Allium Sphaerocephalon
Three years ago I purchased a small pack of bulbs on clearance at a local discount store. I think paid .75 for 25 bulbs. They weren’t labeled with a name, so I searched for them when they bloomed the following summer. Turns our they were Allium Sphaerocephalon.
These beautiful little bulbs are loved by pollinators of all sorts. They naturalize readily, expanding stocks of bulbs each season and blooming more profusely. They grow about two feel tall and the bloombs are about the size of an egg. They start off green and mature to a beautiful dark pink. They’re quite inexpensive to buy, you can get 100 for $10.75 from Van Engelen.
Yesterday, I spent some time harvesting bulbs and moving them into the new pollinator bed by the driveway (more photos of this garden coming soon). I planted them among the hyssop as they have small leaves and the blooms should rise just to the height of the hyssop. This should give me a longer bloom time in this small area, providing twice as much food for the pollinators.
Alliums are becomming a favorite flower around here. I currently grow only four or five different varieties, but hope to add more. Purple Sensation is on my list to buy this fall, I’ve heard a lot of good things about this variety (especially that it returns year after year).
What are you doing in the garden this week? Do you grow alliums? What’s your favorite variety?
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Uncommon Hedge Plants
I’m a lover of a good hedge, in fact I have several hedges planned for the gardens here and have been researching hedging options and noticing any hedges I see both here and elsewhere. Most likely, the large hedge around the main garden is going to be beech. They grow very well locally and the deer don’t bother them. Though I’m going to be trialing hawthorn as well to see if it works, a thornless variety as I have no desire to prune 270 feet of thorny hedge. When we were at Longwood a few weeks ago, we noticed this dwarf fals cypress hedge and loved it.
The unstructured loose feel of this hedge is quite nice. It’s not something I will use in place of the beech hedge as I want clean lines, but it’s an option for other parts of the garden, especially if it proves to be deer proof. It would make for a good windbreak in the winter since it’s an evergreen.
Do you have any favorite hedge plants?
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Bee Hotels
There’s been a lot of talk of insect/bee hotels lately. I’ve been seeing them in most of the botanical gardens that I’ve visted over the past few years. This one was featured at one of the arboretums in Paris.
It’s very cute and looks lovely in the garden. While I’ve always thought about building one, I’ve never gotten around to it. Lately, studies have shown that they’re not as beneficial as once thought. It’s much more effective to produce more natural habitats for them. We have a few large brush piles in the woods where lots of these types of bees and other insects can live. We leave dead trees standing if they’re not a hazzard to us or the house. There are lots of things you can do to help native bees without providing apartment complexes for them. Now I don’t feel so bad about never making one.
Have you spotted any native bee hotels in local gardens?
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Harvesting Poppy Seeds
I grow a lot of breadseed poppies here, they seem to spring up every summer. They bloom beautifully, so I only pull the ones that are in locations where I simply can’t allow them to grow. The rest of them get to grow wherever they germinate, which seems to be everywhere. This year I’ve had more than I’ve ever had in the garden.
Now that’s they’ll all finished blooming, the seed pods are starting to dry off. Since there are so many, I don’t want all those seeds falling on the soil and germinating next year. I’m harvesting as many seed heads as I can and saving them to use this winter.
It looks like I’ll get about 6 cups of poppy seeds for baking (I’ll save a few Tablespoons for planting). I’ve never really been a poppyseed kind of a person, for baking and such. Now that I have a lot, I plan on making a few things.
Do you have any great poppyseed recipes to recommend?
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Selecting for Better Berries in the Future
I’ve been growing strawberries for many years. After trialing many varieties, ‘Sparkle’ has emerged as a favorite around here. It’s a great berry with good flavor and it freezes well but it doesn’t last long once picked. Two years ago we noticed that a couple plants were producing exceptionally large berries (which still had great flavor) and producing a few more than other plants.
We selected those plant and allowed them to runner and reproduce while removing the plants that produced smaller berries. The following year we had a slightly larger patch of plants producing good sized berries. This summer we have a patch of about 50 plants producing the nice large berries.
As you can see in this photo, the larger berries on the left are the ones from selected plants. The smaller ones on the right are from non-selected plants.
We are once again selecting plants from this original plant to increase our stock of plants that produce the best berries. Next year our entire patch will be from these plants and all the berries should be of good size.
Do you grow strawberries? Do you have a favorite variety?
