2 Pumpkins, 3 Questions, 4 Glads, & 5 (maybe 6) Pears

Catch me if you can.

Many thanks to everyone for your well wishes regarding the BigNoseDog who suffered a vestibular episode a fortnight ago.

It's been a battle of wills between him & myself this week.  He's a bit wobbly, yet madder'n a wet hen at having his walkabouts truncated.  When it's time to come home from his walk, he braces his terrier tank self in the middle of the path & refuses to budge.

But who can blame him?

While he's napping, it's on to #SixonSaturday - six things in the garden, on a Saturday, to quote our host, The Propagator.  In addition to Mr P's own Six at his link, you'll find SoS guidelines, should you wish to give us a peek into your garden.  There's also links in his comment section to other SoS-ers from across the globe.

This week in my garden, the rain has done away with the need to water plants.  That leaves me free to pick corn, eat all the cherry tomatoes on my way to the house, & wait for the lawn to need mowed.

Until then, a counting song.  One terrier terror . . .



1. Two pretty pumpkins

There are actually 3 pumpkins in the garden, but only 2 in this shot.

First & last to grow.

I've not done much about mildew this year, other than cut off the leaves.  Someone's sure to report me to the Pumpkin Protection League.


2.  First Question of Three - Tomatoes.

I grew my rosella cherries from seed, transferred them to vigoroot bags filled with new compost, & in time, supported them with cane cages (as seen in the background).  The tomatoes were supposed to have a smoky flavour but are super sweet & about the size of grapes.

Garden candy.

Two self seeders of unknown origin appeared in the pot containing the late, great Asian pear.  No new compost was added, but they're supported in cages.

Feral tomatoes.

The self seeders are a little behind the rosella, but their fruit is markedly larger.  Both types were regularly watered & fed.  What you think => vigoroot bags or tomato type account for the difference in size?  Another thought is that, because the self seeders started later, they were at a different stage in reproduction during the drought.

Maybe all/none of the above?


3.  Second Question - Who am I?

Last year, I gave a neighbour some plant food for her cosmos, so she gave me cuttings of an aromatic shrub that I admired.  The cuttings rooted & grew like Topsy.

While my neighbour's specimen was a narrow, willowy 6' beauty, mine grew horizontally.  In fact, mine've been so insistent about not growing upwards that they've taken their support stakes down with them.  I pound the stakes back in, but of course, the bigger the plants get, the less effective the stakes are in keeping them upright.

Laying down on the job.

They haven't produced flowers, but have a wonderful herby-citrusy scent.  Here's a close-up of the foliage.

The tips turn up.

They're in a sun trap, but are planted near the house, which might be why they lay down.  On the other hand, they're in full sun by 11:00 a.m. until sunset.

If I (or my neighbour) knew what they were, I might be able to figure out how to get them to straighten up & fly right.

Any ideas about the seed & breed of them?


4.  Third & Last Question - Empress Tree Seedlings.

A few weeks ago, I wrote about my kazillion seedlings coming up in a pot where I'd planted some empress tree seeds.  I was a bit of a Doubting Thomas that they were really empress trees.  Here's what they look like now.

Baby empress?

Now that they're bigger, they do indeed look like those in my image search of empress seedlings.  And I have scads of them.  Scads.  Can anyone confirm or refute my identification?


5.  Four glads.

Some nursery sent me a sack of free glad corms with an order, which I stuffed into my large planters.  There've been much more than 4 really gorgeous blooms, but I have 4 photos, so enjoy these beauts.

Some w/the hollyhocks.

Some w/the sedum

Some are a bit frilly.

Some for the kitchen.

6.  Five (maybe six) pears.

These are my Louis Bonne pears.  This tree bloomed its little pea heart out in the spring, but its pollination mate, the Asian pear, had no blooms, then subsequently died.  Since I'd been told the Louis Bonne don't self pollinate, you can bet this crop had me dancing under the new moon.  I might even've been a little bit nekked.

How many pears do you see?

The thick trunk in the front is actually my fig tree.  The fig & the pear seem very fond of each other & tend to mingle limbs.  All in all, I've counted a dozen pears on Louise.  Pretty happy, since this is its first year fruiting.  Here's hoping the critturs don't get there first.

Seen in the graveyard on the BigNose walk - a gardener lies here.

Once again, the tail end of my Six.

I do thank y'all for taking the time to visit.  Hope to see you next week.

Have fun in your garden!

Trial & Error

So we finally got our big rain!  And a high price we paid for it, too, missing the blood moon eclipse & the end of the world.  I hope for plenty of gorgeous rain photos amongst some of the SoSers today!

Here, though, I've been mulling a recent post by Hurtled to 60 wherein a fellow allotmenteer intimated that rural gardeners are superior to townies.  I myself grew up on a farm, yet don't see veg as more virtuous than sunflowers.  But then, my mother, who pressed her 7 chillen into conveyor belt cannery every year, also had a greenhouse devoted solely to African violets.

There are so many types of gardeners - neurodivergent, athletic, visual, artistic, scientific, clueless, those with long term mental or physical illnesses, those who garden by 'the rules'.   

Accidental design.

For every 10 gardeners who can understand a design well enough to perfectly replicate a gold medal display, there's one who can only garden in equal parts experience & serendipity. 

I have to 'do' to understand, something that got me banned from helping in the kitchen a long time ago.  What starts as, 'But why . . . wouldn't it be better . . . how about we . . .' ends with the clenched-teethed cook pointing to the door  =>  Out!  Out!  OUT!!!!!

I'm on my own in the garden, which means I'm also able to process information there in the way I need to.

Other gardeners & their ideas do give me inspiration, but it's only by seeing how this particular plant grows in this particular spot that I understand my garden at all.

Today I celebrate those of us, including myself, who can only garden by the seat of our pants.  Here's some of my trials & perhaps even an error or two.




1.  To bite or not to bite.

Like any first-time parent, I've been discussing the progress of my cucumelons with other gardeners.  Mine reached all their developmental markers right on schedule, but I wasn't sure when I could eat the little darlins.

My delightfully green striped chillen.

Fred the French Gardener said he picks his when they're as long as the distal phalanx of his little finger, at which point they taste like cucumber with a zing of lime.

Out to the garden with me to find one the right size, then gobble down a mouthful of crunchy, tasteless blech.

Well, having a trial & error mind means not stopping at the first hurdle.  Or the second.  Eventually, it occurred to me that, although I'm not petite, I may indeed have a smaller pinky than Fred.

So I waited, like the troll under the bridge, for a bigger billy goats cucumelon & learned that to get that zing, the optimum size is the middle phalanx of my index finger - about 1.25".

Size zingy.

Now that my berries have all dried up, it's cucumelon for brekky.


2.  Hosta trials.

As I've written before, I've never thought hostas worth the ongoing slug war, until I found Big Daddy.  He was fairly slug free in the beginning, I thought because I'd put dried cedar & bramble twigs at his base.  But you can see, the slugs found a way.  When Big Daddy started his 2nd growth of leaves, the slugs threw a keg party.

Big Daddy blues.

About that time, various bloggers were trying out sheep's wool slug pellets.  I had a sheep fleece in the closet that'd gone past its spinning days, so've stuck some of it under BD.

Big Daddy has new leaves.

That's my current trial.  We'll see if it's also an error.  There's a frog quite happy with the new arrangement, so if not the fleece, then maybe the frog will sort those slugs out.


3.  Great Pea Debate of 2018.

Despite other gardeners' distaste of them, we've enjoyed a good season of blauwschokker peas.  Our resident chef has this trick of pouring boiling water over them & letting them sit a few minutes rather than cooking them on the hob.  Sweet as mange tout, tasty as peas.

There were no cooks at home when I decided that was too much palaver.  I tossed peas in with my tortellini & boiled away.  A quick drain, a splash of chili oil, sprinkle some mozzarella, & voila!  I, too, am a chef.

Picture me sitting under the deck umbrella, utterly pleased with myself & surrounded by the sound of bees pollinating my cucumelon vines . . . note the literary device signalling a previous bad dining experience.

Do not boil your blauwschokker.  Ever.  Tough as old boots.  Ptoo Ptoo Ptoo.  Dogs liked them, though.

Last of the blauwschokker.

4.  Seeds, glorious seeds.

I usually toss out last year's seeds at the end of summer, having collected new from the current plants.  This spring, however, I found several small containers of seed I'd collected from 2 gardens ago.

Eventually, I sorted out what still interested me & planted various trays with only a few stragglers germinating.

Except for the hollyhocks.

22 of them bad boys.

The parents were both single & double in pastel colours - yellow, peach, & pink.  Can't wait for next year's blooms!


5.  For the love of trees.

The things I love most in the plant world are trees, which is a shame since I'm rubbish at telling them apart.  That doesn't, however, stop me from gathering seeds at every chance.  In all the years I've done this, I've successfully grown one tree - a motley looking monkey puzzle whom I hold very dear.

So an empress tree growing in the local park dropped these nuggets.

Empress tree seeds & pod.

I left them in the shed over winter.  Thinking nothing would come of this anyway, I did zilcho research into how to grow them, cracked one open & without being precise, dumped half its seeds into a small pot.

What cuckoo nested here?

I've lifted some of the seedlings (thus the bare spot in the pot) & moved them to a trough to give them more leg room.  Although I've image-searched empress seedlings, I don't have a good enough eye to come to any conclusion.  To be honest, I don't believe they're empress.

If they are, I now have a jungle.


6.  Corn angst.

My corn saga started with losing a third of my plug plants during hardening off, followed by the supplier being out of stock, so replacing them with a different strain from another supplier.  Although the new plants were about the same size as the originals, their growth rate was slower, so I ended up with Tall Corn & Short Corn.

Amazingly, the Short Corn tasseled first.  But their tassels didn't open.

Silked, but closed tassel.

Tall Corn gave me brilliant tassels, so pollen all around.  Now, though, even regularly watered, the tassels are brown, yet new silks keep popping up.  I do my feather duster routine & hope great corn sex to be had by both Tall & Short.

Dried tassel.

Expect photos of some funny looking cobs come autumn.

Who splattered paint on Spidey?

There's my Six trials & errors.

If you'd like a gander at other gardens, check out these Six on Saturday Guidelines by The Propagator.  He'll also have a post of his own Six, plus you'll find links from all over the world in his comment section.

Thanks for stopping by.  Look forward to seeing you next week.