June Transition Plants

I only got three pansy plants to germinate this spring but this one is so pretty it makes up for the small selection.  The subtle pink on the top petals and the buttery yellow contrasting with the bright purple is just perfect.

A few potatoes are blooming.  I think this is Bellanita.  Often my potato plants don't bloom although they always make potatoes.  Somewhere I read to cut off the flowers to encourage the plant to put all its energy into the tubers.  That makes sense but the flowers are so pretty, I'm going to leave them for a while.

I have really cut back on buying annuals in May so June tends to be a very green month in the garden.  I planted some new ornamental onions to try to bridge the gap between the spring and summer perennials.  This little blue drumstick onion is quite small - not much more than an inch across, but it is a real blue which is unusual in most plants.  The flower sits on top of a long, wiry stem.  I hope it will naturalize as a big clump of them would be great.  

This magenta onion - atropurpureum- blooms just ahead of the blue onion with overlap as the flowers last a couple of weeks.  Both these onions bloom about 3 weeks after the Purple Sensation onions.  I have heavy soil and the onions seem to do very well in it.  They do best in a full sun location but some of my purple sensation ones are in shade and still bloom.  Not fussy.

The mock orange is blooming well this year.  I'm not crazy about the fragrance but I do like the look of the flowers and they flower in June - bonus.  The only thing I do to it is give it a prune after flowering.  Like lilacs, they should be pruned as soon as possible after blooming as they bloom on the previous year's wood.

The fleece flower.  The bigger it gets, and every year it gets bigger, the more I like it's frothy white flowers. Excellent for pollinators.  It is a big plant - about 5' tall but it only gradually expands with more stems at the base. The flowers last for about a month.  I don't do anything to it.  No fertilizer, no pruning. The stems fall over after a frost and I just leave them on the ground.

Happy gardening.  Take time to smell the roses, or whatever else you have.

 

Pots as Mulch

I like to use pots as mulch for a variety of reasons.  One is that I have limited space with full sun so I need to maximize my use of it.  Another reason is it cuts down on weeding and watering. Also it can make my vegetable patches look prettier as with this pot of Biden in between some carrots.

Here I'm using a coleus plant between cabbages.  As the summer gets hotter, I will move the coleus into a shadier spot and by then the cabbages will be big enough to fill in the space.

I bought a pretty deep red dahlia this spring. I decided to put a pot of cosmos beside it so that no weeds would grow on that side anyway.  The pot will keep the soil on that side from drying out, hopefully, keeping the dahlia happy.

I am experimenting with growing  a lettuce plant in a margarine container.  There are 3 other lettuce plants surrounding it.  When they get big, I will move the container probably to a shadier spot. I am using some slug pellets that use ferric phosphate to protect some of my plants including this lettuce.  I've been using the pellets for a few years now and they work really well.  They are not toxic like the old slug pellets.

Some marigolds nestled in between a few broccoli plants.  Will they deter cabbage moths?  We'll see.

A geranium between beets and broccoli.  It isn't blooming because I pinched off the flowers and buds when I transplanted it so that it could put all its energy into getting established in the pot.  It should be really pretty in a few weeks.

Finally, a small container with a nasturtium plant placed at the base of a cucumber plant.  Every year I struggle with striped cucumber beetles.  Some people think nasturtiums can be repellent to the beetles.  We shall see.  So far I have only seen one beetle , which I dispatched, but it's early in the season.