Gardening, Puttering and Adventure Thread, Nov. 9

Happy Saturday! Thought about some flower arrangements for Thanksgiving?

Garden Brocante (in the UK):

These have to be up there, in my estimation, with the most beautiful flowers I've ever grown!

More:

This was one of my favourite dahlias this year. As you can see I’ve just dug it out of its container. This was quite difficult as the tuber has got so big. I don’t normally divide tubers but I could see this one would be easy. Now I will have 3 plants next year 🤞💐 pic.twitter.com/6knzeIeB88

— Garden Brocante (@GardenBrocante) November 9, 2024

Have you ever saved dahlia tubers?

Thank goodness 17 out of 20 of the butterfly ranunculus are now showing signs of life (left). This variety are really expensive about £5 per corm, the flowers are wonderful and flower earlier than the other ranunculus but they are quite a risky investment! pic.twitter.com/MnN0U8c961

— Garden Brocante (@GardenBrocante) November 9, 2024

Time to put in ranunculus in some climates. I have never heard of "butterfly ranunculus. Have you?

I love the single ones with "eyes". You might want to look up planting schedules for your climate.

One of the few dahlias still putting on a show 🍂🌸🍂 pic.twitter.com/np6uGcNlVc

— Garden Brocante (@GardenBrocante) November 8, 2024

The formal double dahlias are a marvel of civilization. Though there are many other lovely forms, too.

Edible Gardening/Putting Things By

Fall and winter garden here on the Texas gulf coast (zone 9A). As long as I plant early enough that the soil is still warm enough to germinate the seeds, cole crops and carrots will over winter just fine. The small bed is underutilized because the house shadow will starve that bed for sunlight in another month as the sun moves south. It has a hopeful tomato, several cabbage, and some just planted cauliflower seeds.

The larger bed has broccoli and cauliflower along the left, some radishes and cabbages in the foreground, sugar snap peas along the back, and three rows of carrots on the right. The radishes and peas will last until the first hard frost, and everything else will grow all winter, albeit slowly. Along with classic cauliflower, we found a Fioretto variety that grows as fingers rather than a head. Tossed with some oil and seasoning, they roast beautifully.

Advo

Wonderful to see and learn about while most gardens are being put to bed. Not sure about timing for the tomato . . . Good luck!

Here's a page on Flowering Cauliflowers like the one you are growing.

I think it's brave to grow cauliflower from seed.

Where did flowering cauliflower come from?

It was first developed by a Japanese seed company, Tokito Seed, and in 2014 they were nominated for an innovation award for it. It is said that a Tokito employee wondered why they couldn’t have a cauliflower with a smaller amount of stem and a better flavor, so the company began trying to develop it. When successful, they named it Fioretto, which means “little flower” in Italian. It is in the brassica family, and is a cauliflower and broccoli hybrid. It is a hybrid cross, not GMO.

So, sort of like the new Broccolini . . . .

Ah, Nature

After posting the excellent Gardening Year in Review by Don in Kansas, I missed his Additional Garden Notes. Here are some of them. There are some wry ones at the link:

Grasshoppers have been a plague, as usual. The only control I have found that works at all is the orb weaver spider. I observed one in my garden wrap up two grasshoppers almost as large as itself in five minutes.

Roundup is no longer Roundup. It used to contain glyphosate, and it was the best chemical solution for most weeds, particularly invasive, difficult-to-dig-out grasses like bermuda.1 However, it’s been reformulated without glyphosate, and it no longer reliably kills weeds. I sprayed the above plant above three weeks before I took the picture. With the old Roundup it would have been completely dead and ready to scrape off the pavement. With the new, disimproved formula, it looks uglier than it did before but is still vigorously growing. I checked every herbicide at Home Despot; not one of them contains glyphosate any more.

Bermuda is an okay lawn grass if all you want is grass. However, it rapidly spreads by underground rhizomes as well as stolons, as insidiously as Marxism. If you have a bermuda lawn and a garden, unless you are vigilant you will soon have have only bermuda. The northern third of my yard is buffalo grass, which has many virtues, not the least being that it is naturally short and doesn’t need mowing. I think the entire yard was once buffalo, but the bermuda growing in the neighbors’ lawns relentlessly invaded the yard from the south.

Any other ideas for weed control?

Gardens of The Horde

Thinking about next year yet?

Thanksgiving decorations up yet?

Hope everyone has a nice weekend.

More dahlias, including a single one, from Garden Brocante. With mint. Probably a wild mint.

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Week in Review

What has changed since last week's thread? Gardening, Puttering and Adventure Thread, Nov. 2

Any thoughts or questions?

I closed the comments on this post so you wouldn't get banned for commenting on a week-old post, but don't try it anyway.

posted by K.T. at 01:19 PM

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