Still a lot of winter green, though a little beaten up, probably due to the late season. Purple Penstemon Richardsonii and bleeding heart still in bloom, the last of the Gaillardia is fading. No frosts yet. The Brodiaea are very late everywhere, they usually start to pop up about the end of November! Some Shooting star and Camassia cusickii starting to come up. Continue reading “Wintergreen December 2011”
The late spring means the fall is late, too. Lots of leaves still on the trees and shrubs, so the yard is still private at the end of October. Still working on building up the evergreen screen. Made three Ceonothus Velutinus / Snowbrush simple layerings a few weeks ago. The last set of C.V. air layerings made some inadequate roots. These are hard to find in nurseries, so I’ve had to make my own from the original ones.
Planted out the pots with several types of shooting star and delphinium seedlings from last year in the as yet mole-free meadow which was cleared last year. This gets lots of sun. They were left over summer when the seedllings die back, but the summer was so wet and cold that moss grew over much of the pots. In planting these out it looks like a few seedlings are present at the periphery of each pot, but the moss probably killed many of them off – they should be planted out in the spring. More problematic are the bulbs such as Fawn lily seedlings…they are supposed to be kept over an extra winter in the pots. Lots of bulb seedlings, but maybe I should put them in the ground when moss starts to form. When I plant the ’09 bulb seedling I’ll have a better idea how these are affected.
This red dragonfly decided to hang out at the front pond. He tolerated these close-ups with the Cool pix pretty well.
The frogs are still occasionally seen but all matured and out of the pond. No recent pix, but they are about a 1.5 inch now.
I’m going to plant seeds in pots that I haven’t before, less common plants like Munro’s Globemallow (cool orange flowers), Blue Columbine and Yellow Columbine, Hooker’s Onion (small plants, pink flowers) and Harsh Paintbrush. The usual seeds – all the camas (small, light blue, white and large purple), Chocolate lily, Leopard lily, etc will be planted around outside. Sometimes the planting in pots is just interfering with their best chance, just ending up in the right spot in the ground, but sometimes its worth it, plants occasionally do better in the pots. This is true of Wild Blue Flax and camas.
Below is Harsh Paintbrush, a bright orange red. The bright orange parts are actually leaves, not petals:
Saw a coyote on the way to work. It ran across the road and just into our back yard. It stopped for a minute so I got a good look at it. It is the second sighting in our yard, a wooded suburb near a green belt.
First week of August and the Pacific northwest tree frogs whose nursery is our front pond have “evolved”, though only some of them….the eggs hatch at different times. They also hatch and mature faster in warmer weather, so some literally mature faster than others depending on when they hatched and if they spent time in the warmth of the sun (some of the tadpoles hide among the rocks more than others). Its been unusually cool ALL summer thus far, so their development could be a little slower than usual. This little dude is about 1.5 centimeter length, nose-to-butt. No wonder 3 of us adult humans couldn’t find the little (father) beast back in May when he was still here croaking, despite using flashlights and trying to bait him with recorded tree frog sounds from some website.
Tiger lillies blooming, here’s some below with Brodiaea:
Gaillardia, Brodiaea, Yellow wooly flower, bluebell and Penstemon richardsonii blooming. Lots of green leaves still, due to all the cool weather and summer rains.
The Rattlesnake plantain that I boke off (accidentally) and replanted is sending up a new leaf, as is the ‘mother’ plant, with several shoots. This appears to be a useful method of propagation, as the seeds didn’t come up.
We finally found a Fragile Cactus (Opuntia Fragilis) flower in bloom, after at least ten years of searching ! We found it today, June 28, on the south west end of Lopez at Iceberg Point. It looks like several other buds are ready to bloom, hopefully when we return in the next 12 or so days there will be more flowers. We have some in our yard (well-marked and contained, an unpleassant surprise to find them if you are not aware of the needles there) and in a couple of planters, but they have never bloomed…not enough sun? We also had put a few in the planter boxes around the deck at Lopez, but the deer displaced them when they were checking out the goods….I’m hoping they got a needle or two on the snout when they did so!
Mock Orange in bloom, and the Swallowtail butterflies have come back to the neighborhood.
Lupines in bloom. They are a bigger more vigorous plant than before, since they don’t have any more competition from the Mahonia, which had started to overrun the place. Time to start checking for aphids….I use a spray with oil, water and a few drops of detergent to kill the bastards (the aphids, hopefully, not the lupine!).
Continue reading “Almost summer? Hard to tell with this cool rainy weather…..”
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