Vegetable Garden Progress

This is my own first vegetable garden. I had worked vegetable gardens for clients but that was about 10 years ago.
On March 26 I planted pumpkins, tomatoes, chives, basil, strawberries, artichokes, radishes, carrots, zucchini, cucumbers and baby bottle gourds.

5 pumpkins seeds sprouted and 3 pumpkins grew. It was fun watching them get bigger. But the foliage wilted EVERY day despite my watering every other day in my sandy soil. A couple weeks ago the foliage started to get crispy and die back leaving brown vines sprawling across our backyard. Our summer wasn't THAT bad until August arrived with it's oven like heat! Last weekend I noticed that 2 of the pumpkins were rotting! Ugh! :-(.

The 2 tomatoes have produced nicely but are looking crappy now. I left the radishes in too long. The cucumbers were tough. The zucchini stopped producing about a month ago. The chives are doing well. The carrots never sprouted. I was taught that one could grow them any time. But maybe they do better in cooler weather. Strawberries are spreading. I lost one of my 2 artichokes because I moved it remembering how huge they grow. The basil is still growing like crazy! The gourds are very happy and have about 10 gourds on them!

Last evening I ripped out the pumpkins and zucchini.

I'm not the best vegetable eater but I'm a huge salad lover! I'm really looking forward to planting cool weather veggies like spinach and many different varieties of lettuce and carrots. I know broccoli gets aphids and cabbage gets worms. Maybe I'll try snow peas.

I'm still learning and will adjust next year from my mistakes. How did your vegetable garden grow this summer?

Autumn Evidence!

I hate summer!  I hate working out in it and sweating in the heat.  Every year I look forward to Autumn, when the sweltering ends and I don't have to get up super AM early to go to work to beat the heat.  Today I SAW evidence that summer is near the end, Floss Silk or Chorisia trees are starting to bloom!  The first photo I took in Glendale, the others are lifted from the internet.  

 I will always call them Chorisia  (KOR-EE-SEE-a) but THEY(the botanists) recently changed the botanical name from Chorisia speciosa to Ceiba speciosa.  Whatever!   The tree's flowering signals the change from summer to autumn!   Chorisia are native to South America and grow very well here in SoCal.   Research says they'll grow to 80 feet but I have only seen them grow to about 50 feet here.   The large pink flowers can be between 4-6 inches in size.   

They have wicked thorns on their trunks to store water in dry times. And those trunks are green with abundant chlorophyl to be able to photosynthesize even when the tree is leafless.  That makes sense because I have often seen these trees confused.   They're supposed to lose all their leaves in winter, put them on in spring, and flower in autumn. But sometimes they'll be half in flower and half in leaf, or all flowers and no leaves or any other unusual combinations.  Older trees are often grayish.  

After flowering they produce a large avocado-ish looking seed pod.  Inside are seeds held together by kapok(white fluffy stuff).  Pillows once were stuffed with kapok here(they might still do so in South America).  Now mostly polyester fiberfill is used. The kapok helps the wind catch the seeds to blow them around, thereby spreading the tree to more locations.  

Enjoy the flowering of the Chorisia tree.  But don't slip on the flowers.  To me it is more than pretty because I know that summer is almost over! 

Greenhouse or Not?

This will hopefully be the only time I post about a weed. Remember my bottle border of 680 wine bottles? Well it seems that one bottle(I hope it's not a trend) wants to be a little greenhouse! See the weed growing up inside it? I think it's a spurge. Let's hope it cooks itself dead so I don't have to do border surgery to remove it!

680 Planted Bottles

I realized that I forgot to post this here(posted on Facebook already).  I finally finished my wine bottle garden edging about a week and a half ago!  I saw a photo on Pinterest (find me there Aprille at Pinterest) of wine bottle edging in the garden and thought it looked really cool. I bet people used to do it in the 60's or 70's.   I  began gathering bottles in Feb.  My oldest niece Heather works in a restaurant and started saving them for me. I'd pick up about 30 or so every 2 weeks.  I had to soak them and scrape the labels off because I like how they look better label-less. Also my friends Gregory(see a link to Gregory's photo blog to the left) & Joey have really been into wine lately and saved bottles for me.  I got some from my friends Kelly and Jen and one of my clients Sharon K.  It took 5 months to amass, soak and plant 680 bottles!  I can't tell you how many linear feet that was because it was curvy and counting them was enough for me!  We live on a corner.  So I went across 2 front sides of the house, down the neighbor's fence, across the street side, around the corner, across the other street and up to the second walkway.  It involved digging a trench and "planting" the bottles upside down.  It was fairly easy with our sandy soil.  But about 4 times I had to inset a rock instead of a bottle because of tree roots.  If you look closely there's ONE cobalt blue bottle that a neighbor left for me.  It was from Vodka.  But I love cobalt blue so much that I saved it for near the end.   I think it looks funky and fun :-)  As you can see, I still have lots of space between the plants for them to grow.  And I'll do one more brick edged center circle that includes our Deodar Cedar tree.  I haven't decided what to put as the path which at the moment is dirt. Brick is too expensive. NO GRASS!  I'm leaning toward decomposed granite.   We'll see in the fall when it's not too hot.

Fairy Garden or Cute Overload!

Have you ever seen a miniature garden?  Sometimes they are called Fairy Gardens.  I think they are adorable!   My friend Donna recommended a speaker to come give a talk on Fairy Gardens to one of my garden clubs last Oct.  Her name is Kailay and she has a website called Small Weeds.com  There is a gallery of photos and she sells mini accessories too.  She demonstrated how to plant a miniature garden and sold lots of stuff. 

I planted my own mini garden late last year.  But it was small and not photo worthy then.   I was reminded today of that when I stopped on my way home at Sheridan Gardens, a nursery in Burbank.  They had inside their shop a section with Fairy Garden accessories.  I refrained from buying because it's my poor time of year and I have enough stuff for several more mini garden pots that I bought from Kailay.  So, I just cleaned mine up today and added another little plant(that I hacked off of my big Meulenbeckia).  I think it still needs one more but I wanted to share.  

The tall plants(or mini trees) are:  Comprosma "Tequila Sunrise" or C. "Rainbow Surprise"(I honestly can't remember which) on the left, Serissa foetida "flora pleno" which has tiny double white flowers on the right and is used as bonzai often.  The groundcover on the right is Dymondea margareta.  I always think it looks like a miniature Gazania.   The little plant on the left is Meuhlenbeckia axillaris nana.  It makes a cute little green matt.   That is not to be confused with Meuhlenbeckia complexa or Wire Vine.  I have that too but it is very viney.  I had some Irish Moss planted there too but it wasn't happy and died.  It seems moss only grows where you DON'T want it.  

I used two little fence pieces, two chairs and a table to which Kailay glued two coffee cups and saucers. TOO CUTE! There is a small birdbath on the left in the back.   I used some small bits of flagstone and Rick's donation was a little lavender amethyst rock.  

Fairy Gardens are easy.  I just have to be delicate when I water it and try to not knock over the furniture ;-)   Try planting one yourself.   There are a ton of mini gardens on the web.  See my board on Pinterest miniature-houses-gardens here.   Happy Fairy Gardening! 

  

Pink Phlox

I know I shouldn't have gone to the nursery. I always tell my clients that "smart gardeners don't plant in the heat of the summer". I don't even do planting jobs again until Oct. But I was out that way and stopped at one of my favorites, La Crescenta Nursery a few days ago. There are a few plants for which I am still searching since I had to leave them at my old house. I didn't find THEM, but did find this beautiful pink Phlox. I've been growing the white form Phlox paniculata David for about 10 years. I got it from a client I used to have and actually posted about it here last August. You just don't see them in SoCal very often.

The flowers rise up to about 3 ft in summer and bloom several times on the same stems. It starts to look crappy in late Autumn and needs cutting almost to the ground.

I tried to talk myself out of this pink one. But after going back to it 3 times and telling myself that one has to buy unusual things when one sees them, I bought one! I'll keep it in it's pot and plant it in the garden when it's cooler.

Daisy

Who doesn't like Daisies? There are many different kinds from Asters and Chrysanthemums to Euryops and Dahlias to Marguerites. Even Marigolds are related! All are in the compositae family and are native to Asia and Europe. This is a Shasta Daisy or Chrysanthemum maximum. There are many kinds of Shastas, tall short or double flowered. I'm not a big fan of the tall growing varieties because they grow all floppy when in flower and lay down. This is my first Shasta Daisy in my own garden and it's a short variety. They like full sun and bloom in Summer. Like mums they need to be cut almost completely down after flowering but always grow back. They make great cut flowers even with short stems. Plant a Shasta and your garden will be as "Fresh as a daisy!"