Gardening by Mistake

I’m slow getting this last batch of pics up, but better late than never.

It was so hot the day we were there that this guy couldn’t be bothered even when the flash went off in his face.

More pictures from our recent visit to Lake Shawnee.

Last Saturday, our family spent some time at the gardens of Lake Shawnee in Topeka, Kansas. What a gem! As I understand it, these gardens were done entirely by volunteers. They did a fantastic job!

Enjoy!

I mentioned a week ago or so that my young talinum have started blooming. They are an unusual plant for me (my first succulent). I had guessed that they were about one and a half inches tall but, after looking at them, they are maybe 3 inches tall (excluding the flower stalks). I promised a picture of the flowers, so here’s a picture of the plant and the flowers. (These are in a single small 3-inch pot).

I had a minute to get out to the garden this evening to look around. I ignored the flood-ravaged area and just concentrated on enjoying the other parts of the garden. A week ago tonight I spent a considerable amount of time weeding my B bed in the rose garden.  I had it looking fairly decent. Tonight, wow. It looked like I hadn’t pulled a weed in a month. I guess that’s what a week of rain does for weeds.

Among the weeds there were some pretty sights. Here are just a couple:

From C bed:  coreopsis ‘Zagreb’ in the foreground, penstemon digitalis ‘Husker Red’ to the right and up a bit. Above the ‘Zagreb’ on the left is a shasta daisy (I’d have to look up the name for it, Snow Lady, I think), and consuming everything in its path is a monstrous hardy geranium which I will be dividing as soon as I figure out how. The last time, it took two of us to get it out of the ground and an axe to chop it up.

This is asclepias syriaca in bloom. It’s a butt-ugly plant, but the blooms are something else. Everything goes crazy for them, bees and beetles of all kinds. They have a wonderful fragrance, too. A friend across town has monarch caterpillars covering her asclepias. I checked and I didn’t see any. I always have them heavily in August. I think it’s odd that she’s got them now and I’ll have them in 2 months.

This is is a volunteer echinacea purpurea plant. What a show it’s getting ready to put on! It sprouted on the outside of B bed, but I left it there. Every year I intend to move it a few feet so it’s in the bed instead and yet there it is, probably 4 years old now. Now it’s so big I’m reluctant to move it!

The rain we had this morning was incredible. I don’t know if I’ve ever seen it rain that hard for so long. The berm behind our yard was not up to the task, so we had a torrent of water rushing through the immediate backyard (good thing the dogs were inside!) and my rose garden was under so much water in places you couldn’t see the cinder blocks of the raised beds. All that water was moving fast as my garden is on a slope.

The drainage channel at the street which leads to a creek was insufficient for the volume of water, so it backed up into our entire front yard and then it actually covered the road several inches deep. The pictures don’t do it justice, but here they are anyway. On the picture of the street, everything on the street to the right of the tree is under water. The other picture shows part of our backyard.

And we’re still supposed to get more heavy rains this weekend. Not good.

It’s going to be a while before I can mow!

Monday, I was surprised to discover this among some weeds:

I thought it looked like a gentian of some kind. I’ve never grown them before and in the 10 years I’ve had this garden I’ve never seen one in the garden before, although there are some native gentian species. What is funny about this is that I tried to grow some gentian from winter sowing. I didn’t have any germinations, which was disappointing. And then this guy pops up!

I cannot tell which kind of gentian it is. I’d sure love it if someone could identify it for me. (Or if it’s not a gentian and you know it, I’d like to know that, too.)  Notice there are no leaves to help me identify it. Just one really long stem.

Here is what it looked like Wednesday evening.

Update:

The Name That Plant people over at GardenWeb tell me they don’t think this plant is a gentian. They think it’s a brodiaea. I’d say my plant looks a lot like those in many respects, but the stamens on mine look different. So I’m completely puzzled. I suppose it will have to be enough that I like the flowers and I’m happy to have it in my garden. I do appreciate the responses. They could be right; I just don’t know enough to be able to say for sure.

I added this own-root plant of Alexandre Girault last July. Right now it’s just a baby plant. City of York was once this size, too, and now it covers half the arbor.  Alexandre Girault is a once bloomer so its current bloom was my first chance to see it in person rather than in pictures. Unfortunately, I didn’t think to take pictures until after it had passed its prime (duh!), but this will help me to remember it until next year’s display.

I wanted something that would grow monstrously large like City of York on the opposite corner of the arbor. I also wanted something that wasn’t white like CoY. This is definitely both: it’s pink and it’s going to be every bit the arbor-eating rose bush that CoY is. These beautiful pink blooms are set off nicely by the silvery-gray weathered wood of the arbor and they will be very visible even to the street, which is quite a distance away. Now I just have to be patient for a few years until AG achieves some size.

I planted City of York in 2002. It was a small own-root rose. This is how it looked next to the back of the arbor three years later in 2005:

City of York, a once-blooming rambler, is in full, glorious bloom right now. Here’s how it looks today, five years later. You can see why I was so worried that our unusually harsh winter might have caused significant die back and a lesser show. Fortunately, that didn’t happen. The white blooms are City of York.

From the front of the arbor:

The back of the arbor. The bush covers 2 sides of the arbor at this point. Who knows how it will look in another few years.

The arbor is 8 feet tall and the rose canes rise another 2 feet above that.

And, finally…

The rose is highly fragrant and you can smell it for long distances away. Mmmmm!

Ever since I read about this last winter, I wanted to try making chive blossom wine vinegar for my in-laws. They like to experiment with new and gourmet recipes and always appreciate new things like an herbal wine vinegar.

The first step was to get out to the garden and retrieve several cups (unpacked) worth of chive blossoms that were fully open but not past their prime. I took a few that were mostly all the way open but not fully open yet, as well. How much of the stem to include wasn’t mentioned by any of the directions I found for this, so I ended up taking anywhere from none to about an inch. I figured the stems would only add to the chive flavor.

The next step was to rinse the blossoms off. It was frustratingly difficult to get the ants out of the blossoms. I rinsed and rinsed, would think I’d gotten them all, and then out would come a couple more ants. If you do this, you might submerge the blossoms and swirl them around in the water. I rinsed mine in a colander and in hindsight that wasn’t optimal. Once you are done rinsing, you’ll need to lay the blossoms out for drying. It’s important to dry them because extra water can apparently make the vinegar cloudy. (You’ll want to have the bottle you’ll use washed and dried prior to use, as well). I laid mine out on a couple of washcloths and then covered them with another and pressed gently.

I then poured the white wine vinegar into the container I was going to use and then put the chive blossoms in after it. I pushed the blossoms down into the vinegar, put a lid on the container and set it aside. If you do this, make sure you do not use metal because it will react with the vinegar. In my case I used a glass container with a plastic lid.

The directions I read varied in how long to set the vinegar aside. In my case, I wasn’t going to see my in-laws for quite a while after this weekend, so the time was determined for me. I started my chive blossom vinegar 9 days ago. In that time, as you can see, it has turned a lovely pink color from the blossoms.

Once you feel yours has steeped long enough, remove the old chive blossoms, put the vinegar in its final container and, if you like, put in a couple new chive blossoms for decoration. I didn’t do that here because the neck of the bottle is so narrow I didn’t think the blossoms would ever come out again.

The directions I read were contradictory on the steeping period. Some said to place the bottle in the sun, like sun tea. Others said to keep it in a dark place because sunlight could make it get cloudy. I split the difference and just kept it on a counter that doesn’t get direct sunlight. It seemed to work beautifully.