Saturday Gardening and Puttering Thread, Labor Day Weekend 2020 [KT]

Hello, gardeners, putters and Labor Day Revelers! How are things going in the Great Outdoors where you are? It's hot where we are.

From Hrothgar:

Last week's Garden thread featured a Rose of Sharon picture. Frankly, I hate them because they are basically weeds that grow like trees, nonetheless they do have pretty flowers. I did not realize that they were apparently quite attractive to bees. The attached photo is one of the variants of the picture you posted, I hope you can use it.

Thank you so much for the work you do in assembling a thread every week. I wish I had the time to follow it more closely and in real time. I guess the AoS dental plan makes up for all the hard work though.

The photo is great! The best part of the dental plan is the chewing sticks.

Rose of Sharon can be weedy if you don't watch for suckers and seedlings. The seedless types reduces the problem of seedlings, but also the fun of new colors and forms popping up in progeny, if you are into that sort of thing.

Other Interesting Items from Last Week's Comments

Tomato toast

A great, reportedly effective diet recipe for Tomato Toast came in late from Mary Gold. Includes a little butter. Mmmmm.

Bug ID

From Captain Josepha Sabin:

Got a question for all you entomologists out there. I have a whole bunch of somethings flying around my front yard. They are mostly black with one set of wings. The last fourth of so of their abdomen are a reddish brown and they have two yellow spots about halfway down their abdomens. They are about an inch long. For the most part, they are buzzing around four to six inches above the top of the grass and very seldom come to rest. I live in Omaha. Any ideas? They are not cicada killers as best I can tell. Any idea? More importantly, do they sting?

We have a response from Hank Curmudgeon, who is hesitant to guess without a photo, but suggests this resource for insect indentification for the State of Nebraska, or this bee and wasp chart or this bee poster.

Best would be to catch one with a net, transfer it to a ziplock bag, partially zip the bag shut and gently evacuate the excess air out the bag to "pin the critter down" (and to improve photo quality), take multiple clear sharp photos both top and underside and forward the pictures to me.

Bees

The Famous Pat* has been following up on beehives.

Last week, I promised Pillage Idiot I would talk to a beekeeping friend (she has 7 hives in her backyard). The most important thing she said is, now is not the time to start - but if you're going to go ahead with beekeeping, you should buy all your equipment this fall/winter, and get bees started in spring. There's a lot to do when you're just starting out. She mentions feeding them until they've built out the wax in their living space - at minimum, once every several days. Predators include mice, ants, and yellow jackets. And there's checking for Varroa mites. She says she goes out to watch her bees several times a day, just to eyeball them and see what they're doing.

Meanwhile, through the Cousin Connection, two bee-themed quilts:

We have more Quilt Stuff, and Bee Stuff, for later. But if you have information on these topics, feel free to contribute. We do Puttering here.

The Edible Garden

Here's a recipe for Bread and Butter Refrigerator pickles via Bird Dog at Maggie's Farm.

Are you putting anything by for winter? I understand through the Cousin Connection that wide mouth lids for mason jars are scarce right now.

Remember that if you're making dill refrigerator pickles, dill seed heads that are ALMOST ripe - still partly green - will make a huge difference in flavor. If you can use raw vinegar, so much the better.

There's a recipe for refrigerator dills in the Old Farmers Almanac and one for dilly beans. Plus other information on growing dill. The Black Swallowtail caterpillar (along with Anise Swallowtails and related species) is not an uncommon sight on dill seed heads. The seed head below could be used for pickles. Some say the flavor is best just after flowering. I think it is stronger and sharper then. But I like to let the seeds get just a little bigger. The flavor seems more nuanced to me at that stage. You can nibble a few seeds to see which stage you prefer. Do not include the caterpillar in your pickles.

Here's a Black Swallowtail.

Here's an interesting report from The Horde:

Seedless Pumpkins?

We have a curious gardening incident occurring:

My wife is very much into composting, tossing organic kitchen waste into the bins and accumulating it all over time. I carved a couple of pumpkins for Halloween last year, and threw the seeds and the carved rind pieces into the composting bin. After Halloween I also cut up and tossed in the pumpkins. It all mixed in with everything else that has accumulated in the bins and has been "cooking" until ready for use.

Around the end of May we bought some large planters, which she filled with a mix of soil and the compost, and then topped off with the intended decorative plants. Much to our surprise, pumpkins sprouted in the planters. There were no seeds in the compost...by this time the seeds had all been reduced to muck. Apparently the RNA was still active, though, and we now have a fine crop of pumpkin vines going. We've never had this happen before, where a plant RNA survives its composting process. What would let this year's pumpkin RNA survive it, and why haven't other organics likewise survived it?

As a further question: those pumpkins have been growing now for over two months and all we've so far seen are blossoms. We have not yet seen a single gourd or even a hint of one. According to the interwebz we can expect about a 120-day growing season for a carving pumpkin - from which these are descended. As we are halfway through that with nary a gourd in sight: how long does it take for the gourds to show, or do we have some manner of RNA-damaged or otherwise mutated pumpkin growth going?

Peers over the lurking rampart as,

LCMSRulz!

The Great Outdoors

Rodent sends the following scenes from the Great Outdoors:

Kingston New Hampshire. The garden in front of the camp office/store. The bear carvings are cool. The man on the left passed in 2018. My college roommate, best friend, and best man at my wedding. Rest in Peace Yaz.

Anybody doing any carving lately?
I notice that there is no sampling the Shrooms below.

Not a garden picture by any means. But a tree growing through a crack in a rock is very interesting nonetheless. Because nature.

I don't know. It could happen in a garden. And it certainly happens in nature.

Gardens of The Horde

These are photos of Hemerocallis blooms in our garden beds from this summer. We have nearly a dozen different varieties from several sources -- Viette Nurseries in Fishersville, VA, donated plant sales, and from previous owners of our properties -- spread around eight different beds that I am presently in the process of rearranging to create more organized and pleasing displays. All these blooms are from 2-1/2 to 3 inches across. I do not know the varietal names for most of them, unfortunately. These three are unknowns. The rebloomer, probably from a donated plant sale as we have just this one, went through two waves of blooming this year. I hope to divide it and begin making a larger grouping for it in its bed. The double bloomer, from our place in Sussex County, spreads well and we use it to fill in areas where we prefer not to have to do much maintenance work. The yellow bloom likely was obtained at Viette Nurseries, but I no longer have the bill of sale that would identify it. Best regards, Krebs v Carnot

The first one is the rebloomer. The last one looks familiar, like an old standard.

Not as apt to run wild as Rose of Sharon.

If you would like to send information and/or photos for the Saturday Gardening Thread, the address is:

ktinthegarden
at that g mail dot com place

Include your nic unless you want to remain a lurker.

posted by Open Blogger at 01:12 PM

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