Port Potager

Some old favorites along with a new flower this week. The zinnias are enormous, with great big blooms as well as long stems. These have suddenly shot up to five feet high, and I'm not at all sure why. In other news, the strawflowers are finally here. These are some of the flowers I started from seed back in the winter, and I was beginning to doubt I'd ever see them bloom. They're worth the wait! Zinnias Strawflower and Chinese forget-me-not

Glad I made it outside to cut flowers yesterday before today's downpours came and crushed a bunch of our cutting bed plants. Here's what I'm enjoying in the vase this week: hosta, snapdragons, and zinnia black-eyed Susans rose, Chinese forget-me-not, lavender, and yarrow

There are still lots of flowers going strong in the cutting garden, and they seem no worse for wear as the ride out the dry spell we've had this August. This is one time where the deep afternoon shade is a blessing, but in general I think most flowers would enjoy a sunnier location. Alas, they will always play second fiddle to tomatoes and beans, and so must learn to adapt to less than optimal conditions. Anyway, I really love blue flowers, so I was excited to have enough blooming at once to make an all-blue bouquet: Chinese forget-me-not, bachelor's buttons, and lavender  I also grabbed a few other really bright flowers for a different room. That zinnia grew with a crazily bent stem so it looks a little funny, but I like the way the yellow center exactly matches the other yellow petals:   Zinnia and black-eyed Susans I almost put some pale pink snapdragons and baby's breath in that blue bouquet, but decided against it. Pink and blue always make...

Today's Flower Friday is a tale of two cutting gardens. On one hand, we see the happy mayhem of just cutting whatever happens to be blooming and throwing it into a mason jar: Baby's breath, phlox, black-eyed Susans, zinnia, bachelor's buttons, penstemon, hosta, and snapdragon.  On the other hand, we see the result of some carefully controlled color selections. When I first started planting the cutting garden , I chose perennials in a range of sunset colors: orange, peachy-salmons, golden yellows, plus deep purples and blues for contrast. I also tried to choose seeds for annuals that fit that scheme this past spring as well (though looking back, I can see that some things didn't bloom). Anyway, the idea was that anything in bloom at any given time would look good together. I guess that's true of the first bouquet, but below is a primo case study of what I was going for with that sunset color scheme: Echinacea, yarrow, roses, foxglove, and Chin...

I only have one bouquet today, and this one I only barely managed to bring in before the sky opened up yesterday. It's super-pretty, though: Snapdragons, rose, Chinese forget-me-not, astilbe, and yarrow. It's a little hard to tell in this photo, but those snapdragons at the bottom are a deep, velvety red-purple, which really sets off the delicate pink of the rose. So much pink this year! It's definitely growing on me.

Unlike last week , this week I remembered to take a picture of the cutting garden before any actual cutting occurred: Yes, there's still a hole in the fence. Yes, it's gotten bigger as the kids continue to use it as a short cut to the neighbors' yard next door. Allow me to distract your eye with pretty flowers: Chinese forget-me-not, astilbe, yarrow, snapdragon, and bachelor's button. Chinese forget-me-not, astilbe, and open-faced snapdragons. Here's a closer look at those open-faced snapdragons. They grow on a spike, but are a cup shape instead of a mouth shape. I like them (though the kids don't think they're as fun), and they were pretty easy to grow from seed. Black-eyed Susan, echinacea, and snapdragons.

I introduced a lot of annuals to the cutting garden this year, and since they were all grown from seed, it took quite some time for them to finally come into bloom. But here we are in mid-July, and the cutting garden has a lot going on. I should have taken a picture of the garden itself before doing said cutting, but I didn't think of it in time. Here are some vases I threw together to bring inside: Chinese forget-me-not, echinacea (two kinds!), and yarrow. Snapdragons, Chinese forget-me-not, yarrow, delphinium, echinacea, astilbe, zinnia, and baby's breath. Chinese forget-me-not, snapdragon, delphinium, astilbe, echinacea, yarrow, and bachelor's buttons.