Sunday, January 13, 2008

picture contest- week 10- January 13

Week 10
Wow- week 10. We are almost at the middle of January. The picture contest is over half way done. (We will have 12 weeks, followed by 4 weeks of payoffs between the winners, and then one final Super contest, totaling 17 weeks in all.) The January “thaw” is over and it seems like the gray days will never end. 20 degrees seems so much colder after several days that got close to 50.
The days are also getting longer, even though you can’t tell it in the morning. Actually the days get longer faster mostly at the end of the day, if you have any idea what I am talking about. ( Sunrise has stayed pretty much the same since the solstice, while sunset is later in the afternoon by as much as 15 minutes at this point.)
It is time to start thinking about this year’s garden season. I ordered some seeds the other day. I try to do something about the garden every day as a way of maintaining my sanity.
But how about this last week’s voting.
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For the third week running we had a close contest last week. The electronic vote was suppressed since I forgot to put the link on the email. Sorry. The winner was the calla lily, ensuring that this flower will be in the finals in some capacity. For one of those obscure statistics, last week we did have the highest percentage so far for the 4th place contestant.

1- Purple Coneflower 5+5=10 for 15.2%%
2- Calla Lily 12+11=23 for 34.8%
3- Spider Web 5+9=14 for 21.2%
4- Poppy seed head 8+11=19 for 28.2%
The first number is the electronic vote from the poll, the second number was the write in or email vote.

Remember that 4 wildcards will get into the next round in a month. So far the highest finishing pictures that did not win were:

Blue Anemone Week 8 32.5%
Daylily close-up- week 7 28.6%
Poppy Seed head week 9 28.2%
Spider Lilies week 2 27.6%
Calla lily week 1 27.6%
I am not yet prepared to do the higher mathematics involved to break this tie for the final position. Suffice to say, it is real close.
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This week we have some amazing pictures. Here they are:

First there is the lily called Silk Road, a hybrid that is at the top of somebody’s Popularity Poll for the last four years. What a color. It is what is called an “Orientpet.” That means that it is a cross between an Oriental lily and a Trumpet Lily. I guess it could have been a Trumtal but that just doesn’t sound right. Silk Road tends to dominate the garden the way that only certain plants do during the year.











Second there is this blue Japanese iris. Go Blue. Japanese Iris finish off the iris season each year. Actually this one is a rather early Japanese iris blooming on June 8 this last year. Check out the bonus pictures this week for a real Japanese iris treat










Here is this wonderful pink butterfly weed, or asclepias incarnata (I think) . I grow a fair amount of the orange variety but this pink is hearty and a nice contrast to the iris and lilies blooming in late June. We saw its wild cousin this summer in Colorado.









Finally there are these Japanese anemones. These bloomed on October 27. Gardening into the fall is so different from gardening the rest of the year. Aside from watching the weather calendar always to see when the big chill is coming, the individual flowers are just so much more appreciated. Japanese anemones bloom starting in late August and last until frost. They are a real keeper.










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Here are the bonus pictures
So here are this week’s bonus pictures.
First there are other Japanese iris in the garden. Japanese iris take more water than bearded iris. I plant some of mine at the end of the drainpipes from our roof. If you have a sunny area that is in a low place Japanese iris along with Louisiana iris should go right there.


















































Then there are other Orientpets. Nymph in week 2 was an Orientpet. These two are Shocking and American Heritage. So far they are dividing nicely each year. It seems like they add at least one new stalk each year.























Here is the wild pink asclepias from Colorado, known as the Showy milkweed.











As a final note I must report that two pumpkins did not survive the week’s temperature fluctuations. Both were original Halloween pumpkins, so they had a long life. Here is one of them now resting with the frozen pansies on the ground, along with a picture of it in better times. There is also a picture of the one of the pansies emerging from the snow. The flower that is drooping was almost open in November. It went into its cryogenic sleep with the snow fall and just stayed that way until the snow melted. You can see a new bud that is formed and ready. If there is no snow and the temperatures drop below 0 the foliage and flowers will not survive. The plant will be fine and will bloom in April. That is getting closer all the time.





















Have a good week.
Philip

4 comments:

Craig said...

RIP ole orange.

Anonymous said...

So, I always select what is the most interesting photograph, not which blossom I find most appealing. Sometimes they match, and other times they don't.

I mailed in my absentee ballot for the California primary today as well. As much as I like that physical act of going to the polling place in the local Grange Hall (which is as close to a community center as we get here in Bodega Bay), I am thinking I might want to escape to the hot springs in Nevada and come back to civilization a day after Tsunami Tuesday.

IBOY said...

Ha! Those are great pumpkin pics.
Don

Anonymous said...

I like to think my favorite flower and my sense of best picture match, but that may be delusional. The depth and brilliance of the iris won over the pink asclepias, which I sort of like a little better, maybe. But the iris is so three-dimensionally perfect.

random thought: can you dig up and transplant peonies, or will they all succumb to the bulldozer when my mother's house finally is sold and (as my cousin delicately puts it) slabbed?