Loving the Misty Companions

I love all the little experiments that I conduct in this garden, especially those which take a few years for the results to burst into bloom.

This morning, I can report that all the work saving the seed of our Love-in-a-Mist (Nigella) flowers a few years ago has resulted in a small but very pretty show of self-seeded, multi-coloured Love-in-a-Mist blooms this morning. Here's a blue one.

The experiment goes back to late 2013, when I collected the seed of the Nigella flowers after they finished blooming. I then planted the seed the next autumn, and in October 2014 they bloomed in the same mix of colours as the original seed packet. Next phase of the experiment was to do nothing. That's right, folks. Do nothing. I know that Nigella is considered a weed in some climates, so I figured that virtually anything and everything grows here in Sydney, so mine should do the same and not need any help from me.  

In midwinter this year I noticed the first ferny shoots of Nigella coming up, so all I did to help them along was pull out the usual bunch of weeds trying to smother them (and everything else here).

Being good weeds themselves, the Nigella have been growing and forming flower buds since then, but the big question for my experiment was "which colours will I get?". I suspected they might all default to just one colour. Well, so far the answer is two colours! White and blue, but there are lots of buds left, and for the perfect result to replicate the original seed packet I bought in early 2013 is that I'll need some pale pink ones, too.

 

I like everything about Love-in-a-Mist. The flowers are pretty but a bit weird with that ferny lacework (the "mist") around them. And the flower buds are definitely up there on the "ain't nature wonderful" scale of interesting things that only nature can design.

I'm happy for these flowers to become an established, self-seeding part of our garden. The more life goes on, the more I see all the annually flowering established plants that pop up every year as gentle, pretty little companions in my life. 

They mark the coming and going of the seasons (and the years), and it's not just the flowers that we notice. It's their whole life cycle, the emergence of the buds, the blooming itself, their inevitable fading and, in the case of several of them, their modest green summers as leafy people quietly building up energy reserves for their big show next year.

Getting Misty again

Well, it's hardly a spectacular success this time round, but I am still claiming one cup-of-tea's worth of self-bestowed job satisfaction for this 12-month-long effort, now bursting into bloom.

Last autumn I planted some "Love-in-a-Mist" seeds which I had harvested in January from the plants which I had grown from seed the previous autumn, and which flowered in October.

Hold on. That's a bit complicated. Here's the simpler version. These flowers below are from plants which I have raised from seed which I had harvested earlier on. That's better.

The original seeds came from a Yates Seed
pack called "Persian Jewels". These come in various 
shades of white, violet, blue and pink. The interesting 
challenge for me was to see whether this year's 
crop of harvested seeds produced all the colours, or 
just one. Well, it turns out I get lots of white, a fair
 few blue, and little blobs of pink here and there. 
That will do me!

As you can see, white rules, but other colours get a look in.

The pink ones are pretty but lonely.

The "Mist" in its name is of course the whispy veil of fine,
needles of foliage around the flower heads.

However, this low angle shot reveals the plant is a little
cloud of flowers floating atop a green mist, too.

In the interest of the full picture, here's a shot taken in early
January this year, of the papery, hollow seed pods after harvest.
These split open and drop a lot of seed on the ground, but
my harvest managed to gather enough seed to fill the whole
backyard with plants, if I wanted to go mad.

The black seeds themselves are heavily ridged and hard.
I planted them last autumn in rows, and they do take a while
to come up, and the plants look like they are never going
to ever produce flowers through August and most of
September. Then in October they get a move on, and flowering
is always about now, in mid-October.

(One interesting sidelight on this plant, for bloggers at least, is that its botanical name is Nigella. Now, unless you never watch TV or cookery shows on TV, you will have heard of the British TV cook, the lovely Nigella Lawson, who has unfortunately been in the media for some very sad reasons in the last 12 months. Well, innocent old me called last year's posting on this plant, "Nigella's secret admirer" because a little insect, a hoverfly, was photobombing all my love-in-a-mist photos, so I made it both the heading and the lead-in to my blog posting. This of course led to quite a spike in (very disappointed I am sure) visitors to my flower-loving post on these flowers. So, if you want to drive traffic to your blog, which I don't actually have any real interest in doing, try to work a celebrity name into your blog title. That should do the trick!)

The changeover season

Every move you make here in Sydney at the moment, you sweat. It's sticky. On these uncomfortably humid, end-of-summer days, the weather forecasters endlessly repeat their "chance of a shower" chant each morning, and that means it's very warm and humid, mostly sunny all day, then in the late afternoon there's rain or, if we're lucky, a storm as well.

While it's not my favourite time I year (the humidity knocks me around more and more as I get older), I do enjoy this season because it's time for the changeover from the spring/summer crops, to the autumn/winter plantings in the vegie patch. Rip out the old crops, plant new ones. That's what I call fun.

So the garden looks like a mulch farm at the moment, with not much to show for all the effort, but I do like digging soil. That's one of the best bits about gardening. Digging over soil. I also enjoy adding a bit of dolomite lime to sweeten the soil's pH, then working in some cow manure and compost to give the worms and all the other soil-borne critters a treat. At the end of it all, smooth over and level the rich dark soil, stand back and admire your work... 

The digging takes some time, the planting seems to be over in minutes. I've been a bit lazy this time round. Instead of conscientiously raising everything from seed I went down to the garden centre and bought some punnets of seedlings. I've sown seeds, too, but only here and there. Here's how things are going, in the Changeover Season of autumn 2014.

Wild rocket in front, lettuce (raised from seed)
behind. The wild rocket is the serrated-leaf kind
seen most commonly in shops. It's a perennial
plant that should last some time here. It's a much
better bet as a garden plant than the ultra-fast
growing annual type of rocket. Mind you, baby
annual rocket (with the rounded leaves) is still
my favourite rocket to eat, but it's so much work
to sow, re-sow, re-sow, re-sow. Eventually I
tire of the effort, and give it a rest. At least
with this wild rocket you get an easier supply.

Here's the mulch farm. There are spinach seedlings in the
centre, spring onions as well, perpetual spinach on the left.
The perpetual spinach will crop well until spring and is one
of my favourite leafy greens. The English spinach is much
shorter-lived, but it is so nice in Japanese cuisine. The big
leafy greens on the left are more chicory plants, and they are
another excellent leafy green that we turn into Greek-style
horta, boiled greens dressed with olive oil and lemon juice.

There is such a thing as too many Thai limes. They're falling
off the tree now. It's a wonderful choice if you're wondering
which citrus to grow in a pot. It reaches a bit over 1m tall
and wide and seems quite hardy, too. Just brushing past the
leaves or the fruit is such a fragrant thing to do.

Huge, green and unproductive. I've tried watering in some
sulphate of potash to stimulate flower production on our
18-month-old passionfruit vine. No luck. Plan B is do nothing
at all. Pretend it's not there. It's a bit hard to do when it
is so huge, so it's now my 'elephant in the room' plant.  

At least the lemon tree is flowering its head
off. It smells lovely in the still morning air,
and hopefully the recent rains and the big
dose of chicken poo I gave it will restore it to
health and happiness.

Have you ever anxiously watched a plant, hoping
it would flower in time for the big Sunday lunch
that you've invited some friends to? Well, our
Tibouchina 'Jules' is letting us down. It has
18 hours left to burst into purple glory by midday
tomorrow. Otherwise it's just another green blob
in our very green blob of a garden. Healthy, yes.
In flower, not yet. 

As for the things I can't show you, I have sown more seeds of collard greens, as these big cabbage-family leafy greens were such a success over spring and early summer. They're meant to be even better in the cooler months, so here's hoping that's true. And I have also sown a few rows of seeds of the love-in-a-mist (Nigella) seeds I collected in midsummer, following the end of its spring flowering. 

The first of the collard green seeds are already up, after only five days in the soil. The Nigella seeds are on a more leisurely schedule. They'll appear in a couple of weeks, and the flowers won't do their thing for at least another six or seven months. I can wait. It's one of the very nice things about growing plants from seed. They offer the chance to share in a full life-cycle, especially if you harvest the seeds at the end of it all. I like that idea.

  

Casting pods

Gardening deals out all manner of minor punishments to the keen, and one I am about to willingly risk once more is that of saving flower seeds in late spring to sow in autumn next year, in the hope of seeing a pretty colour show a year from now. 

The last time I did something similar was back in 2010, when I saved the seeds of colourful Zinnia angustifolia plants, hoping to get the same nice mix of yellow, orange and white flowers that I had enjoyed the year before.

Alas, they were virtually all-orange, with a few yellows and no whites at all, plus one pink one that I didn't want. Despite all that effort for such unpredictable results, I'm giving it a go once more, this time by collecting the seeds of Nigella, or love-in-a-mist. Besides, such interesting looking seedpods deserve to be saved.

These pods make a fair bit of noise, as they are dry and
papery, in some case with seeds rattling around inside.

There's no shortage of seedpods to harvest either. Lots of them.

Just as a reminder, here's what I want to see next year. This
year's flower colours were blue and white, and I'm interested
to see what pops out in early spring 2014.

The seedpods themselves go through a few stages before they
are ready to be picked. These are the youngest stage, fresh
green with green lacy surrounds that form the 'mist'.

As time goes by the pods colour up with a light wine colour,
but even still this one isn't ready to be picked. It still feels soft,
and the lacy surrounds are still green. I'm only picking the pods
when the lacework has dried to bone colour and the pods
feel dry to the touch, like paper.

Splitting a dried pod open reveals the plump
black seeds. I'll collect all these over the next
week or so and put them in an envelope,
ready for sowing in autumn next year.

And who knows which flower colours we
will see. The original seed mix, called
'Persian Jewels' had a mix of blue, white
and pink on the packet. I didn't get any
pinks at all this spring, and my suspicion
is that my collected seed might end up
producing all-white flowers, but I'll just
have to be patient until next spring, won't I?