tomorrow’s salad
Tag: garden
fun times in the garden
Option 4: remove the plants to make space for something that rodents don’t like to eat. Kale?
Ipomoea batatas
The gardening calendar tells me that August is the time to plant sweet potatoes, and this specimen in the veggie basket agrees. It’s going in the ground today!
Domesticated sweet potatoes (Ipomoea batatas) have been around for a long time; they were present In Central America at least 5,000 years ago. The tuberous root is long and tapered, with a smooth skin whose colour can be yellow, orange, red, brown, purple, or beige. Its flesh ranges from beige through white, red, pink, violet, yellow, orange, and purple. Sweet potato cultivars with white or pale yellow flesh are less sweet and moist than those with red, pink or orange flesh.
Although darker sweet potatoes are often referred to as “yams” in parts of North America, the species is very distant from true yams. I love the name “kumara” (emphasis on the first syllable) which I learned from my Kiwi friends.
Pieris rapae
Our most common garden butterfly is one that does not delight me. The cabbage white has a natural range across Europe, Asia, and North Africa. It was accidentally introduced to Canada around 1860 and spread rapidly throughout North America. Estimates show that a single female of this species might, in a few generations, be the progenitor of millions.
That’s a lot of caterpillars eating my brassicas 😖
en plein air
It’s a jungle out there.
succulent wall
Our friends gave us this vertical planter some time ago, and I filled it with random succulent cuttings. They’re now nicely established and spilling out in a most satisfactory fashion.
babies
We rarely get more than a fig or two for ourselves, but this year there’s quite a few on the tree, so maybe the birds will share more?
Aceria aloinis
Some of our aloe plants have “cancer” 😩
chard roots
Lamiaceae
Lavender and oregano are both in the same family, Lamiaceae, along with about 7500 other species. This family of flowering plants is commonly known as the mint, deadnettle, or sage family. Many of the plants are aromatic in all parts and include widely used culinary herbs like basil, mint, rosemary, sage, savory, marjoram, and thyme, as well as other medicinal herbs such as catnip, salvia, bee balm, wild dagga, and oriental motherwort.
How many members of this family are growing in your garden?
