Flowers, Onions, Edamame, Greens and Berries

Flowers keep erupting from the little packs of seeds I planted in the front bed. They were all seeds from those free packs that come in the mail. Other than the bright orange California poppy, they remain without identification. I hope they re-seed. Maybe by next year I'll have found out what they are.
This was a big weekend in our yard - the piles of limbs from the ice storm are all burned now - it took 6 days of burning to dispose of them. All manner of wildlife had taken up housekeeping in those piles - box turtles, rabbits, snakes - all were displaced by the cleanup.

The red onions, pak choi and some mystery green were pulled yesterday and today. The greens were fabulous as part of our meals and the red onions are cleaned and spread out to dry.

The cool weather garden had to go in order to make room for edamame. The plants grew to 6 or 8 inches tall. I amended the soil with a variety of things and completed the transition from spring to summer. If the bunnies don't eat the heads off the edamame again this year we will be enjoying them as a great summer treat.

A friend was here today while I hung strips of flashing silver paper on onto the blackberry branches to distract the birds from the fruit. She said that the birds will use the silver surface as a mirror rather than a distraction from the sweetness of the blackberries. "Oh, doesn't my beak look grand today," the bird would say. "And, now for a snack." Oh, well, I have to at least try.

The 200 little plants I grew for the Muskogee Garden Club Garden Tour June 9 and 10 are benefiting from the sun finally coming out. They may be ready to plant in a week or two. Hopefully, your ventures and adventures in the garden are making you happy.

Hard to Beet This Catch of the Day and Carl's Birthday

The beets all have to come out before the weather beats them up. This morning I watched the sun come up while I was pulling these. What a great way to start a day.

Snow peas are just now forming - the spring has been a little late for them. It's unusual for the snow peas to be in flower when the blackberries are already forming on the vines. What a berry crop this year! Last year because of the drought there we so few that we had none to give away. This year will be very different - assuming the storm on the horizon does no damage.

The Muskogee Garden Club's Centennial Garden Tour is coming up June 9 and 10 so yesterday I planted a few hundred little pots of things for the plant sale. If they all come up and survive, there will be purple majesty millet, amaranth, rose campion, sunflowers, summer squash, loofah sponge vines, and a few other odds and ends.

So you want a big dramatic planting pot but don't want it to weigh a ton? Check this out.

The orange disk inside the tall flower pot is an Ups-a- Daisy planter insert. It's a circle of plastic that is designed to fill in the bottom of large planting containers.

The Ups a Daisy already has drainage holes in it. Just insert the disk and put a potted plant on top. The pot in the photo already had three small bump-outs in it for a pot to sit on. The Ups-a-Daisy is a definite improvement over filling the bottom of the big pots with Styrofoam peanuts which is the customary method of filling them up high enough to put a plant in them.

Ups-a-Daisy comes in 9 sizes from 12-inches to 18-inches. They are designed to fit half way or two-thirds of the way inside a tapered sided planter. The 10-inch is $4.99 and the 18-inch is $12.99 (cheaper than potting soil? maybe). The manufacturer Klanga, Inc. in Spring Grove Illinois makes them out of recycled plastic.

Westlake Ace Hardware and Southwood Nursery in Tulsa both sell them.

Today is the 300th birthday of Linnaeus whose name was actually Carol von Linne. This is the Swedish physician who invented our system of categorizing and naming plant families.

Before he completed his degree, the university encouraged him to travel to Lapland and record all the plants he found there. In order to sort out all the plants, he designed the system we now use. While in graduate school he also became the curator of a private botanical garden.

Linne became a professor at Uppsula University where he oversaw the restoration of the University gardens.

He continued his work as a physician at the same time and was the doctor to the Swedish royal family.

The Linnean Society of London holds many of his paper and their website has fascinating items in the Links section. The weblinks are there for nature sites, more Linnaeus sites, herbariums, etc.