bloom_records

As soon as the snow melts, before anything even blooms, there is color.If you are aware that some plants can grow underneath the snow, this is not a complete surprise, though I always marvel when it is an attractive garden plant that pulls this trick, and not just the tap-rooted and creeping weeds.The first flowers [...]

It's not much, but it's more than I had last year. There are two methods for getting Christmas cactus to bloom. One way is to keep it in total darkness from 6pm to 8am starting September 1st until buds form. The second way is to keep it cool (say 53F) from mid-September to mid-October. (Source: [...]

The first half of November, when these photos were taken (November 12th, to be exact), was unusually mild. So even though I missed Garden Bloggers Bloom Day by a mile (well, okay, only 9 days), I'm going to post these photos anyway, so I can remember this mild November when next winter comes around. The [...]

The double colchicums, which are later blooming, are at their peak:Our summer never got really hot for long periods this year, and the pansies kept blooming. These "black" pansies were part of a mix, so I wondered where the rest of them went to. Turns out something's been nibbling them. Leaves are still there, but [...]

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 [...]

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 summery, and a mere nine days later it was 92F [...]

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 [...]