Organic. Period.

Liatris is one of those medium tall spiked flowers that are fairly easy to grow from seed. The main problems I have with them are:

• The birds like to eat the seeds (and mice do, too)

• The baby plants look like grassy weeds

The flower spikes are such bee and hummingbird attractants that there are always vast numbers of seeds. Here is what the flower spike looks like in the fall when it is full of seeds.

If you want to naturalize with liatris flowers, you can just let the seeds fall to the ground and plant themselves. I try to keep them in some kind of row, but it grows wider every year. Here are the individual seeds separated from the head. Notice that they have slight barbs to catch on animal fur, etc. for natural seed distribution.

Liatris will reseed all during the late summer and early fall. Some seed will overwinter before it sprouts, and some will grow into baby plants before the cold winter arrives. I mulch these, and they will be growing early in the spring. And they DO look like grass, so I have to weed carefully.

Once you establish Liatris, you will be pleased to see them reappear every year. I’ve never used them as cut flowers. I’m just happy to see them standing tall in the garden. Liatris is a reliable grower here in the midwest.

This is October, the end of the season for the Purple Coneflower. This plant is the echinacea plant, with medicinal uses.

You can propagate coneflowers by dividing the clumps and transplanting them, or you can plant the seeds.

Notice in the photo that there are attractive round seed heads. The seeds look like zinnia seeds, and come off the head easily. Plant them in the spring, or if you have not dead-headed the plants earlier in the fall, you can take the early seeds and plant them in the late summer. Mulch the baby plants well over the winter if you plant this way.

These plants will self-seed if you just let them go wild. I have trouble with birds eating the seeds, though. Goldfinches love them, and so do titmice.   I lost some plants to a downed tree last summer, and I will save some seed to plant next spring.

(Regular four-legged mice also like the seeds, and will climb a dried flower arrangement to get them. It seemed like a good idea at the time…)

Well, it dipped into the upper 20’s last night.

The snow peas still look ok, even the blossoms aren’t nipped. It’s too late in the year to spend much time covering everything up, so I’ll just hope the next couple of nights are not too harsh.

I gleaned everything Sunday afternoon and Monday.

Here are some green tomatoes and a few partly ripe ones. It’s one way to have garden tomatoes in November. Now I can get the plants taken down and chopped for the compost pile.

Leave the tomatoes on the vine stem if possible.

These three tomato plants are volunteers from the edges of the compost pile. Yes, it really needed a good turn! I figure that out of the three plants, one of them is sure to produce a tomato this winter. And if not, it’s still a nice summer memory to have them as houseguests.

Light is always my problem. I’m going to have to do something about that this year.

After other flowers have begun to wind down their blooming period this year, this Blue Salvia is still pretty. I dead-headed it in mid to late September, and it sent out these large flower stalks.

Blue flowers are not that common for a long blooming plant. This Salvia keeps blooming as long as I keep the spent flowers trimmed off. It was sold as an annual, but I have had it for three years now, so I believe there was an error on the nursery tag. There is a large clump of several plants, and I’ve had them in the same place all three summers. It is a rather sheltered spot, in my little kitchen garden area near the house. I’ll mulch again this year, and see if they are back next spring.

I use the long flower spikes as filler for summer bouquets. It adds a really pretty touch of color, different from baby’s breath or other fillers. They are charming with daisies or black-eyed-Susans, and elegant with roses.

OK. It will be in the 30s tonight. I’m potting up a few plants to bring indoors and picking everything that’s left in the garden. I considered covering the peas because they are still blooming, but they say 3 nights of temps into the 20s, so I will use my time doing something else.

Every baby snow pea and baby green bean is picked, and lots of tomatoes, too. I’ll bring in the half ripe tomatoes along with some green ones and let them ripen in the pantry. Sometimes this works, and sometimes it doesn’t, but it’s always worth a shot. I make a relish I call End of Garden Relish where I basically grind up green tomatoes and anything else that is left in the garden, then cook it in a sweet vinegar sauce and can it. Onions, green and red sweet peppers, celery, carrots, zucchini, corn, it all can go in. If I don’t have fresh carrots, I’ll use some from the grocery. I like to have a nice blend of colors. If I make a batch tomorrow, I’ll take some pictures.

This is some of the last of the 2008 garden.

Fall kale will withstand light freezes, but I’ll cut this now and get some mulch on the plants. Chances are it will be green and have some leaves before I can even get the earliest spinach or pea seeds planted next spring. Kale is my favorite cut-and-come-again vegetable.

The weather forecast calls for a couple of days before a hard freeze. I always have mixed feelings about this.

Here are some picks from the garden this afternoon. Still lots of food out there, and it keeps me busy.

Doesn’t take long to rinse everything and get it ready to cook!

We like garden goodies stir fried. Whatever is the pick of the day is fine! A little chicken is always good with it, but sometimes just the vegetables fill us up.

The State Flower of Indiana is the peony, and I love them. Even though they only bloom for a few weeks in May, they are so pretty. The bushes are nice the rest of the time, a good place for rabbits to shelter on their way back to the briarpatch.

Fall is the time to divide and transplant peonies. I missed the window of opportunity this fall to get my peonies divided. I have only two bushes now, but I should be able to divide them into 3 or 4 each. They need to be rejuvenated, and dividing will liven them up.

They have grown under the bottom board of the fence, so now they are on both sides of the fence. I have better plans for that space, so I’ll try to remember next spring to divide them. As long as it’s before they come out of dormancy, they should be ok. The roots need to be able to begin growing right away.

I’ll try to do it in very early spring, maybe the beginning of March.
Somebody remind me about this, ok?

I’ll trim this peony back and then use plenty of mulch over the crown.

More about this lovely plant, Touch Me Not, or Balsam.

I wasn’t satisfied with the grungy photos I posted yesterday, so I found a nicer looking plant that still had some fairly decent flowers on it. You can see how the flowers open from the bottom of the stem and move up, leaving the seed pods to form behind them.

Some of these plants are quite bushy, with flowers blooming on several branches at the same time. They are really showy, maybe 30 inches tall or so. If you order seeds from a catalog, you will find these in different colors, and mixed color packets.

I have hummingbirds who nest nearby, and the babies can almost get lost in these flowers.

Balsam is one of the prettiest and easiest flowers to grow here. It can be direct-seeded in the spring, and it will re-seed itself year after year. I always save some seeds, because sometimes I want to move it to another spot. Bees and hummingbirds and butterflies love these flowers. They are a lovely medium-tall border plant and they are rather heat and drought tolerant if the conditions are not prolonged.

My husband calls this “Touch-Me-Not”. When the seed pods are ripe, if you touch them they POP open and the seeds come springing out. I bought seeds for these about 8 or 9 years ago. They were double ruffled blossoms, but some of the subsequent generations are single. The colors are mixed now, too, but they are really pretty in all shades of pink. These pictures are from October, so the plants are pretty much spent.

Below is a flower stalk with seed pods ready to pop. The blossoms are a little worse for wear. They remind me of little orchids.

And here is what a seed pod looks like after it pops open and releases seeds. Notice how the pod splits and curls backwards to fling the seeds a distance. You can put a bag over a group of the seed pods if you want to save some seed. This way if the pods open when you touch them (and they WILL) at least some of the seeds will go into the bag.

It dipped to 39° a couple of nights ago. Luckily there was no frost in my little area between tall trees and woods on all sides.

I still have vegetables in the garden. I have these beautiful green peppers. I did pick most of them, even though I wanted to wait and see if they would ripen to red on the plants.

And my FAVORITE of all hot peppers, Habaneros, are just now turning a nice firey orange. I save these seeds every year. Be careful putting them too close to other types of peppers, because they will easily be cross-pollinated. A few years ago, every pepper plant I had was some degree of HOT, even the large green bell peppers.

Lesson learned. Hots go in the hot area, regular ones are separate.

Habaneros. Some say these are 300X hotter than jalapenos. I believe it!