New Etsy Store with Garden Photos and More!

As was stated in a previous comment of a post I need more pictures. Well, I've put up an Etsy store (http://www.etsy.com/shop/GoldenTipPhotography). Here's a sample of what we're putting up at $25 per print. We'll even mount it on a board for a few dollars more.

More Survivors of Summer

I've looked around some more and found further survivors of the summer heat.
Up front there is still a clump of chives. Half of the lavender plants made it, unfortunately that means that half of them didn't. The purple cone flowers have some green left. Since they come up every year from the root they'll be fine. One pepper plant is springing back even though the last peppers it made are still hanging on the plant shrivled up.
Out back the tomatoes of course have a few survivors as previously mentioned. My day lilly plant from down south is hanging in there and some of the oxalis around it has shown up again. The onions didn't make it. I got a few out of the dirt but they weren't any bigger than my finger.
I need to check on the grape vine. It might be either dead or needing some TLC.

Thriving in the Yard

The hops are growing like weeds, actually better than the weeds. I wasn't so sure these things would break the ground around here. It's hot and unrelenting at times. It's sure to need plenty of water when the heat arrives. Currently it's only in the high eighties at worst. Next week or two may hit the nineties. Next month the hundreds are possible but fortunately not likely.

In the mean time we get to pamper them and hope that we can get them to have strong roots and something to climb. They haven't minded the wind so far even though it blew off part of the greenhouse roof again. The fig tree isn't doing half bad itslef in that regard.

There are currently only three that are growing well. The fourth has broken ground but isn't going anywhere for some reason. The fifth is currently a no show.

Someone we haven't had a problem with is the cone flowers. They have sprung back up and are threatening to amaze us with their flowers again. There are about twice as many as last year and I keep seeing new clumps rising out of the ground. The spring cleaning WEEKS have paid off. If I knew it was this hard to keep a garden growing I might have just gotten rich and hired a gardener. That getting rich part I think might have been a problem though.

Yet another fast grower is this little fern that my wife bought to replace some of the plants that didn't make it so well last year in the shade. They grew this much in under a week. If I could only get my tomato plants to grow that fast and healthy then I wouldn't have to go to the store for a while.

Seed Survival

It never ceases to amaze me how long a seed can sit in the dirt and still sprout. Recently I had a bird of paradise sprout. It didn't last two weeks but it still sprang up and said "hi" for a second.
This morning I had another visitor in a seed starting tray come up. I think it's a bean plant but I'll have to check the charts when I get home.
There are a lot of seets that lay dormant for years before sprouting. Typically seeds last a year or two. You can usually count on most of your seeds sprouting if kept for the usual time for the type of seed. Every year past that you can drop the number by half or more unless you have stored them well. The better you prepare the seeds for storage the better chance you have that they will sprout.
Some seeds seem to sprout on their own. I collected a bag of acorns one year and they sprouted in the bag. I watched it for a week and by the end well over half of the acorns were sending out roots.
My wife planted some coneflower seeds last fall hoping they would come up. Winter came and she forgot she planted them. We nearly removed all of the flowers since we thought we had contracted a bad case of some strange weed! Fortunately we hadn't gotten around to removing them by the time we realized what they were.
Citrus seeds store well since they have a hard outer coating. They can be stored for years and still sprout. Of course after a long period you will want to score the outside or maybe even entirely remove the outer layer so it has a better chance of sprouting quickly.