Tagged spruce
Live from the late summer garden: a quick veggie patch tour
What have I been doing all season?
Working backyard veggie patches, picking friendly orchard fruit, digging rocks on mountainsides, crafting small business web copy, perusing new poetry, and doing my best to stay informed on this wide wild world of ours.
Take a quick tour of my 2013 Pacific Northwest veggie garden:
I’m finally learning to use a pressure canner, and there’s been a lotta apple cake in my house this season. Next, I’ll try to make my first batch of apple cider vinegar. Less than 10 days till autumn! Time to sow winter crops and split firewood.
Poetry book review comin’ your way in a few days!
Christmas Not-a-Spruce Tree and Summer Solstice Foxglove
NOTICE: Correction to the true identity of this tree forthcoming!
This Christmas tree was planted about ten years ago, an evergreen (not a spruce) tree Colorado Blue Spruce (Picea pungens) which surprised us in 2009 with flowers, and in 2010 with its first cones (which I’m pretty sure turn red-purple as they mature).
Like the native evergreens, this tree is slowly and steadily emerging from the protective understory of Red alders. I’ve seen this tree provide a home for spiders, caterpillars, tree frogs, and birds, but one never knows what’s hiding in this shady corner of the yard.
The adjacent foxglove (Digitalis) are coincidentally in their first year of flowering. These plants have been working up the gumption to blossom for at least four years, possibly longer, and shine in late sunlight with purple, pink, and white.
Now is the time for seeds to quietly form and ripen for the autumn.