Flowers From Around The Garden

I was walking around the garden yesterday and was surprised by the amount of flowers still in bloom. Having a large variety of plants flowering in your garden is beneficial in many ways. First is beauty, I will step out of my power tool infested man-cave and say, flowers make me happy, plain and simple. Secondly, flowers of different colors, shapes, and sizes bring all kinds of beneficial insects to your garden. Some of these insects are predators that help control insect pests, and some are pollinators that will help pollinate your food crops while they are in the area. Last but not least, many flowers have medicinal properties or are edible, or both. Here are some pics I took yesterday.

This is one of our favorite flowers in the garden. Cosmos (Cosmos bipinnatus) is native to Mexico. The flowers attract birds and butterflies, and bees love them.

We bought a perennial flower seed mix that had dozens of different flowers in it. I am not sure what this is but it is a beautiful flower.

Same thing here, some kind of perennial flower. In the spring I plan on filling the beds along the back of the property with this mix.

Marigolds are very beneficial. They are said to deter some insect pests and bring in beneficial insects. This is a french marigold (Tagetes patula), it is not edible, just beneficial. Some people confuse the inedible french marigold with the edible, sort of look a like, Calendula (Calendula officinalis).

This is Borage (Borago officinalis), which is very edible and delicious. The flowers continuously bloom all through the season. Bees love these flowers and they make a nice addition to a salad.

 

The first Jerusalem Artichokes (Helianthus tuberosus) are blooming. I took this picture with the camera extended as high as I could above my head and the flower was still a few feet away. Right now these plants are around 10-12 feet tall. I did a detailed post on Jerusalem Artichokes here if you are interested.

Not sure what this plant is. I was about to cut them all down when I noticed it was about to bloom. I am going to leave one and take the rest out. It has a very woody stalk that leads me to believe it might be a perennial. We will see if it comes back in the spring.

This is a perennial I bought in a big box store clearance sale. Not sure what it is, but it comes back every year and the bees like it.

Same here, this is a perennial from a clearance sale. I have a hard time passing up .50 cent flowering perennials.

My addiction strikes again. I often think about getting a part time job at my local big box store just so I can get first dibs on the clearance plants!

Yarrow (Achillea millefolium) is a very valuable plant in the garden. It is a good companion plant, a medicinal and edible. It attracts predatory wasps, ladybugs and hover flies; all very beneficial to have around. It is said to improve the health of sick plants it is near to. Yarrow has been used for centuries as a pain reliever, an astringent, an anti-inflammatory,  a diaphoretic and it was used in ancient times to stanch blood flow in wounds. In those days it was called herbal militaris.

Well I'll Bee

 I opened up my hives for the first time since I installed the new colonies. They both are doing great. In my previous post on bees I mentioned one of the hives was lost. After seeing no activity in the hive for days, I saw bees coming and going a week after I thought they were gone.

I don't know if a new swarm came in and set up shop or if the original queen managed to keep the hive going and I just didn't notice it. The hive in question is the one that had the dead queen in it when I installed them.

 

 You need to make sure your bees have enough room in the hive or they will go into swarm mentality. In a top bar hive set up you have what are called follower boards. These can be moved left and right in the hive to make the center bigger or smaller. When I opened up the hives they were both almost full of comb.

 The new top bar design I am using this year seems to be way better than the old style. The bees are drawing comb on the triangular edging I added to the bars. I did not see any cross combing. I recommend this style of comb guide over the flat bar with a line of wax in a groove.

 Here are some bees on our oregano flowers. I am not sure if these are our bees but the odds are really good.

This is our wormwood. This picture was taken after Dara gave it a pretty good pruning. This perennial is very hardy and does well in our climate. Wormwood is a insect deterrent and can be used to make a tea that is effective against aphids, caterpillars, flea beetles and moths. Don't use wormwood tea on edible plants.

 One of the best flowers you can plant for bees is Borage. Borage is a continuously flowering plant. The flowers are a beautiful blue and are quite delicious in a salad. 

 Borage is an annual but once you plant it it will come back every year from the seeds it drops. It is a good companion plant for tomatoes. The leaves are edible with a cucumber like flavor. They contain a very small amount of alkaloids that can be harmful in large quantities.

I let a lot of alluim (onion, leeks) plants go to flower throughout the garden. Bees absolutely love the flowers, who am I to argue with bees.

Tea and the Ugly Tomato

I saw some ripe rose hips on my beach rose (Rosa rugosa) on a walk around the garden last night. I picked them and a handful of mountain mint (Pycnanthemum muticum). I added another mint and some borage flowers as well. I boiled the rose hips for 3 minutes and then added everything else and steeped for 10 minutes in the kettle. 

The only ingredient I added that was not form the back yard was some honey. This spring I should be harvesting my own honey so I could make this next year completely from the back yard. It had a great flavor and was very calming. 

Okay, this is the ugliest tomato I have ever grown. It looks like I super glued a bunch of small tomatoes together. But I bet if this tomato was ripe it would be delicious! I had to pick all of the green tomatoes due to the frost coming. I will post on what I am doing with them later. 

Garden Flowers

Just thought I would share a pic of a flower arrangement I made for Dara. I had to cut the Jerusalem Artichoke flowers so they put their energy into the tubers and thought I would see what else was in bloom.

Flowers: Jerusalem Artichoke, Borage, Marigold, Yarrow and some white flower I found growing in the perennial flower bed.  

 

Homestead Update

Its been a while since I walked the property and took pictures. Here a few images from around the yard and garden. These pics were taken with my cell phone so I apologize for the poor quality. I find if I take pics with the cell phone I do more posts because its easier. It's a trade off.

In the center are our beach roses "rosa rugosa". The purple / pink are the flowers and the red you see are the rose hips. These roses produce one of the largest rose hips of all roses, full of vitamin C.

Here is whats left of our corn. A squirrel came in the day after I planted and dug up close to half of the corn I planted. Squirrel season starts Sept 1st, my corn should be ready towards the middle of Sept..... squirrel corn stew?

I planted over a hundred pole beans yesterday. The left row is a green bean and the right row is scarlet runner bean. We plan on canning a bunch in Sept.

Here is the compost / raised bed / volunteer plant nursery. We got our first ripe tomatoes of the year from volunteers that came up in the compost pile. The raised bed in the foreground has spinach, various herbs and okra planted in it. 

Here are my cascade hops. I was very busy with school when these came up in the early spring. I did not string them up right away so they did not grow to their potential this season. 

Once you plant borage you never need to plant again. Half of this raised bed is full of beautiful blue flowering borage. The flowers are so good. I eat a handful everyday I am in the garden.

This is the horseradish. It is doing very well. I want to split and move half of it to another location in the garden soon. I dug some up earlier this year, the flavor is amazing!

We still have 6-7 heads of cabbage getting bigger and bigger. I just planted a variety that gets up to 10 pound heads.

Here are some peppers. The peppers I start from seed always start out slow but once they hit the heat of summer they go crazy. 

All the stakes along the fence have a tomato I started from seed staked up to it. The tall sunflower looking plants on the right are Jerusalem artichokes. I can't wait to harvest them in the fall.

Here is the asparagus patch. I have been very good and have only eaten one spear over the last two years. This coming spring will be year three and we will be enjoying fresh asparagus for a few weeks.

Here is a shot of the garden. I finally got all the straw down after a storm coming in and blowing my hard work all over the yard.

I have upgraded the arrow target. The round bale was to short and we lost a couple arrows over the top.