July time:
My liatris, what a difference a bigger pot makes, they're flowering finally, for the first time in 3 summers of having them. My daylilies are also flowering well, we tried eating them for the first time tonight in a stir fry which also included radish seed pods, eating some and drying some for seedsaving, am I supposed to pick them or let them dry on the plant? The reason I ask is because they're getting heavy and breaking the branches of the radish plants, so that's why I'm wondering how best to do it, my first time saving for pods to eat and pods to seed.
Well none of my pepper seeds grew again this year, so the only pepper plant I have is the jalapino from the big box store haha. We have been enjoying harvesting our spinich, it started bolting so I finally harvested most of it, we ended up with three plants but they were super slow growing which was a definite surprise, tasty in salads and we did spinich artichoke dip several days ago, plus some breakfast scrambles. I cut off the bolts and I think that has made my spinich hold its leaves longer for me. I have one baby cucumber plant which is growing so we'll look forward to that later on in summer, plus I transferred the spindly sunflowers out of the yardsoil, clearly my yard can't grow purposeful stuff out of its own dirt very well, turns out a couple of the pumpkin seeds did take, but were hiding, I transplanted those too, and planted a few new ones which have started growing. They will likely be later than I'd like but oh well. So I probably just need to focus on continuing to use containers to good effect, plus get more raised beds because those do work here. The decomposed barkdust patch by my front door though, I think that can sort of handle having plants put directly into it at least.
I ate the only blueberry which made it to maturity on my sad blueberry plant, still not totally sure what's wrong with it, sadly the second one, which I wanted my husband to have, was already gone. Last year that bush took a gap year and was leafy with no berries, so maybe one berry is better than none? Presumably my potatoes are coming along, as for yard foraging we've been enjoying ladiesthumb, mallow and dandylion leaves lately, transplanted some of the calendula into a more convenient spot, and even though the mason bees all flew away and didn't like my yard the leafcutter bees have hatched and taken up residence in the box and are happy here! At least I'll have some bee eggs to send back in Sept. so it wasn't a complete "failure".
For the 4th we visited and ate with family and friends and partook of the traditional passtime of the holiday (fireworks), sweeping up our mess afterwords of course. Met some neighbour kids and their mom in the process.
You can read about more locally based subjects, my singing etc., on my thread in the Cascadia section.
Interesting that other lizards besides geccos can drop their tails when scared.
