Week 2 of the Picture contest- December 6, 2020

Welcome back to the Mears Garden Blog, and the second week of the Picture Contest.

One week of 'winter' is now behind us. Actually, as it is now December, a decent chunk of the inside season is behind us. Many plants came inside in October, which seems like ages ago. 

Last week, which was Week #1, presented a spirited contest. The top three pictures were within a few votes of each other for most of the week. There was a last minute Saturday vote, which brought the poppy into a tie. 

There have not been many ties over the years. As you might expect when there is a tie both pictures will advance to the playoffs 13 weeks from now.

Here are your two winners from Week #1. 

Here was the voting:

I appreciated the comments and reply emails. I really like to know not only who you voted for but also why. I received more favorable comments and emails about the black daylily, which did not translate into winning. How do you ever pick a winner? You could have runoffs. You could have rank choice, where you have to decide which would be second and down the line. You could also assign a weight to a vote based on whether someone really liked a particular contestant. I guess in our political system I suppose that is what campaign contributions does.

Let me make another comment about the weekly voting before I get to the pictures.

I do try to balance the pictures throughout the 13 weeks. I try to balance by color, by type of flower, and even by the time of year. 

Week #2

#1 A different bloodroot

 (April 8, 2020)

One of my favorite spring bulbs is bloodroot. Of course there is the one that grows as a wildflower in the woods. I have grown that over the years. I do not find it that reliable in the garden.

In the bonus section I will show some pictures of those wild ones from Ryerson Woods, a little park south of the Fairgrounds in Iowa City.

The picture is of hybrid called Snow Cone. It was named and I assume developed by the couple who have Joe Pye Weed Gardens in Massachusetts. Sometime you should look at their website. Their plants, all of them,  are rather remarkable.

http://www.jpwflowers.com/

The botanical name for bloodroot is Sanguinaria canadensis. The genus is sanguinaria. The species is canadensis.  Here is more about bloodroot.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sanguinaria

One interesting fact is that the seeds are spread by ants. That process of course has a name. Read the article if you want the name.

It is one of the first spring flower to bloom in the woods. Guess what. It tastes bad. While it is fertile, and produces pollen, it does not produce nectar. Who knew?

The wild flower lasts only a day or so. This hybrid lasts longer, as the does the double. There is a double? Well, yes. You will see it later this winter.

#2 Peach Tall bearded Iris

 (May 29, 2020)

I really like Iris. There are so many varieties. They bloom at all times of the year. They come in so many shapes and sizes. The bearded iris bloom from April to May.

There are tiny bearded iris. There are medium sized bearded iris. And there are these big ones. It is the 3 bears family all over again. I appreciate that they bloom in sequence, by size. 

I do not have many of the tall variety. They often need staking. I prefer plants that are not that weak-kneed.

But they are pretty.

#3 Dancing Queen Amaryllis

 (February 17, 2020)

I grow quite a few Amaryllis. I have maybe 30-40 bulbs. I do not label them, and many are not blooming size. 

Dancing Queen has been around for a few years. It is sold many places, as you would find if you put it into google. 

I will have to make a point of giving it a label the next time it blooms.

Amaryllis are often given as holiday gifts in the winter, and they perform well after purchase. They will bloom in later years with some care. They will bloom about 6 weeks after breaking dormancy. The idea is to have them bloom  and then, like most bulbs, store up as much energy as possible.

Unlike bulbs like tulips and daffodils, the strap like foliage will grow as long as you allow it to. The plan is to deprive them of water and even light in the fall. That gets them a dormant period.

Theoretically they will stay dormant as long as they are deprived of light and water. You bring a dead looking bulb out in December. You give it water and some fertilizer.  6-8 weeks later it blooms.

I like to keep them dormant for as long as possible. In some cases I can have them wait until spring. At that time I can take them outside and they will bloom in the garden. (No frost please.)

#4 Purple zinnia 

(October 10, 2020)

For a number of years I have planted zinnias about the first of July. The idea is to have them just coming into bloom in September. This particular flower had some wonderful color. I am also fascinated by the really complex centers of these zinnias.

They look fresh in the fall and provide color to the garden when it needs it. Zinnias, like so many annuals, want a lot of sun. For that reason I have little spots where they can grow. (I have a few other plants that want sun too. Mostly my garden is high shade.)

#5 Lilium Fiamma

 (June 20, 2020)

Fiamma, which is Italian for flame, joined the garden in the fall of 2018. I got 6 bulbs which made a decent clump. I planted them with a similar number of a nice yellow one. They sort of bloomed at the same time.

Let me tell you about these "lilies",  which are not to be confused with daylilies.

They are not related to daylilies at all. 

They are in the genus lilium.

There are many different plants found in the genus lilium.

It is not as simple as identifying species within the genus.

Here is the wikipedia entry for lilium

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lilium

It appears that the groups we may know, such as Asiatic or Trumpet or Oriental are just collections of species and cultivars with the genus.

Fiamma is a cross between a plant in the Asiatic group and another plant in the Easter lily group.

My clump of Fiamma has now done well in its location in the backyard for two seasons now. It gets some direct sun in the middle of the day. It grows to about 3-4 feet. It blooms a little earlier than most of the lilium in the garden.

I had shied away from growing lilium for 20 years. I then went to an open gardens event in the Chicago suburbs about 15 years ago. It featured lilium. There was in fact quite a bit of shade in that garden. 

I am not saying to plant them if you have a lot of shade. But in the pockets of sun they will be fine. 

There you have the contestants for Week #2. Please vote, and tell me why you picked the particular picture you selected. 

And please invite your friends, and the rest of your family. I believe you can vote a second time on your device if you just close out of the cite and then come back to it.

Bonus Section

I want to show you pictures of bloodroot in the wild.

We were able to visit Ryerson Woods quite often in the spring of 2020.  It is just south of the Johnson County Fairgrounds. 

There is a forty minute loop that takes you through most of the park. It is good to go every week for a month in early spring. That allows you to see the progression of green, which in turn leads to the progression of flowers. This goes from the early bloodroot and Dutchman's breeches to the extensive May apples, almost a month later.

This next picture was taken on April 5. That is within a few days of the picture of Snow Cone, the first contestant this week.

I always am interested in comparing spring in the garden with spring in the woods. Of course spring in the garden varies from the parts that get sun to the more shady areas.

I suppose that is the same in the woods as certain places get more direct sun.

In this picture you can see one flower still in bud, on the left of the three flowers.

This next group of Ryerson Woods bloodroot was observed, a week later,  on April 11.

These native bloodroot are fertile. You can see the seed pods later in the spring.

The foliage of the bloodroot plant will remain for a while. It looks like a lung.

In the garden it will be gone by the fall if you want to plant more bulbs. When I planted all my aconite this fall, I did disturb (a euphemism for 'dug up') several of the bloodroot in the front sidewalk bed. I suppose I will find out in April if that mattered. Labels for some plants are important, particularly when the plants have become dormant. Having said that I have just put Snow Cone on the "To be ordered" label list.

Amaryllis- more pictures of Dancing Queen

I wanted to put these two next to each other so you could think about cropping. Closeups can be wonderful. I have occasionally thought that including closeups in the contest was unfair competition. 

Then I think I am over-thinking all this.

Big pictures are good. 

The many things with pollen on them are the stamen. I did not realize that as a double flower it would twice the parts. I am not really surprised.

I tried something different with my amaryllis in 2020. As I have mentioned before I rented a little sunny garden plot from the city this summer. It was over at Chadek Park for those of you who know Iowa City. It was fenced so there was little worry about deer. It was about 10X20 feet in size. In some of that space I grew herbs and vegetables. But I also planted my amaryllis bulbs there. Some I left in pots. Some I just took out of the pots and planted in the ground. They got a good 4 months of sun and rain. I dug them in the fall. What I did not do was measure them, before and after. I was not really able to tell how much they grew over the summer.

Here were the bulbs after they were harvested when the city parcel rental ended. They had us get everything out of the plots about October 1. 

The bulbs will get bigger. They will also grow side shoots. Then you have a whole lot of really little ones.

Here was one nice red amaryllis that I managed to keep dormant until it was warm enough to go outside. For that reason it bloomed outside on May 16.

More zinnias.

Here are another two of the late flowering zinnias. Actually there are some (not these) you may still see later in the contest. Think of it like several teams from the same conference getting into some tournament. You do not want them to meet in the first round.

Here are more Fiamma pictures.

The video was taken on June 23 when the companion lilium named Nashville had started blooming.

Here are the two varieties together,  mostly full bloom on June 25.

I mentioned that lilium are not daylilies. One big way they are not the same is that the individual lilium flower can last a good deal longer than one day. 

How about some more tall bearded iris?

Right Now

 Here are a few things of note in the 'garden' right now

 These pictures are little cattleya orchids. 

The little ones reliably bloom early in the indoor season.

This is the big one blooming at the moment on the dining room table.

This is out kitchen sink area. There are cuttings that are rooting, and one little hanging orchid.

I take this picture to show you the little globe of airplants we have had for 5 years. Thank you Pat and Stewart.

It has many little plants woven together into a ball. They individual plants bloom when the days begin to shorten.

It hangs over the sink to get the moisture and to be noticed.

I noticed one plant was turning red. Then the purple bud emerged this last week.

It then bloomed.

Gardening contains a lot of anticipation. You watch a bud form and then get larger.

Here is a bud on an indoor lady slipper orchid.

It can be fun watching a bud when you do not know what the flower will be.

I could in this case read the label and look it up. It is more fun to be surprised.

Julia' recipe

Salmon with horseradish glaze

It turns out there are a lot of ways to glaze a piece of salmon. So far so good as far as taste and ease of preparation are concerned. I just ran across a recipe that calls for grapefruit juice that I have not tried yet. I am not sure about grapefruit juice glaze. But this glaze is good and also fast and easy.  It is slightly adapted from a recipe from the Sitka Salmon folks who include recipes along with the deliveries of fish. 

The ingredients: a piece of salmon probably about 3/4 lb.; 1 tablespoon each of dijon mustard, salad oil, soy sauce, brown sugar and prepared horseradish (that is, the kind in a bottle, not the actual root). 

I patted the salmon dry and pulled out the pin bones and lubed up a pan to bake the fish in. 

I heated the oven to 375 degrees. 

Next I mixed the glaze which does look a bit unappetizing in the bowl. I whisked it up and slathered in on the fish (having put the fish in the baking dish). Then I set the fish aside on the counter to marinate for 30 minutes.

Because the fish cooks quickly, I started the potatoes next - small yukon gold potatoes, cut in half, tossed around in a little bowl with maybe 1 tablespoon of olive oil then spread around (cut side down) on a silpat-lined rimmed baking sheet and sprinkled with kosher salt. I also cleaned and cut up some broccoli.  

Here is the fish on its way into the oven.

At that time, I flipped the potatoes over (they were nicely browned) and turned on the broccoli. 

I put the fish in the oven and cooked it for about 12  to 15 minutes. People differ in their thinking about how long to cook salmon. I tend to cook it longer than others do. 

Here it is out of the oven. The glaze was still liquidy in spots and it was nice to whoosh the roasted potatoes around in the little bit of glaze on the plate.

I think this glaze would also be nice on a pork roast or maybe on a turkey breast. 

Odds and Ends

I still have a few plants in the garage that is attached to the house. At this point they do share the space with the car. Until it gets very cold the garage stays above freezing. That is a good storage temperature. With those temperatures I have my Amaryllis and Calla lily bulbs stored there. They will have to move when it gets colder. 

Sometimes the key word is "dormant." With plants like clivia and my orchid cactus, I want them to just survive the long winter. I cut back on watering and discourage growth.

The deer are still out there. I had quite a few tracks in the garden a few weeks ago. The tried to strip the bark from one of my new dogwood trees. I now have a little fence around it. I do feel a little like I have closed the proverbial barn door.

Speaking of deer we have a local garden club in Iowa City called Project Green. They have done wonderful things over the years. In the last few years they have been making a wonderful garden at the Ashton House. That is a property right on the river, purchased I think by the City, after the last big flood. The City has been discouraging people living in the flood plain.

I just received the Project Green newsletter.  They are just giving up on growing hosta at Ashton House, given the deer. They are going to dig up all the hosta planted there and have a sale in the spring. My only thought is that the deer will just eat something else. 

The temperatures are going down in Iowa. It is now regularly getting down well below freezing at night. 

Be safe.

Better times are coming. Soon.

Philip