More great photos from Mike in Oly:
As much as I love the historic bearded irises I cannot be without some of the beardless irises as well. Here is a selection of them that bloomed for me this season.
(A few either didn’t bloom or will be blooming soon, so adding a couple of shots from previous years of them.)
At top: Dutch iris ‘Eye of the Tiger’ – A bulbous variety that is good for use as a cut flower. They do well here and last if the drainage is good. I like this odd color combo.
I. douglasiana – a Pacific coast species, it requires mild wet winters and dry summers.
I. tectorum – the Japanese ‘roof iris’. Legend has it that this variety was grown on thatch roofs to lower the chance of fire, and the rhizomes were dried and ground into powder to use as a cosmetic by the ladies of the household.
I. tenax – Our local native iris. I have several versions of it grown from wild collected seed from Washington and northern Oregon. Such a dainty looking thing but it is tough. Local tribes grew it on their prairies to use in braiding ropes.
i. foetidissima – I have the yellow form. It has been blooming for over a week but I just noticed it a few days ago. Very drab flowers do not catch the eye, but when their seed pods pop open in the fall the bright orange seeds sure do!
This is a species ripe for hybridizing and improvement. Little work has been done. It does well in dry shade, but likes zone 6 or higher. Does very well in a Mediterranean climate.
‘French Buttercream’ – A pseudata iris, being a species cross of I.pseudacorus and I. ensata, this was a new break that came about in the 90s and has gained popularity with many varieties being named and registered. A good grower and gorgeous bloom. Our local hummingbirds love them.
I. chrysographes – I rescued this last year after years of it struggling under a peony, and moved it to better digs. It survived and increased but did not bloom this year.
This variety came from seed collected and grown by Dan Hinkley at Heronswood nurseries back in the day. He called it ‘Kiwi Black’ but never registered it. It is in the Siberian iris family of species. A very elegant flower, in my opinion.
Hope you enjoyed these!
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Minor brag: Just picked (and shared with the Spousal Unit) our first ripe cherry tomatoes of the year — variety Wee Tang Shebang. Right on schedule, despite my secret hopes for an early start after the unseasonably warm spring. The other plants are doing well, but it’ll be a week or more before even the other cherry tomatoes (Sun Gold and Chocolate Sprinkles) ripen…
What’s going on in your gardens, this week?
JPL
Irises are so pretty. The grand imps vote for the chocolate sprinkles.
mrmoshpotato
Their faces look cold.
satby
Very pretty Mike, thanks!
I have to reaquaint myself with my garden this week after having other priorities in June. At least I was able to keep up the watering so nothing died. I have some small green tomatoes forming, and the daylillies have started to bloom. The raspberry bushes were so overloaded I asked the neighbors to come help themselves, and later I’m having them take shoots to plant, because I may just yank them all, they’re becoming invasive.
rikyrah
Good Morning Everyone 😊😊😊
Doc H
Let’s see if this works, me being a newsky* and all… My first Bluesky #FlowerReport skeet/post! Feat. lotus, hollyhock and foxglove beardtongue (no relation to Grima Wormtongue).
*Bluesky noob
Ramalama
I see what looks to be wild irises growing at my nearby lake. I tried a phone app once to help me identify plants (trees and ferns grow in my yard at the drop of a hat) but it didn’t seem conclusive. So I stopped using it. I’d like to ID the irises or whatnot because these flowers seem to like the wet, and … there’s a shite ton of wet happening in my area. Climate rain. Like the level in which it pours forth from the sky is new-ish and Biblical.
Anyone use an app they swear by? Or maybe a book you can recommend? I might be able to coax our little francophone library to get it via ILL.
Jeffg166
@Ramalama: They are water iris.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iris_pseudacorus
Anne Laurie
@Doc H: Also a Bluesky noob, but clicking through to your link reminded me… apparently I have three invites to share, if any of y’all want one…
satby
@Doc H: not available to non-bsky folk
@Anne Laurie: I’d take one!
Anne Laurie
@satby: Sent you an email — let me know if it works!
WaterGirl
@Anne Laurie:
I would also love to have one.
Ramalama
@Jeffg166: OMG so great! I am not going to steal a bulb or two from the lake…no I am not. But I love having flowers. Have missed so much having flowers. We now get quite a bit of sun after 30 trees were felled in our yard after last year’s derecho. But we also still get a ton of rain. I think this might be an appropriate visitor (thriving, gorgeous, not clingy/weedy).
Anne Laurie
@WaterGirl: Sent you an email — let me know if it works for you!
Doc H
@satby: Dang! I’m surprised – there are a bunch of posts over there warning that Bluesky is !!completely public!! Back to the drawing board…
satby
@Anne Laurie: Thanks!
Gin & Tonic
@Anne Laurie: Sounds like you have one left, so ….
OzarkHillbilly
Nice pix of some nice irises, thanx Mike.
I watered various gardens, and parts there of, and sure enough it worked: It finally rained yesterday. It also blew. We lost power and Crawford Electric says we won’t have power until Monday at the earliest. So now the generator is getting a workout. Plenty of juice in it for what we need to run (leaving the deep freezes be for now) but the one thing I can’t run is the water pump. So now I get to make water runs 2 or 3 times a day.
Oh well, that’s life in the country.
As far as the gardens go, everything is still alive, which is no small feat this year. Our Mimosa does not look well tho. I don’t know if it is dying or going dormant for lack of water. Once before it did this and came back with a vengeance. Here’s hoping it does so again.
CaseyL
@Doc H: It’s public, but you still need an invite code.
I’m on Mastodon, which I visit multiple times per day. That is my go-to social media outlet.
I’m also on post.news, which I hardly ever visit because so far it just seems to be an aggregator of other news sites.
I don’t have an account on Twitter, but the experience was so degraded when I still did that I’m not inclined to sign back up again, certainly not with a (metaphorical) gun to my head,.
Anne Laurie
@Gin & Tonic: Sent an email to the addy you used for this comment. Let me know if it works!
satby
@OzarkHillbilly: Fingers crossed for the mimosa, I think those are beautiful. Biggest shock about country living to this city kid was power outages meant no water and no toilet flushing either 😮, at least without a bucket to fill the tank again. Logically, I should have realized that, but it was easy to forget having lived 55 years without that experience.
satby
@CaseyL: Oh, you gave me an idea.
Ok, AL, it looks like it will work as soon as account creation is enabled again. Thanks!
Gin & Tonic
@Anne Laurie: Worked most of the way through, but then I got “Account creation is temporarily disabled. Please try again later.”
Thanks. Maybe I’ll try again later.
satby
@Gin & Tonic: Same. Must be a glut of people trying right now.
Sorry mastodon people, that’s just not going to cut it for a lot of us. Too much effort for way too little, and it’s almost all still on twitter anyway, which is quite the tell.
MazeDancer
Love the photos, but especially enjoy the commentary and history. Am reading about “tenax” means tough and how tribes used it for nets now.
Ramalama
Not flower related but have you guys listened to this cover of Tracy Chapman’s “Fast Car” by Luke Combs? It’s really good. Folk/pop –> country.
Denali5
Love the phots! Iris are my favorite flower-just wish they would stay in bloom longer.
Jeffg166
@Ramalama: Given the right situation they can become invasive. Then lots of plant do that. I read foxgloves could become invasive in Pennsylvania. Like that would ever happen in my garden.
I am about to plant seeds for next years foxgloves. Once they are big enough I will separate individual plants into 4” square pots to have sizable plants to put into the ground in the fall.
Scout211
Gorgeous irises! Thank you for sharing them, Mike in Oly.
I have so many tomatoes on my 7 plants but all are still green! This is a crazy year for us in NorCal. It was so cool this winter and spring that my garden is 4-6 weeks behind the usual harvest. It hasn’t delayed the tomato horn worms, though. I am now on my daily tomato horn worm safaris and finding many every day. Ewww! But I haven’t yet harvested a tomato.
Since the weather has turned super hot right now, I should be getting all kinds of tomatoes and melons in the next few weeks, all at once. That should be interesting.
Kristine
Love irises. Mine are bearded, and I have issues with brown spot. Copper fungicide works but I need to apply it more often and do a better job in general of cleaning up the bed.
It is raining in NE Illinois! About .3-.4 inches yesterday according to my inaccurate but pretty rain gauges. Raining pretty hard right now, with rain/showers expected through the morning. Could get over an inch. 🤞 Very happy.
satby
@Scout211: Try diatomaceous earth to control them and other bugs. I use food grade just so I don’t have to be paranoid about eating the occasional cherry tomato right off the vine. It’s very effective.
satby
@Ramalama: It’s ok, but it’s completely wrong for the story the protagonist in the song is telling, since it’s from a female POV and the singer is male and doesn’t bother to recast the genders. And the story is practically a dissertation on how the disordered thinking in dysfunctional, substance-abusing families is handed down generation after generation.
Gvg
The Japanese roof iris like the east coast too. I have quite a few spreading gently in my shady front yard among the ferns. When I moved in, I dug up the invasive non native fern which was an enormous amount of work, then planted a native, and have gradually been reducing the pathetic struggling grass by allowing leaves to accumulate and planting shade lovers. Yesterday, I pulled out almost all of the grass. There is still just a little left where there is some sun at the beginning of pathways but those are being replaced by dwarf mondo grass which loves shade, grows much more thickly so no weeds and doesn’t need mowing. In time I will have it to where a once a year mowing after frost is all it needs. Mostly shade loving wild flowers and Ferns. Many, I have dug out of the lawn and transplanted to this area. Violets etc. In the hottest part of the summer it’s the only part of the garden I can be in. The roof iris bloom in early spring before the ferns leaf out. Right now they are hidden and I can even see the seed pods but they most make quite a few.
Scout211
Thanks! I will check it that product. If I can get the food grade version, though. I don’t use pesticides on my vegetable garden but food grade sounds safer. I actually don’t mind picking them off every day. But by the time that they are large enough to spot, they have already done damage. So this could be worth a try.
StringOnAStick
Picked my first green beans yesterday! My favourite summer vegetable. No small feat to have them since they were already 6′ tall when we had a late light frost the second week of June (I covered them with old sheets).
Ramalama
@satby: I think a hefty white guy singing from the POV of a woman in this song was a tribute to the song. Agree on the dissertation part.
Ramalama
@Jeffg166: Hostas grow really well in our yard, among the trees (sigh) and the ferns. But they don’t proliferate like the maples and various pine trees. They just spread really wide. I’d love me some fox gloves. I guess too much of a good thing is still too much.
Anyway
Lovely irises!
Is there a template for Garden submissions? I found the one for OTR but can’t find one for Sunday am. Sure it’s right there somewhere and I am overlooking it. TIA.
Anne Laurie
No template, because I’m old-school and like to mess with stuff.
Email me your gifs, jpgs, or pngs, along with any commentary you want included. And please include your nym, too!
JAM
I have been picking sun gold tomatoes and Burgundy Traveler just started giving ripe tomatoes. The Cherokee purple only has about a dozen green tomatoes on it but the BT is covered with them. This is the first time I’ve grown this variety. I only planted three tomato plants this year. I’m getting WAY too many cucumbers.
satby
@Scout211: I had tried to attach a link but missed a step it seems. I got a large bag of food grade diatomaceous earth from Chewy for a very reasonable price.
CCL
The photos are beautifully composed. Love the irises.
Scout211
@satby: Thanks. I saw that my local Tractor Supply (and big box hardware stores) have the food grade version. I’ll head there after the holiday. 😊
A woman from anywhere (formerly Mohagan)
Nice to see you mention our local (Mendocino County) wild iris, although yours are definitely larger! They are known locally as “Doug Iris”. Man, that Douglas sure got around. Douglas Fir, Douglas Iris, Douglas Squirrel, etc.
A woman from anywhere (formerly Mohagan)
@Jeffg166: Ha indeed! I have a couple of yellow Columbine plants which bloom wildly and make lots of seed and were labeled in the nursery as self-seeding and would be invasive if they could, but they are stuck in a large container surrounded by dry CA summer soil, so nothing doing. I have a few Columbines in the main container garden area, where they are spreading a little, but the volunteers clearly need water, so the main Columbine planting continues in lonely splendor.
Dan B
I love the non bearded Iris. My father grew Tall Bearded at our garden in NE Ohio. I grow Pacific Coast hybrids and Japanese Iris. I grew the others at my landscape business nursery but had trouble with slugs – mild winters let the pests flourish. How do we get the fragrance of TB Iris into the species?
Tommy D
One of the joys of life on my bumpy back road just outside Yosemite is the iris garden of my neighbor Doug, a self-taught, widely admired hybridizer. One unexpected payoff to the grower is, turns out if you develop a new variety you get to name it — kind of like with race horses, but less expensive. So Doug has ‘Why Do Cows Gossip”, and “None of Your Beeswax”, and “Cranberry County Fair.” And we get none of the work and much of the fun just living up the road. Thanks, neighbor.