It was a long time coming, but this month, at last, blessed us with long days of sunshine and warmth, reminding me of the seemingly endless blue-sky summers of my childhood in Victoria. Gardeners have been gorging on cucumbers, tomatoes, zucchini, blueberries, salad crops and root vegetables. Ocean swimming at the end of the day refreshes hot, hard-working bodies and life is good.
There is something about long, hot days that slows things down, enough to notice little changes and happenings in a garden that would more usually be overlooked.
Early in the month, I began to pause while watering the container garden at the back of the house, to monitor the large flower clusters on a potted Hydrangea macrophylla 'Paris Rapa.' The flowers started out with sharply white-centred, dark pink florets and progressed to all-pink. It was like a floral movie, and more is yet to come. As the season moves along, the colour will change further to an attractive green.
I like the bigleaf hydrangeas for this seasonal change of colour. Soon the deep blue mophead hydrangea in the garden will begin taking on tan and purple tints.
On watering duty at the brick planter across the front of the house, I became equally fascinated by something completely different. In the planter section by the front door, a nasturtium was sporting a leaf that was half missing. And it had developed a short, straight, raised green line by the leaf's jagged edge. On close inspection, the line turned out to be a velvety smooth, green caterpillar.
I'm not a Buddhist, and I have been known to crush woodbugs and various green things with my fingers, but this little fellow I left unmolested. After gently stroking its soft length, I walked away.
The creature, the imported cabbageworm, offspring of the familiar white cabbage butterfly, is not quite so cute when it eats holes in other cabbage family plants, including our broccoli, cabbage, cauliflower and brussels sprouts plantings.
I grow these under a protective floating row cover, which also prevents the cabbage maggot fly from laying eggs at the plant bases and ruining the plants with the root-burrowing action of the resulting maggots.
Garden economics. The owner of my local hardware store has a small farm, with a street stand to sell produce. In the spring, he decided to plant carrots in a free area that had well prepared soil.
He planted 12 packets of his store brand carrots and tracked the earnings from that plot. By the end of the second week in August, the carrots had brought in $680.
I've never counted up the monetary value of the food I grow, but I'm conscious of being able to plan meals around what's in the garden, year-round. In winter, the outdoor pantry that is the food garden holds root vegetables and hardy greens. Other vegetables and fruits are stored and frozen. It's all grown without chemically treated fertilizers and pesticides. Priceless.
Welcome the bulbs. Though the exact dates of their delivery vary a little each year with the nature of the growing season, flower bulbs usually begin arriving at garden centres around the third week in August.
In this first wave of bulbs are those that bloom in autumn and require early planting. Fall crocuses include the famous saffron crocus (Crocus sativus), the beautiful C. speciosus, a favourite of mine with purple-veined lavender petals, and C. zonatus in deep rose.
Colchicums look like giant crocuses, though they belong to a different (lily) plant family. Waterlily is a popular double form in magenta pink. The Giant is a classic goblet shape pink flower.
Other early arrivals are bearded (German) iris rhizomes. Here is a flower that has been the subject of intense breeding, with many fancy, frilled forms in gorgeous colours. There are intensely fragrant varieties, and some bloom as usual in late spring and again in late summer.
B.C.-grown bulbs - daffodils and others - usually arrive around the last week in August. The majority of spring-flowering bulbs for fall planting begin appearing in the first week of September and by the end of the second week the bulk of them will have arrived.
A note here about daffodils: These bulbs root early and should be planted as soon as possible. Several times over the years, I have unearthed daffodils bulbs by mistake in July, to find they had already begun to grow new roots.
Amaryllis bulbs arrive last, in October, in a dazzling array of early bloomers, Christmas amaryllis, double-flowering varieties and novelties with fragrant or spidery flowers.
