As the Garden Grows

What's blooming today?


You are here: Home / Archives for In The Garden / Blooming today

My garden is getting it’s Fall colors

by

It looks like my garden is beginning to get it’s fall colours. I believe my roses are starting to go through their last bloom of the year … wait, what am I talking about – my roses often bloom right up until Christmas!

Nah … well my Browned Eyed Susans and Phlox David are certainly on the way out, however, just as those plants are winding down, others are beginning to shine.

For example, my Toad Lilies are covered in buds and I expect I’ll have blooms next week. I’ll also have blooms on my three Monkshood in the next week or two as well.

My Sedum are already changing color and looking lovely:

Sedum blooms

The large potted Chrysanthemums that I purchased at Costco at the end of August are blooming away too:

chrysanthemum flower blooms

Aren’t they lovely?

My Cosmos have been blooming all summer, but this one looked so pretty the other day and it happened to have a bug on one of it’s petals as well – can you spot it?

Cosmo flower

How is your garden doing this month? Is it changing as the temperatures change? Tell me what’s blooming.






A bad reaction to tomato plants

by

My garden is growing beautifully as usual this summer. It’s been quite hot, especially in July so the plants seem to have stopped growing, but that’s ok, they all seem to be healthy.

My tomatoes are growing like weeds. I have four Sweet 100’s tomato plants that are covered in tiny green tomatoes. I can’t wait for them to ripen so that we can have a taste.

I also have five regular sized tomato plants – a variety of patio tomatoes and Early Girl Tomatoes and each of them have several large tomatoes on them in various shades ranging from green to almost red. We’ve already had about four ripe red tomatoes from one of the plants already and they were lovely. Yum.

Unfortunately earlier this evening I seem to have had a reaction to the large tomato plants. I noticed that the tomato plant vines were flopping over so I got some bamboo stakes and some plastic green tape and started staking the tomato plants and within seconds my hands and arms were on fire – burning and itching.

I’ve never had a reaction like that to tomato plants before. I knew that the leaves and plants could be irritating to the skin but I’d never experienced any problems. I had been working with my roses earlier and I had some scratches on my hands and arms so maybe that’s why the reaction was so bad … but man … I can still feel some burning! I had to go inside and take a Benadryl in the hopes that it would calm the reaction down. If I’m still feeling the itching and burning on my skin at bedtime I’ll put some hydracortizone cream on my hands and arms. Luckily I happen to have some prescription cream.

Have any of you ever had a problem with touching tomato plants in the past? Is it an allergy or just a bad irritation? I have had tomatoes come up in allergy tests but I can still eat them most of the time.

BTW Don’t forget to also check out my other gardening blog Organic Gardening Tips. I’d love to have you come visit me over there too!

My garden’s beautiful this month

by

At the beginning of this month I wasn’t sure how well my garden was going to do this summer.

You see, we had my neighbors putting in a new fence on one side, and the neighbors on the other side don’t take care of their yard at all so there’s always weeds creeping into our yard from their side, so the month started out in battle mode and it didn’t look good.

I’m quite happy to report that after several weeks of giving our garden some tender loving care – ie lots of compost, mulch, planting new plants in the bare spots, making up my special alfalfa tea to fertilize the garden beds and so on … the plants are looking quite happy.

I’ve actually been out in the garden taking quite a few pictures in the last week, maybe an extra 200 pictures! You see we just got a new cellphone. It’s a Nokia N8 and it has a 12 mpg camera inside it and it takes fabulous pictures and video! I was going to post an HD video that I took with the phone in this post but for some reason I’m having trouble posting it to Youtube. Youtube keeps saying it’s going to take about five hours to upload a 7 minute video. Crazy! So for now … I’ll just post a few pictures and I’ll try to find a way to get my garden tour video in another post soon.

Here are some lovely White Petunias. I always put a few Petunias in hanging baskets near my bird feeders. They help attract more birds, even hummingbirds if I plant red or pink ones.

06282011234

Another flower that’s blooming like crazy right now is this Octavia Hill Rose, isn’t it pretty?

Octavia Hill Rose

My Lavender plants are just beginning to bloom. I believe I have 7 or 8 Lavender plants scattered throughout my garden beds. The ones in the sunniest spots are flowering the most right now, but the others will catch up quickly I’m sure.

Lavender

I also have several Clematis vines in both my front and back yard garden beds. This lovely pink/red clematis flower is one that grows on a trellis at the front of my house. The plant climbs along the trellis about 12 feet up the wall. It’s beautiful when it’s in bloom.

06262011132

What’s blooming in your garden this month? Is your garden just gorgeous right now? I know I’m loving mine at this time because I have so many roses in bloom that whenever I walk outside all I smell is lovely old rose fragrance. It’s beautiful.

Meta