Seranade of sedums

Nancy and I were sitting around over the Labor Day weekend, drinking some red wine while grilling some burgers – served with potatoes and summer squash from the garden – and Nancy said something like,"I don't know what I would do without sedums in the fall."

You can tell things get exciting when relatives aren't visiting over the weekends. And she went out and tooks some pictures.

Autumn Joy, above, is the most common of the fall-blooming sedums. It starts off pale pink in mid to late August and gets a deeper color as the season progresses until it gets to be almost a dark copper.

Neither Nancy nor I know the name of this sedum. It looks quite a bit like the Autumn Joy, but the stems are red instead of green. That is the problem with plants we bought before I started writing a gardening column. We did not keep great track of the names of all these plants.

There are two sedums in this picture, and neither one of them are we positive about the name. We think the one on the right is  kamtschaticum, which is sort of a ground cover sedum. The one on the left could be John Creech, which blooms earlier in the season.

This one we actually know for sure. It is Dragon's Blood, which we have right beside or front walk but is supposed to be good for rock walls and rock gardens.

We have other sedums that bloom earlier in the year, but these are the fall ones that were looking good over the weekend.

Switching over to food, the vegetable garden is still fairly prolific. We are getting a bit more disease on our tomatoes, and the potatoes are dying back. On the potatoes I will dig only what we want to eat immediately and leave the rest in the ground until October. They store better in the ground than in the cellar. The Sweet Million cherry tomatoes seem highly resistant to all the diseases, however.

The leeks are doing well, as are the onions. Beans are coming in nicely. We are still getting a few cucumbers and the summer squash are producing well. And we had our first two eggplants. And we have picked pints and pints of blueberries, with Nancy making jam.

I apologize for not posting for a couple of weeks. Last week was wild, and I didn't get to it. So I have two columns in the paper I want to refer you to.

Two weeks ago the column was on the philosophy of pruning. There are some practical tips, but more general thoughts about what you should be thinking about while pruning.

And Sunday's column was about another fall flower, asters. I like those more than Nancy does, but probaby not as much as I like the sedums.

And while I am in the self-promoting business, the column this coming Sunday is about a natural swimming pool at a home in Buxton. I had a lot of fun visiting there.