Heliopsis helianthoides

Hmm, this is a test post to see if traveling with an iPad, camera, iPad camera connector, Blogsy, and Picasa web albums might actually work. I don't know yet if my venerable Nikon D100 will work with the camera connector, nor is writing especially fluid on an iPad, but it certainly would be nice not to have to worry about having a laptop!

Posted with Blogsy

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Squash, beans, eggplant, and tomatoes

There's a steady stream of vegetables coming from the garden now.  They're abundant enough now that I'm trying to get more creative with what I do with them.  (I roasted and froze a couple of trays of tomatoes yesterday).

Mixing the harvest together for a vegetable medley is fine, but tends to be a bit boring after awhile, even with homegrown garlic and basil, so I'm venturing into single vegetable dishes at the moment. 

Keeping the young tromboncino and tatume squash separate from the eggplants is fun, and gives us a sense of what each vegetable is like.  Today's bean harvest will wait for tomorrow (there were some big scarlet runner beans that had been hiding!)

My favorite dinner dish at the moment is fresh tomato, basil, and garlic sauce over pasta.  Doing it in a no-cook manner is delightful and easy, and hard to beat with a variety of fresh tomatoes.  Basically, it's chopped-up fresh tomatoes with chopped up basil leaves, and pressed garlic, with a bit of pepper, then the hot cooked pasta thrown in.  Perfect.

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Images from the Olympic garden plantings

These photos are linked to The Telegraph's photo gallery of Olympic park plantings (where they were downloaded).  They look like remarkable gardens!

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Olympic garden plantings

I've been immersing myself in learning more about 'New Wave' naturalistic planting design in Europe (and the inspirations for them), and was impressed by the new plantings for the Olympics in London (following google hits for James Titchmough and Sarah Price).

They're well worth taking a look at. Here's the Telegraph photo essay.

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An early morning garden tour

Just after dawn on Saturday morning in the garden...

A male black swallowtail butterfly looks like a jewel with the early morning sun backlighting his wings.

The same butterfly with the sun at its back. He must have been newly emerged because
he stayed on this grass flower head for a long time.

A female butternut squash flower waiting to be pollinated. A squash flower requires
8 or 9 visits by pollinators before it will set fruit.

This luna moth has been through a lot. Adults live only long enough to have sex and lay eggs.
They have no mouth parts, so their energy comes entirely from their larval stage, which feeds on leaves of walnut, hickory, sweetgum, maple, oak, persimmon, willow and other trees. Around our yard they have plenty of larval food--sweetgum, oak and maple.

A blue bee lit on the dew-covered spiderwort just as I snapped the photo.

Earlier in the season, I dug a volunteer squash from between the peppers. Oddly, it turned out to be a birdhouse gourd. It blooms at night so even in the early morning, the flowers do not look fresh--I suppose it's pollinated by moths or bats.  This is also called a bottle gourd or a calabash, which reminds me of Jimmy Durante.

The birdhouse gourds I planted up near the pumpkins look like this now.  See "The birdhouse gourd adventure". Most of the seedlings that I transplanted to the rim of the swale did not make it, but I still have some good-looking seedlings that sprouted in the center. More birdhouse gourd adventures to come.

There are wonders to behold in the landscape. I'm pleased to share my current wonders, for tomorrow's will be a different story.

Green Gardening Matters,
Ginny Stibolt

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Rampant squash

I've had such poor luck in recent seasons with squash (even the squash vine-borer resistant varieties like Tromboncino) -- uh, woodchucks love it -- that I overplanted this year in the mountains.

What was I thinking?

The vines are rambling everywhere, down the slope, up trellises, through tomatoes, etc.  Yikes!

Tromboncino squash rambling down the slope, along with Butternut and Delicata

Tatume on the right; Tromboncino on the left

But we've had some tasty squashes for a change -- Tatume, Tromboncino, young Butternut and Delicata, and a couple of Eight-Ball (Ronde de Nice) before the plants succumbed to borers.

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Understanding plant communities & creating pocket meadows

The heading titles were my gardening companion's message and mine at the Cullowhee Native Plant Conference today.

It's been such fun to connect with avid native plant people of all persuasions (novice to expert!) over the last few days.

Learning is always good, at whatever point in the process of learning about native plants that we are:  as native plant enthusiasts, garden designers, nursery owners, and home gardeners.  There's a great mix of participants in the conference, representing all of these, and more.

I'm thinking again that I don't have a image to upload - but really, my end of the talk photo is what it's about -- what do you want to see out the door?

An endnote:  currently the pdf version of my presentation along with a species list is on the sidebar.

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