Good morning, and I'll miss June when it's gone. Welcome to Saturday Morning Garden Blogging.
June has been beautiful here in Denver — enough heat to get the veggies going, but no consecutive days of record-breaking highs. Regular waves of thunderstorms have kept night time temperatures in the 50s — a little on the cool side for tomatoes, but lovely for the peas. The Tall Telephone shelling peas are now ripe enough to eat and seldom make it from the veggie patch to the kitchen — peas straight from the vine to the mouth are too rare a treasure to waste by cooking them!
And Zasu loves laying in the shade at the base of the pea vines on warm afternoons.
The only lack we've had is moisture: the rain part of the thunderstorms have missed my neighborhood, so I've had to water the grass and veggies.
Last week in the comments Joes Steven asked if gladiola bulbs from last year were still good. The answer is yes.
Really, it's amazing how badly one can abuse some bulbs and have them still be viable. For example, this photo: a hyacinth which is currently blooming in my back flower beds. Last winter I didn't water a couple of containers of forced hyacinth bulbs enough, so they sprouted but didn't develop all the way. I shoved them in the ground last spring, not expecting them to bloom but hoping they would finish sprouting leaves and be able to gather energy to bloom next year. I'm shocked that they bloomed.
And I discovered a few hyacinth bulbs left over from last winter that are still firm, and well sprouted. I'm going to hold off planting those for a little while — I think August would be better. Perhaps they'll bloom in September with the fall crocus.
Nah. Not going to happen.
As I collected seeds from the corn poppies, mat daisies and blue flax this week, I started thinking about how colonies of self-seeding annuals establish themselves. Have you ever noticed that with a lot of plants it seems very difficult to get the first plant established, but once it manages to self-seed an off spring or two the growth in the population is rapid?
Part of that, of course, is just the mathematics of propagation. But I think we get a little bit of self-selection going, too — those seeds most suited to the particular site survive, and their offspring are more likely to survive; and after two or three years you have plants that are better suited to their environment. At least I hope so — I finally got the first volunteer chocolate flower this year, and I want a few more!
That's what's happening here. What's going on in your gardens?