Beets

Here is Roger harvesting beets with me.

me holding the mother of all beets - it's bigger than my hand!

Results of the cutting of the beets to fit in jars. Chiogga is the name of the white/red rings beet and in the other bowl are Bull's Blood, Early Wonder, and Detroit Dark Red. The chiogga ones look pale in the jars, but I'm sure they will taste just as good. I've cooked them together with the more red ones for dinners and they absorb the dark red color - I think we'll do that if we can pickled beets again next year. We also planted Golden Touchstone which are a beautiful yellow, but there was only enough for one jar. We'd eaten the rest before today - they are delicious!!

Here are the finished jars - we (Sheila and I) got 12 pints and 28 half pints of pickled beets. Some we put cloves in with the pickling liquid. We tested this last year and it was very good. The one yellow jar is on the far right. The harvesting took a couple hours on Monday: digging, washing, chopping off roots and tops. The peeling, chopping and canning took 5 hours today. All well worth it!! yum!

Late Season photos

Here are some of my beautiful rainbow carrots - see the one with a little one hugging it? Cute! they were delicious too!

 Next photo down is my shallot bed. I planted tons of small sets and they all pretty much failed. Don't know why. There are small ones in there that developed new sets along side, so I think I will rescue as many as I can and save for spring, or clean out the whole bed and mulch after setting them back into the dirt. Maybe that will work, anyone else have any ideas? Next photo is this year's potato crop from the compost pile. We are eating some of the white ones for dinner tonight - they are in the oven and smelling almost done, so I better get this posted so I can finish the rest of dinner to go along with them. The last photo is some beets - so pretty and delicious too. These are part of the crop that Sheila helped me with last spring when I was just after surgery on my hip and couldn't do the heavy stuff. Remember she cleaned out the bed boxes and we planted peas, onion sets and these beets. We have been eating on them for a couple months, both of us - there are still some left and we are going to make pickled beets out of them. Yummm!

here are some successes and failures in my garden this year - more potatoes from the compost pile, excellent beets, carrots, and failure of shallots.

Lilies from Verdelle

Verdelle gave me these lilies this past spring. She didn't think they would bloom this year, but look! There are more buds, too.

Thank you, Verdelle!

Strawberries in August

The strawberries just keep coming. We only have a 10-foot row, so there are just enough for us to snack on in the evening.

Summer 2011

So summer (?) is in so-called full swing now. Finally I have some dahlias blooming, only about a month late - but I am grateful to get some seeing as how I finally got all the tubers planted by mid-and late July because of the weather and time restraints. Usually they should be planted by mid-May, but then it was way too cold and way too wet. Enough whining!!! Here are some pix of things going on it my garden recently.

This clematis is two years old, finally big enough to be half way across my front entry. I added a string from the post to across to the post on the other side. I planted two, one I thought was dark pink, the other this color. The "dark pink" is also just about this same color but the flowers are twice as big as this and blooms before this one starts. So that is a good thing, longer show of flowers.I have to be diligent about removing the morning glories though, they would take over everything everywhere in my garden including this lovely plant.

 Here is a bouquet of sweetpeas, white and pink baby's breath and lobelia. Finally thriving! Sweetpeas would be gone by now if it were a normal warm time of summer, but since they'd rather grow in cool weather, I'm in luck to be able to pick some this late in the year - I love sweetpeas! Their smell is so pretty!

More Roses and Other Blooms

The Cinco de Mayo rose made its debut with several blooms at once. I was expecting a dusky lavender rose but it is more red than the rose on the tag appeared. Maybe the blooms will turn darker as they age. Still for a first year rose is has nice blooms with promises of more to come.

This small rose, Happy Chappy, has also begun to bloom and I look forward to its ground hugging blooms all summer. The tea roses and climbers are still being shy, but the Queen Elizabeth is teasing me with a couple of blooms, each on a cluster of multiple buds. I can hardly wait for the clusters to open.

Meanwhile, the bees are keeping busy buzzing around the blooms at the front of the house, where the lilies, spirea and cosmos and providing plenty of nectar while they wait to harvest the roses. You can see one on the center bloom of the close-up photo. There were a dozen or so buzzing around, but they don't sit still long enough to get a shot of them at work:)

First Rose of Summer

Yesterday's warm summer sun finally opened the first rose in my garden. This Spellbound tea went from a tight bud on Sunday to a fully opened rose this afternoon. Guess it wanted to take advantage of the sun while it could. The rest of the tea roses are taking their time. Most have only tiny buds and only one other is showing any color on the bud. That's what this cool spring has brought. That and black spot--the curse of rose gardeners in the Pacific Northwest:)

The Betty Boop has several buds that are also ready to open any day. This one is the closest. I love the bi-color of this rose and the fact that it is almost always blooming. It is usually the first to bloom. I only have one other floribunda, the Cinco de Mayo, which I am looking forward to blooming as it is the newest rose in my garden. I will post pictures when it begins to bloom.

This rose was quite a surprise. It opened yesterday too. It is growing on the side of my arbor where a pale pink climber is supposed to be blooming, but isn't yet. On closer inspection, this is a shoot off the root and not the Pearly Gates rose that is grafted on to this root. The other side of the arbor has a Joseph's Coat climber which is also not doing so hot. Both these roses went gangbusters at our last house--may be they need more sun than they are getting here. I think I'll let this "wild rose" hang on and let it give a little inspiration to its showier cousins:)