Blooming Now

It’s a busy time for the garden. It’s doing well this year.

Angel wing begonia, on the patio with sparrow

Tradescantia 

Spigelia

Clematis and rose

Daylilies along the front walk

Red daylilies on side of house

Lilies. These were dug up and replanted for the gas company

Berry Land

My garden is riot of berries, ripe and not ripe, but ripe with potential. It has been a great spring. The birds and squirrels are having a fine old time, and so do I, watching them. I am so easily entertained.

Service berries. The dark ones can be popped right in my mouth

What’s ripe right now are the service berries (also known as shadbush), well known for being the first fruits of summer. Many years ago, I bought a bundle of what were basically shadbush sticks, and I plopped them in the ground all around the yard. I put several on the very steep slope between my house and the neighbor’s, outside my fence. Before this year, I never realized they had actually survived and turned into slender trees more than 10 feet tall, this year serving up a cornucopia of beautiful red berries. This is my view as I lounge on my patio. I’ve seen cardinals, robins, and catbirds pulling off a berry and eating it delicately. I’ve seen squirrels trying to hang on to the tiny end branches where the berries are, scarfing them down by the pawful. I’ve got another large service berry tree in the front of the house, but many of those berries are covered in what I’m told is “cedar apple rust”, a most un-appetizing fuzzy orange coating. (Serviceberry is a close relative of apples.)

The blueberry extravaganza 

It’s really hard to take great pictures of green berries in the midst of green leaves, so bear with me here. Green berries coming along include a spectacular load of blueberries along my front walk. Again, I planted several bushes several years ago. Most have survived, but almost all the berries come from a single giant bush that exploded with growth when the Big Tree fell two years ago and it started getting full sun. I have only once battled the birds and squirrels for the blueberries, and got enough to make a pie. That was ten years ago. I wrapped the bush in bird netting to do it, and those silly birdbrains got stuck inside the netting regularly. Also, the bush was a lot smaller size then. I’m trying to figure out if there is a way I can protect at least some of the berries for myself.  Last year, I ate a few blueberries as I passed by, but it seems the birds like them slightly less ripe than I do, so the berries tended to disappear before I wanted to eat them. Thinking...

Pagoda dogwood

I planted an unusual member of the dogwood family a long time back, the Pagoda Dogwood. It has small clusters of flowers, and the branches form horizontal tiers. The clusters turn into black berries that birds go nuts over. The problem with the two trees I have is that deer destroyed them both several times, variously eating them to the ground or killing them by rubbing off the bark with their itchy antlers. Now both trees are inside my fence and they are coming along nicely, one about my height and the other much taller. I expect these berries to ripen in about a month.

Apples!

Not a berry, but related, is my apple tree. I have one left, and from a distance it’s kind of sad and bedraggled. But close up, there are definitely small little apples coming along. I see this tree from my bedroom window, and again, I wonder if I’ll be able to save any of the apples. I never have yet, though the tree is more than a dozen years old.

I have three kinds of viburnums: arrowwood, mapleleaf, and cranberrybush. The arrowwoods are supposed to have black berries, but I’ve not seen many on my bushes. The mapleleafs have black berries as well.  The cranberrybushes have, as you might expect, red berries. All three sets of bushes seem to be producing nice crops this year. These I won’t try to eat — they are for the birds.

American cranberrybush 

Arrowwood 

Harpooned

Very sparse and lacy, hard to capture

I was weeding the sunny slope by my front steps when I felt a prickle. The prickle quickly turned into a myriad of little stabs. Every time I moved, more stabs. I realized that some new bunches of fairly ornamental grass that had sprung up spontaneously were festooning my pants and t-shirt. Ugh.

So the first thing I did, standing up in my bedroom to change my clothes, was to identify it. Blackseed needlegrass, Stipa avenaceum (Piptochaetium avenaceum), says iNaturalist, the coolest app around. Snap a pick and ask for an identification. It has been spot on when I’ve tried it locally. And “needlegrass” is exactly what it is. It’s native to much of the United States east of the Rockies.

I pulled about a 100 spears out of my clothes before tossing them in the laundry. I had to carefully pull each one out and then run my fingers around the inside of the fabric to see if any spearheads got left behind. Then I studied more about this odd pest. It has perfect little harpoons. It launches them, and they bury themselves in clothes (and presumably animal fur). They are really miraculous. Take a look at how well designed for the purpose they are.

This also gave me a chance to get out my specialized macro lens for an extreme closeup.

Look at the hooks behind the point!

I’ve been turning my mind to how to control this without getting stabbed by a thousand tiny cuts. I think hard surface tight weave clothes, as opposed to the soft cotton knits I wore yesterday, might be more resistant to the stabs.








And then this morning, I found some more spears on my sneakers. I was able to capture what the harpoon looks like when it’s buried in the target. What an admirably persistent and well adapted plant this is. Despite its capabilities, it is listed as disappearing in Indiana, Ohio, and Pennsylvania.

Harvest!

I've had more food from my garden already this year than in many previous years. I had lovely lettuce and arugula, planted from seed, in a single large pot. The lettuce has been less slug/bug/rabbit eaten than other lettuce I've tried recently. I finished it up, and ripped it all out by the roots, this weekend. I've put a tomato plant in the same pot, and moved the pot into more sun.

My big harvest this week was broccoli! I planted six plants from Home Depot back in March. By just dumb luck, the deer didn't come by before I got around to putting up the netting recently, and the plants got BIG! I've never successfully harvested broccoli before. I watched the big center heads get bigger and bigger, and worried about when to harvest. I got the first couple of clumps early last week - probably about 5-6 inches across each. That's a lot of broccoli! But then I realized the other four heads were about to flower, so I went for it big time! In fact, I should have picked them a couple of days earlier.

One way I fix cauliflower that makes it disappear quickly is to roast it, and I discovered this roast broccoli recipe from Jose Andres in one of my new cookbooks. Basically, you cut off the stems (reserving for another use) and roast the florets with slivers of garlic and a generous amount of olive oil. Truly, stupid-easy, and truly delicious!

Yesterday, I finished the last of the roasted broccoli in a salad with the last of my own lettuces. I'm finding I can overeat on vegetables - I define "overeating" as eating past the point of optimal fullness, to stuffed. Things could be worse, I suppose. I haven't had a serious ice cream attack in days.

Today, I had the well-cooked broccoli stems with rice, onions, and parmesan cheese in my own version of comfort food. It'll be a while before there is another harvest, though the broccoli plants may produce some viable small side shoot florets. I've got onions, chard, cucumber, zucchini, and two kinds of beans coming along, as well as two small tomato plants in pots. It's been a good summer for growing, so far. Sun, rain, and not too much humidity. The rotating of crops and fertilizing is also helping, I bet.