Bouquets for Friday Spetember 26th and Monday September 29th

It is hard to believe it is the end of September and I have only 3 more weeks of deliveries. Bouquets for this week contained mainly chrysanthemums and asters. I also have lilies which were started in crates on July 15th, plus some annuals that are still producing like snapdragons, statice, zinnias and sunflowers.

I am both proud and ashamed of using roadside white asters in this yellow and white bouquet. Proud because they look quite nice and I don't have any white aster hybrids, but a bit ashamed because they are, after all. roadside weeds!


I made several burgandy and white bouquets this week just to get away from all the yellow, gold and red that is around in the fall.




I made many bouquets using purple and orange with dashes of gold. The lily here is 'Royal Sunset' and the picture really doesn't do it justice. The red-orange in the picture is actually kind of a deep pink and the yellow throat in the lily is more dark gold than it appears in the picture. The aster is a hybrid called 'Little Carlow'. The pinkish-orange spikes are an Agastache but the name escapes me right now.

I have a few of this wine red aster called 'Crimson Brocade' which is just beautiful. After dividing it again next year I should have plenty. I don't usually combine crimson and orange becqause they usually clash a bit, but it somehow works here, maybe because there is enough purple in the aster to bring out the purple-orange contrast.

Bouquets for Friday September 19th and Monday September 22nd

The flowers for the 19th and 22nd are about the same as for last Monday the 15th except I had more asters available. This first has red aster 'Crimson Brocade' with pink, white and red mums:

Orange lilies, mums and zinnias with purple aster 'Marie Ballard':

This one is red celosia with pink aster 'Patricia Ballard' plus pink and white mums. I guess there is a snapdragon in there, too:

Lastly, here is a yellow lily combined with white and yellow mums, a sunflower and goldenrod.

All in all I thought they were quite nice!

Bouquets for Monday September 15th

After a whole summer of mostly annuals, things are now switching back to perennials with the cooler weather. We have not had a frost but most of the usual annuals like sunflowers and zinnias prefer warmer temperatures and longer days.

Asters have finally started blooming. The purple one below is 'Marie Ballard'. The taller mums are commercial but the shorter ones were grown locally. The feathery spike at the top is celosia.

I was talking to a local mum grower who told me the short stature is probably due to the drought in the summer - I just couldn't keep them wet enough.
I still had a few lisianthus and used them in Monday's bouquets. A new crop is just starting to flower and will be appearing in the next week or so.

Bouquets for Friday September 12th

I missed posting on September 5th and 8th, but I'm still using the same flowers: sunflowers, a few lisianthus, lilies, zinnias, statice, artemesia, delphiniums  and dianthus.  

For today's bouquets I had to use some commercial chrysanthemums because the chrysanthemums I am growing have mostly been  too short.  The place I used to buy chrysanthemum cuttings went out of business and the ones I have been able to find have just not grown tall enough.  

I'm not including any pictures because they are so similar to what I have done in the past.  I expect to start getting New York asters in a day or two and hope to have those for next Monday.

Bouquets for Monday September 1st

The lisianthus are starting to run out so I can't be as generous with them as I have been for the past several weeks. I have a third sowing coming along but they won't be ready for a few more weeks. I've been using more foliage to make up for fewer lisianthus. I often use few if any "greens", preferring to use small filler flowers instead, but this week nearly all the bouquets contained either baptisa, silver artemesia or Sweet Annie.

Because the contents of the bouquets has not changed much I have been mostly posting pictures of more unusual color combinations. Most of the bouquets are still in more traditional color combinations like red-yellow-orange, pink-white-purple and so on, but I have already posted so many pictures like that it seems silly to post more.

This one is a combination of silver artemesia, salmon zinnias, light purple lisianthus, gladioli and a few spikes of salmon agastache. The agastache has an aromatic, minty smell.



The next is yellow and white with ferny Sweet Annie as a foliage filler. The other flowers are lisianthus, zinnias, helenium (small gold flowers top left) and solidaster.




This last one contains no foliage and a combination of pink lisianthus, red, green and pink zinnias and white statice.

Heirloom tomatoes

I don't grow very many vegetables. This year all I grew were sugar snap peas, lettuce, kale and tomatoes. In 2007 I bought a number of heirloom tomatoes from Project Grow's annual plant sale. My favorite was 'New Brooks', a pinkish beefsteak. I liked it well enough to try saving the seed, something I have never done before. All I did was take some of the seeds and wipe them across a paper towel with my fingertip to remove the pulp and then let them dry for a day or two on the paper towel. Then I removed them from the paper towel and put them in a ziplock bag to be planted this spring.


I planted the seed expecting to get tomatoes like the parent, and some of the 'New Brooks' plants did produce large pinkish beefsteaks similar to the 'New Brooks' I had last year. However, some some produced golden yellow beefsteaks. They are both good but I actually like the gold better.




Something similar happened with cherry tomatoes. I have grown a number of cherry tomatoes over the years, usually hybrids like'Sun Sugar' or 'Sun Gold'. After awhile I started seeing volunteer tomato plants that produced small cherry tomatoes about the size of a grape. They tasted pretty good so last year when I saved the 'New Brooks' seed I saved some seed from the volunteer cherry tomatoes, too. Surprisingly, these seed gave me plants producing two very distinct cherry tomatoes.


The smaller one is about the size of a small grape and is a pale orangey-pink. The larger one is bigger around than a quarter, but smaller than a golf ball and is classic, deep tomato red. They taste very different, too. The larger one is sweet and tastes...well, like a cherry tomato. The smaller one is a little more tart and more fruity or citrusy. I keep eating one and then the other and trying to figure out what is different.


I asked Royer, Project Grow's heirloom seed guru, how he could explain this since he had told me a few years ago that tomatoes typically do not naturally cross pollinate. Royer said that 'New Brooks' is not a very pure strain and he had also seen some of the following generation turn up yellow.


At any rate, these unexpected results have made the whole idea of saving tomato seeds much more fun! I've already saved the seed from all 4 varieties but will have to wait until next year to see what they produce.

Bouquets for Friday August 29th

Once again, no new flowers. I don't think anything new will appear until the asters start blooming in a week or so.

As it turned out, none of the sea hollies I planted came up. However, I did have a couple at the house so I made a bouquet using them.



I also did more purple and orange, a combination I never seem to get tired of.

My friend Deb once told me that she only liked red combined with white so I was thinking of her when I made this last one.