Strawberries and Roses galore!

Posted on June 25, 2022 by Mominthegarden

Hi there! You’re very welcome to my blog. This week’s summer solstice coincided with what finally felt like the start of summer in Ireland. Not to get too excited, but we hit 23 degrees Celsius – which is 73 degrees Fahrenheit. Not overly hot, but better than what we’d been having! 🙂 This was great news for our strawberries. A little bit of warmth was exactly what they needed. We’ve had several great harvest and the strawberries are so sweet.

June is typically the month for my roses to start showing off, too. The rose shrubs have been covered in buds and now those buds are finally open flowers. The bed is a beautiful mass of pink! Although I was quite late in applying it, this year I have used Uncle Tom’s Rose Tonic to help keep them healthy. It is a nature-identical plant food. A few of the plants tend to suffer from black-spot, which I’d love to prevent. We’ll see how they do. (Just a note that the product is pricey.)

The peony are still hanging on! My Sarah Bernhardt and Bowl of Beauty are the last two varieties in bloom. I couldn’t resist, and I created a large arrangement with them this week. I was quite pleased with it, with the added bonus of it smelling lovely, too!

I am joining The Propagator’s meme Six on Saturday. Feel free to have a visit of the other contributors, too!

Enjoy the tour!

In Peace,
Dana

1 – Strawberries! Remember when I said I’d give this bed one year to prove itself? Well, it did. We’ve had more than these three hauls and the strawberries have been large, firm and delicious. The covers that my husband built were great to keep the birds out and light enough to easily take off. Strawberry plants do take work: the runners need to be kept in check, you need to keep a balance of old and new plants, and they need to be weeded – all of which is hard on the back. It is why I wanted to make sure the work would be worth it with LOTS of strawberries. I’m so glad this is the case. My back-up alternative plan is to have a bed full of peony plants, which isn’t too bad either.

2 – A peony, poppy & rose arrangement. This was fun to create! I love it when I am able to collect lots of flowers for an arrangement. The different shades of pink are fabulous, but what I think makes the arrangement are the coral colored poppies. The deep pink roses are Princess Anne, and there are some mid-pink The Ancient Mariner roses, both are David Austin varieties. In the center, there is one small Kansas peony (it’s a deep pink), along with Bowl of Beauty and Sarah Bernhardt peonies. And finally, I added some lychnis Coronaria rose campion, just to have some flowers that were a little smaller. The only thing I was missing was sun to photograph it! 🙂

3 – Princess Anne, David Austin roses. This shrub is covered in deep pink flowers and is just show stopping! I’m glad I have it on the outer edge of the bed. It is also sweetly scented. This is one of the plants that suffers from black-spot, badly. We’ll see if this new treatment can perhaps help that over time. I have used the milk/water solution in the past, after the black-spot appears. It is quite a lot of work if you have many plants to do. Stay tuned!

4 – The Ancient Mariner, David Austin roses. This beautifully scented shrub just seems to be a tiny bit ahead of the others with the amount of flowers it has. It is spectacular! But because it has other rose shrubs around it, I can’t fully get a perfect picture of it. But this one isn’t bad. 😉

5 – Bowl of Beauty peony. This peony, like a bunch of my other ones, had to be moved last year. We ended up dividing it into two plants. Not surprising, it only had a few blooms this year. Like all the rest of my moved peonies, I’m hoping with feed and time they will settle in and increase the number of those flowers.

6 – Boxwood. A rather unglamorous picture! But I wanted to try and capture the work that went in to tidying up the boxwood plants. I did a lot of weeding of the boxwood, and then gave it a good feed. These plants were all grown from our cuttings a few years ago and they are really doing great! I also weeded the rose bed, although I’m still debating about pulling those poppies out. We’ll see.

And that is my Six on Saturday! Thank you for stopping by. I hope you enjoyed the tour. See you next time.

A garden clean up for today’s ‘Six on Saturday’

Posted on July 17, 2021 by Mominthegarden

Hi there, and welcome to my blog! I’ve been spending a lot of time cleaning up the garden as we’ve had some really warm days and everything is in overdrive! I’ve decided that my roses are absolute Divas! They are nothing short of spectacular, and they completely show off their loveliness. But they require the most care of any plant in my garden (real Divas!). Of course I’ll be showcasing one of them today as I join The Propagator‘s ‘Six on Saturday’ meme. You can visit his site and see lots of other links joining the meme as well!

1 The Ancient Mariner – David Austin Rose. This has been a fantastic year for roses. They are almost finished with their first flush of flowers, and boy were they amazing. But admittedly, these flowers require a lot of time both in preseason and during the season. Getting the pruning right can really help the season go well. I gave most of my plants a hard pruning this year, and they are doing much better than last year. I have noted the ones that didn’t get a hard prune as it will be their turn next year. But for now, deadheading is a full time job! This week I made an extra effort to clean up all of the dropped petals and leaves. It really looked so much nicer when it was tidy. I’ve added some feed and fresh compost to all of the plants, too. I’m hoping that it pays off with a good second flush of flowers!

2 Pink lilies. A number of years ago I bought a selection of pink flowers to be planted in one planter. It worked great and looked pretty over many weeks each season. But as time went on, the plants weren’t doing so well and seemed to be crowded and unhappy. So this year, I took all of the bulbs out to repot them. I could not believe how many bulbs there were! I filled three large pots with lilies, gladiolas and some other flowers I’m not quite sure of. The lilies looked so much nicer than they ever have (even after being eaten by some bug/slug). I’m looking forward to seeing all of the gladiolas, as so many have come up!

3 Sunflower Claret F1. I almost always grow sunflowers. I love having them in the garden! This is the first year I’ve tried a ‘non-traditional’ sunflower, and I think they are absolutely fabulous! They’re described as wine-red, but some of mine are a chocolatey brown/wine-red, with yellow on the back of the petals. They are tall, well taller than me, with lots of little off-shoots on every stem. I’m very happy with them, and hope to use some in an arrangement at some stage, too.

4 Helenium ‘Moerheim Beauty’. I added Helenium to my garden a few years ago, and I’m so glad I did. I think they look nice next to my daisies, but I also have some next to my yellow ‘Teasing Georgia’ David Austin roses and they look great there, too! Their mixture of colors (red, yellow and orange, with brown centers) is always fun. Mine do much better with supports, I’ve finally learned!

5 Red Kuri squash (pumpkin). Funny to be called Red Kuri and look this yellow. They apparently start out yellow and turn a redish-orange as they mature. I’m excited about this item in my garden as I actually have quite a lot of them. They are supposed to be quite tasty and our family like different types of squash, so I’m looking forward to eating these!

6 Pumpkin Arch update. Well, the plants are growing up the arch! What I need to clarify though, is what the plants are. So, way back in March, I sowed a bunch of seeds for the garden. But there were too many for my suntrap hallway that I use (because it is perfect for sowing seeds). While I tried to keep the different varieties in specific containers, and separated, that all fell apart once I started putting them outside to acclimate. So while I *thought* the red kuri pumpkins didn’t survive and the jack o’lanterns did, it seems quite the reverse happened (although I believe there are two jack o’lantern plants). This actually works out much better for my arch, because the Red Kuri squash are smaller than the jack o’lantern. It’s a learning process for me! Oh, and on the right side of the arch, on the right of the bed, are some Claret Sunflowers, although you can’t see the flowers because they are so dark!

That’s another week done. I hope you had a good one. I’m just so thankful for the wonderful weather we’ve been having. It has allowed me to work in the garden to my little heart’s content!

Feel free to check out the other ‘Six on Saturday’ posts!

In Peace,
Dana

What’s happening in the garden in August?

Posted on August 23, 2020 by Mominthegarden

Hello there! Is it just me, or is this summer going super fast? Do they say that as you get older, time goes faster? I think it is true! The garden is shifting to ‘end of summer’ mode, with a few plants finishing their season.

We have had some *terrible* weather recently – as in lots of rain and gale force winds. Not a great mix for plants. I have to say that the garden has held up pretty well (I’ve seen worse). Thankfully, I captured some nice pictures of my roses *before* the weather turned. Some roses still look well even after all of the bad weather. They’ve had a lovely season so far! I’m afraid that my sunflowers have definitely seen better days though. They just didn’t shine as bright this year as they usually do.

The lilies have finished off their season with a bang! They were just spectacular this year. I love flowers with fragrance, and they do not disappoint. Their many blooms are pure white atop tall strong stalks.

My project this weekend was to cut some of my mophead hydrangea. I have not (yet!) perfected the exact time to cut them to have the petals dry properly. By “properly” I mean that the petals stay open and keep their color. If I cut them too soon in the season, the petals shrivel up and it really is not pretty. But, if I wait too long before cutting them, they lose their color! I believe it has more to do with the maturity of the flower than the time of the season. I am hopeful that most of the flowers I cut today will be O.K.. Last week I cut some stems off of my Vanille Fraise hydrangea paniculata ‘Renhy’. I had mixed results with some stems drying well, and some shriveling up. But I tried again about 5 days later and they have dried perfectly. I had wanted to cut them before they turned completely pink, which is why I cut them a little early. I think I’ll have a good mix of white and pink. Did you see my Instagram stories where I showed the cuttings? 🙂

Another plant near the end of its season is the globe artichoke. My plant is well established in the garden, and takes up quite a bit of space. It has produced many, many artichokes this summer. This is another plant that I like to dry and use for decoration. Earlier this summer, I tried cutting teeny tiny baby artichokes to use in wreaths, but they just shriveled up and turned brown. I’ve discovered that if you cut them right after they’ve bloomed (after the thin purple spike-like form in the center of the artichoke appears) they keep their purple color. The artichokes themselves don’t keep their lovely green color, but have a molted coloring. I like how they look in a large vase, as they are quite unusual.

I hope you are well and enjoying good weather wherever you are in the world! Are there any flowers that you like to dry and use again?

In Peace,
Dana

two Princess Anne David Austin Roses — From David Austin, this is the Princess Anne shrub rose.

You might notice that the leaves of my roses will usually have black spot. I have some varieties that are more hardy, but at some stage it usually hits all of the roses. If I had a bit more time I’d treat them with a milk and water solution. I’ve done that before and it does work. But I now have a lot more roses and it would take a fair amount of time to treat them. This just goes with the territory when not using chemicals.