Pinching zinnias and more
This is one of my LEAST favorite gardening tasks - pinching the young zinnias. It’s so painful, because you take a beautiful, thriving, ready-to-bloom-any-day-now plant and uncermoniously CHOP off its top stem and bud. It’s like risking a sure thing on the hope of a better one to come.
You pinch them above the third set of leaves so that one stem will end up as two, thus doubling the number of flowerheads. But it is still OH so hard to do!
This bed of zinnias are all really cool color palettes from my favorite florist, Floret in the Skagit Valley on the west side of the state. She is a floral education superstar. I can already see the unusual pale coloring of these two, which are about to get CHOPPED for the sake of pinching!
So sorry, ladies! But it’s for your own good, I promise!
I had to make a tiny bouquet out of the cuttings. I can already see the cool colors that the Floret zinnias are going to provide. A typical zinnia would be brighter reds, pinks, whites, oranges. But the Floret zinnias are mostly antique-y pastels.
Running along side the in-ground Floret zinnias are 8 different varieties of celosia. I have never grown this seed before, and I could not believe it germinated, because these seeds were even smaller than a poppy seed! But you can see the different celosia colors down the row. These are very feathery/fluffy looking flower tufts. I can’t wait to see how they turn out!
I have a checklist to see if I can identify all of the different color cosmos I planted this year.
If I could I would grow an entire acre of cosmos. They check all the boxes for me - wild and rangy with really interesting individual blooms.
So much red aramanth growing from last year’s seed drops. You can understand why when you see that those seed heads are comprised of thousands (millions) of tiny little red seeds. I have a couple of fun experiments with this plant planned in my herbal notebook.
Then I hit a bit of a mystery. This raised bed is (supposed to be) planted with three calendula (marigold) varieties. These specially-bred varieties are often very different from what you might typically think about when you think marigold, so it’s not unusual to find something that looks a little strange. But these flowers that I noticed coming up along the right-hand side of the bed are decidedly NOT calendula - these are DEFINITELY zinnias! I emailed the seed breeder to see if they think it was just a mislabeled packet or what. But they are GORGEOUS anyway!
Look at those colors and those little yellow centers!
Those are 100% zinnia plants.
Wow! What a stunner! Zinnias are so simple, but so interesting to me. I keep waiting for someone to write a REALLY GOOD book just on zinnias - they deserve it!
In this case packet mislabeling would be very easy to have happened. I purchased all of my calendula from Peace Seeds, a small open pollination farm in Oregon, and they use the same little craft paper envelopes for their seeds, just adding a sticker on one side when they fill it with. What a gorgeous mistake! And also - since I had problems with some of my heirloom zinnia seeds from Baker’s Seeds this year, maybe I’ll just get my zinnias from Peace Seeds next year!
Steve’s corn seems to be doing fine. The red amaranth is doing its best to take over the corn area.
Plenty of squash this year, but I’ll have to dig a bit to check on the zucchini. This bed also has a bunch of calendula coming back up from seeds dropped here last year, and they are a lovely complement!
The bumblebees are loving the flowering oregano.
We placed this cute little bird feeder behind the trellis supporting the espalier fruit trees.
It’s a old metal dollhouse barn that we picked up at an antique store while we were in Omaha, the Brass Armadillo, which used to be one of our favorite haunts. Still highly recommend! I’ve seen lots of these metal dollhouses, but never one in the form of a barn. Very cute. Montana put a polyurethane coating on it to minimize rusting, and Steve screwed it to a wooden pedestal we had laying around from an old birdhouse. Now I just need to remember to pick up some birdseed.
I do not have irrigation on this far right in-ground bed, because it is filled mostly with “water-wise”, low-water-requiring plants. But here I am giving some water love to a few baby yarrow plants, helping to give them a good start.
Today is also time to start harvesting/trimming the lavender. It is good for the plants, and I also have a bunch of projects waiting for those dried flower buds.
At first I tried tying them with twine, but the string was so old it just broke.
Then I realized with these young plants it’s just as easy to just grab them in a bunch and then use my garden knife to slice their tops right off.
Super easy! Nice and level cut. Way easier than snipping.
Now it just looks like some of the plants got a little haircut.
Into the greenhouse hanging air dryer the lavender cuttings go!
Bottom to top we have lavender; plantain; chamomile; mullein; and lemon balm. I’ll add some lemon thyme in that top layer later tonight.
While I was out in the garden it was getting quite windy, when I heard a VERY loud CRAAAAACK pretty nearby. Down went half of an old apple tree by the driveway. Most of those old trees are pretty much dead inside, but it still made quite a sound and quite a gigantic mess! Montana got to work breaking it down.
Ouch! But you can see how dead it is inside.
She has a mini chain saw, but gets nervous about using the big one without Steve around. It’s the one power tool that we are all afraid of! Steve is in OKC with Sandy for her surgery next week, so Elijah got out an ax and separated the limb from the tree, and then Montana just kept breaking it down, taking loads down to the goats in the bed of the truck. What an ordeal! And especially frustrating because we have 3 other limbs that have come down in the past few weeks, and also this is no-fire season, so after the goats eat all the leaves we cannot burn the branches until October! She and Elijah are going to go buy a battery operated “in between” size chain saw tomorrow. With four large limbs down, we need it!
