Near miss

Pulled back the brassica row cover this evening and discovered....

A BROCCOLI!

A broccoli getting past its prime.  This is for supper tomorrow.

Cucumber down

Two Topsy Turvy planters were put to use this year - one for Bushy cucumbers and one for Tante Alice cucumbers.  As before, I  would gently tug downward on the small transplants, thwarting their attempts to grow skyward because I was trying to get them out of the shade of their planters and into the sunlight.  While they did relax somewhat as they grew heavier, they still managed to extend horizontally more than downward, and this may have been the downfall of one of them.








In the photo above, the plant on the right looks a bit limp.  This is why.  It was hanging by a thread.  The wind blows here, by times.  A linear vine reaching toward the ground might sway in the wind, but a vine maintaining a constant elevation is subject to twisting on its stem.  Too much stress, especially on top of the already bizarre orientation in which I tried to make it grow.  Minutes after this picture was taken, Tante Alice was on the ground.  This is not surprising.  We have a third planter hanging from the clothesline support, left there from last year, with the stub of a broken tomato stem poking out of it.

Topsy Turvy planters are watered from the top and a good soaking should result in some seepage out the bottom.  This particular planter hangs directly over the entrance to an ant metropolis.  Seeing an ant crawling down the side of the planter last week, I surmised she may be an engineer looking to rectify the problem of water intrusion.  Keeping an open mind, since I did not witness the cucumber stem breaking in response to wind-induced torsion, I will allow that ant mandible activity could conceivably have been the cause of breakage.  If so, did the team foresee that the entire mass would end up on their entrance plaza?  I have left it in place to see how they deal with it.










The sole greenhouse cucumber, meanwhile, enjoys the freedom to grow directly away from the ground, as long as it receives some assistance in not keeling over.  I placed a second tier tomato cage on top of the first one after seeing the cucumber almost strangle itself trying to get a grip.

Birthday perennials

Mom came through again with the $1 per year survival award and once again I pedalled out to Greenhaven Garden Centre to make the most of it.  This year's picks are, clockwise from the left:

Carpet Bugle (Ajuga reptans 'Burgundy Glow') - forms a spreading carpet of leaves dappled in green, cream and smoky pink.  Taller spikes of blue flowers appear in spring.  ~jeeperscreepers.info

Peachleaf Bellflower (Campanula persicifolia blue form) - a low mound of leaves, bearing tall stems of large, bright-blue bells during summer.  ~perennials.com

Kinnikinnik (Arctostahpylos uva-ursi) - low growing, native, evergreen perennial with a spreading habit.  Glossy dark green foliage is highlighted by small pinkish flowers in late spring.  ~Northern Classics

Purple Labrador Violet (Viola labradorica) - a charming violet for shady places.  Forms a low tuft of purple-tinged leaves, with small mauve-purple violets in spring and fall.  ~jeeperscreepers.info

Evening Primrose (Oenothera missouriensis) - a profuse blooming plant.  The red-spotted flower buds open on summer afternoons to yellow cup-shaped flowers.  ~Northern Classics

Purple Rockcress (Aubrieta deltoidea 'Purple Gem') - a compact plant with grey-green spoon shaped leaves.  Deep purple blooms appear in spring and again in late summer.  ~Northern Classics

Red Wonder Pussy-Toes (Antennaria dioica 'Rotes Wunder') - forms a flat carpet of tiny silver-grey leaves, with taller stems of fuzzy cherry-red flowers in late spring,  ~rockstarplants.com

Alpine Wall Cress (Arabis ferdinandi-coburgi 'Old Gold') - forms a very low carpet of rounded waxy-looking green-and-gold streaked leaves.  Small white flowers in spring are a bonus.  ~rockstarplants.com

Left to right from Carpet Bugle:

Wineleaf Cinquefoil (Potentilla tridentata ' Nuuk') - Selected in Greenland, this is a tough little evergreen creeper.  Small white buttercup-shaped flowers appear in late spring and early summer.  Foliage turns wine-red in the colder months.  ~jeeperscreepers.com

Woolly Speedwell (Veronica pectinata) - a low dense carpet of grey-green foliage studded with deep blue, or occasionally lavendar, saucer shaped flowers.  ~jeeperscreepers.com

All ten have found new homes in the front yard.  The most notable development has been this stunning blossom on the evening primrose.



































Adding these new specimens to the garden, I could not deny that the colour tendency leans heavily toward the pink-purple-blue range.  This week I wandered the aisles of a garden centre, on the lookout for more yellow-orange hues and discovered they are in short supply for this climate zone.  Blanketflower, yellow coneflower, stonecrop, and now evening primrose (though that is the coldest yellow I have ever seen) make their contribution, but they are greatly outnumbered.  Warm colours should be the priority next time.

As for the 2012 group, results have varied.

creeping lamium, aka dead nettle, is spreading to fill its nook and generated a few pink blossoms in the spring

single painted daisy - the victim of a weeding accident (I thought the thing next to it was the single-painted daisy),
I have been coddling this one with daily watering.  It will be cool if it comes back bigger and better next year.

alpine strawberry - looks great; too bad about the berries (it's hard to tell when a white strawberry is ripe,
and I found too many that were inhabited by creatures)

rock soapwort - quite showy at its peak in spring; not so enthusiastic about summer

variegated periwinkle - had a rough summer 2012 and finally found a shady place around the cotoneaster hedge

fern-leaf bleedingheart - I'm sure this is where I left it last fall

creeping jenny - doing a great cover-up job around hops-on-a-bike;
 too bad it has to live with wilted daffodil leaves

stella d'oro daylily - two blooms so far this summer, but a little lost in its surroundings

moss phlox - holding its own in the rock garden, with pink blossoms this spring

Unintention

I call it wrath-of-God hail, because the force of it hitting the roof is too much, I think, at the time, to be explained by gravity alone.  The ice pellets seem to be shot from a gun, or hurled by an almighty arm with a wicked overhand pitch.  I don't quite pray for it to stop, but occasionally notice myself pleading to a hail storm to leave us be.  Wind makes me testy.  "Enough already," I think at it. "If you have so much energy, go find some turbines to spin."  (Though never when it's giving me a push up the eastern slope of the valley.)  With hail I am utterly submissive.  Why?

It's not unusual in the summer here to feel the wind pick up suddenly around supper time.  The environment changes rapidly:  a rumble of thunder, a noticeable chill, a huge charcoal grey cloud,seemingly out of nowhere, looms over the elm and green ash trees that line our street.  These are hit or miss situations.  There might be a sudden downpour.  Could be a tornado brewing.  Maybe it will keep calm and carry on to give a good thrashing to Coaldale.  Possibly it will fire hail at us.

The evening of June 19 it was a hit.  P had warned me in the morning that "golf-ball hail" was in forecast.  That was good of her, because it prompted me to throw many of the old bed sheets (frost inhibitors) from the greenhouse over the most prized and/or tender vegetable plants - tomatoes, peppers, zucchinis.   The golf-ball hail did not materialize.  That's fine.  Cultivated-blueberry hail is devastating enough for us.  Barry was outdoors, managing his rainwater retention system, when the first hailstones hit.  Nasty pointy chunks of ice, unlike the smooth spherical hail we were taught in Grade 3.  Even the World's Greatest Rain Poncho couldn't protect him and he soon sought shelter in the house.  We listened to the drilling on the roof and watched in awe as a great mass of projectiles streaked earthward.

After a few very long minutes, the precipitation changed to a less alarming liquid state.  We went back out to assess the damage.

We had just begun to harvest lettuce for salads, so this was disappointing.  I hadn't even been worried about the lettuce, probably thinking it would enjoy the cool, wet conditions.






I did worry about tomatoes.  They were covered with sheets, but the sheets were just draped over the stakes and cages in place to support the plants and were not secured in any way.  They had begun to blow around and exposed some of the plants by the time hail hit.  This was the worst of them; most sustained very few injuries.

Costata romanesca zucchinis were still small at the time, so some spare border fencing was enough to keep their protective sheet from weighing to heavily on them.  They were barely aware of the violence that surrounded them.


The most surprising devastation was the Swiss-cheese style adopted by Rhubarb.  I had expected it to be tougher.  Even the stalks were badly wounded where they were hit.  Had to put a hold on those great breakfast smoothies.




Bean leaves were ripped and bines knocked free of their poles.  Corn stalks were rather festive with leaves all shredded lengthwise like fancy party streamers.  Squash plants were flattened and baby bunches of grapes lay limp on the concrete floor of the grape grotto.  A pane of glass was smashed out of the greenhouse roof.  Hosta leaves were irreparably fractured.

We were the fortunate ones.  Within a day, to the north of us, the same storm system had washed out highways and bridges and destroyed houses.  It was the type of disaster that could be a season highlight on "Nature's Savage Fury" (or some such show) on TLC.  Of course, there was no fury on Nature's part, any more than a wrath-stricken God was shooting ice pellets at us.  It's just physics; one event leads to another.

Roads and houses don't rebuild themselves, but plants do.  Less than three weeks later, most of the garden had grown up out of the wreckage, making perfect new leaves that hid the mangled ones.  Then it hailed again, and again, somewhat less forcefully.  The plants are wounded, but they just keep growing.  Why wouldn't they?  There is a metaphor there about the human spirit, but that's for someone else to find because I think comparing people to plants is fairly stupid.

Lesson learned - covering our most treasured plants before hail arrived was worth the effort.  Weather is without intention.  I have the capacity for intention and might as well exercise it when it can make a difference.


.

Pole dancing

The winner of this year's Reach For The Top competition is.........

..........Mennonite Purple Stripe.

And now it doesn't know what to do.





Elsewhere in pole beans......

...........what are those red blossoms doing in a bed of Ina's White Beans?  Looks like somebody has been cross-pollinating.

Stand back - I'm going to try science

You don't really have to stand back.  Just don't touch the yellow sticky card unless you want to become part of the data.

Furthermore, I'm not really trying science.  I did not formulate a hypothesis or design an experiment, nor will I analyze the results and draw conclusions.  My role is to dangle yellow sticky cards in my tomato beds in hopes of trapping critters who like to visit tomatoes.  The creature of interest is the potato psyllid, a major pest of solanaceous crops in North America.  An environmental science researcher sent me the traps.  I can't quite follow the instructions, which direct me to set the cards at least 10-20 metres into the crop; you probably can't get even half of a metre into any of my tomato beds without being closer to the other side.  Alors, I doubt that data from my garden will make it into a scientific journal, but that doesn't mean it is not of any use.  

Already caught my first specimen.  Don't know what it is.  Psyllids are of the order Hemiptera - true bugs.  The picture I saw looked more like a waspish fly than a bug.  Good thing someone else is conducting the actual science in this project.