Plant Swap!

Last year we started a new gardening tradition: a plant swap party. At the end of the summer we invite people over for a barbecue and ask them to bring a plant or plants from their garden to share and then we all swap. We started it in part because we had too many irises and needed to split up some crowns. But, the party is fun too and we enjoy showing people around the gardens. It's a pretty neat idea and we've gotten some really interesting and lovely plants from people. One of my favorites is Lady's Mantle which is a low-growing flower with sectioned leaves that catch the rain or dew and make them sparkle. The plant is unusual, and I love the feathery, light-yellow flowers it puts out.

This year we had bad luck with the weather - cold and rainy. But Kevin dug up our plants anyway and we had our glasses of wine on the front porch. My prize for this year is some purple coneflower donated by my friend Lynne. We didn't have any and I've always wanted some. This year we gave away a lot of tall phlox, thinning out most of our flower beds. This will be good for the plants and give us room in the gardens to space things out and show off the lower growing plants like the mini-daylilies we bought this year.

I'm sad that fall has arrived, but this is a nice end-of-season tradition. It gives me something to look forward to in the spring.

End of August

We got this catmint from a neighbor. She wasn't kidding when she said it would take over.

Say it ain't so, summer. How can it be the end of August already? I do love Fall, but as I get older Winter becomes more and more depressing to me. And so these late summer days are incredibly bittersweet. We've had a lovely summer, full of warm sunny days and just enough rain to keep everyone happy. The gardens have achieved a blowsy, over-grown state that almost defies weeding. At this point I just let the vegetable garden go --- not that we were ever terribly diligent about the weeds! And the flower beds are so full that the weeds almost can't compete. The phlox are still trying to show off, and the black eyed susans are everywhere. The obedient plants are about to get into the act, though, and they've spread so far that soon they will be the dominant bloom. Oddly enough the hydrangea bush just produced a couple of flowers, and I'm not sure what to make of that. I guess they don't want summer to end, either, and think that we could fool it into thinking it's June with a couple of crazy blue blooms. I'm going along with it.

Turnips?

Planting the vegetable garden this spring was a bit of a scramble. With Oliver's two-year-old "help," we had to get a little creative sometimes in keeping him occupied and getting things in the ground. This has manifested itself in the nearly grown garding in quite a few ways. For one thing, there are random sunflowers in several spots throughout the garden. And, most rows have "walk-throughs" where the seedlings just weren't tough enough to survive Oliver's wandering.  The funniest thing, though is that we planted a lot of things that I couldn't remember planting. We have what I think are delicata variety summer squash, but I'm just not sure that's what they are. And this week I realized that we must have put in some odd varieties of beets. Seeing some non-beetlike greens early on, I had assumed they were swiss chard and happily eaten the greens several times. Then, I noticed the bulbs. Huh. That's not swisschard. So, I asked my sister and she said maybe they were turnips! Ah, turnips. I don't remember planting turnips, but whatever. I dug a few up (what the heck do you do with turnips?) and peeled them and oven roasted them. Kevin and I cut into a few on Sunday night ... and ... they tasted like beets. Delicious. And I'm pretty sure that's what they are. I think.

Heat wave

I love Black-Eyed Susans.

We're in the midst of a string of super-hot and muggy days and I'm hoping it encourages our tiny tomato plants to beef up a little. The vegetable garden looks good, but we started with some pretty runty tomatoes and they're not making much headway. It's discouraging to me because fresh tomato sandwiches are one of my favorite garden foods. But, we may have to buy them this year. Another goof we made was to buy pole beans rather than bush beans and, while they look great, we need to figure out a way to let them climb. The bee balm and black-eyed-susans are starting to bloom and so the gardens are beginning to show their colors. The black caps are ripening and Oliver has eaten all of them right off the bush, none have made it to the house. But, the blackberries will provide more than enough for canning! Ah summer, I wish it lasted longer.