Beautiful iris from my garden

My garden makes me aware that there is beauty in everything, from a tiny earthworm wriggling its way through the earth, to a honeybee drinking water from the birdbath, to the lovely flowers that are blooming en masse now. I have become aware of colors--all shades and hues of colors--because they are in abundance in a garden. The different greens in the leaves of different plants and how they reflect the sun's light shining through them, the varying shades of blues and violets, the brown color of the earth and what that tells you about the quality of the soil. The list is long. I could post many photos of the different flowers that are blooming or have bloomed this year, but I've settled on posting one today, because suddenly this year, my iris plants produced many flowers, and they are beautiful. So here is one photo of a lovely iris bloom.....it's just a pity that they don't last very long.

Mid-June garden update

We've had wonderfully warm and sunny weather for the past week, which the garden just loves. The daily growth spurts are amazing. From one day to the next, I come to the garden to find that the flower buds on my physocarpus (ninebark) plant have bloomed; the leaves of the plant are a deep red color, whereas the flowers are white and fuzzy--quite pretty. The kaprifol (honeysuckle) plant right next to it is blooming and happy. The zucchini plants have also grown larger in the space of a couple of days, and yesterday they had begun to flower. The pumpkin plants have also begun to spread out. My mini-cucumber plants are producing some really good-tasting cucumbers, ditto for my radish plants. This year will be a banner year for strawberries, raspberries, and black currants, also gooseberries. The red currant bush produced thousands of berries last year, so this year it's taking a well-deserved rest. One of the two blackberry bushes developed cane rot, so I had to cut it down, but it's already coming back and seems to be in good shape. My perennial garden is blooming--oxeye daisies, carnations, and cranesbill (a hardy geranium) so far. My coral bell (Heuchera) plants have spread out and are quite healthy, and my irises this year are just beautiful. The pachysandra plants that I planted under one of the larger trees at the entrance to the garden have grown taller and are beginning to spread out. So things are moving along as they naturally do in the garden. Here are some photos of the garden from this past Saturday--you can see for yourself!

oxeye daisies

ninebark flowers

zucchini plant starting to flower

left side of the flower garden (mostly perennials)

right side of the flower garden--check out the crane's bill plant with blue flowers

the coral bells perennial garden--they are just gorgeous plants 

my rose bushes that cover the arch entrance to the garden have started to bloom 

my irises are blooming this year--so many of them 

A garden update

I've been working in the garden since mid-March, about the time lockdown started here in Norway. Apart from working at home and remaining indoors, the garden has been the only free space available to me when I am outdoors, and I am immensely grateful for that. I have taken the occasional walk around the neighbourhood, but ran into too many people for there to be safe social distancing. And that's not so strange considering we live in a city. So it's been nice to escape to my garden, and there's been plenty of work to do since March--raking, clearing away dead twigs, turning the soil, cutting back a number of trees and bushes, spreading grass seed, sowing out vegetable and flower seeds in the greenhouse, cutting away the dead canes in the raspberry patch, weeding the raspberry and strawberry patches (this can take hours), and transplanting some bushes from one place to another. Plus I've bought more plants, mostly perennial flowers, to round out the garden, and they needed to be planted. It may not sound like enough work for a couple of months, but it is, especially since I am not in the garden full-time. If I was, it might go faster, but since I'm still working full-time, it all takes time. And that's ok for now.

We finally got the roughly 12 square meters behind the greenhouse 'returned' to us last summer, and I decided to make this space another 'room' in the garden. Last autumn, I planted allium, tulips, scilla, spring snowflakes, grape hyacinths, regular hyacinths and narcissus (a type of daffodil), all of them bulbs, and they have all come up. We also bought a wisteria tree and a magnolia tree and planted them in this space, as well as a lilac bush. The magnolia tree is blossoming now, and its blossoms are a lovely reddish-pink color. I decided that I wanted a stone path leading from the vegetable garden area up to and behind the greenhouse, so I bought some slate stones and embedded them in the soil, and sowed grass seed around them. I bought pachysandra plants and planted them along the path, in the hope that these hardy plants will begin to thrive and spread out.

There is always a new project to work on in the garden, and I love each one--both the planning and the execution. Whenever I think I'm 'finished', I realize shortly thereafter that I'm not, and never will be. Gardens are works in progress.

A winter garden

It has been a mild winter this year in Oslo, and I'm not complaining. Temperatures have hovered around the 40 degree F mark, and even when we've had days when they've dipped to freezing followed by snow, the temperatures rise again, it rains, and the snow disappears. These are the winters I like, and I hope there are more of them in the coming years. 

I visited the garden this morning after mass. A beautiful sunny day...... I was the only one in the garden except for the birds, who were merrily chirping as though it was already spring. They were out en masse, as were the crows, seagulls, and magpies. And on my walk home, the ducks were out also. Yes, ducks. The mallards have returned to the water pools at Alexander Kiellands plass, and they were having a great time. 

It was nice to be back in the garden; there was frost on the grass and on the leaves of the perennials that are just waiting to bloom anew once spring comes. It can't come too soon for my taste. My fervent hope for the coming garden season is that it won't rain as much as it did last year. Too much rain is not good for a garden, just as too little rain is not good either. 

Plums, butterflies, and bees

I took this video of the butterflies and bees in the garden at the end of August, when they were happily enjoying the plums that were rotting after having fallen to the ground from my neighbor's plum tree. They were completely wild about the plums, and the butterflies especially flew around as though they were a bit drunk. It was fun to watch them. Of course I would have preferred that the plums would not have rotted, that they would rather have been collected and used in preserves and other food items, but it was not my call because it was not my garden. But at least they provided weeks' worth of food for the butterflies and bees.

A look back at this year's gardening season

And suddenly, just like that, summer is over, although you can't call what we had this year, summer. It was just a temperate rainy season with very little sun. In previous years, there has been a gradual movement toward autumn, with September days that have a hint of autumn in the air. Not so this year--just rain and more rain. Temperatures during September stayed mostly in the low 60s, so I cannot complain about that. But there was no real summer this year, and there has been no real autumn either. Now it's just cold. In some places right outside of Oslo, it's already snowed. This year's gardening season was less than stellar due to the rainy summer. The outdoor tomatoes rotted, as did three of my ten pumpkins. The string bean plants did not do well either. Too much rain and too little sun will rot plants, since the roots never have a chance to dry out. Or they develop mold, as did my outdoor tomato plants, producing tomatoes that were mottled and mealy. The greenhouse tomato plants did fine; that's how I know that the amount of rain we had this year was no good for the outdoor tomato plants.

We got the allotment garden in 2016, and since then, not one successive season has been the same. It is impossible to predict from year to year how the next season will go. I imagine that causes farmers much consternation; a farmer's life is far from idyllic or romantic, that's for sure. Last year, the summer was very warm and there was very little rain; that was true for most of Western Europe. But it was a banner year for the garden. Looking back, the 2016 gardening season was the best in terms of a good balance of sun and rain. I know that because the pumpkins grew well, and to a good size. This year, I've gotten one large pumpkin; the rest are small to medium-sized. The only plants that produced well this year were the zucchini plants--six large zucchinis from three plants. But zucchinis grow fast and for some reason were not affected by the overly-moist soil as were the pumpkins. Strange, because together with other types of squashes and pumpkins, the zucchini belongs to the species Cucurbita pepo, and you might think that they would all react similarly to the weather conditions. The berry plants all produced fairly well this year; berry plants seem to be quite hardy. The only problem was a blister aphid infection on the red currant bushes that sucked the juices out of the leaves so that they ended up looking wrinkled and blistered, hence the name. But the infection did not affect the actual berry production, which was something to be thankful for. 

The Folva potatoes did well this year, so next year I will plant more of them. Based on this year's experiences, I've decided that next year I will plant potatoes, zucchinis, pumpkins, and will try string beans again. If they don't do well, I'll skip them in the future. I'll only plant greenhouse tomatoes. In the end, you end up planting what works, because in truth, it is heartbreaking to watch what you've nurtured from seed end up dying due to frost, too much rain, too little rain, slugs, or mold. I know that how I feel pales in comparison to what farmers must feel when the weather is unpredictable. For example, this past April was a warm one, and the apple orchards started to bloom early. Then came May, with several weeks of cold temperatures, and the resulting frost killed the apple tree blossoms and killed the chances for the trees to produce any apples. The farmers who were interviewed were heartbroken. This is the ruthlessness of nature. It doesn't care what lives or what dies--there are no feelings one way or the other. It is us humans who feel sadness or elation at watching our plants die or grow, depending on the unpredictable weather. You either develop a thick skin and continue to plant the same things, or you learn and plant only the things that work.

Our garden in mid-August

I haven't posted many pictures of our garden this year, but that's because it took so long for it to really take off. But during the past several weeks, it has grown like wildfire--the pumpkin plants have long trailing vines now and the pumpkins are looking good, the zucchini plants have already produced three large zucchinis, the greenhouse tomato plants have produced a few tomatoes, the dahlias look lovely, the gladiolas and hollyhocks likewise. The marigolds, cornflowers, and sunflowers are also doing well. My bean plants are producing string beans, and the carrot and potato plants are growing well (hopefully they'll produce well). It's been a banner year for berries of all sorts--strawberries, red currants, black currants, gooseberries, blackberries, and blueberries, but strangely enough, not raspberries, at least not in our garden. I planted two panicle hydrangeas, which are hardier than the usual hydrangeas and which seem to bloom for quite a long time, and two potentilla shrubs, which produce lovely small yellow flowers. They also seem to be quite hardy. I hope the warm weather continues into September so that the tomatoes, potatoes and carrots can grow to full maturity.

Here are some photos of the garden that I took yesterday and a few days ago......

Cinderella pumpkins growing happily

Lavender, gladiolas, dahlias, and Coreopsis flowers

one of four giant sunflowers 

Cinderella pumpkin patches

entrance to the garden

panicle hydrangea

tomatoes growing on the outdoor tomato plants

The garden in June

It is a pleasure and a privilege to have a garden. It is also a manifestation of faith in the natural order of things--that the cycle of life, death, and life again will continue each year, unchanged, predictable, orderly. There is peace in knowing that.

The tomato plants in the greenhouse are already starting to grow tomatoes, and the pumpkin and summer squash plants are starting to flower and take off. The green bean plants are pushing themselves up out of the soil and starting to grow. The potato and yellow onion plants have been growing well for about a month already, and the carrot plants are showing their green fronds. The dahlias and gladiolas are quite high already; the hollyhocks are also doing well. The lavender and celosia plants are blooming, as are the carnations and Dianthus. The hydrangeas are also blooming, as are the panicled hydrangeas (syrinhortensia in Norwegian--translates to 'lilac-like hydrangeas').

I was in the garden yesterday and took some photos, as I always do, to document the garden's progression from one week to another. Enjoy!

One of three rose bushes that is blooming

Once a cherry tree, now covered in wild ivy, with coral bell plants and pansies at its base

Green beans, yellow onions, carrots, and potatoes growing. In the background, pumpkin and zucchini plants, sunflowers, and cornflowers

Outdoor tomato plants, royal geraniums, different hydrangeas, and my ninebark plant that has grown a lot this year

Lots of lavender plants, gladiolas, Cock's comb (celosia), carnations, hydrangea, dahlias, lilies, peony, and Dianthus ('pinks')

Pachysandra planted under the Emperor bush 

Strawberries from the garden--so good! There is nothing quite like them. 

Pansies 

Pansies

Pansies and coral bells 

The garden in late May

It's taking a while this year for the garden to really 'take off'. Daytime temperatures have been mild, around 50-55 degrees F, but at night it's quite chilly, with temperatures around 40-45 degrees. A lot of the plants don't know what to make of it; there has been too much temperature swinging. In late April we had temperatures between 60 and 70 degrees F and a lot of sunny days, and here we are, nearly in June, and we're still struggling with chilly temperatures and mostly cloudy days. That can confuse a garden, especially the vegetables and some of the more sensitive flowers. Some few vegetable plants have died, whereas others (like my green bean plants) have not sprouted yet (I put the seeds right into the soil). Conclusion: seedlings do not like chilly temperatures and therefore do not sprout. So it doesn't help to start plants in the greenhouse if the temperatures drop considerably after the seedlings are transplanted outdoors. Yesterday, I seeded out green bean seeds in the greenhouse again, in the hope that the warmth inside will allow for quick sprouting. We'll see. Otherwise, the perennial flowers have come back, albeit slowly. I planted dahlia tubers for the first time this year, and they are coming up nicely. But as I said, it's slow-going and slow-growing for the garden this season.

I took some photos of the garden this past Sunday; this is my garden in late May.

Allium blooming--the bees love it

Potato plants--Folva type

Strawberry patch starting to flower--one of two patches

view of garden facing Telthusbakken (street)

north view of garden including greenhouse

Heuchera (aka coral bells or alumroot) perennials interspersed with pansies