Previously unpublished nemophila

These "Baby Blue Eyes" nemophilas are my favourite. Not only they're the bluest, they're also amazingly long-lasting compared to the "Penny Black" and "Five Spot". They were still wide awake as of this morning, after several days of hard frosts and near-zero temperatures around the clock, and snow. But since they were in the window boxes that I really wanted cleaned up, I uprooted them all.

Anyway, the real point of this photo from September 9 is the white one. For whatever reason, one among the thousands of seeds produced a pure white mutant. Unfortunately I couldn't uproot it to keep it separate for further study and other purposes, since the obligatory stygian overcrowding makes separating one plant from my garden impossible. But just so everyone knows, I had a pure white nemophila in my garden. Neener neener.

More nemophilas

These are the Baby Blue Eyes nemophilas, which are currently looking quite awesome. Too bad they didn't do this a week earlier for the Yards in Bloom people.


And these are Penny Black. They're smaller than the other two, but they're black. Ooooooh... black flower!


Also, the Wall of Insanity is trying to take over the window box.

Next year I'm gonna do something neater with these. They come by the thousands in a seed packet, so I could have them in every planter if I wanted. So I haven't quite decided where to put them, but I sure won't plant all 4000 together like that.

What else is in bloom

English daisies. This was the first one, which opened August 3. There are currently four: this one, another pink one with lots more petals of which I botched the photo, and two white ones. This isn't exactly what I was after. I want the ones that make a round mass of petals so you can't see the yellow center at all. However, what I seeded is a mix and there is plenty more that haven't flowered yet, so the right ones could still be out there. And if not, there's always next year.


Asters. Yea verily, asters finally bloomed. I logged the date officially as August 4, but it took a few more days to reach this state of full openness. The strange thing is that I seeded a mix and yet only these bright pink ones are flowering. Oh well... I don't mind them. As much as they've aggravated me in the past, they're good flowers, and they did have my back when the judges came through, so maybe I'll plant them again next year after all.


Convolvuli. I'm still perplexed that only dark blue ones came up when I know I seeded a mix, but oh well. I like the dark blue ones.


Forget-me-not. They're making quite a good show, actually. I'm definitely getting them again next year.


Star of Yelta in the Wall of Insanity. This one is blooming very profusely, whereas the one at the other hand is blooming very little. Yet the difference in sunlight is less than two hours between the two. Then again... two hours is 25% less sun, so maybe it is indeed a question of sunlight. Or, maybe I just got a particularly vigorous one by chance.

Also, poppies are blooming profusely now, but mostly they're outside the railing and we don't see much of each other. There are some nemophilas and California bluebells left, not enough to make a decent photo. The geranium not only never turned blue, but also got trampled by the raven. The new plant hasn't come in the mail yet and I'm not really antsy about it.

And another one!

This is the third variety of nemophila, Baby Blue Eyes. There is one tiny one in the shadier of the two window boxes, whereas all the other flowers bloomed in the sunnier one first. So either it likes shade, or the other ones like sun more and are choking it on the sunny side, or there are some in the sunny planter and I haven't found them.


And this is the forget-me-not which did bloom today. It should look nice once more flowers open.

Guess what?

There is a bud on my English daisies.

Yaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaayyyyyyy!

None of the plants seem to have suffered from being divided and repotted, by the way. Everything I read about transplanting goes on about transplant shock, and I've yet to lose a single plant from repotting, transplanting, or otherwise interfering with them.


Also, a second variety of nemophila. This one is called variously Penny Black, Pennie Black, or Total Eclipse.


The first aster is almost open. They must be the slowest-opening buds in the world of flowers; at least on my balcony they certainly are.


Female flower buds are starting to mature on the pumpkins.

And also, there are flowers in planter #14.4, the shady end of the Wall of Insanity. And they're Stars of Yelta. Of course. And while I appreciate their speed, I wouldn't mind to see something else for a change. I really need the other varieties to get happening so I can collect seeds before winter.

More of the same

Pansies, phacelias and five-spots looking good. The rest... still waiting.

The first nemophila

That's the variety "Five Spot." For obvious reasons. Quite a few of them opened this morning, while the other two varieties (Baby Blue Eyes and Penny Black) are not even budding yet.

One thing about nemophilas is they don't like heat. Most days they're all flat by one o'clock unless I water them in the morning. Today, because it's particularly hot, they were already wilting by 8:30 AM. But they bounce right back up when you water them, even if they've been flat for some time.

When did THAT happen?

In all that, I totally failed to notice:


A pansy! The camera systematically failed to capture the colour properly in six tries, for some reason. It's a beautiful deep purple.

I wonder when it hatched, because it was on the dark side of the pansies, and the only reason I noticed it is because I decided to eat "al fresco" with the dog, and since there is no room for a chair and table on the balcony, we were sitting right on the floor. And from that level, I noticed something purple among the green, turned the pansies around, and there it was!

That's awesome. I tried pansies last year and failed. This year I planted something called "matrix jewel mix" from Veseys. So far, I'm very pleased.

By the way, I'm making a list of my suppliers in the sidebar, so if you see something here that you like, you can go buy it too.

In other news, there are now some buds among the nemophilas as well.

Weekly garden update

Actually, it's been 11 days. I'm sure you're desperately yearning for garden news, yes?

Let's start with pumpkins.


The pumpkins are taking over the world. They're huge. And this year they have very tough sturdy stems, which look promising. But now they've reached down to the concrete, so I really need to get them some rigid insulation to sit on, otherwise the concrete will burn them yet again. Other than that, I was worried that they'd be damaged when the dog and I rub against them in our comings and goings. I was wrong. Turns out pumpkins have nasty little pointy hairs on the underside of their leaves which scratch you when you walk by. The dog doesn't care. I, of course, get a skin reaction. I have skin reactions to pretty much everything under the sun anyway. In any case, I have great hopes for the pumpkins this time around.


The asters. I found out why it takes so long for asters to bloom: because normally they're a fall-flowering plant. I guess they don't realize that up here fall is RIGHT NOW and they need to get their butts in gear if they're planning to flower at all. But since you can't talk sense into a plant, I guess I'll bring them inside in the fall.


The pansies. I haven't thinned them yet because they're not complaining. Being that they're perennials, I don't know if they even plan to flower this year at all, but they're making pleasant verdure at any rate.


English daisies (left) and geraniums (right). Again, English daisies are perennials, so they might not bloom this year at all. Maybe now is the time to thin them; some of them seem to be getting a bit stretchy.

The geraniums have picked themselves up quite a bit since the last update, but they're still nowhere near blooming. I'm now puzzled as to their lifecycle. The Veseys growing guide says they're annuals, the supplier says perennials. Maybe because Veseys is in Canada and the supplier is in the US, they might be hardy to their climate but not to ours. Oh well. I'll bring them inside in the fall regardless, and we'll see what they do for next year. But I do wish they would bloom though. I was so looking forward to them.


The Wall of Insanity is finally understanding how things work. I tricked them with strings, as you can see. At first they were like "meh", but then they grabbed on to the strings with a vengeance, and now they've reached the railing. Madness will now ensue... I hope. That being said, they still have at least another month until they bloom. Sigh... At least now I know how long it takes them to start climbing, so next year I will start them inside about five weeks early. Darth Plant is still in there somewhere, but making no progress at all. It's too late in the year now to do any more seeding, so I'll have to try it again next year. You can see also that some of the maydays have been migrated to the gaps in the Wall, but that will have to change yet again as the Wall starts to shut out the light.


Nemophilas and California bluebells. You can see the bluebells on the outside with the different leaves. They're just starting to bud. I'm expecting them to bloom in about a week to ten days, and the nemophilas about ten days later, based on their performance in 2009.


The lemons. Not much change there. They seem to like it on the balcony, but being trees, they have their fast growth in the spring and slow growth in the summer, so there isn't much to see right now. As long as they're green and have leaves, that's satisfactory.


Same with the maydays, slow summer growth. Here you can see Deng Xiaoping in front and Liu Shao-ch'i in back. To the right of Deng Xiaoping is its aster roommate. They're now the same height. Spooky!

And now here is a bigger problem:


Remember those pear seeds I got tired of stratifying and threw out there to rot?

Oops...

So now I have five pear trees. The first to sprout is still with Peng Dehuai and is doing fine, but I can never get a decent photo of it. The second one died. I checked on it because it wasn't progressing, and its root was gone. I don't know why, but sometimes plants' roots disappear and they die. So I put more seeds into the CryoVat... but meanwhile, unbeknownst to me, these four sprouted in Deng Xiaoping's planter.

Uh-oh.

I'm going to end up with a veritable army of pear trees now. Then I'll have to cull them down to two. I hate culling trees.


The Jungle. You can't really see anything, but that's pretty much how it goes with the Jungle. The gigantic thing on the right, with its many branches, is the Head Zombie.


This is a very-close-up of the Head Zombie. First of all you can see it looks like it's all coated in coarse salt, or ice, or something, but it's not. That's just the way it looks. Second, do these look like petunia buds to you? I have no photos at all from last year's petunias. Also, they can't be petunias, because on closer inspection of my logs, it wasn't the petunias I dumped into the Jungle, it was the lavateras. And I have photos of lavateras and their leaves look nothing like that. In fact I have no photos of anything at all that looks like this. Also, it's now two feet tall. I think I'd have noticed a forest of two-foot-tall psycho plants taking over my balcony last year. I can't find anything like it in my book, either.

Whatever it is, I'm going to kill it. It's way too aggressive for my garden. But I want it to flower first, so I'll know what it was. In the meantime, it's making itself useful as a climbing pole for the "non-climbing" convolvulus. Non-climbing, my foot. It's climbing all over the place. Not as fast as a morning glory, maybe, but it's definitely climbing. And it's budding, too. At first I thought the four o'clocks were budding, but no, it's a convolvulus vine that's wrapped itself around a four o'clock stem and is making buds.

Meanwhile, the "short" poppies are also making buds. Several buds. They'll flower soon. It's too bad that the "short"poppies which were seeded close to the edge grew so much faster than the "tall" poppies close to the center, because now the tall poppies are in the shade and getting nowhere. Tying the "short" poppies to the railing seems to have helped, but I doubt the tall poppies will catch up now.

The flax is still healthy. It's not supposed to bloom this year, but I'm hoping to get lots of stalks to give it a better chance next year.

What else is in there... Globe thistles: still growing, but they're shadowed by... something or other. They're perennials anyway, so I suppose they don't plan to flower until next year.

Bellflowers: growing, but were shadowed by the poppies for the longest time, so they're very late, and they're also perennials.

Shastas... Er... What is with the shastas anyway? Let me have a look. Ok: the shastas have lots of leaves, but nothing that looks like a stem that might some day turn into a flower. Crud... You know what? Next year I could dig some from the library's flower beds, that would be way easier.

Four o'clocks are prospering, but again, they're planted in front of supposedly taller plants that happen to grow much slower and are now in their shadow, so I'm not pleased. Had I known how fast some things grow and others don't, I'd have planned this better. Or... not. The Jungle isn't exactly a paragon of planning. Anyway, I chopped another one down today. I don't even care about them, they're just something I grabbed at the store in passing. I don't even know if I'm gonna like them. I killed most of the zombie that was making those strange pseudo-flowers I posted the other day. I left one stem because it's leaning far out of the pot and not really shading the others. Now there is room for the middle plants to get some light; hopefully they'll put some growth on yet before it's too late.

Hollyhocks are looking good, they made big leaves fast enough that they're not starved for light. Lupins and... well, I don't know about delphiniums, but the lupins are definitely prospering. But again, all these are perennials and might not flower this year. But at least this time I know that a lot of my flowers won't flower this year. I didn't know that the last two years. You live, you learn.

The ornamental grass is still there. All one stalk of it, as far as I can tell.

Other than that, it's all a bunch of stuff I threw in there for no apparent reason, and I have no idea what's what. It will be a surprise if/when anything blooms, I guess.


Ensemble. You can see Insanity Plant at the back. It's no longer trying to get taller, and is finally starting to bloom fairly regularly again. I hadn't seen a Star of Yelta on it in some time, but now there are two ready to flower tomorrow. Insanity Plant is indestructible.

The lawn is doing fine, clearly. The oriental poppy is still inside and according to my googling, it only flowers once a year, so there won't be anything to report until next spring. And the roses are having fun in the fun gel. And I suppose it's just as well that they're roses and not peonies, because according to my reading, roses are really easy to root, whereas peonies are anything but.

So, that was the garden for this week.

Garden update

The Jungle is thriving, as you can see. I've thinned out the poppies (top left) quite a bit, but we could still lose at least half of them.

The huge thing going up into the top right corner is one of the zombie plants. I removed all but two, because I'm more and more convinced they're petunias. Petunias are nearly indestructible, as far as I can tell, which would be an awesome quality if I liked them. As it turns out, however, I'm only moderately fond of them, so two is about as many as I want to keep.

The thing trying to crawl out of frame in the bottom left corner is a convolvulus. A convolvulus is "like" a morning glory in shape, but comes in different colours, and according to the seed packet, it "does not have a climbing habit" and grows to about a foot tall. I wish they had mentioned that it crawls quite agressively, and in particular, it keeps trying to crawl all over my globe thistles, which I don't appreciate. So I keep relocating it, but it always finds a way to crawl over something important, such as my poor little flax sprouts. I've never managed to make flax flower yet and I don't want it ruined by a convolvulus. If this trend continues, I might have to get rid of the convolvulus.

Other than that, the globe thistles are doing fine. Nothing particularly interesting happening with them. Likewise with the flax, the ones that sprouted are carrying on, nothing much to say about them.

The Shasta daisies are mostly hidden by the zombie plant here. Now that there is a bit of volume happening, their poor sprouting performance isn't so noticeable. And as we've seen with the poppies, there is such a thing as too much success.

The lupins, delphiniums and hollyhocks are starting to look quite solid, which they'd better because at this point anyone who doesn't get a move on is going to get crushed by the zombies, poppies and convolvulus, and that would annoy me extremely.

There is one pampa's plume that I can find, it's looking nice and healthy.

The four o'clocks are now also becoming very aggressive. I've pulled one out already and might have to whack some more. I wish seed packets would tell you when a plant has a tendency to take over the world like that, then I might not plant crazy weeds with my most valuable species all the time.

Hidden behind all this on the sunny side are all the little plants: bellflower, nemophila, California bluebell, and... other stuff that I forget. They are not doing well and the poppies keep flopping over them so they're not getting the sun. Clearly, this project wasn't very well thought-out.

Oh well. Let's move on.


The window boxes. As you can see, I've relocated the one from the sunny location next to the shady one. The shady one had much better sprouting than the sunny one, but the real reason I did this is because the sunny one was casting a shadow on more important plants. In any case, they're doing fine.


Pumpkins. As I've mentioned, I've never succeeded with pumpkins yet, but I must say, these are the best pumpkin leaves I've ever grown. I'm attributing this early success to the fact I thinned them out, but then again, it could be just because they're in a shadier spot than last year. If I'm understanding things, plants make bigger leaves to grab more light, so big leaves isn't a sign of success, just a comment on the light.


Here we have asters at the top, doing fine. The English daisies in that planter, not so much, but oh well. I got lots more. Asters are really slow-moving for annuals. I tried them two years ago and they never had time to flower. If these don't make it by first frost, I'll bring them inside and hopefully get something that way.

Bottom left is the vat of English daisies, looking verdant and enthusiastic as you can see. I really like English daisies, so I'm pretty excited to see all this growth.

Bottom right are my pansies. Not much to say about them... they're growing. That's what plants do.


The Wall of Insanity is also looking lush and determined, but hasn't reached climbing mode yet. I'll make a note of when they start winding around the railing, that way next year I can start them indoors and they'll be ready to climb as soon as last frost passes.

Darth Plant is still in there somewhere, but still losing ground compared to the Ipomoea vines. Oh well. Better luck next year.

Note also that the dog's lawn, on the right, is needing a haircut.


The trees. Everyone is doing fine. The lemons don't mind being outside, but then again, it hasn't been windy yet. The maydays are fine. Liu Shao-ch'i hasn't complained about being transplanted. The pear tree I thought I damaged is actually thriving so far, though I didn't get any usable photos of it. You can barely see it as a green dot in the far right planter in the back row. The other one is still in Deng Xiaoping's planter. I'll move it later, if it doesn't die first.

The far left planter in the front row is the geraniums. Progress is slow. Some leaves have been burned by the wind. My early optimism is beginning to fade.

Not pictured are the baobabs, the plum cuttings, Insanity Plant and the oriental lily.

The oriental lily flowers are now wilted. I'm not sure what it's supposed to do next or whether I should remove the dead flowers. I'll google it tomorrow.

Insanity Plant is sulking. It doesn't like change, so it has been flowering very little since I put it out on the balcony. Also, a lot of the leaves have been eaten by the wind. It seems to have given up on reaching the next balcony. I'm sure it will pick itself up, though. It's indestructible.

The cuttings are still having tons of fun in their fun gel. They're more or less upright and clearly alive. No roots yet, but that's fine. It's supposed to take weeks for the roots to form. Weeks of fun in the fun gel!

The baobabs are thriving. A. digitata now has a leader. Next baobab photo is on Friday, unless they do something unexpected in the mean time.

And that's pretty much what's happening in the garden.