2006 August | wildeherb.com

Faded Cone Flowers and a Blue Morning Sky

Posted by wilde on August 20th, 2006 — Posted in Animal, Vegetable

The sun glinting off the clouds drew me outside this morning. I think I’ll use this photo as a desktop background for a while. Just breathe in the cool morning air!

Beautiful morning sky in the mountains of southcentral Pennsylvania.

I can’t seem to catch this garden spider on the other side of her net. I’m sure many people kill this lovely Argiope spider because of its scary size, but I’ll leave her to catch lots of other visitors that we don’t want chewing on the plants or buzzing around our heads.

The yellow and black orb spider tends her web.

The giant blue hyssop is doing well, even though it was squeezed into the garden. There must be a dozen flowering tops now.

Giant blue hyssop flowering tops.

The catnip at the end of the flagstone walkway is flowering nicely. It draws the honeybees and bumblebees, and the cats!

Terminal flowers of catnip are blooming.

The purple cone flowers are fading quickly. The color is draining from the flower petals and grasshoppers and such are nibbling on the petals and leaves.

Grasshopper shopping for a little lunch among the purple cone flowers.

Faded purple cone flower is now a light pink.

The cone flower stems are still erect because we used a small tomato cage to contain them. In Spring before the Echinacea put out a lot of growth, we put a cage over this cone flower plant. As the plant grew the stems were guided inside the cage and pretty soon the leaves covered the cage to hide it from view. The cage supported the stems as they gained height and really showed the coneflowers at their best.

We’ll leave the seed heads on the purple cone flowers over the winter. It seems to be a favorite stopping place for the goldfinches.

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Sorrel and Giant Blue Hyssop

Posted by wilde on August 10th, 2006 — Posted in Animal, Vegetable

I had been wanting to try out some new herbs this summer, so I planted quite a number of them in flats with some great potting soil. Being surrounded by trees the sun that we do have tends to move around a lot from the morning to the afternoon. I kept moving the flats so they would feel the heat of the sun. Perhaps the shifting of the soil in the tray was not appreciated as only a couple seeds sprouted. Perhaps I purchased a bunch of crappy seeds. Anyway, having waited three weeks time, I figured no other seeds were going to sprout so I dumped the flats into the vegetable garden between a couple rows of Walla Walla onions.

Two plants emerged from this planting disaster — sorrel and giant blue hyssop.

Sorrel, Rumex acetosa, actually belongs in the vegetable garden. Its leaves attain great size and serve as a nice addition to garden salads. The great oval shaped leaves are a foot long or longer and at least a few inches wide. One leaf is quite enough to add some zest to a lettuce salad or to place on a couple sandwiches.

Sorrel leaves ready to pick for a salad.

Giant Blue Hyssop, Agastache foeniculum, is also called anise hyssop because of the anise flavor of its leaves and flowers. I enjoyed adding a couple blossoms to a tomato and cucumber vinegar salad.