90° for the first time this year.
Temperatures have since decreased to more seasonal levels — or lower. On Thursday the high was only 59°, and continued cloud-cover and chances of thunderstorms forecast for the upcoming week will keep us comfortably in the 70s. The cooler weather is welcome: the snap peas are in full flower and the first pods are ripening. A couple of weeks of cooler temperatures will do much to extend the pea season.
The bearded iris are blooming; this one was planted last year. I'm starting to get quite a collection of varieties, even if I don't know the names of them all. It's nice because it extends the blooming season. Some of my iris are supposed to be reblooming ones, but I've never had it happen.
I added another columbine last year, too — and it survived! I finally broke the Curse of the Columbine, after killing gawd knows how many columbine plants over the years. I read someplace that there are no green thumbs and black thumbs when it comes to gardening — just varying degrees of persistence. Gardeners keep trying when they kill things. One of Younger Son's friends asked me last week what the most important rule of gardening was and I told him "always remember that you will kill things".
Like the blue poppies. I bought three plants this year, and all of them are dead (or, at last, mostly dead; there may be one that's still a little bit alive). The Polish Princess has been trying to get blue poppy seeds to start for years, and it's never happened. She knows a master gardener who has tried for blue poppies for twenty years and has yet to have them survive.
Next year I'll try again. If I can get columbine to grow, I can do anything.
I was able to take a chunk of time off last week to catch up on some gardening chores. I haven't finished it all (the back yard is still a gawdawful mess), but I did plant the rest of the veggie patch. I, of course, chose Tuesday, the hottest day of the week, as the day to plant out the corn, tomatoes, basil, cucumbers, squash (delicata and zucchetta), cucumbers and beans.
I also whacked back the over-growth of the white lilac (it's trained into a tree, rather than a bush), and looked at the poor, pathetic branches of the daphne bush and decided to whack it back to the ground. Its foliage had emerged early and then was frozen off, so there were long naked branches with tufts of two or three leaves at the end. A lot of new growth was coming from the bottom, so I decided that in the long run it would look better to just get rid of the scraggly growth.
I despair, however, on what the fuck I'm going to do with the climbing rose/sweet autumn clematis on the back trellis. I usually clean out the dead stuff in March, but it didn't get done this year, and the whole thing is a huge, tangled mess of dead clematis branches, new clematis growth, and thorny rose canes. I think I'll just whack it back to a place where I can get it lashed down to the trellis, and call it good for the year.
I also need to mow the lawn again, and then mix the new clippings and the last batch of clippings into the compost bin. I'll have help with that, though — last weekend I bought tickets for Star Trek for Elder Son and his buddy, in exchange for Elder Son assisting me with the compost.
The last event of the gardening week was yesterday — my "stay home ladybugs" and lacewings arrived and were released last night. I usually have a pretty good ladybug population, but I haven't seen many this year — perhaps they, too, emerged too early with our warm January and February and were frozen by the extreme cold of late March. I'm hoping between the lacewings, ladybugs and insecticidal soap I can get a handle on the spider mite infestations that have been growing over the last several years.
And since it is Memorial Day weekend, it's timely to finish up the memorial plantings. It was two years ago this weekend when I wrote about the Dadster, his final illness and his love of gladiolas. I haven't yet planted the majority of the Dadster's glads — I have dozens, both newly-purchased and some saved from last year — that will go into the ground over the next three or four weeks. As mentioned last week, we're adding fennel to our garden this year in memory of the Mister's brother. And in early April pale pink hyacinth bloom, planted to commemorate my friend MJ, who died of cancer on April 2, 2003.
The Mister told me the other day that it took him a while to get it, but now he really likes the idea of planting things here, at our home, to honor those who have gone before us. To me it makes more sense than placing flowers on a grave — I have constant, happy reminders of the people who are important to me, and the things they loved. When I go, I want my ashes scattered in a bed of hyacinth.
That's what's happening here; what's going in your gardens?