Category Archives: gardening

The Summer of ’24

butterfly, flowers, gardening, Goldfinch, goldfinches, Hummingbird, morning glory flower, Nature, New England, rosebreasted grosbeak, summer, sunflower, Tiger Swallowtail, , , , , , , , ,
Well, you might not know it from this week’s temperature, but summer should be moving into autumn now that it’s September.  So, perhaps my late developing pumpkins and veggies may come to full bloom after all.  Earlier in the season, we did dine deliciously a couple of times on our own eggplants.  And there are more growing! We also have had a few meals flavored by our home grown peppers.  Here’s a shot of one harvest.  Don’t you just love the deliciously spicy and fresh smell when you slice open a  garden pepper?

We haven’t had such good luck with our tomatoes and pumpkins this year – although  we did get a few fresh tomatoes for Yang to add to his omelettes and stir fries.  The beans are just now coming into form.  We had one serving earlier, and we’re planing on harvesting some of these beauties soon.

 

I’m also hoping that though these pumpkin and gourd embryos are late comers, they may still grow and ripen with the hot autumn we’ve been having.

 

We didn’t have the best of luck with our sunflowers, as some form of insect (we think beetles) brutalized the plants grown from seeds planted directly into the garden.  However, after a daily spraying of tabasco sauce in water to drive off the insects, most of the sunflowers recovered.  Some even grew  up to full height and even better than the ones we’d protected by growing them as seedlings in cups before planting.

 

 

The Morning Glories had been growing full throttle, vines creeping up the trellis, until chipmunks tunneled out of the wood retaining wall on which the flower’s boxes were located and munched them silly.  It’s a jungle out there! Again, tabasco spritzing did its job and some managed to recover and grow.  I especially like the orchid colored ones.

Did you notice the  two-toned orchid and purple one?  Those hybrids pop up every year.  If you look at the seeds, they are even half black (purple flower) and half cream-colored (orchid flower).  I save the seeds every year and replant, so I sometimes even get pink instead of orchid.  I guess that’s the orchid and magenta hybrid.

 

We’ve had interesting fauna as well as flora this year.  First, let me introduce you to Bunzie.  A very young and small rabbit showed up at the beginning of the summer.  He has since grown!  Best of all, he seems to  eat only clover and grass – well he did devour much of a dying petunia.  However, that petunia regrouped and has a lovely deep pink flower now.  So, I guess he was just dead heading for me.  He’s actually not too afraid of Yang and me, but we don’t bother him, either.  One night, he triggered the motion-detector light outside the sun porch and we got to watch him dash hither and yon while two skunks patiently waddled about that stretch of yard looking for grubs.

I only saw one Monarch Butterfly this year, yesterday.  Unfortunately, I didn’t have a camera with me – and I scared Bunzie when I rushed over to the butterfly bush to see it.  We have had at least two regular visitors to the butterfly bushes, these Tiger Swallowtails.  I love how you can see the same yellow and black patterns on the insect’s body that you can see on his wings.  I was so surprised that these guys let me get close enough to watch and take these pictures.  They also love to dine on the nectar of flox and Rose of Sharon flowers.

Another critter who loves butterfly bushes, flox, and Rose of Sharon would be the Hummingbird – or birds.  We had at least two, though usually only one showed up at a time.  When there were two, feathers flew, so to speak.  Yang got some great shots.  It’s fun to watch him , the bird not Yang, come in for a landing, wings a-whirl!  I’m sure that you can understand why the pictures are a little blurry!  Once he/she landed, the little guy enjoyed our nectar – as well as taking sips from all the flowers.

Sometimes, he just liked to sit majestically atop the feeder and survey his domain.  Other times he enjoyed parking his tuffett on the structure on which the Morning Glories grew – he thought they were tasty, too.  If you’re wondering what that contraption is atop the feeder, it’s a moat that Yang created to keep ants from climbing down into the feeder.  Yang saw some designs for sale on line, figured he could make one for much cheaper – and did it!

Sometimes the Hummer just stared at our window with a “Who you lookin’ at?” attitude.

Of course, we also had some of the other usual suspects this summer.  The Goldfinches pretty much dominated the two globe feeders, though the Redbellied Woodpecker wasn’t above shooting his long tongue through the bars to steal some sunflower hearts.

The Rosebreasted Grosbeaks were back as well.  I saw as many as three males at once one time!  I also saw the females and some juvenile males as well.  Unfortunately, though we kept putting out oranges, we only saw an Oriole here twice.  My neighbor said he saw the Oriole quite a bit, though on the feeder.

 

 

One visitor to the feeders who was rather unique for the summer was this chap.

Now how often do you see a Slate Colored Junco in new England in the middle of July?  He stayed around well into August, then I haven’t seen him since.  Someone got his GPS all fowled (ahem) up!  Now, will he be back this autumn?  Stay tuned!

Adventures of a Pumpkin Grower: Harvest Time

Claude Rains, gardening, gardens, Halloween, Hallpween Decorations, massachusetts, Nature, New England, pumpkins, Sharon Yang, Uncategorized, , , , , , , ,
My last post was about the denizens growing in my pumpkin patch.  Now, I can write you about the harvest.  I still have one large orange pumpkin on the vine, and two embryos actually got fertilized about a week ago-who knows if they’ll make it.  However, most of the others are now decorating my house!
Number One Son is here in the living room, decorated appropriately for Halloween.  He may not be the biggest of the family, but he’s the brave first to be fertilized and survive.  He’s right next to the television, so we can see him all the time.

 

 

 

Here is Number Two Son on the dining room table-another place that we spend a lot of time.  He’s a bit bigger than his elder brother, and he is strong and handsome.  You can also see he shares the table with a lovely striped gourd.  Each of these was the only survivor on its respective vine, but both do the mother plant proud.  They certainly fit nicely with the Halloween decorations, don’t they?

And speaking of handsome gourds in the dining room, here’s this gorgeous  melange of orange and green.  He’s a perfect fall color!  The first gourd on his vine grew for a while, but didn’t make it.  This chap grew up next, initially hanging from the fence where the vine had climbed.  His healthy form soon brought the vine down to earth.  Beautiful color and shape, wouldn’t you say?
I have already harvested three more orange pumpkins.  I suspect they are sugar pumpkins, but they are just too pretty to eat.  Two of them, I have put by the fireplace with a white pumpkin and a green striped one.  I think they make a neat combo.  How about you?

 

The white pumpkin was actually attacked by a grub and has a hole in it, but a little peroxide seems to have ended the invasion.  I put the side with no wounding out to face the world.  Good-sized guy, isn’t it?  When we harvested it, we found it also had a local root coming off the stem.  I guess that’s how it got enough nutrition to grow this big.

 

There’s also this good sized pumpkin or squash that’s green with stripes.  I don’t know what kind it is, but it sure is pretty.  Does anyone out there know?  I’d love to hear from you so I could find out what I have.  I wonder if there was some cross pollination that created a hybrid?

 

Remember the runaway/escapee?  That pumpkin grew into a real beauty.  There’s even an almost bluish cast to it’s white skin.  Is this a Lumina or  is it another breed of pumpkin?

 

Last but not least, remember I said I’d harvested three orange pumpkins?  Well, the third one is not on display at home. Instead, I brought it to the grave of my favorite actor, Claude Rains and left it as a token of esteem.  Presents you work to create yourself are usually the best!

 

Tales of a Pumpkin Grower

Autumn, Fall, gardening, gardens, massachusetts, Nature, New England, pumpkins, sunflower, , , , ,
I was surprised to realize recently that I have been growing pumpkins for almost thirty years!  And it all started by accident.  One early summer afternoon, when I lived in Connecticut, I was sitting  in my yard under some shady trees with a friend, when I noticed we had these big orange flowers growing in the composting area.  I had no clue what they were.  When I asked my friend, she said they looked like squash flowers-but I hadn’t planted any squash seeds.  Yang was away in China visiting his family, but when he checked in with me by phone, he said those were probably from the Halloween pumpkins we’d put in with the compost last fall.  He told me to check for a bump under some of the flowers, which I sure enough found:  embryos on the female flowers.  I even learned how to pollinate the female with male flowers.  Happily, we ended up with some giant pumpkins for Halloween that fall. My pumpkin growing with Yang was off to a successful start!
Eventually, we had to re-purpose that area, but we created another pumpkin garden next to the house.  They loved it there!  We had gourds, pumpkins, decorative squash and even hulu!  You can see how the vines spread out and took over. The land was so rich we had the best of luck growing.  You can also see that in my thirties, I was a natural blonde-just saying.

When we moved to Auburn, we had a lot of land, but not all of it was good for growing vegetables.  Still, after the first year, we did get some nice pumpkins and gourds, as well as other veggies (peppers, tomatoes, eggplants, soy beans, corn).  However, the earth in the first garden we had started to wear out after almost twenty years.  About three years ago, we got NO pumpkins or gourds.  Yang decided to do something.
He developed a circular garden in the middle of our large lawn, filling it with lots of good earth and cow manure.  Last year, we got plenty of veggies and some outstanding pumpkins and gourds.  One white pumpkin is still whole and unrotted over a whole year later.  Of course, Yang also circled the garden with a fence and chicken wire at the bottom to keep out the critters.  This year he expanded the garden and replaced about six inches of bad earth with cow manure and good soil.  Boy did we do well with eggplant, peppers, tomatoes, and PUMPKINS!

 

Here’s Number 1 Son, the first pumpkin to get fertilized (thanks to me), as well as the first pumpkin to be picked.  He’s not the biggest, but your first born is always special.  He came off the vine of some seedlings that we bought.

 

 

 

We also have a sister to last year’s big white pumpkin.  I think this one might even grow to be bigger than last year’s.  This pumpkin grew from seeds that I saved from an early pumpkin.  When I buy pumpkins for decoration, I always look for good “breeding stock” from which I save the seeds for growing the next generation.

 

I’m not sure what the heck this one is.  It’s green with stripes.  I don’t remember buying seeds or saving any that looked like this one, so it’s probably some kind of hybrid.  If anyone recognizes the type, please let me know.  Maybe it’s part squash?

 

 

We bought a bunch of pumpkin seedlings from Howe’s in Paxton, and I also planted seeds from previous years’ pumpkins of a similar variety.  I did plant the seedlings and the seeds in different quadrants, but the vines just went wild, so it’s hard to tell which is the source for these beautiful orange pumpkins.  this one, I can trace back to a seedling, but the others are hard to tell.
Some of the plants are more adventurous than others.  This guy snaked through the fence and is now growing wild and free (and subject to rabbits and ground hogs) in the yard.  What a rebel!

 

 

 

As you may have noticed, we have some sunflowers in this garden.  I successfully planted delphinium and bachelor buttons, then said, “What the hey!” and dropped in two sunflower seeds.  We’d had a mammoth sunflower that I bought last year, towering about seven feet.  Well, one of my seeds (either from a package or that sunflower) has shot way up.  Here it is next to me (I’m 5’3″) for scale.  So, I hope your growing season this year, despite the drought, was as successful as ours!