All things green

Our Poinsettias turned out wonderful this year.

The color and size were outstanding.

We grew about 250 poinsettias of various colors: marble-pink, burgundy, white, and of course, red.

We started giving them out about mid-December and sent the last ones out on the 23rd.

To keep your poinsettia going for as long as possible, you need to follow just a couple of simple guidelines.

First, keep in mind that most poinsettias die from over-watering. Your home probably has a lower quality of sunlight than the greenhouse from which it came, so your plant will be less actively growing and therefore need less water.

So, let the pot dry out some before watering. Then water the plant thoroughly until water flows out of the bottom of the pot.

If any water remains in the foil pot-wrapper, dump it out. It is this extra water in the foil that causes main reason of poinsettias dying prematurely;  waterlogged roots.

Don’t worry about fertilizer for your plant, it won’t really need much until spring. A half-strength dose of water soluble fertilizer once in a while should be adequate.

Also, keep in mind that poinsettias weren’t meant to last too much longer than the Christmas season.  They were bred for color, not hardiness.

Enjoy your poinsettia as a reminder of wonderful Christmas memories.

Bob

Some seed catalogs have arrived already.

Enjoy the pictures of flowers and vegetables for now, but, when you start to order seeds and plants, read the descriptions thoroughly. Look for plants that like your climate conditions,  paying close attention to the hardiness zone for each plant. Also note requirements for light, size and spacing.

If you are a beginning gardener, you’ll enjoy  your garden more if you don’t  try to push the limits. For example, if the plant description says it is hardy to zone 7, don’t think maybe it will grow on the south side of the house where it is “protected”.  You will be just asking for headaches and disappointments.  Get to know plants that will do well here in southeastern Michigan (zone 5/6).  If the description says it’s easy to grow, then it would be a good backbone plant for your garden.

Think about getting your garden soil tested. That way you’ll know for sure whether it is acid or alkaline. A complete test will also show what plant nutrients are lacking in your soil.  Some tests include the soil texture as well, that is, whether it is sand, clay or loam.

You also need to know if your site drains fast or slow. Some plants won’t tolerate “wet feet”.

How much sun or shade does your garden get?  Early morning sun until about noon, even though it’s for 6-8 hours, is more like “partial shade. While 6-8 hours of sun in the afternoon is more like “full sun”.

Look for plants that grow the way you want them to. Do you need a tall upright foliage plant in a certain spot? Then don’t talk yourself into ordering a medium-high, bushy round plant just because it has a flower color that you fell in love with.

As one gardening friend once told me, “now’s the fun time of gardening… no bugs, no heat, no drought, no aching back.  Just beautiful dreams of what you want your garden to look like”.

Happy dreaming.

bye now, 

Judy

We have a very interesting botanical event happening in the greenhouse right now. One of our Agave plants is blooming.

Agave plant in full bloom

This plant is about 3 or 4 years old and has decided to bloom after all this time.  This is actually fairly quick for an Agave though.  Their other nick name is “century plant” , so-called because of the seemingly long length of time it normally takes them to flower in the wild.

Agaves are native to the southwestern part of this country and “south of the border down Mexico way”.  The ‘Blue Agave’ variety that grows in the Mexican state of Tequila is used to make… you guessed it…Tequila.

I don’t know what variety this one is since Judy rescued it from going into the compost bin at the Botanical Gardens.  At that time the plant was just a small  one inch diameter “bulblet” with no name.

Agaves only bloom when they have stored enough energy in their roots and leaves. How many years this takes depends on the species.  After blossoming and forming seeds, they die, trusting that the seeds will carry on the next generation.

Even though this Agave of ours is planted in a small 8 inch pot, the flower stalk is 10 feet tall! It has been alternately ignored and well tended throughout its life.  It couldn’t have had life too hard since it took quite a bit less time than a century to bloom. We had a few last year that were in 6″ pots and their stalks reached nearly 6 feet.

This Agave is planted in an 8" pot. Note the swollen bulb-like stem.

I counted over 120 flowers on the flower stalk! Wow! Each flower will produce a bulblet that will go on to produce another plant. I’d say that is pretty good odds that the next generation will survive.

Our Agave produced a ten foot tall flower stem containing over 120 flowers. I can barely reach the lowest set of flowers.

The new seeds will go into a 20 inch pot.  I wonder what will happen…

Bob

Now it feels like November.  Cold, rainy and dreary.  Gone are the Indian Summer days. Summer’s garden seems long past.

But with a little bit of effort a few weeks ago, I am able to make a pot of chili today using fresh tomatoes!

The day before we had that really cold night (not just the first frost when we covered our tomatoes, but this time it was going to get below  freezing so we knew the covering up wouldn’t do much good) it went to 28 degrees where my garden was.  I had picked all the tomatoes I could.  This was just a few days after that total day long rain that made the tomatoes start cracking , they swelled up so much.  I picked the red ones with a little cracking and all the green larger ones, some with a tinge of red and some that were totally green but otherwise perfect with no blemishes.

My goal has been for many years to have fresh tomato salad for Thanksgiving dinner. Some years a few tomatoes make it, some years they don’t .  So the perfect green tomatoes are wrapped carefully in newspaper and put gently in a cardboard box, then placed in a cool dark place.   They need to be checked every week or so. Take out any that show mold or black spots.  Put them on a sunny window sill and they will redden up after a few days. Cut out the bad parts of the tomato and use the good .

So, today I sorted  the tomatoes I kept in the garage and made a pot of chili with them.  This is the second time this fall that we have sorted through them . There’s still 1/4 to1/3 of them left for Thanksgiving.

Well, the tomatoes are simmering nicely.  I’d better get back to my chili making…  it smells delicious!

bye now, Judy

During this week of nice weather, we will do a lot of clean up.  Odds and ends of plants sitting around that didn’t get planted for some reason or other, such as too small or ran out of room in  a certain spot., etc.
 
We are fortunate to have at the Gardens some very useful coldframes.  They are dug down into the ground about 4 ft, enclosed with cement block with a dirt bottom.  The cement block extends a block high above the ground on the south side, and 2 blocks high on the north side.  We used to have glass windows that fitted over them but they deteriorated.  Now  we have translucent fiberglass panels that cover them up.  As deep as it is, it stills freezes in there, but that is okay. What we want them to prevent is wind burn drying out the over wintered plants.  Also it reduces the quick freeze and thaw that can cause disastrous effects for over wintered potted plants.  So cold frames are for hardy plants that, because they are still in pots, need a little extra protection.
So into the one coldframe that I use, which is about 12 ft by 5 ft wide, we will put in some leftover heuchera’s which didn’t get planted.  Plus some very small wood anemones that I thought might get lost (read: weeded accidentally out) in the big Gateway Garden.
More leftovers are mums, rudbeckias, 2 Alberta spruce trees 3 ft high, sedums that I use in pots on the terrace in summer and odds and ends of perennials that I can use to fill in holes when plants die in the Perennial Garden.
Homeowners can construct a temporary coldframe using haybales as walls and old storms door as covers.  In spring and fall keep an eye on the coldframe so it doesn’t overheat. In fact don’t put the covers on until things freeze which is probably in December.   Translucent covers are probably the answer to that problem.  Expensive plants (like the bonsai trees that a coworker takes care of here) can be further protected by putting sand around the individual pots in the coldframe.
Winter’s coming but we have a respite this week and I am trying to take advantage of it.
Bye now, Judy

With Halloween right around the corner we are seeing all kinds of scary stuff; themes relating to goblins, jack-o-lanterns, graveyards…

We have a  graveyard here!  It’s not the scary  Halloween type of graveyard, but a flower bulb graveyard.

In this area outside, we plant all of the lily bulbs we grow out of season in the greenhouse that are left over from various projects or those that get returned to us after they are done flowering.

I just can’t bring myself to throw them away or even compost them, so I give them a  “decent burial” in the bulb cemetery that’s located in an out of the way corner. Since it used up most of its energy blooming while in a little pot, some times it takes a couple of years for a bulb to build up enough strength to bloom again. I’ve been doing this for at least 4 years.  It’s always fun to see what new flower will be blooming from one year to the next. 

Even  now, during Halloween season, the old Easter Lilies are still blooming!

They seem to have shook off the frosts we have had so far. It won’t be long until they finally give in to the cold weather and take a long winter’s nap.

Bob

The Aloe vera plant has been popular for decades as a balm or salve used to treat minor burns, cuts, sunburn and other maladies. Every household should have an Aloe plant as part of their first-aid kit.

You can do your part to spread the good news about Aloe by dividing your plants and giving them away to folks who don’t have an Aloe yet. It’s very easy to do.

As an Aloe plant grows, it forms small plantlets or off-shoots around the base of the main stem. They may or may not have roots. These can be gently pulled apart from the main plant and transplanted into new pots.

In this post I’m using an old Aloe that needed to be renewed. The same process is used for making divisions of an Aloe that might not be this far gone. Here we go…

Start by getting a potting mix together. I like to use  fairly coarse potting mix to which I add sand, fine gravel and other grit to help the mix drain water well.  Aloe doen’t like to be in a soggy pot.

In this example, where the plant has grown too long between re-potting, the Aloe has developed a long, undesirable stem with a lot of dead leaves.

Fix this by cutting the stem an inch or so below the green active part of the plant. Peel off all of the “onion skin” until you reach the stem itself. Also, remove  any dead or dying leaves. The stem has dormant root buds that will sprout to form new roots to support the newly separated plant. A dormant bud can be seen just below the pencil point. If you rub your finger over the stem, the bumps you feel are the root buds.

Then just fill a pot (be sure it has a drain hole in the bottom) with your potting mix and insert the prepared Aloe cutting into the soil. Water the new plant and that is it.  You now have a new Aloe plant that will soon take hold in it’s new home. Here is An Aloe I transplanted a few weeks ago.  Look how nicely the roots are growing.

You now have a plant that can be given away as a gift.  Everyone loves Aloe !

To use Aloe as a treatment for an injury, cut a leaf from your plant. Slit the leaf open and apply the jelly-like juice to your injury. You’ll feel relief immediately.

It’s medicine you can grow right on your window sill!

Bob

A few days ago Judy and I decided to replenish  our grape jelly supply. Of course to do that, you need grapes. As I was getting out the  kettles,sugar and pectin, Judy went out to pick grapes.

She had almost a basketful when out of the corner of her eye she was startled by an alarming sight, a hornet’s nest just inches away  from her head!

After regaining her composure, she realized there was no activity around the nest at all.

Apparently an animal, most likely a skunk, had torn into the nest looking for hornet larvae to eat. By now, all of the hornets were long gone.

Look at both photos and you will see that the hornets built their nest right on a grapevine.  As the nest grew larger, it engulfed the grapes until the grapes themselves became part of the nest.  You can see the grapes ripening both inside and outside of the nest!

Working outside in your garden, you never know what wonder of nature you are going to find next!

And, yes, we did go on to make a couple of batches of jelly.

Bob

One of the annual flower color combinations that did well together this season is a blue and gold patch in a skinny bed two feet deep and ten feet long.  It has a medium dark blue Salvia with the varieity name of ‘Gruppenblau’  (which is German and must mean some kind of blue) in the back of the bed.  With a medium green coarse leaf and tall  (24 -36 inch) wand like spikes covered with small two lipped petaled flowers, this blue salvia is at the top of my list of favorite flowers.  Last year we saved seeds from it from plants that were taller than the rest and had slightly bigger flowers.  That’s what I planted in this spot and was rewarded with all of these plants being about 36 inch tall.  Even the stems of the flower are tinged with blue.  It is very striking.

In front of the salvia is another favorite flower called Melampodium ‘Showstar’.  this is the combo to plant if you want no maintenance!  Healthy, full, rounded, 20 inch tall, lots of yellow gold 1 inch daisy blossoms.  It has no disease and a great shape.  The salvia’s tall and spikey shape complements the round full and shorter Melampodium.    Both of them are still at peak bloom , have never needed deadheading and the leaves of both are still looking fresh and bright green.  These colors look great with the goldenrods and the purple asters of the fall season.

Behind me as I sit on the bench is a Monarch nectaring on a white phlox called ‘David’.  This is one of the best phlox - it’s resistant to mildew and is always upright with a clean green look.  Behind the phlox is a patch of Joe Pye Weed 6 feet tall.  Bees and butterflies love Joe Pye, too.

White Phlox 'David' is at the top of the photo.

Today since it is almost October would be a good day to go out and pull any poor looking plants and compost them.  we have been cleaning up around our beds and cultivating the bare patches when we pull anything out.  It makes this rest of the bed look even better.

That’s it for today.  I am going to go out and enjoy this beautiful weather while it lasts!

bye for now, Judy

Here we are in late summer, most of the flowers of the season have faded.  That means the honey bees have to work harder for their nectar.

I was watering the outdoor potted plants this afternoon and noticed the bees “working” the flowers of our Leonotis (Staircase Plant).  Usually I don’t see any bees on this plant but today was different.

The honey bees were seaching for nectar. Some were flying franticaly from flower to flower, while others were spending some time at each blossom.

Looking closer, I noticed that the “frustrated” bees (the ones flying from flower to flower) were trying to get nectar from the tip of the elongated flowers. (Please excuse the out of focus shot, it’s pretty hard to convince a bee to stay still for a picture)

While those working calmly and deliberately were gathering nectar from the base of the flower.

Looking closer at the flower, I discovered that the petals of a Leonotis flower are wrapped in such a way that it forms a funnel shape.

If a honey bee tries to get nectar from the tip, it finds that it can’t reach the base of the flower where the nectar is stored.  The flower is too long for the bee to stretch her tongue that far.

A smart bee learns that where the flower petals overlap, a small crack is formed at the seam near the base of the flower. This is where she inserts her tongue and is able to easily gather the nectar.

This was a very intriguing display of honey  bee behavior.  I could have watched it for hours, but I was running out of time and had much more watering to do.

 So, I just continued on with my work and let the bees carry on with theirs.

Bob