Lots more flowers in the vegetable garden

The flowers are just as important as the fruits and vegetables in our vegetable garden, since the garden is in a conspicuous place. A vegetable patch can be ugly in the middle of summer. Picture corn stalks falling over and tomatoes and cantaloupe vines running amok and then dying spectacularly. This ruining usually occurs in the middle of summer when I'm more concerned with avoiding heatstroke than tidying the vegetable garden after I've completed the rest of my chores.

In the beginning the vegetable garden was quite open.

2008

2009

The roses were small. This swamp rose is now over 6 feet tall.

So I planted a lot of seed grown Gulf Coast penstemon to fill in the gaps.

Belinda's Dream in 2008, before being grown over by the swamp rose and 'Veilchenblau'.

The flowers in the vegetable garden are around the perimeter, with the exception of the perennial sweet pea. We used a little metal stand for the sweet pea, which served its purpose for a couple of years before snapping off at the bottom in a wind storm. Later the sweet pea grew on the teepee with the Marabar spinach before that fell over too.

Lovely but not fragrant alas.

For a while there was also a Sombreuil rose on the wires
also meant for raspberry vines. The garden in 2010.

Then the raspberry died and 'Sombreuil' is much too thorny to have in the inevitably tight quarters of a vegetable garden. G. ended up taking the wires down.

The picture below is from spring 2012. All of the roses have sized up except for 'Hansa'. Some of my rugosa hybrids (Hansa and my 'Therese Bugnet' seedling) had severe dieback over the winter last year. After a mild dry winter?? The TB seedling may be gone and the 'Hansa's are still struggling. I hope they don't come down with RRD this year. I've noticed some roses showing a decline before showing full-blown symptoms. Will have to wait and see.

See how much better Hansa looked in 2011?

These rugosas (seedlings of R. rugosa rubra and 'Hansa') need to be cut back to allow more room in the garden, but they do make a good hedge. Deer don't eat the rugosas here and the way the vegetable garden is designed/ has turned out there aren't many easy ways out, so I think they may help keep the deer out. If the deer were hungry enough they would eat everything, but that hasn't been the case so far.

'Pink Pillar' is one of the two truly warm-colored roses I have, both of which are climbers. 'Crepuscule' is the other one. The predominance of cool-colored roses is more the result of natural selection than personal choice, but this way the warm-colored roses make a lot of splash in an ocean of cool colors.

The combination of orange and candy pink somehow works with this rose.

The drainage in the part of the bed next to the drive is half dry, half wet, because the run-off from the roof of the house and from further up the hill runs down the edge of the bed and seeps under the rocks the keep the bed from washing out. The wild Indian strawberry loves the moisture and has formed a thick carpet on its own under the swamp rose and the other plants.

DH buried a 2" pipe that carries the overflow from one of the rain barrels to the edge of the
vegetable garden, next to the R. Palustris scandens. Louisiana iris 'Sinfonietta' thrives there.

Broccoli, sweet peas, Antique Rose Emporium Rosa palustris scandens, rugosa, and 'Veilchenblau'.

R. palustris scandens

'Veilchenblau'

Buddleia 'Petit Indigo' is just far enough away from the edge to keep its toes out of the damp. As you can see the term "petit" is just for the size of the flower panicles and the leaves, not the actual size of the plant.

Hibiscus 'Anne Arundel', Phlox 'David's Lavender', and Formosa Lily. The hibiscus is a seedling of 'Anne Arundel'. I love the deep pink color of the flowers. The plant itself is tall and slender, unlike my light pink hibiscus which is more a round shape.

There's room for a few daylilies next to the driveway as well, although they're started to get a little crowded out.

'Pandora's Box'

I don't know the name of the pink daylily ~ it may be a seedling.

'Hyperion'

'Meriam White'

The north end of the bed gets a lot of moisture as the water that runs next to the bed at the edge of the drive turns and heads toward the ditch and eventually into Middle Creek. This area is home to seashore mallow, more daylilies,

Iris japonica,

amaryllis (Hippeastrum x johnsonii) and crinum. Crinum bulbispermum doesn't have a good fragrance but it's a striking plant, with its tall umbels of blooms and long curving tapered leaves. I bought it a few years ago at Plant Delights and stuck it in dry spot (ironically in the floodplain, on a small ridge that's still feet lower than where it is now), where it sulked. Once moved to richer, wetter soil it started putting up scapes of pink and white flowers with regularity.

Next to C. bulbispermum there is a white crinum and Crinum 'Ellen Bosanquet', a crinum from the 1920's that in my opinion may still be the loveliest out there. I got this crinum in a trade but am 99% sure this is Ellen based on the flowers, and although not apparent in these pictures, the distinctive ruffle-edged foliage. Both of my white crinums (a pure white from Niche that blooms early and 'Royal White' (C. digweedii), which blooms later and repeats) and Ellen are sweetly fragrant. Each one has a distinct perfume. The Niche crinum is just wonderfully sweet, 'Royal White' reminds me of Ivory soap (as does H. x johnsonii), and 'Ellen Bosanquet' has warm spicy undertones.

Flowers and the vegetable garden

From 2011. In front: Transylvania Sage, Calico Penstemon (Penstemon calycosus),
and Phlox pilosa. To the right: Pink Showy Primrose. In background, left to
right: 'Veilchenblau', Verbena bonariensis, and Larkspur.

The plantings in the side of the vegetable garden next to the driveway are short because the strawberry patch currently resides there. Strawberries serve as a pioneer species here, plugged into odd open spaces as they become available, mostly because I really dislike the idea of weeding an entire strawberry patch. Here they grow mingled with pink primrose and lemon balm. If and when they are swamped there are new starts already spreading in the bed in the back yard next to the paddock.

I love larkspur and I've missed it in the garden the last two years. I really should mow back the primrose this fall and the lemon balm and put down seeds for larkspur and poppies. Larkspur may be more modest than delphiniums but still has that magic sheen.

I have one garden sign. Rather than saying something nice or neutral like "Relax" or "Think", this one has an edge to it:

It's supposed to be a joke. Sort of. There's some backstory involving an unpleasant garden visit. When we saw it at Niche Gardens we looked at each other, started laughing and thought it was too perfect to pass up.


There's some tall see-through Verbena bonariensis in this space. I like the effect of looking through it to the rest of the garden.

2008

2009

2012

Everything else on this side of the vegetable garden is short, like this Dianthus 'Russian Skies'.

The iris hadn't been growing very strongly so I was thrilled when 'Fabuleux' bloomed. I think it is well named. I love Cayeux iris. They have their own special brand of elegance.

Here it is blooming with Calico Beardtongue, which came from Gail's clay and limestone garden. I thought I'd lost that beardtongue so I was thrilled to see it too.

Isn't it lovely?

The vegetable garden, 2010-2012

I would like to start this post by stating that I am not a vegetable gardening expert. To be honest I have found growing vegetables to be more difficult than growing flowers, with the insect pests and especially the wilt diseases.

The vegetable garden is really DH's baby. DH isn't an expert either, although he did tag along with his grandfather in his vegetable gardens. He has more enthusiasm for it than I do mainly because the flower gardens take up so much of my time. My main contributions to the vegetable garden are growing some things from seed (tomatoes, peppers, and basil), weeding, watering, and growing the flowers around the vegetable garden.

The vegetable garden back in 2010, with a fresh topping of
compost. The roses were a good foot or two shorter back then.

In the summer of 2011

For the first few years DH planted tomatoes, squash and cantaloupe all together. That combination makes for a very crowded garden, although it's somehow easy to forget about that each spring. lol

Initially there were wires between two posts to support climbing roses and raspberries. Not a good idea to have something thorny strung up in the middle of the garden. I'm not sure whose idea that was but I will deny it was mine if asked. ;) The raspberries tasted like dishwater so I wasn't sorry when the canes died out. 'Pink Pillar' is still entwined around one of the posts, 'Sombreuil' was moved out, and unfortunately 'Fields of the Wood' got buried under last year's crops of corn and pole beans.

2010

In 2011 DH took down the wires and put up string between the two posts and for the next two years planted sweet peas, followed by corn and string beans planted together. We never got that many sweet peas (hot weather usually cuts them short), but the corn and pole beans have worked out well. In previous years he planted 'Kentucky Wonder' (which is really nice, sweet with a good texture), but this year I ordered 'Lazy Wife Greasy Bean' seeds and the plants were excellent producers. The beans are called "greasy" because the pods are hairless and somewhat shiny, and "lazy wife" because they grow in bunches and are easy to pick. The one drawback is that you have to string the pods on both sides.

Sweet peas and broccoli in early spring 2012

In early May 2012

The best broccoli we ever grew was broccoli that DH picked up at Lowe's one year, that unfortunately didn't have a cultivar tag so its identity may forever remain a mystery. The stems and leaves were slender and a very dark green, almost blue-green, and tender, without that woody texture that broccoli stems sometimes have. Not a hint of sulfur taste.

One of the few vegetables that can match broccoli as a superfood is spinach. Real spinach is a cool season crop that likes good drainage and a sweet (basic rather than acidic) soil. I haven't even tried to grow it, but when someone offered us seeds of Malabar spinach in a trade I thought, why not? It's supposed to love hot weather (which it does, in abundance) and it's high in high in vitamin A, vitamin C, iron, and calcium. However, despite its common name Malabar spinach isn't really spinach at all. It usually isn't eaten raw because it has "mucilaginous qualities" ... in other words, it's slimy. Smells delicious while it's cooking but I can't abide the look of cooked greens. To me they always look cooked to death, which they are. Naturally since we didn't really care if the Malabar spinach came back, it did, and covered its teepee again until that fell over in a windstorm at the end of this summer. It is a beautiful vine, with shiny heart-shaped green leaves and clusters of small pink flowers.

Speaking of slimy, we had okra in the garden this year. The vegetable famous for being slimy! One plant will grow taller than a person and produce plenty of okra for two people. As far as I'm concerned, the only way to eat okra is fried. A little corn meal, hot oil in a skillet, and the result is light crispy delicious okra without a hint of slime.

DH planted 3 asparagus plants this spring in anticipation of a harvest 2 years down the road. They put on tremendous top growth this year, shooting up to 6 feet in height. I'm not an asparagus fan so I'm glad the plants are attractive. The airy foliage is gorgeous covered with dewdrops.

Tomatoes have been hit and miss for us. The first couple of years we harvested lots of tomatoes; then, just a few, with many plants succumbing to wilt. We decided to try them in the bed back of the house next to the paddock, where no tomatoes had ever been grown. That was a real tomato disaster. Only one Roma produced anything. The rest wilted, one after the other, even wilt resistant cultivars. New races of Fusarium or Verticillium Wilt? Spotted Wilt Virus? Stalk Borers?? Whatever it was the Japanese eggplant, tomatillos and pepper plants survived and thrived. So the bed was converted back to a baptisia/ Bidens/ anything goes bed this year since it so spectacularly failed as a tomato bed.

2011. Poor tomato plants, looking so hopeful here but so doomed.

I did plant two tomatillo plants back there this year and finally got some tomatillos, although by the time the plants fruited the tomatoes were done. I will try to get them in the ground earlier next year and see if that makes a difference. Worth growing just for the bees though. Bees LOVE the flowers on this plant, which blooms and blooms until a freeze cuts it down.

We had tried growing purple tomatillos from seed and something chewed off the seedlings at the base. Only the tomatillos, on a porch full of seedlings. Go figure. A lady from DH's workplace then gave us some plants. She'd raised them from seed she brought from Mexico. Tomatillo plants get quite large, at least 3' square, so they need plenty of room.

This year we decided the only option was to grow the tomatoes in pots, with bagged potting mix.

So DH bought some pots and rigged up a twine netting as support for 8 plants. We got plenty of tomatoes and they were good, although I'm not sure they quite had the usual depth of flavor. Next year I want to use bigger pots (as I had to water them twice a day in hot weather), perhaps add some "cooked" compost, use rope instead of twine for support, and put everything in the vegetable garden instead of the front lawn. The twine proved to be entirely inadequate for support.

We also planted lima beans at the four corners, which did nothing but grow and grow and produce a few shriveled beans, so I won't try them again this year. The pole beans are enough anyway.

DH planted white potatoes for the first time in 2012. We got some and the voles got the rest. I want to grow sweet potatoes this year, again in pots.

Our success with the gourd family has been hit and miss too. This year we planted spaghetti squash as usual in the vegetable garden and they all croaked. When one actually harvests spaghetti squash, the innards are scooped out and boiled just like pasta. The cantaloupes were not good. I think DH was picking them before they were actually ripe. Judging from what I have read ripeness can be more accurately ascertained by how much the stem has pulled away than by the fragrance of the melon. I would like to try growing butternut squash too. Someday. Given the problems with disease it looks like pots are the way to go with the gourds too, although providing support will be tricky at best. They get so LARGE. Growing tomatoes and potatoes in pots will be enough for this year.