August 2022 in the Northern Hemisphere

[Mariette]

Yet there are winners, too: a small collection of tomatoes grown in the green-house and vegetable garden.

[Leucogenes]

Campanula aghrica from Turkey has survived the extreme heat and drought of the last weeks and months in a trough very well.

[Pauli]

very nice! Perennial or hapaxanth?

[Robert]

Hi Thomas,

Your Campanula aghrica looks great. What a fantastic photograph!

Hi Mariette,

Salvia confertiflora is one of my favorite Meso-American Salvia species. Yours looks great. Do you keep it in a greenhouse during the winter or start over each spring with a new plant?

As always, the plants in your garden look great. I enjoyed the medley of tomatoes. Do they taste as good as they look?

Your Colchiums might also be suffering from xenobiotics in the atmosphere. I see this type of damage all the time when it gets hot and there is a great deal of air pollution (wildfire smoke and/or other air pollutants). My understanding is that the shortage of natural gas has lead to the use of more coal fired electricity generation. When it is extremely hot ozone formation from polluted air is a very frequent occurrence in our part of California. The damage you see on your Colchiums is very similar to ozone damage on plants that we see here in California. Insect damage is also a possibility. It is hard to tell for sure from photographs, but anyway maybe some ideas to consider.

[Leucogenes]

very nice! Perennial or hapaxanth?

Hi Robert & Pauli

Thank you very much for the kind words. However, only a small part of the honour goes to me. Because I bought this Campanula aghrica last year at a plant fair for alpine plants. Therefore I cannot say yet whether it is a perennial or hapaxanth. Of course I hope that this little Campanula will continue to delight me for a while.

Cheers
Thomas

[Robert]

Thomas

The Campanula still looks great. Thank you for sharing the photograph.




Zephyranthes macrosiphon has been blooming off and on for many weeks now. I have a large batch of seedlings to trial out in the garden.



The flowers of Zephyranthes jonesii are a nice color, however the flowers do not always open completely. I am hoping that the F1 hybrids with other species will bloom this season, however it is the F2 generation plants I am looking forward to growing out. I have a longer wait on this.



The first Colchicum flowers have emerged and opened in our garden. This is right on schedule.



I especially like the flowers and large bold foliage of Colchicum macrophyllum.



More flowers of Cyclamen hederifolium continue to emerge in our woodland garden.

[Robert]

Salvia coccinea ‘Lady in Red’ adds a great deal of color to our garden.



Salvia coccinea ‘Brenthurst’ with a tall single-flowers Dahlia hybrid is looking good.



Cosmos sulphureus with Helianthus annuus. The plants are all volenteers and look great.

[Mariette]

@ Thomas: Your campanula looks like it feels at home - a very nice scenery! I wish I could grow alpines like that!

@ Robert: I always marvel at Your plants looking so fresh in pots and garden, I wonder how You manage in a climate that´s possibly similar to ours right now! This is how most lawns look in our area. Hypochaeris radicata was an unfamiliar plant here 10 years ago.

[Mariette]

It´s difficult to find a spot in the garden still looking nice. In this case Tinantia pringlei, Geranium nodosum and Cyclamen hederifolium cope reasonably well with the drought.



Salvia confertiflora is cut back to 1 m before overwintering in the green-house, which means I´ve got a reasonably tall plant for the background on our terrace in spring, thus avoiding the unpleasant smell of the leaves released when touched.

Regarding the strange damage to the colchicum flowers, I think You´re right suspecting ozone to be the culprit, in accordance with the sunny weather and high temperatures we faced. Obviously, only the very first buds were concerned, the later ones probably taking advantage of a spell of little rain and lower temperatures.

Every year I sow about 10 different varieties of tomatoes, chosen for taste and their ability to cope with the high humidity here, usually exceeding 90 % daily despite the drought. They come from different sources, the red one with yellow stripes and spicy taste is called ´Tiger Striped, USSR´, and available from Gatersleben, an institution meant to save traditional varieties. Some are bought from supermarkets without a name - for instance the yellow ones. The beef tomato in the middle was also of that origin, a yellow one of fruity taste, the seedling with the added bonus of red stripes. Once I got a black tomatoe, which produced a seedling which was partly black and partly red, shown top left. This comes true from seed and ripens earlier than the black ones.

For several decades I was able to grow tomatoes and runner beans true to name from seed harvested here. In recent years, they tend to hybridise - I wonder whether this is due to the climate change.

[Jeffnz]

Would be surprised if climate change was the sole driver for hybridisation, bees the more likely culprits.

[Robert]

Mariette,

I enjoyed your account of growing tomatoes from seed. I too have the habit of growing open pollinated tomatoes from questionable sources (the market, gifts from friend, etc.). For example, a friend of mine brought me some Cherokee Purple tomatoes from her son’s garden several years ago. I saved the seed knowing that they were likely hybrids. She had also brought me other tomato varieties from the same garden. I grew on the F1 tomatoes and got a uniform batch of Cherokee Purple like tomatoes. This year I grew on the F2 generation of plants. I was uncertain what I would get, and ended up with a typical batch of F2 plants – plants with a large variety of different characteristics. I did not grow enough F2 plants, so next year I will grow 50 or so plants and do early selection for the characteristics I like. This year I have a few F2 plants that I have selected to grow on as a F3 generation of plants. I do this with ornamental plants and end up with very interesting new plants. Seed exchanges can be a great source for surprise hybrids. Growing on the F2 generation plants frequently yields very interesting new plants. For me, this is very enjoyable. Seed exchanges can have additional benefits depending on how you want to look at the situation.

In our garden, Scarlet Runner Beans, Phaseolus coccineus, seem to outcross fairly easily with other P. coccineus varieties. Scarlet Runner Beans do not like the heat so I have switched over to growing Blackeyed Peas, Vigna unguiculata. They too are inbreeding, however they will outcross with other V. unguiculata varieties in our garden. I solve this situation by using blossom bags to assure that Bumble Bees do not cross-pollinate the different varieties we grow. As a side note, Jasmin and I have noticed both seasonal and long-term changes in the insect populations in our garden due to climatic change. For example, Gulf Fritillary Butterflies, Agraulis vanillae, were never seen in our area, now they are quite common. We have many other examples.

Here in our part of California, brutally hot and dry conditions are a yearly event. Gardeners in our area adjust to the climate or they do not garden. Most do not garden. Our garden looks lush and beautiful because I have made a conscious effort to design resiliency into our garden. All the groundwork – soil preparation, plant selection, irrigation, etc. – is in place to make the garden work despite the adverse growing conditions. It is a constant and ongoing process and there are always new challenges to deal with. Those in Europe who are, or were, experiencing extreme heat and drought can now take steps to prepare for the next round of heat and drought. It will come. It is possible to have a vibrant thriving garden despite extreme heat and drought.

[Mariette]

Robert and Jeffnz,

thank You for Your answers!

Part of the reason for increased hybridising maybe indeed the fact, that with a hotter climate the population of insects partly changed, and more pollinators may be on the wing. Bees were always in our garden, as one of our neighbours is a bee-keeper.

On the other hand I noticed with plants like hellebores and trilliums, that they prefer certain temperatures when flowering to set seed, even when hand-pollinated, as I did for many years with hellebores. When it was too cold or too hot, my hellebores didn´t set seed even when pollinated by me.

[Jeffnz]

I have had the same issues wiht HP'ing of hellebores, found that warm dry days and midday pollination seems to work the best.