Flowers. 7.23.22

 Mixture - sweetpea, lavender, coreopsis ready to bloom.

More tigridia among the squashes.

More Crocosmia.

Bees love shallot flowers.

I brought a few indoors.

Harvesting More Garlic. Lorz and Music. 7.23.22

 Today I harvested the rest of the garlic.  I also cut off the tops of the garlic I dug up a week ago and have been letting dry out.  These are the hardneck Music Garlic that I have been growing for a decade.  This time, I grew ten rows of eight plants per row.  There were also some volunteers, which were much smaller because they were in clumps instead of individual plants.

Music has jumbo size cloves, much easier to peel than grocery garlic.  It has a strong garlic flavor.  The bulbs keep nearly a year in a cool dry place.

I also harvested the Lorz garlic.  Like Music, Lorz is Italian.  I had these in half wine barrels.  They were on the drip system, but I made a mistake.  I should have stopped the irrigation for these a couple of weeks ago.  The ground was too moist, and the papery husks tear too easily when wet.  We'll see how they dry.  

The Lorz garlic also has jumbo bulbs and jumbo cloves.  I'm interested to see how they dry lut, and how they taste.  They are described as strongly flavored too.

Softneck garlics can be braided.  I read they keep longer than hardneck.  That's why I decided to try them. I'm very impressed with the size of the bulb and the beautiful purple blush.  From the two bulbs that I bought mail order last fall, there are eighteen now.  I will set aside three or four to plant this fall, in addition to continuing the Music garlic.

Squash Flower and Honeybee. 7.22.22

 I think the squash flowers are among the nicest.  It's nice to see some honeybees now.

The Buttercups and Dakota Dessert squashes have a lot of developing fruits now.  Especially the Buttercups.  The Costata Romanesco  is making countless, rapidly growing fruits, and the Saffron yellow summer squash provides a new one each day.  Galeux and Fordhook are all male flowers so far.

Sweetpeas Blooming. 7.22.22

 The sweetpeas are actually pretty nice.  I think about 1/3 survived starting from seeds and transplanting, if that many.  Then they were slow to take off.  But now they look very nice.  Across the yard, the red ones also look nice.

Rudbeckia and Ratibida the First Year From Seeds.

 The information available on Rudbeckias is confusing.  Are the perennials or annuals, and will the bloom the first year from seeds.

I started all of these from seeds, mid-winter.

The Ratibida is also blooming.  I grew it the same way as the Rudbeckias.  Only one, of six, survived.  Moles and feral cats got the others.

If I remember, I'll add the Gallardias which were the first of the seed - started perennials to start blooming.