Garden Report: June 3

This week we have been eating blueberries:

And cherries (some Black Tartarian, some Lambert):

It's funny. We get an organic veggie/fruit box every week from a local farm, and there have been cherries in the box that tasted really great until ours started coming in. Now they just taste like store cherries. So everybody, go out and plant yourself a cherry tree (actually, you'll need two for pollination). You deserve it.

Usually June is when we say goodbye to any semblance of spring, as the summer dry sets in. The tulips have gone to seed: I take my little trowel and bury seed all over the place in a hopeless attempt to get some free tulips. The Wahlenbergia (the blue bells in the background) is covered in blooms and bees. The ground is dry and hard. But it rained last night. I give up on trying to figure this year's weather out.

Anyway, more plants. This is a campanula that is finally behaving like everybody said campanulas would behave. "Oh, be careful about planting those; they will spread like mad." And of course I ended up with a series of polite campanula. This one is a little less so.

Similarly, everybody warned me about planting lobelia. So far, they have stayed right where I planted them, in a nice tight little bundle. It's not that I don't have any invasive plants (hello, mint, ferns, and Bermuda grass), but I find it amusing that the plants that are supposed to be beasts are doing nothing. And these warnings were coming from local gardeners, so this is not about climate or adaptability.

Speaking of invasives that aren't invasive here, out back, my little Psorlea pinnata, aka "Grape Jello Tree," has its first ever blooms.

This tree, covered in blooms, smells like a piece of grape-flavoured candy. It's growing fast now, but they're actually not massive trees; the very mature ones I saw at Cal Poly's arboretum were maybe 15 feet tall. These are terribly invasive in Australia; they were brought in as backyard plants from South Africa and easily hopped the fence.

Another plant that is supposed to be a real bear is the buddleia. I've never actually met anybody for whom buddleia was a problem, but I see references to it all the time. Mine are thriving this year, and finally growing up to cover the ugly fence and the weird neighbors (see how part of their roof is different? They were putting an illegal addition on there last year and were busted).

Some garden problem areas (oh, lord, it's all problem areas right now, but I won't get into that) are this area by the side fence. My little collection of penstemons is doing nicely, and the Salvia, but I want to get rid of the grass and can't decide what else to put there.

And our quince tree, usually the super-healthy specimen in the garden, seems to have fireblight or something of the sort. Which means a heavy prune this year, but it's not as if we can figure out what to do with all those quince, anyway.

Apart from that, we continue to pick away at the hallway work, and maybe one of these days we'll actually finish something enough to photograph.

Technorati Tags: berries, blueberries, cherries, flowers, fruit, gardening, invasive plants, plants, quince, rain, seeds, shrubs, trees, weather

posted by ayse on 06/03/09