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Tidying up the garden on a nice fall day

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Do you ever just go in your garden and start chopping away at the plants?

Of course you do, most of you are gardeners. Naturally by chopping away I simply mean you see a dead branch on a rose bush or shrub, some dead leaves here and there on other plants, flowers that need to be dead headed and so on.

Sunday was on of those days for me.

I went into the garden in the early evening and it was 10 pm by the time I came back inside! It’s a good thing we have one of those big security lights at the back of the house to light up the yard!

Several of our roses were overgrown and needed pruning. That’s what got me started. As I made my way through the garden beds I found many flowers that had started to go to seed so I got some of the small jewelry bags that I keep on hand and collected the seeds.

I’m keep the little bags of seeds that I collected open slightly so all of the moisture can leave the bag. I’ve also got to remember to put a few grains of rice in the bag to absorb moisture as well. There’s nothing worse than collecting seeds, sealing them up and then having them go moldy because you didn’t store them properly or because they weren’t fully dry when stored.

When the seed baggies are totally dry I’ll take them and store them in a nice cool place. Usually that ends up being the coolest corner of my basement.

Have you been pruning any of your plants? Collecting seeds for next year?

Oh … I overworked myself. I’ve got an aching back. One of the woes of gardening!






The sun’s guarding my garden

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Do you decorate your garden?

I have a few ceramic and metal pieces scattered throughout the garden beds, on the fence or in this case on the wall of my enclosed back porch. I think my garden decor is tasteful and there’s only a few items scattered throughout the garden so it’s certainly not overwhelming. If anything is overwhelming in my garden it’s the roses.

My sun ornament is beside my green pole beans which really do grow on poles – bamboo poles that is. You can even see some green bean dangling beside the sun if you look closely. Perhaps my sun ornament is helping the beans grow?

I have cucumbers beside the beans and we finally got to pick a cucumber on Saturday. It was hiding behind several leaves and we surprisingly didn’t see it for a while. It’s close to two feet long and is at least 2.5 inches in diameter! It’s huge! Perhaps we’ll make some cucumber sandwiches later today. Mmmmm.

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Rows and Rows of Liatris flowers

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This weeks theme is Rows

Liatris

When you take a close look at many flowers or leaves you can see that there’s often a pattern to how it’s been formed.

I mean, take this Liatris stalk. When it’s in full bloom it just looks like a puffy floral stalk in the garden, but when you look a little more closely you’ll notice that the stalk is composed of many flower buds in tight rows. Each stalk must have at least 50 flowers on it.

I can’t remember if this Liatris was about to bloom or if it’s blooms were fading when I took this photo, I believe it was finishing up it’s bloom.

I have several clumps of Liatris throughout the garden. I plant five to 15 bulbs or corms (I can’t remember which they are at the moment) in a circular pattern so that when the individual plants grow they form a natural looking clump.

I’ve only been growing Liatris (Gay Feather) for a few years and I haven’t yet noticed if any of the bulbs have naturalized to produce more plants. Does anyone know if they naturalize?

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