bloom_records

The growing season gets a slow enough start around here that many annuals don't really strut their stuff until September. This is a real liability for the frost-sensitive ones like cosmos. I learned to seek out early blooming varieties because the old-fashioned ones often only had two weeks of bloom before shriveling in the first [...]

A lot of the plants from last month are still blooming, though most of them look a bit weather-beaten and are past their peak. Goldenrod, asters, and Joe Pye weed are starting in the fields. A careful inspection of the wooded hillside reveals the first flashes of red. I've always maintained that, for cold climate [...]

Reading Carol's description of her plant cataloging project got me thinking about my own efforts to organize my records. When I first started gardening, I used some large index cards to catalog all my plants. I entered the same info Carol did, but didn't include the plant tags. On the back of each card I [...]

Poppies, peonies, and iris: the three Grandes Dames of June In a cold climate, the gardening season is shorter and more compressed. By the time the spring flowers get going, boom! it's summer. Consider this: on May 29th we had our last frost. The next day it hit 80F (27C), which we reckon to be [...]

Variegated bulbous oat grass, sweet white violet, and a bit of 'White Nancy' lamium in the lower left cornerBecause of the warm April, a lot of the daffodils that were still blooming last year are done for this year. This is the "gap" time between the early blooming spring flowers and the big June extravaganza [...]

The Crocus Bank is looking glorious (click any photo to enlarge it): But I was pleasantly surprised to see this wee thing:

You tell me: do I have blooms for Garden Bloggers' Bloom Day? These snowdrops are the furtherest along of all that I have. They have "dropped"; that is, their buds are no longer pointing up, but have been released from their sheaths and are hanging from their pedicels. Now these… These are unquestionably blooming snowdrops--but [...]

There are snowdrops under this snow Some of you, I am sure, thought I was being overly pessimistic when I said the snowdrops sprouting in January wouldn't be blooming in a month. As you can see above, my assessment of how things would go was pretty accurate. As a matter of fact, at this point [...]

I did not go outside to look for blooms today. Today looks like this: Last Friday, on the 11th, it looked like this: There had been so much snow melt that water was seeping to ground level and then flowing through the chicken yard into the driveway. Of course, I recognized this as perhaps my [...]