The current darkest dahlia in my garden and my first year growing it. Hoping for a good tuber yield so I can grow even more next year!
Edit: Third picture is Diva, a gorgeous deep purple.
I can always count on my lovely snapdragons! Can't seem to grow them from seed myself but my dad always has extra seedlings for me and they love my garden.
This one is called "passionate" and it's so much richer in color than I expected! It was a last minute impulse purchase, didn't get the head start I gave my other dahlias and still zoomed ahead to be the first blooming in the garden. Astilbe "dark side of the moon" foliage compliments it perfectly!
I'm new to growing peppers but I have decent gardening experience with flowers. I was gifted five pepper plants from a local farmer and they were labelled mostly with numbers, some with names.
The pepper in the first photo was labeled "8 hun chz" but all the pictures I see when I look up Hungarian cheese peppers are squat and rounded. The second photo is of the other plant that was labelled "8 chz pepper" and looks like it might end up being correct. The last photo is the list of peppers he was growing, can anyone guess which one this actually is?
Also when is it ready to pick? I don't know what type it is so I don't know if it's going to turn red or if it's already close to ready. Any guidance on knowing when peppers should be picked would be super welcome, thank you.
I'm taking a short day trip to Boston for my birthday later this month and not having much luck finding any tea shops through google. Are there any good places to shop for loose leaf tea or a nice cafe to sit down and have a drink at? Most of the other things I have planned are around the North end of Boston and it would be preferable to stay in that area but I could make a detour for a really good find. Thank you!
My irises finally bloomed after a year of nothing and I got a very early sunflower from a plant my dad started in February! Some wild fern and buttercups (?) plus flowers from my chives rounded out the first bouquet of the year. It will be a long wait for my second one now as everything else is quite young.
The big bed has snapdragons, strawflower, statice, and gladiolus. In the pots there's Sweet Annie, sunflowers, amaranth, scabiosa, cosmos and zinnia. Around the front of the house I've got a whole bed of dahlias not pictured. Here's hoping for a wonderful second year of my cut flower garden!
Was going to prep my flowerbed for seedlings and came across these small mushrooms growing in it. They're growing in the soil, there's some wood chips in this bed but just whatever was already in the soil when purchased. The soil was bagged soil from either Walmart or Lowe's so the spores could possibly have come from outside my native range in Maine. Quite tiny, about the size of a penny?
My second year with dahlias. I found this 4x4 raised bed on clearance in the middle of winter and I ended up with 16 viable tubers so it seemed like the perfect fit! I've been growing most of them inside under lights since April to hopefully get a jump start.
Varieties I have this year are Diva, Thomas Edison, Esli, Marble Ball, Lights Out and Passionate.
I'm looking to branch out and explore some more types of oolong. My favorite for a while has been the Jasmine Oolong from Taiwan that the steeping room sells. I've tried the osmanthus one as well, and recently ordered a duck shit oolong from YS. I definitely love the floral types of oolongs but I'd also like to branch out.
I know there's three other categories that I haven't tried but the amount of different types available is kind of overwhelming so I figured I'd take some suggestions, both on teas to try and vendors to buy them from.
Also I plan on placing a White2Tea order for some shou soon and saw that they have quite a few oolongs so I'd love suggestions of your favorites from them.
These were supposed to be white with pinkish middles but are definitely yellow. The ones I planted the previous year were supposed to be a mix bag of pink varieties and I only got yellow and orange ones. They did come from big box hardware stores which I know don't have the best reputation but two years in a row wrong is just sad. Where can I source some actually pink daffodils?
I hadn't heard of purple tea before and purple is my favorite color so I had to get a couple to try. Two versions of purple lao cha tou ripe puerh - loose nuggets and a 100 gram brick - plus sweet ya bao white purple tea. A couple new shou puerhs to try, 2024 lao man'e and menghai loose leaf "everyday drinker." Duck shit oolong to round out the order plus the pretty pink cups I couldn't resist!