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Posts Tagged ‘flowers’
Garden Bloggers Bloom Day, Aug 2012!
August 16, 2012 | 
Author 
Bean blossoms look far too complicated; I’m glad bees can figure them out. The green bush beans I planted this year have pink blossoms; a nice change from the white bean blossoms of past years. In the bottom-right of the photo, you can see a bean starting to develop.
Garden Bloggers Bloom Day originates from Carol Michel’s blog, May Dreams Gardens. She wants to see blossoms all year long, and the garden blogging community rallies: post blossoms on your blog, then link to it from her blog. It’s simple, and it helps other people find your blog!
Please enjoy my Bloom Day post. Then, come back on the 22nd and participate in Post Produce. Just as Carol does, I’ll write my Post Produce post and include a Linky widget before I go to bed on the 21st. On the 22nd, you write your own post about what you’re eating from your garden, then link to your post from Your Small Kitchen Garden. I hope you’ll join me on August 22nd and Post Produce.
Here’s what’s abloom in my garden today:
If it’s Bloom Day and tomatoes are in bloom, you’re going to find at least one tomato blossom in my post! This photo is more about hairy stems than it is about blossoms. I’ve harvested about a bushel of tomatoes so far. Barring a late blight incident, I may see three or four bushels from my plants this year.
My thyme plants are struggling a bit this year. One has some seriously involved fungus that I’ve treated a few times with the copper-based fungicide I use on my tomato plants. Amazingly, the stems of that plant touch the stems of a perfectly healthy-looking thyme plant. Too much information? This flower stalk is from the healthy thyme plant.
The mint has been in bloom for weeks. It has overwhelmed the planter holding it, and blossoms hang over the sides. I fear an impending mint invasion and will be vigilant for plants that decide to germinate next to the planter.
Bush cucumber plants I set in a deck planter have grown vines as long and tendrilly as the non-bush cucumbers I planted in my garden. Cucumber blossoms look happy against the deck flooring.
Pepper flowers are among my favorites.
For flower drama in a vegetable garden, you can always count on squashes! This is a butternut blossom, and it clearly understands flower sex. For this photo, it attracted four pollinators, though the reliable pollinator was holding the camera. Despite all the bee activity among my summer and winter squash blossoms, I hand-pollinate every female flower. The bees didn’t budge when I brushed this female flower’s “parts” with a male flower’s “part.”
Posted in bloom day | 
Tags: beans, bloom day, blossoms, cucumbers, flowers, garden bloggers bloom day, peppers, squash, thyme, tomatoes, vegetables | 
1 Comment »
Butterflies and Puddling in my Small Kitchen Garden
The flower beds my wife maintains near my small kitchen garden get a lot of attention from butterflies.
My wife has established various ornamental plants near my small kitchen garden. Many of these, she has heard, will attract butterflies. I can attest that at least some do; there are often colorful butterflies flitting about while I till soil, plant vegetables, remove weeds, prune, and otherwise muddle about in my vegetable beds.
I enjoy the variety of butterflies that come and go, and I have two observations I want to share.
A Kitchen Gardener’s Deep Thought about Butterflies #1
Butterflies? Really? Whatever about butter made someone name these insects butterflies? I reviewed the Word Origin discussion at dictionary.com and found a silly explanation that mentioned witches, butter, milk, yellow wings, and excrement. Clearly, this is an effort to cover a more astonishing truth: No one ever named them Butterflies.
Trust me: there can be no doubt that the original name for these insects was Flutterflies. You can find hundreds of literary references to the fluttering of these colorful creatures. Anyone lacking even primitive imagination would have named them Flutterflies, and that they did.
Then, near the beginning of the Renaissance, a scribe was copying an authoritative manuscript about Flutterflies. This scribe was known for pushing the tolerances of his quill and he accidentally turned the “Fl” into a B on the nearly-finished cover panel. Rather than recreate the cover from scratch, the scribe copied the entire text of the book using “B” in place of “Fl” wherever the word Flutterfly appeared.
Sheep that we are, we continue to call Flutterflies by this silly dairy-related name. There’s no going back.
A Kitchen Gardener’s Deep Thought about Flutterflies #2
Marauding cabbage flutterflies puddle after I water my small kitchen garden. I love that they do this… especially if it keeps them away from my broccoli. Yes: broccoli worms are baby cabbage flutterflies.
Puddling. If you’re a gardener, you’ve probably seen puddling, but you might not have heard of it. Often after I water my small kitchen garden, a flock of flutterflies assembles on the moist soil. This, my dad used to tell me, is how flutterflies (though he called them butterflies) ingest essential minerals that simply don’t exist in nectar the flutterflies typically consume.
So, while my wife plants flowering ornamentals to attract those pretty insects, I do my share by watering the vegetable garden from time-to-time. Of course, my brassicas wouldn’t mind if someone would come to puddle besides the cabbage butterflies.
Small Kitchen Garden Bloom Day 11/11
This lone pink blossom is on a plant my wife set in one of her ornamental beds. A clump of buds just behind the blossom looks ready to pop. Forecast temperatures suggest the buds have a chance.
It was a challenging Garden Bloggers Bloom Day for this kitchen gardener. Mainly, my small kitchen garden was finished by late summer. Rain, blight, rain, mud, rain, rot, rain, insects, rain, and rain conspired to shut things down well earlier than in any previous year. After all that, we had a significant snow storm in late October when peak fall colors were just starting to fade. Oh, and guess how the weather was when I went out to take photos? Yep, it was raining and overcast.
It impresses me that anything is in bloom around here, so I stepped out of my small kitchen garden and scavenged blossoms wherever I found them in the yard. Most of what’s in bloom is in ornamental beds or containers, and it’s all barely holding on. Please enjoy what’s left of summer in my wet little chunk of central Pennsylvania.
A diaphanous puff of white clings tenuously to a stem just a few feet from the pink blossom in the preceding photo. The two blossoms are all that remain on annuals my wife planted in late spring.
There are four potted plants on our front porch. They might have served as centerpieces at some banquet during the summer. Two have wilted back to their roots (one I recognized as a begonia). The other two show signs of stress, but they continue to put out blossoms resembling asters; the ornamental-savvy among you will have to ID them.
The second of two potted plants on our front porch that continues to produce blossoms despite many overnight lows in the twenties and a significant snowfall in late October.
Somehow, this makes sense to me: the holly bush that came with the house is in bloom, though it has more buds than it has blossoms. Still, if it’s just blooming now, will berries form within the month? Come to think of it, in 18 years, I don’t recall ever seeing berries on this plant.
Rain stunted my broccoli this year, but one plant continues to taunt me by putting out tablespoon-sized florets.
In the department of confused, a forsythia in a back corner of the yard is in bloom. Is it because an unseasonable warm spell followed a cold spell? Is it because the rain paused for two weeks after the freak October snow? Perhaps this branch of blossoms thinks winter ought to be just four days long?
Nutmeg provided drama on this month’s Bloom Day. She happily accompanied me on my photo shoot and discovered poop in the grass when I paused to photograph the broccoli. If my dog is going to roll in something stinky, I choose carrion. Sadly, today she chose poop. She’s damp in this photo because I dragged her straight to the shower where she had the lather, rinse, and repeat treatment twice! I’m pretty sure the camera captured a smirk; Nutmeg has a lot of attitude for several hours after a shower.
Don’t Forget to Post Product Next Week!!!
Your Small Kitchen Garden blog hosts Post Produce on the 22nd of every month. Create a blog entry that shares what you’re eating from your garden-what you’re harvesting, what’s ripening, what you’re cooking or preserving, or even what you’re taking out of your larder for an off-season meal. Then find my Post Produce post and create a link back to yours. Follow the link here for find more information about Post Produce.
Posted in home kitchen garden, small kitchen garden | Tags: bloom day, blossoms, broccoli, flowers, garden bloggers bloom day, nutmeg | 5 Comments »
Touch Me Not on Bloom Day
The flowers of Jewel Weed are small but quite pretty and they attract all kinds of native pollinators. Jewel Weed prefers damp soil, so look for it along stream banks.
This Garden Bloggers Bloom Day in my Small Kitchen Garden is a real downer. 8 inches of rain last week drowned roots of my climbing beans and my chili peppers… and I must believe the winter squash isn’t happy. The rhubarb is also looking pretty bad which is especially distressing because rhubarb should be building up stores to help it through the winter.
Stepping out of My Small Kitchen Garden
To escape the ugliness, I stepped out of the garden for September’s Bloom Day post. I found one of my favorite common plants, the Touch Me Not, which many people know as Jewel Weed, and shot a few photos.
What I Know About Jewel Weed
I know Touch Me Nots from when I was a kid. It grew in thickets at the summer camp I attended. There were three things I loved about the plant then… and I still love those things:
Jewel Weed produces small pods that contain one or more seeds. As the pods mature, they become plump, and you can eventually see dark spots through their skins. The spots are seeds which are ripe when they turn dark.
1. The flowers are gorgeous
2. The seeds are edible and they taste pretty good
3. The seed pods explode
I’ve since learned a few other tidbits about Jewel Weed:
1. The sap is a cure for itchiness—particularly for poison ivy. Supposedly, if you crumple up and crush a leaf and rub it on a rash, the itchiness will diminish for several hours.
2. The flowers attract butterflies and hummingbirds.
What’s not to like?
When you bump a ripe seed pod, it explodes and sends its seeds up to several feet away from the parent plant. I contained the explosion of this under ripe pod to capture the seeds and provide a look at the springy parts. Find a stand of Touch Me Nots, gently harvest a bunch of ripe pods, and contain them when they explode. Then snack on the dark-brown seeds. The flavor may remind you of wild hickory nuts.
Posted in home kitchen garden, small kitchen garden | Tags: bloom day, blossoms, flowers, garden bloggers bloom day, jewel weed, touch me not | 4 Comments »
Small Kitchen Garden Bloom Day, August 2011
There are three pots of basil on the handrail of my deck. I put far too many seeds in the pots, and the poor plants grew up stunted. Still, the flowers are delicate and beautiful.
My small kitchen garden, like so many gardens in the US, has struggled through the season. Happily, things are finally moving along, though I’m afraid there is a fungus trying to kill my tomato plants.
But today isn’t about the problems, it’s about the bling! The 15th of every month is Garden Bloggers Bloom Day. You can learn more about it over at May Dreams Gardens. I failed to capture decent shots of the flowering mint and cilantro. Also, I neglected to photograph corn silk. Still, there were a lot of blossoms today. Please enjoy the photos of what’s abloom in my kitchen garden.
There are two windowsill planters of cucumber plants under the handrail on my deck. This flower snuggles beneath the handrail, and it is one of dozens that have popped in the last week or so.
A bell pepper flower appears healthy and robust. Oddly, my bell pepper plants are thriving while my jalapeno, banana, and poblano pepper plants are struggling.
Despite the appearance of something blighty on some of my tomato plants, they continue produce flowers. I don’t suspect late blight because all the lesions are on lower stems and some lower leaves. I’ve seen no signs of sporulation, so it doesn’t seem likely to move from plant-to-plant. Still, I fear for my tomato crop: it may be quite limited this season.
How’s this? I understand it’s the male flower on a corn plant. My sweet corn is growing ears, and the silk on those is, technically, the female flower. This corn tassel is red and the corn lower down on the plant is also supposed to be red. I’ve never tried red sweet corn, but I suspect it will taste a lot like yellow sweet corn.
That’s a cosmos trying to hide behind a corn leaf. I planted cosmos with my corn because I heard from an online acquaintance that this would keep away corn ear worms. The first ears are nearly ready to harvest. I don’t see evidence of worms, but they can be pretty sneaky, so I won’t know for sure if the cosmos helped until I start shucking.
As long as I’m confessing about planting flowers, here’s an even bigger sin: My wife ceded an ornamental bed to me so I could grow more climbing beans. I set about ten beans across the back of the bed, and then planted five or six types of flower seeds through the rest of the bed. From the looks of things, only two types of flower plants survived, and the first to bloom is a zinnia. The leaves way back against the wall of the house on the left are Kentucky Wonder bean leaves.
On the subject of beans, here’s a flower on one of my bush wax bean plants. The plants suffered heavy chewing by insects until I treated them with insecticidal soap. With new leaves, the plants show more vigor toward reproduction. I’ve harvested a serving of wax beans and anticipate being able to preserve about a gallon of them before the season is over.
Weed. There’s quite a bit of it near my small kitchen garden, and just a few stems actually in the garden. The flowers are pretty so it’s hard to go all anti-weed on them.
I had to finish with a winter squash blossom because it’s all that! This is the biggest squash blossom in my small kitchen garden. It belongs to a neck pumpkin plant and was one of about a dozen gorgeous blossoms peaking out from rain-soaked leaves this morning. Oddly, my blue Hubbard plants have produced about 8 female flowers and only one male flower. I’ve pollinated the blue Hubbards using male flowers from the neck pumpkin plants. So far, they seem to accept this hybrid pollination, but I can’t predict whether the seeds will be viable next year (and if they are, what the squashes might be like). Perhaps I’ll find out next summer?
Posted in home kitchen garden, small kitchen garden | Tags: basil, beans, bloom day, blossoms, corn, cucumbers, flowers, garden bloggers bloom day, peppers, squash, tomatoes | 7 Comments »
Small Kitchen Garden Bloom Day, July 2011
This onion barely qualifies as “in bloom” on this Garden Bloggers Bloom Day. A few petals remain, and I assume the white bud-looking things are future onion seeds. If these grow anything like wild onions, I expect to see sprouts emerge all over this ball within a month or so… assuming I can continue to work around it—at this point, it’s kind of in the way in my small kitchen garden.
It’s Garden Bloggers Bloom Day and my Small Kitchen Garden actually has something to offer! My vegetables are a few weeks behind compared to past years, but things are finally shaping up. (Understand that I had virtually no spring crops this season because my planting bed was underwater until the end of MAY.) Tomatoes have formed (seedlings went into the garden in early June) and I’m projecting the first will ripen in mid August… which is just a bit later than usual.
Peppers are the hold outs this year. While my bell pepper plants are lush and growing, my jalapeno, banana pepper, and poblano plants have stood for weeks with no apparent growth. Now that the soil is seasonably dry, I hope these struggling plants finally get it in gear.
For long-time readers of Your Small Kitchen Garden, the cilantro and dill pairing should seem familiar; it has starred in many a Bloom Day post. The dill (right) is poised to blossom, while the cilantro (left) is about to produce coriander—seeds from the cilantro plant are, in and of themselves, a popular seasoning.
My herb bed helped me through the wet spring; it was never as wet at the main planting bed so I was able to start annuals alongside the perennials I’d set in in the fall. The purple flowers—clearly in bloom—are on a volunteer that I recognized when it first sprouted; it had snuck in from my wife’s ornamental plantings. The modest blossoms stand out against the lush greens of sage, cilantro, dill, and basil.
Mint blossoms! I don’t know what type of mint it is… it started growing two years ago in a planter containing tarragon plants. I’m OK with it as long as it stays in the container. But if it escapes, I will almost certainly eradicate it; mint is aggressive about colonizing planting beds.
The broccoli was a joke this year. Because of rain, I left seedlings in their starting pots about a month too long. When I finally set them in the garden, the soil was too wet—and then it rained. When the plants finally sent up florets, each would have filled about a tablespoon. The side shoots have been even less impressive. I’ve pulled all but three of the plants, and a rabbit recently pruned two of them. Climbing beans are now emerging from the decimated broccoli area. Pretty yellow flowers will not save the last broccoli plants from a move to the compost heap.
Happiness is a tomato blossom presaging the coming harvest. (I said “presaging” because it has “sage” in it.) I’m growing 10 varieties of tomatoes this year if you don’t count the Cherokee Purples that have sprung up in the compost heap.
There seems always to be at least one interloper at my Bloom Day photo shoots. Here, a fly-looking thingy tries to steal the spotlight from a bell pepper flower. I so hope my peppers have enough growing season remaining to turn red; I’d like to make a batch of red pepper relish using only peppers from my garden.
Yep: weed. At least that’s what my wife says. I think it looks like a morning glory, but my wife assures me it’s not. Still… it really wants to be a morning glory. I suppose I should believe my wife given that these things grow as abundantly as purslane wherever we work the soil.
That’s a cosmos about to burst into song in my vegetable garden. It irks me just a little to have been planting flowers, but I planted corn this year (which I haven’t done since I was a kid). I mentioned one week during #gardenchat (a weekly gathering on Twitter of anyone wishing to discuss gardening) that I was going to plant corn, and someone assured me that if I plant cosmos with it corn ear worms will not visit my crop. I hope this wasn’t just a mean trick to get me to plant flowers… We shall see.
Posted in home kitchen garden, small kitchen garden | Tags: bloom day, blossoms, cilantro, corn, dill, flowers, garden bloggers bloom day, herbs, onions, peppers, tomatoes | 6 Comments »
September 2010 Bloom Day in my Small Kitchen Garden
Autumn is but days away in my small kitchen garden, and frost won’t be far behind. That being the case, vegetable plants really have no reason to bloom. There simply isn’t enough time for a flower to produce fruits, seeds, pods, or anything else I’d want to eat before cold weather shuts it down.
Of course, my plants don’t know this, so they continue to convert sunshine into food and show off their reproductive junk. Don’t blush; here’s what’s exposed on this late-summer Garden Bloggers Bloom Day:
There is a most unexpected display in my small kitchen garden: Lupine blossoms. I thought these were a springtime phenomenon, but this year several plants decided that once around wasn’t enough. This year, the springtime display was a bit lame, so it’s nice to see more blossoms now. Why are there lupines in my kitchen garden at all? In a moment of weakness some years ago, I set perennials at one end of my planting bed… and I added a few flowers “just cuz.” Had I to do it over, the lupines and hollyhocks would be asparagus. I set only three asparagus roots, and two failed. My “official” recommendation: if you ever start an asparagus bed in your home kitchen garden, set a dozen or more roots. Never mind ending up with more than you can consume; it’s especially frustrating to grow so little that you can’t make a meal of it.
I might have overstated the futility of mid-September vegetable blossoms. There’s some chance that this bean blossom will produce a decent bean pod before frost kills the plant. Still, there are so few blossoms left on the bean plants that if I do get a bean out of this one, it’ll be the only bean in the garden.
The pepper plants seem to be eternal optimists. There are dozens of pepper blossoms in my small kitchen garden. I may carry a few of the potted peppers inside when frost threatens. On the other hand, there are still hundreds (I’m not exaggerating) of peppers ripening. If I can, freeze, and dry batches of them, I’ll have more than I’m likely to use before the first peppers are ready next summer.
With goldenrod in full-bloom, it’s hard to imagine a broccoli blossom drawing this kind of attention. Perhaps the nectar has a more subtle flavor than that of goldenrod? No clue, but the bee insisted on participating in my Bloom Day photo shoot.
What, no blossoms? Oh, and more broccoli? You see, there’s this broccoli plant that just hasn’t stopped growing. I harvested in late spring, and the plant went crazy. It now towers more than eight feet, and has become a nature preserve in my kitchen garden. This grasshopper suns itself lazily as the ants go about storing food for the long winter to come.
This tiny red flower is really pretty. I think my wife planted it in the ornamental bed across from my raised bed vegetable garden. No, ornamentals haven’t leaped across the lawn to grow among my vegetables. Rather, this little beauty is growing in my excavation. You see, I started digging a new planting bed in early spring and then lost interest in it. I left a hole adjacent to the ornamental bed and a mound of soil next to the hole. My wife’s ornamentals have grown across the hole onto the mound, suggesting that my future herb garden may have issues with my wife’s pretty plants.
Posted in home kitchen garden, small kitchen garden | Tags: bloom day, blossoms, flowers | No Comments »
Abloom in Your Small Kitchen Garden in July 2010
Yes, some of the broccoli has gotten away from me. I’ve planted the same variety for two years, and in both years it has produced tiny heads. I kind of loose interest in it, though we do eat most of the side shoots. This winter I’ll be shopping around for a breed of broccoli that makes giant heads… the tiny yields I’ve had lately aren’t worth the garden space.
It’s Garden Bloggers Bloom Day, an event that happens on the 15th of each month. Founded by Carol over at May Dreams Gardens, Bloom Day beckons garden bloggers the world over to post photographs of what’s abloom in their gardens. Most of these posts have pictures of beautiful flowers in gorgeous ornamental gardens. Alas, my small kitchen garden isn’t about pretty.
Still, I love the blossoms nearly as much as I love the vegetables… and seeing them heightens my anticipation for the harvest that’s likely to follow. Things are doing extremely well this season. Early heat followed by drought has finally relented to several days of rain and more typical summer temperatures.
Here are the flowers I photographed this afternoon in my small kitchen garden:
I haven’t planted dill this year, but there are many dill weed blossoms in my small kitchen garden. The flowers attract all kinds of insects. If I let the dill go to seed as it did last year, I imagine the planting bed will be a veritable lawn of dill sprouts in the spring.
The oregano jungle has rebounded from some autumn and spring culling. The flowers are delicate and they provide beautiful contrast for nearly half the growing season. Still, I need to be more aggressive culling this fall; the oregano patch increases about a third in size in a season.
Onion blossoms make me happy. The globe of tiny flowers emerges in late spring and lingers for weeks. I cut a bouquet of onion flowers for the dining room table, and they’ve filled the room with a delicious onion aroma for nearly a month. I don’t encourage you to harvest your onion flowers; I had missed a few bulbs last fall, and what sprouted this spring needed to go to make way for the 2010 crops.
We’ve eaten bell and poblano peppers from the small kitchen garden this year, and there are dozens of banana peppers ready to harvest. Happily, there are many pepper blossoms which portend a massive harvest. I expect I’ll pickle a lot of peppers… and probably give away a whole bunch of them.
This sad specimen is an early cucumber blossom on a plant growing in a container. This is the first time I’ve grown cucumbers, so I’ll probably do some research to learn about what bugs eat cucumber blossoms… I haven’t seen this kind of abuse on my winter squash blossoms in past seasons.
The potato blossoms here stand above the background of the cardboard tube in which the plants are growing. I wrote about this project in a post titled Plant Potato Towers in your Small Kitchen Garden. In two of three planters, the potato plants have grown up through an accumulated 3 feet or more of soil. I’ve stopped adding soil, and the plants have gone on to grow well above the containers and produce flowers. One of my neighbors has asked me to invite him when I tip the containers over and dig out the potatoes. He’s as curious as I am to see how things come out.
Oh, the tomato blossoms abound! This has been the season of the great seed-starting debacle: I planted a whole bunch of seeds indoors, and they didn’t sprout. So, I planted again as many. This second batch sprouted about when the first batch sprouted; I ended up with double the seedlings I’d intended. After giving away many tomato seedlings, I crammed 84 plants into my small kitchen garden where I have traditionally planted 24.
While photographing flowers today, I found the very first barely pink tomato of the season! This may be the largest chili-pepper-shaped paste tomato I’ve harvested, and many more on the plants are just as big. Why did I pick it when it’s so under ripe? I explained last season in a post titled The Vine-Ripened Tomato Lie. This baby will finish ripening on my dining room table.
Posted in home kitchen garden, plant basil, plant beans, plant herbs, plant potatoes, plant tomatoes, plant vegetables | Tags: bloom day, blossoms, flowers, vegetables | 5 Comments »
Small Kitchen Garden P*rn: Bloom Day, April 2010
The forsythia are in their second week, and will be gone within days. They have been particularly striking this year.
To celebrate my first Garden Bloggers’ Bloom Day of 2010, I’ve stepped out of my small kitchen garden. In fact, I’m going to confess something that is completely contrary to my best intentions.
I often express my lack of interest for planting anything that I’m not eventually going to eat. In truth, I’ve planted many ornamentals over the years. My wife has planted far more than many, and our yard is quite loaded with flowers through most of the growing season. Both the landscaping and the maintenance of it are exceptionally reproachable, but the flowers are gorgeous.
The photographer in me has always been a sap for flowers, and our interior décor includes enlargements of many of my flower photos. When I create a Bloom Day post, I usually stick to blossoms of the kitchen garden. Today, however, those blossoms share space with whatever else is busting out in our yard.
I grew a bit self-conscious while taking photos; I realized that I was focusing my camera a lot on what we might refer to as the flowers’ junk. The experience really brought home to me the meaning of the term “garden p*rn,” and I apologize for bringing it up in the first place. My next post will be back on point… I promise.
(Wondering why I’ve spelled “p*rn” with an asterisk instead of an “o?” I didn’t want to give Google the wrong idea.)
My wife has planted many varieties of daffodils, and they are usually the first plants to push leaves out of the thawing soil. They start to blossom as the crocuses wilt. I love the textures on these particularly frilly daffodils.
Not your typical all-yellow daffodil, the orange tinge around this daffodil’s junk makes for some lovely contrast. It was when I was photographing the daffodils that I realized the p*rnographic nature of my flower photos: what normal, young-blooded daffodil wouldn’t find this view compelling?
Among my favorite of all flowers, forget-me-nots are hearty perennials. They also seem happy to drop seeds that speed the plant’s spread through flower beds and into lawns. I adore these annoying plants… in fact, I planted the first forget-me-nots in our front ornamental bed at least ten years ago. My wife has done battle with them ever since.
The tulips start to blossom about when the forget-me-nots do. I’ve shot hundreds of tulip photos dating back to before digital, but these may be the first I’ve ever shown beyond my family photo albums. They look like tulips, yes?
Just squeaking in in time for Bloom Day, the lilacs are opening. A freeze about ten days ago left the tiny buds looking ominously dark, so I’m very happy to see these popping next to the stairs down from our back deck.
Azalea blossoms this early seem so out of place. The white azaleas have always blossomed ahead of the red ones, and this year is not exception. Only a few buds have opened, but in a matter of days I imagine the whole plant will be covered in white flowers.
Clouds against the blue sky, clusters of blossoms portend a decent pear harvest, assuming we’ve already had the final deep freeze of spring. Last year we had frost around May 26. I personally think fruit trees are stupid, given that they break into flower just because we have three weeks of warm weather three weeks earlier than usual.
I planted a Bartlett and a Moonglow pear tree side-by-side two autumns ago. They have both produced gorgeous pink blossoms among purple leaves. I won’t let them develop fruit this season, but perhaps next year they’ll be large enough to handle it.
If anyone in my yard is trying too hard this year, it’s the peach trees. An awesome display of overachievement. Assuming all the flowers set fruit, I’ll need to remove a lot of them while they’re young if I hope to harvest peaches of any significant size.
I love the way a cluster of buds emerges on an apple tree, and the bud in the middle opens… just a bit ahead of the other buds. I hate to see apple blossoms this early, but the bees have been happy. Here’s hoping we get no severe freeze, and the apple harvest is bountiful this coming autumn.
Dandelions and violets are among my favorite weed flowers. They are both exotic beauties that dominate my lawn for many weeks before I fire up the ugly lawn mower and behead them. Spring is an awesome time in a small kitchen gardener’s yard!
Posted in home kitchen garden, small kitchen garden | Tags: apple trees, bloom day, blooms, blossoms, flowers, peach trees, pear trees | 16 Comments »
Early Fruit Blossoms in my Small Kitchen Garden
This spring’s early start has peach blossoms busting out all over with pear and apple blossoms anxious to pop. When a fruit tree gets and early start, it often loses fruit when more typical weather returns.
Every year that fruit trees have graced my small kitchen garden, I’ve faced an uneasy springtime vigil: Will my fruit blossoms survive?
Fruit trees produce blossoms in response to increasing warmth. By late April, the temperature has usually been high enough for enough days that we get a dramatic display of white, pink, and purple.
Early Spring Kills Small Kitchen Garden Fruit
Two phenomena are particularly distressing to any fruit-grower: a late freeze, and an early start.
While the pear blossoms have held off longer than the peach blossoms, this cluster will probably pop within two days. Meteorologists predict a freeze in two days. Will my peaches and pears survive?
Late freeze—In some years, we see the typical gradual warming that brings on the blossoms in late April. However, with all those gorgeous blossoms on the trees, a cold front drops out of the north and temperatures plummet below freezing.
The opened blossoms freeze, killing the fruit. The kitchen gardener loses out.
Early start—In some seasons, the air temperature rises in March, staying relatively steady for several weeks. Fruit trees react by budding up and putting out blossoms weeks earlier than is typical. If the “unseasonable” warmth continues, there isn’t a problem. However, usually an early start leads to an abrupt return of “seasonal” temperatures. This means sub-freezing nights that can kill fruiting blossoms and destroy hope for a fruit harvest.
Edgy Vigil in my Small Kitchen Garden
During an early start, I can’t help but monitor the bud clusters on my fruit trees. As long as the buds remain tightly closed, even a deep freeze isn’t going to hurt them. When the clusters start to loosen up, I become particularly concerned. Will blossoms pop early this year? If they do, will a nighttime freeze exterminate my fruit crop?
So far, my apple trees are keeping a tight grip on their petals, but the warm weather will almost certainly make them let go in early April. It’s more common for them to wait until late April. That two-to-three week difference could make the difference between a bumper crop of fruit, or a very poor harvest.
This year the vigil started in mid March. It has been crazy warm, and the trees are responding. In fact, my peach trees are in full bloom, pear trees are close on their heels, and my apple trees—the late bloomers of my fruit trees—are threatening to pop. Experience tells me this is very, very bad. Heck, last year we had a killing frost in lat May!
I’m enjoying the gorgeous fruit blossoms, but I’m not happy about them. If Mother Nature blankets us with cold air, there may be nothing to harvest this summer and fall. While I continue my vigil, there’s nothing I can do about the outcome. I don’t need the fruit harvest to survive, so I’ll merely be disappointed if there’s a killing freeze. I can’t imagine the anxiety of a commercial fruit grower when faced with such an early start.
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Other useful information about fruit blossoms:
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How To Save Your Fruit Tree Blossoms From A Spring : : Little Home – How To Save Your Fruit Tree Blossoms From A Spring Freeze. In most parts of the country it’s still dead of Winter. However, in a few spots like here in the Desert Southwest, the warming weather starts to play tricks on …
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Fruit Tree Update: Recognizing Cold Damage to Peach Blossoms – Recognizing Cold Damage to Peach Blossoms. Spring can be a very dangerous time for fruit tree blooms. If cold weather hits when the buds start to swell and bloom then some or all of the blossoms can be killed. …
Posted in home kitchen garden, small kitchen garden | Tags: apples, blossoms, flowers, frost, fruit trees, peaches, pears, plant fruit | 1 Comment »
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