Wonderful Time for Gardening

Summer is a great season for gardening. The plants are well underway, and many of them don't mature or blossom until mid to late summer. Here are some pictures below with descriptions by the garden planner herself, Martha.

This is the second year for the delphiniums.
The blossom spikes have reached at least six feet!

It is amazing how varied the colors and petals are-

Strawberry foxglove made an early show- I let it go to seed so I can
propagate more and fill in the borders of the Cottage Garden.

Many of the hollyhocks planted last year have deep purple- nearly black blossoms,
tho we do have some white and pin. Unfortunately with the wet spring they
have been stricken with hollyhock rust and have been cut back to nubbins. You can
see the rust forming on the leaves to the right. It looks like large scale. Looking in
Wymans I found out that this can be combated with laying down
ground cornmeal prior to emergence- otherwise it is best to destroy the plants.

We got four unique perennial onion sets from Southern Exposure Seed Exchange in
the fall. Unfortunately my labels disappeared during the winter!

The early lettuce has gone to seed. Not the most attractive but
the seed has to come from somewhere.

Hollyhocks prior to the rust explosion-

Bib and redleaf going to seed-

The Cottage Garden was created last spring (2010). The asparagus was
moved from the raised beds it occupied to the inner and outer aspects of
the garden border setting it back a yer. I expect that in the following years it
will be lush. I read in Field and Forest that I can put oyster mushroom
spawn under the asparagus in the straw mulch and plan to
try that next year...or maybe this fall.

This magnificent mass is an Autumn Joy Clematis combined with a Jackmanii.
It has totally covered the birdhouse we constructed during the snows of 2009-2010.
In the hidden garden of the foliage a hummingbird has nested. It is fun to see the
tiny bird zip in and out the huge jungle.

Bronze fennel obscures one of the bird baths in the raised beds
making a protected spot for some of the shy birds.

Red leaf lettuce- yumm salads

Salvia and lavender share the bed with climbing roses. The wet spring was
hard on the roses. Continual dampness allowed black spot to flourish-

We have had a bumper crop of cilantro-

Another view of the bronze fennel with baby's breath in the foreground.