My Half Acre of Paradise

I planted green beans last week on the 23rd. I hope there is still enough time for them to grow before fall frosts. I think it’ll work — they’re supposed to ripen in 60 days.

Yesterday (the 26th), I trimmed the roses to get rid of all the spent bud growth. This photo shows how the wind was blowing in a cool little storm we had last night, but you can also see the shorter, trimmed rose hedge. Hopefully, we’ll see a good rebloom on them in three weeks when we have all of my employees over for a barbecue.

Today, I sprayed Ortho Max all over the flowerbeds and on the corn to stop a grasshopper infestation. I’d hate to get back from vacation and find that the darned hoppers had eaten the silk off the corn ears like they did a few years ago! The first batch of corn is starting to create tassels on top now.

I weeded all through the corn patch and around the tomatoes and zucchinis. Also did the back flowerbed one more time yesterday before our trip.

The raspberries are still producing, but it’s tapering off quite a bit now. We got a moderate harvest of them today, and when we get back from vacation, it’ll probably be all over. Our neighbor is going to pick some while we’re gone, I think.

Our strawberries are heading into a second wave of production now. They’re doing fairly well.

The zucchini squash plants are getting large now, and there are a bunch of flowers forming. Only a few look like the female flowers right now (they have a mini squash at their base), so I hope some more appear or that I’m wrong about which ones are female.

I’ve tried to raise maybe a dozen Japanese maple seedlings over the past two seasons, and almost all have died. I’m down to only one left now — one just died this week. I don’t know if I’m giving them too much water or not enough. Or if they need more humidity or more shade, or some fertilizer, or what. All those cool little seedlings I grew last year died; most of them because I left them outside too long at the start of winter.

So, I posted in the maples forum at GardenWeb.com to see if I can get some advice. I’ll follow up here with their advice soon.

After seeking input last year on getting my Pink Simplicity roses to bloom better, I decided to do two things this year:

1. Give them a lot more water. I’ve been putting a soaker hose on them for an hour or two once a week, sometimes skipping a week, but trying for once a week. I’ve been doing this since early April, when they first began leafing out. I also opened up some drip emitters that I had shut off before, because I had thought back then that they were getting too much water. This advice to give more water came from folks on the Gardenweb.com rose forum when I showed them photos of the little flowerbuds drying up and falling off. The consensus was that our dry air here was causing the shrubs to prematurely abort those buds at a joint where they are later meant to separate from the plant after the flowers are spent.
2. Give them more fertilizer. I’ve been spraying them with Miracle-Gro about once a week, missing a week here and there. It’s just a quick wetting of the leaves with the fertilizer, using it as a foliar feeding, not a soil soaking.

It’s working fairly well, because they’re now all blooming, including two that get shaded by my nectarine tree, which have almost never bloomed in the past. It still took a long time for the first bloom wave — it didn’t happen until just this last week or two. But there are many, many flowerbuds still developing, and it looks like I’ll have a strong, continued bloom season. I’m still disappointed that they grow so tall before they bloom. I cut them back to around two feet high in the spring, but they still got six feet tall again before blooming. Here are some photos from this week:

These pink flowers are Lavatera tauricensis (see an earlier post with info about the name being in doubt). I transplanted them to this backyard flowerbed in spring 2007, I think. Now that they’re established, they’ve grown well and are flowering like crazy. I love this plant, because it keeps flowering all summer long, even when it’s producing seeds.

I’ve given away a lot of these seeds, but people seem to have quite a bit of trouble getting them to germinate. I’ve done it before, but it did take some work and patience.

Siberian Iris and Dianthus grationapolitanus, both from June. This Dianthus is a very small and slow to grow. I’ve lost a bunch of them and only have a few left.

Salvia nemorosa ‘East Friesland’ and Geranium ‘Johnson’s Blue.’ The salvia is awesome and will rebloom repeatedly when cut back. The geranium probably needs to be moved to full sun, because it’s leggy and weak in the shady spot I have it in.

‘Pink Simplicity’ rose and Dianthus deltoides ‘Brilliancy.’ The dianthus is doing quite well — I have perhaps 10 of these. I will write another post about the roses, because they are doing better this year than in past years and it’s the result of some different care I’m giving them.

This is ‘Steve’s Yellow’ (lol) — my own selection of a yellow Gaillardia that I’ve grown from cuttings. Also my lavenders are in full flower now.

Cherries!!! We just picked all of them on Saturday, July 5th, and we got two huge bowls full of them. Very nice. No worms, either, so my spraying worked better this year. Also, on the right are some flowers from our Linden tree. When this tree flowers, it smells SO good!

This is part of the front flowerbed, which I redesigned last fall. The Lamium is growing well in front, and everything else is filling in pretty well, too. The ‘Stella D’Oro’ daylilies are blooming, but they still could be better. I need to fertilize them regularly, which I haven’t done well, mostly because it’s inconvenient to get a hose to them.

Here are a Delphinium, some Hostas (and other things), and a large Foxglove. All in the front flowerbed. It’s turning out to be a pretty good flower year at the Kroes home!

One of the things I love about my Ruby Meidiland roses is that they bloom profusely right around the Fourth of July. They make a nice foreground to the flag that hangs on my house behind them. You can’t see the flag in this photo, because it was taken on June 29th, but the blooms are still there this week and it looked really cool with the flag. You can also see my front flowerbed here, which is growing nicely after all the rearranging I did last fall.

Here’s a closer shot of the rose blooms.

Just look at this Larkspur — doesn’t it seem to have an iridescent shine to you? And it’s so BLUE! It’s tough to find real blues in flowers. I admit this looks just a little more purple in real life, but this photo was not “photoshopped” or adjusted in any way (besides resizing). It does have an intense blue color in the garden. These are offspring several generations after having the ‘Rocket’ variety of Larkspur in a wildflower mix in my backyard. I can’t be certain that they’re still ‘Rocket’ since some plants along the way could have been cross-pollinated by another variety from somewhere nearby.

My ‘Ville de Lyon’ Clematis has now been in the ground for four years, and it’s true that they are slow to establish. The one on the other side of the arbor finally died all the way this year. Previously, it was only “mostly dead” (wasn’t that a line from The Princess Bride?). But this one is doing quite well! I was worried for a while that it wasn’t competing with the birch tree roots very well, but it seems to have found its niche in this spot.

This photo was taken on June 22nd, and it flowered pretty much all of June. Still has a few now, and I hope it will rebloom again this season.

This is Rosa ‘Nearly Wild’ - a very cool small rose that I planted up among my aspen trees. This one is only about 18″ tall, and it’s been in the ground for two years now. These photos were taken on June 22nd, when it was in full bloom. Its blooms have faded now, but I believe there will be more waves of them soon.

When I pruned my Blue Arctic Willow this spring, I took some of the branches and stuck them in a bucket of water. They root very easily. I have asked a few neighbors if they want some of these starts, but no takers so far. I think they’re a cool shrub. I’ll plant several of them along my back fence line soon, although it may not be a good time to do that with all the heat we’re having now.