Wordy Wednesday - July 10, 2024

 Let's start Wordy Wednesday off with a look at the Dragon Tongue bush beans.  Gone.  A few days ago I mentioned giving up on them.  I'm giving up on the entire bed, beans and one of the tomatoes.

The air is better, not so much smoke, however the over 100°s are still around.

There are a few good things!

The peach I grew from a pit in 2019 is small, so I only left one peach to mature.   It stayed on the tree!  Three to five years is average for a peach from pit to produce fruit.   If the pollen came from the same tree it will bear true, a Frost peach, but even if the pollen came from across the street via pollinator, it won't make much different.  

Eleven years ago I got free boysenberry canes.  I don't remember where, and only remember the year because I mentioned it in a post in January, 2013.  They were a lot of trouble, cutting down the current years sharp canes, and leaving new growth be.  After five or six years I gave up, they were a tangled mess.  They'd been growing in large black nursery pots, which allowed roots to escape and pop up now and again as the years went by.  This year they were hidden in the Virginia creeper.   That's fine!  They are delicious.  Their thorns cause a quite a sore for me though.

The Pluot tree is sick (gummosis and leaf curl), and I got one edible fruit this year, the rest dropped.  There weren't many anyway.  It blooms pretty, and shades part of the vegetable beds, so I leave it.  This is not Pluot.  This is a sucker "tree" that has lots of small plums.  I think it's getting the same leaf curl problem as the Pluot.  Fruit trees are too much trouble.

Can you believe the black-eyed Susans are already declaring their summer is over?  They're pretty when the petals age and turn white on the tips.

This is Woolly Apple mint I planted in the Toss Garden.  It's one of three mints I propagated from cuttings just to plant there in an attempt to crowd out the lemon balm.  They are doing a pretty good job! 

The others are orange mint and spearmint, which was originally a volunteer.  Mints may be said to like less sun, but these do very well for me in full sun. 

This is Strawberry mint, another that thrives in the sun. You can tell by it, and the three above, that mint can really get invasive.   Not as much as the lemon balm, which was in a container until its seeds escaped.  Tiny pollinators like the flowers on this and the Woolly Apple mint.

For all the hoopla written about coneflowers for the pollinators, mine is far the least attractive to them.  Oh, they'll come when other flowers are done.  Coneflowers are perennials, but can be short-lived.  Mine aren't as robust as in years past. 

Not my garden!  This is a diorama at the library.  It's made in a lunchbox.