The Life of A Garden

"The Garden Keeps Growing Whether I Have Time to Write About it Or Not.." KHT

Gosh, I can't believe it's been a full week since I last posted and my oh my! How much things have changed since then! I apologize to any subscribers who have been left to wonder what has been happening. In a word: LOTS!

For starters, the Moon Flowers are HUGE:

I did not try to start new peppers because I thought it was too late even after doing all that research (which will come in handy next season), but to my delighted surprise, as soon as I gave up they went ahead and germinated themselves.

I think I over watered them. I hadn't quite gotten the wicking system of the APS working correctly (for whatever reason - the wicks may have been upside down?). Anyway, I was watering the heck out of them and as soon as I let them dry out, the little guys poked their heads up.

We now have six Jimmy Nardello's Sweet Italian Frying Peppers growing as twin companions ala TOFA and the Chocolate twins are doing great...

And there is even some hope reserved for this tiny little King of the North who showed up late and weak but at least he showed up so we're giving him some TLC and we'll see what happens.

And OMG the tomatoes! Yesterday we transplanted the do-over seedlings and they're standing up tall and beginning to grow their secondary leaves:

We're up to twenty-three heirloom varieties that I'll list on a separate post so I can give them their due. I can almost taste them already and am desperately trying to figure out a cheap, preferably recycled way to stake them so that we can maximize their yields, as I plan to go restaurant to restaurant to sell them as they come in.

As a former chef, I personally can't imagine refusing a local, organic gardener with her arms full of heirloom tomatoes still warm from the sun....can you?

XXKHT

Moths and Moonflowers

Last week, my beloved B sent to me some seeds from her collection. She not only added greatly to our tomato selection, but also a variety of marigolds and an edible flower/bean called Scarlet Bees.

She also enclosed Moon Flower seeds that she'd gathered from her own gorgeous vines that she grows over the brick and iron wall of her city garden in downtown Baltimore.

Moon Flowers might be my favorite flower of all. A member of the nightshade family*, they have an enormous, pungent white blossom that unfurls after dark like a virgin on her wedding night - one time only - then closes back into a beautiful fractal spiral within which a fat pistachio shaped, hard-shelled seed will grow inside a sexy coffee colored pod.

The seeds are so hard, that in order for them to germinate, the cultivator must nick them - or as I like to think of it, give them a love bite.

What flower is more sensuous than this? I can't think of any.

Velvety, ghostly, voluptuous petals reek of desire. They require particularly well endowed moths like the Carolina Sphynx - one of the hummingbird species - noted not only for resembling the bird in size and shape, but also for it's extra long proboscis, the better to reach into the deep wells of their sweet nectar.

Oh my. Moon Flowers and Moths have it all over The Birds and the Bees. I move to change it.

XXKHT

A nice poem about Moon Flowers is here: Cold Tea Blues Moonflowers

The picture at left is jacked and edited from here:
Moon Flowers and Carolina Sphynx Moths

*Same as tomatoes, peppers, egglplant etc. but a different genus.