kopper is king ? a blushing and boastful hibiscus.

behold, a massively petaled kopper king hibiscus tucked into my garden. this is a hardy  (for our zone 6b region, i should note) hibiscus with a dark reddish brown nearly blood-veined set of leaves. it grows to about 3 or 4 feet tall. mine is around that point already.

but unfortunately, the puffy pink petals, with the flowers themselves probably spanning at least 5 or 6 inches across, are apparently considered scrumptious by critters, as evidenced by some holes in their patchwork.

this hibiscus is grown by new jersey's centerton nursery. the man who started the nursery  and began his agricultural escpades in illinois, donald mcallister, headed a top-secret production of marijuana to produce the fiber hemp for the u.s. navy during world war ii, as the government mandated its cultivation as a rotation crop since hemp played a role in making rope.

the day lily blooms i often post are also from centerton nursery in bridgeton. 

this hibiscus' thick stalks should be cut back to about a foot off the ground or less during or before winter. since it blooms later in the season, it often looks completely dead early on in spring. but have patience because it will eventually shoot up new red-gushing growth. the first year i had mine, i thought it died, but i realized that it's just slower to join its glamor into the growing season.

some rain, baby mice, buddleia, and a worthy t-shirt.

in this harshly ungiving summer of almost no precipitation and many a heatwave, this blurred sight soothed my soul for at least 15 minutes. i love rain.

two days ago, i heard the tiniest squealing in the back of the shop, set away in the dark. i thought maybe it was baby pigeons or something along those lines. but it turned out to be two baby mice. i wondered if they fell through a crack in the floorboards in the upper level of the barn.

earlier in the week, i had seen two small corn snakes zipping around in the barn and somehow managed to not scream my head off (i generally scream bloody murder (so female, damn) when i see snakes). so maybe a slithering one ate the mother. i'm not sure. so i scooped the two little furballs  up onto a shrubs catalog and took them outside. they were wrapped in wears of the dusty crevices of the barn.

i called my co-worker terry, as he always knows what to do. he suggested i put them behind the barn near the potting area under the shade of some trees. so i did that, and i broke open sunflower seed shells, giving them the seeds, and also some dried cranberries and mushy pieces of banana. the one mouse ate the seeds like a fiend, while the other wandered off.

the next day, they were both gone from the area. i know they're just babies, so i hope they somehow make it. if a bird swooped down to gobble them up, i don't want to know it !

a butterfly bush (buddleia, as noted in the subject of this post) known as the closest to red as you can find in this shrub's family of blooms is called attraction red. but it still mostly looks purple. it's just a more mauve-y purple.

and after terry left for the morning, he came back to show me his new t-shirt. i've referenced terry quite a bit in past posts. and what a shirt ! i do believe he was quite proud of it, reasonably so.

i didn't know you could legally have the word ''ass'' in the name of a business. i experienced some brain wrinkling on that one !

a brief spin of a tour of the garden center: part 7.

not yet shown here before now is at last a partial view of the barn at the garden center. it dates back to 1811 and has some beautiful, small stretch of stained glass at the front by the road, but this is the back view.

i believe this coneflower has been planted by now. good for it ! i love the prickly-soft way their middles feel. scope out that little antenna-ed one on the underside of the flower !

mountain fire pieris japonica needs a bit of shade but speak well of their familial seeming relation to the flame.

bumble bees were all a'buzz at the vitex last week.

tiger swallowtail butterflies always remind me of my mother.

liatris is such a pleasantly hairy perennial. it almost paints hairy as a positive adjective, briefly.

this chesapeake crablegs daylily looks so similar to a wild tiger lily that i'm almost surprised it was bred. its edges are a bit more scalloped though.

i believe i discussed duckweed in an earlier post. it's a surface-growing plant that spreads as a lime green wildfire in pond settings, creating surface vegetation very quickly, if that's your goal, or even if it's not.

i'm always surprised but delighted about how close these guys let me get to them for a good snapperoo before they hop their way into the nearby water.

and this is probably the last daylily i'll have the good fortune to show off, from our new jersey grown supply leftover since last year. it's called apache war dance.

until next time !

sheron faye is growing up !

nestled in a sweep of hills in yellow house is wholesome dairy farms, which i've noted before. the farmer and his team of helpers raise ayrshire cows for raw milk and cheese production and also just because they love these social butterflies of creatures.

lopez kindly offered to name a newborn calf for me last fall after i wrote a story about his dairy. i requested sheron faye in memory of my incredibly missed momma. despite the way her parents took her for granted and wiped her good heart out of their life in the early 1970s before i was born, i'm glad, and i think she was too, that they chose to switch out the first vowel in her name with an 'e' for the usual 'a' the name involves.

i last saw sheron faye in october, and sadly, she was not doing well and barely clung to life, with the other cows bullying her and not letting her get to their food and water supply very easily or fairly. in a post about douglassville's kimberton whole foods last month or so, i included a picture of me with sheron faye from that time.

the pro-organics grocery store right down the street from the dairy carries lopez' raw milk in its refrigerated section. 

left, sheron faye is curious for the camera next to her buddy roxy, otherwise known as roxy star.

sheron faye has grown so much since i saw her last fall. what a sweet girl she is.

sometimes i wonder what my mom's response would be to learn that following her own time on earth, i had a cow named after her. her cousin peggy, a sprightly 80-something, quick-lipped former clemmer, let her words jump and bounce around across the phone line when i first told her about the then-calf. i guess she thought my mom would not be a fan of the name re-giving. but i have a feeling that it would instigate a smile out of her, and that's one thing i miss most about her-- the smiles she could offer to her children and the grand-kids. so the cow end of it is all good with me.

a tomato-set of words from february, now with in season visuals.

Tomato Coveter, Nouveau 

by Jennifer Hetrick

For 23 years, I firmly avoided letting my tongue touch the taut, sun-kissed red skin and gush-filled bite that is a tomato.

I hesitated, my taste buds recoiling when my mother held a salted half-slice of the cherry variety in her fingers only inches away from my face.

We sat at the kitchen table, with her telling me, “Try it! Just try it.”

Although our picky eating habits often overlapped, she had an avid fondness for tomatoes while I simply did not. Once or twice, I licked the wet and soft-seeded layer of a cut piece of the quasi-fruit, the vined vegetable. But the flavor did not suit me as a child, and I felt helpless to keep my distance, never allowing one to grace my plate.

My mother’s main meal, while out to dinner, generally consisted of a cheeseburger and fries. No other toppings—no lettuce, onions, pickles, mustard, or sauces. But she would nod her head yes in asking for a tomato to take a seat between the bun and the rest of the business. No ketchup either.  I volunteered for the role of ketchup dipper when the fries needed eating.

Throughout her entire life, my mother also refused to eat pizza because her first episode with it involved a mean case of trickery. In the early 1940s, before pizza had taken the U.S. fully by storm, her neighbors invited her to their house for one of her favorite sweets—cherry pie. Little did she know that in fact, something called pizza was the culprit fooling her in that initial chomp. The neighbors buzzed with laughter while her young face squirmed in pure dislike.

Me, I do eat pizza, but only if the sauce is not too heavy or reminiscent of sugar.

In the past few years, I raised tomatoes in my modest townhome garden, outlined in a c-shaped paver wall with the soil sloping down at one side to meet the blotchy grass of my backyard. I’d stretch the hose as far as I could toward each wriggling stem, spraying water to the roots from a short distance.

Some days, I’d come home from work, noticing the wilting demeanor the leaves had taken on in my absence, and I knew I was a bad plant-mother. Water does much for a quick reprieve though in scenes of vanity and the green.

As the seasons passed, with each new summer greeting the market pack of nine tomatoes I’d bring home, and the stalks reaching skyward almost as tall as me, I began to envy the idea of what it must like to enjoy such an aesthetic, ripe vegetable. They looked as if they’d taste nothing short of phenomenal. With caution, I licked yet another slice of tomato again but felt nothing.

I wanted to be able to say what I’d grown was delicious. But instead, I tried to just be grateful that I was at least evolving toward admiring tomatoes somewhat from a previous perch of nadda.

At the age of 24, I tried again. It began with caprese at an Italian restaurant. I dared to absorb the mingling essences of my endeared mozzarella (the words “cheese” and “no” do not occur in my voiced sentences), cuts of basil, drizzles of olive oil or balsamic vinaigrette, and slice after slice of rounded tomatoes. But this time, my taste buds whirled.

Success—the flavor of something as basic as a tomato finally made sense to me with gratitude due to the taste-thick combination of that fresh, earthy dish.  This kind of relief is practically impossible to appreciate unless you can deem yourself a picky eater from birth.

Soon, it will be four years since my mother ate her last tomato. It will be four years since the earth pulled her away from us and into an imperfect powder form via a crematorium owned by Ruggiero Funeral Home on Collegeville’s main street.

I hate that they burned her.

I feel guilty when I look into a black kitchen pot on my stove, seeing that I’ve burned the skin of tomatoes in my attempts at crafting a basil-fresh soup during the crisp and chilled days of the last season she knew before she signed into the hospital, not making her final exit on foot.

But life is about burning sometimes, and if not that, then tomatoes.

I can’t tell her that I now eat the one vegetable she loved so much while she pinched facial expressions at most vitamin-rich greens. Nonetheless, I feel better knowing I do, with how much she craved them weekly despite the fussy nature of her palate. How ecstatic I become knowing my rarely devoured cheeseburgers will don cuts of a single tomato is something I can only hope she senses in the glee of my shifting palate, bite by new bite.

what's that growing in your mulch ?

moldy mulch ? fungus ? mushrooms ? what ?!?

every few weeks, a customer calls the garden center to complain that we sold them faulty mulch. not so. less than a minute's investment in just thinking logically about what mulch is, and giving science some credit, leads to making sense of understanding how and why you might just have some spots of moldy or oddly growth-filled mulch.
 

mulch is aged, rotting wood. it's decaying material, if you think about it. so especially when we have sudden spells of moisture (by which i mean rain--wonderful rain !), and it gathers in flowerbed areas where the drainage isn't especially efficient, such episodes of higher ick factors are more likely.

these natural occurrences can make themselves known in any mulch from any supplier, keep in mind. i believe that certain types of recycled, shredded, and aged wood might be more susceptible to these growths than others, but i'm not well-learned about any specifics beyond that.

to teach people about the real deal behind mulch mold and more, i usually show them a copy of a brochure published by the penn state college of agricultural sciences cooperative extension.

the brochure identifies the main kinds of molds, mushrooms, and fungus that can spur into mulch beds, complemented with a few visuals, of course. people seem to calm down a bit in their huffing and puffing when they see this university-associated literature about the issues.

the only copy i had of the brochure, until recently, was one from 1997, very weathered and beaten. i contacted the university's publications department and learned that an updated version came out in 2009, so i ordered that. they will only send one free copy to a pennslyvania resident. after that, you pay per copy.

i don't believe this exact literature is online, and my cropped pages on display here may be a bit difficult to read. if you would like the originally scanned files, for easier reading, let me know and i can e-mail those to anyone who is interested.

but at least by the photographs, if you have these growths culturing in your landscape, you know they're common and can learn more about them.

the brochure's content mostly explains that the mold, fungus, and mushrooms are short-lived and will eventually decompose on their own. instead of finding them repulsive, you're supposed to appreciate the beauty in their existence, especially in that most of them are not harmful to your landscape. if you can't stand to look at them though, it's suggested that you scoop them up and dispose of them.

unfortunately, one damaging breed here is artillery fungus. they shoot of little spores that often stick to siding, cars, or any other objects around the mulch, and it's very difficult to remove them, especially without leaving a stain. the brochure's only remedy for dealing with this problem is prevention by adding mushroom soil to blend with your mulch.

if by chance you come across this and know anyone who has complained about these little sights popping up in their flowerbeds,  pass it on !

three non-blind amphibian-types.

i swear-- they had this planned.

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