Try "Gigante" White Runner Beans
Growing Florence Fennel

Flower Border--Arugula in Bloom

Arugula and Pericallis IMG_2529
Ah spring. I am just posting to show a photo I took of a spring border that happened in my backyard garden. I grew arugula in a bed I had lined with hardware cloth. After I ate arugula in salad, with pasta, and on pizza all winter, it bloomed. (And I have even been eating the arugula flowers in salads.) I have the pericallis (the purple daisy) because I don't pull all of it out when its seedlings appear. The pericallis and arugula flowers together made a handsome border, the arugula in the bed and the pericallis at the foot of the broken concrete retaining wall that defines the bed, along the decomposed granite path next to the bed. I found that the stems of arugula blossoms are a good cut flower as long as they still have buds at the top, lasting nearly a week. I used them in mixed bouquets, but not with the pericallis, which doesn't last very long. Still, I find the pericallis splendid in my garden in April and May. 

The pericallis, which you may know as cineraria, is the same as the short blooming plants that florists sell in pots. It reverts to a taller plant when it self-sows in the garden. It's a hybrid of several similar plants that are all native to the Canary Islands, off the NW coast of Africa. It is perennial here in San Francisco, which is similar to the foggy, mild winter, low rainfall, native habitat of several of the species that created the hybrid. (It would be unhappy where summers are hot, and would not thrive where winters are very cold.) It will always bloom in a range of colors and bicolors, from white to blue purple, generally with many magenta-flowered plants. I have several white ones, one of which has bloomed three years in a row just by a step into my patio. If you have pericallis in your garden, and you want to introduce a wider variety of colors, buy a couple of florists' potted cinerarias with interesting colors and let them form seeds in your garden. Many people especially like ones with blue purple flowers (see photo). I wish there was a way to predict flower color from a seedling, but if there is, I haven't discovered it.

Pericallis  blue  close From Cruzer 2009 spring 033 copy

Blue-purple pericallis flowers

The arugula and the pericallis are both almost done blooming now by late June. I am letting the arugula seed fall in the bed and cutting back the pericallis. I will probably plant carrots where the arugula is growing, and will eat the arugula seedlings I pull from the bed in summer.

 Oh, did you notice the white foxglove at the end of the border, by the fence. I moved several foxglove seedlings there last summer. I didn't know what color the flowers would be, but I did let seed drop from a white one last year, so I was hoping some would be white. It's a biennial, so the plants that are small now will bloom next spring. I cut the stems of most of my foxgloves when they finish blooming, before seed can ripen since each plant drops hundreds of seeds and I have plenty of seedlings. 

The strappy leaves in the left foreground are of Naked Lady plants, Amaryllis belladonna. Those leaves are gone now. They yellowed and dried up. Now there will be a bare spot there until the "naked" flower stems form in August or September. 

Comments

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Pam Peirce

I agree with 4 of the 5 tips in the link in the last comment, but I do not use companion planting in the ways suggested. In fact scattering marigolds is little help. They repel soil nematodes, but the way to use them is to plant an are solidly with them and remove any weeds for an entire season. (You have to remove weeds, or the nematodes will just move to the weeds.) Then you can plant a nematode-susceptible crop for one season, a nematode-resistant crop for another season, then rotate back to marigolds. But most of us don't even have soil nematodes, so the marigold treatment is not needed! They don't repel any other pest we get. Pretty though.
Also, in our mediterranean climate, the most important time to weed is when the fall rains get weeds growing in your garden. Do it in the fall or winter. Do not wait until spring, when some of the plants are big and hard to get out, the seeds are dropping, and the underground reproductive bulbs have multiplied! The other important time to get weeds out is when you plant and water a new bed and your watering starts weed seedlings growing. Get them out. You will need to do it several times as new seeds germinate.

Aws

Gardening is such a beautiful thing, I just love the connection it brings you to nature. Here's some gardening tips, I hope this helps someone out one day:

https://zintragroup.com.au/gardening-tips/

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