The View from My Armchair

It’s that time of year again!

This is the time of the year when the soil is either too soggy or frozen, right now it is too soggy, to be doing much in the garden. The drainage ditches are all tidied up and doing their job, it just happens to be raining constantly. There is only so much space on the Hippy Hot House bench to fill with seeded and start-filled flats. Not to mention I’m fairly tuckered out and the next really busy time, lambing season, is only six to eight weeks away.

This is also the time when the catalogs start pouring in and accumulate into a lovely cardboard box. And now that is where they sit, next to my chair, along with my trusty garden note book, a box of tissues (no, I’m not sick, but it does work to hold my catalogs up from slumping) and my bread book is in there too, just in case I need a change of pace. I’m ready to begin my season of serious evaluation and planning.

King’s Mums

catalog is first up. It’s not just because it is the smallest, but I am enjoying the last of my cut chrysanthemums. With the recent chrysanthemum season just ending and still fresh in my mind it is time to evaluate where I’m at with my collection. What I might like to add; what I should aim to do different. Since I didn’t keep super accurate records, I better strike while the memory is still hot… er, warm.

King’s catalog is packed with information, general growing information as well as information about each individual variety. Each description contains the height of the plant (a few exceptions don’t remark about the height) and is accompanied with the bloom time along with type and size of bloom. Using the varietal stats to help narrow my choices I go through the catalog a few times before really getting down to final cuts.

Height

I deal with plant height first. Sadly it is a make or break cut for me, I’ve passed by some beautiful sounding blooms because of height. By the time any of my chrysanthemums for cutting begin to bloom I put them under some sort of cover. It isn’t because the plants can’t survive, but rain abuses the blooms, hard frosts don’t help and severe freeze kills. The early season bloomers, late September through early November, I’ll put under a short hoop in the garden, the crown of which is just barely over five feet tall. The later bloomers will flower in the Hippy Hot Hut to protect them from possible hard freezes. Even if the plants are in the more spacious Hippy Hot Hut, add two feet of bucket and a tall plant becomes six to seven feet. Just too stinking tall to manage, so I do not consider any of the tall varieties. And if everything else is equal, short wins every time.

Before any variety is even considered I go through the catalog and mark all the varieties according to their height. This is fairly easy because there really aren’t that many varieties in the catalog. (There are some on the web site that aren’t in the printed catalog and I make my order there, so I’ll check one final time before I order.) In the catalog on my first go through I don’t make any mark on the ones that are tall or the few that don’t say how tall they are. In all the other descriptions I underline the word medium and I circle the word short. Only after I’ve done that do I look at the picture and rest of the description.

Timing and Color

I love the idea of cut flowers year ’round nearly as much as good delicious fresh food year ‘round. Whatever I can do to extend that season into what is usually the improbable, I’ll do it, just shy of a lot of supplemental heat and light.

Chrysanthemums are sensitive to hours of light and the dwindling hours of day light in late summer and early fall signal them to begin blooming. Technically up here in the PNW mine should actually bloom before King’s stated bloom dates. But for some reason my chrysanthemums bloom far later even than what the catalog calls for. So while I have it fresh in my mind and some evidence still in vases and arrangements, it is a good time to evaluate and decide what to add and what to focus on.

For ginormous farm bouquets, dahlias and gladiolas take me from from late July through September, depending on frosts, possibly into October, with asters and zinnias filling in the crevasses. But then chrysanthemums begin to take over.

Since it is full on autumn when the chrysanthemums bring on their charms, when I started this venture I aimed for the deep earthy colors that reflect all that I love about autumn. Corals, buttery apricots, bronzy crimsons, burgundies, butterscotches, burnish lavenders and deep purples, the colors that help me tank up on warm. I’ll continue to round that color palette out.

I used to think of chrysanthemums as only autumnal. Their distinctive fragrance sings autumn to me. But now that I have been growing them for a couple of years and have realized how far into December I can carry the bloom time without a lot of rigmarole, I am happy to consider some of the other colors that I would have left out. Fill up on more purples, whites, and reds, deep ones and bright ones. And by the end of the season I wouldn’t mind a few light purples, nearly pinks and tender yellows, they’ll remind me of the gentleness in the season, like the pink candle in the Advent wreath. Thinking of the lighter colors today brought up some of my most memorable presents as an older child from my mom, the winter pastel sweaters and outfits in soft pinks and delicate yellows.

Bloom Type

I am unorthodox in my chrysanthemum growing (imagine that). Chrysanthemums are classified by bloom type, how the petals curl up or down or show a big center, have spoon or quill shape. And size, the big fat fancy ones, the special medium ones and then the little blooms and they are further bunched up by growth habit. All in all, thirteen class numbers that signify bloom and or petal shape, paired with three class letters that indicate size.

What I’m mostly after are varieties that lend themselves to casual bouquets, the ones that King’s says should be grown as sprays, with a few of the more formal types – single stem blossoms that are big and or exquisite. I don’t have any intention what-so-ever of exhibiting flowers or selling started plants. So the blooms that are strictly noted as disbuds are not super high on my list, but I don’t disregard them entirely. Disbud means that at certain stages of growth and budding you pinch off all but one particular bud so that the remaining bud is big. Big like the huge football mums your mom wore when she visited you with your dad on Dad’s Weekend at college, or the one that was in the corsages the older girls wore to Homecoming.

Different varieties need different buds saved, they aren’t all pinched the same. The catalog tells that in the description and so just to make sure I have that info, after I place my order, my King’s catalog will go down and live on a shelf in the Hippy Hot House for reference material.

I thought I would only use the disbud types for more formal arrangements where only a few blossoms are placed into structured greens or twigs. But having let some of them “go” and seeing that they are still really wonderful even when they aren’t what the breeder intended, I wouldn’t rule out just letting them grow in spite of what the expert says.

As far as the small blooms go, the ones that are grown for cushion mums, grown in groups of three or four to make a big ball of outdoor color in early fall or tucked here and there in pots of flowering kale for lovely fall displays, or the time consuming cascades, I might stick a couple of new ones of these type in my order. But only the cushion or short types, I don’t have the time to train cascades (they don’t do that fancy stuff all on their own you know). Right now, for the cushion or garden types I only have unnamed varieties that I have picked up over the last few years at garden centers and Costco. They are great for what they do, so I’ll only order more if I need to fill out my order to meet the minimum and fill in a color I don’t have.

The Chrysanthemum Season at VF&G

A week or more ago, I cut the varieties that are completely done blooming back to about nine inches, sprinkled some compost on the top of their pot, made sure their labels are intact and gave them a little drink of seaweed magic to make sure their sprouts are tip top for January propagating.

I have several more varieties left to cut back and feed for shoots. Often when I get part of a job done, like half of the varieties prepped, I get distracted, feel like I’m done, and forget that I have more work to finish up. So ordering up my new varieties, having the little catalog up front might just keep me from overlooking the notations on my calendar of chrysanthemum things to do.

Next week sometime I’ll finish cutting back the last of my stock plants, put a little more compost on everyone, add collars on some pots if they need them. Give a spray of neem oil for aphids. Boy Howdy will I be spraying for aphids! Chrysanthemums are crazy attractive to aphids, especially in the hot house.

Then in another week I’ll begin taking cuttings from the sprouts coming from the roots, dipping the cuttings in rooting hormone and then putting them in a nice soil mix. Making sure I don’t go crazy with propagating. I don’t plan on selling rooted plants only the flowers, and I can only hold so many blooming plants.

Trust me, food will always be at the top of our priority list, it is what we do, “we feed out friends”. But I find fresh seasonal local cut flowers as important as fresh seasonal food, or at least nearly so. They fill up the home and heart, feed the soul. My hope is to always send home a bunch of seasonal flowers, greens and twigs, with each harvest box.

My List

of already-haves, in order of bloom time here, classification & size number letter combo, King’s bloom time, height, sprays have double asterisk**, single bloom types have one, if the name doesn’t say it all, the color description follows:

• Honey Glow 4B S26-O12 M**
• Prom King 8A S22-O10 M ** (deep yellow)
• Prom Queen 8A S22-O10 ** (autumn pink)
• Coral Charm 4B O16-N1 M **
• Apricot Courtier 2B O10-N9 M *
• Purple Light 8A O18-O30 M**
• River City 1A O15 S* (incredible burnished salmon color)
• Obsession 4C 1024-N10 M** (white brushed with lavender and deep lavender centers)
• Frosty Time 4C O22-N2 S **
• Mount Shasta 1A O28-N10 M* (white)

The ones I will be adding this year:

1. Jefferson Park 1A O24-N30 M*Deep pink
2. Tobago 4B O24-N10 M** Deep red
3. Red Delano 4B O15-O28 M**
4. Indian Summer 4B S22-O10 M**
5. Samson 2A S28-O15 M** Deep red
6. Candid 5A O24-N15 M* Burgundy red
7. Artist Pink 7C O22-N1 M** Peppermint stripe
8. Seatons Toffee 10A O25-N10 M*
9. Diana Stokes 10A O28-N15 M* Maroon tips with silver rays
10. Icicles 11A O23-N3 M*

I know that is a lot of numbers and letters, the first number is the style of bloom 1-Irregular Incurve, 2-Reflex, 4-Decorative, 5-Intermediate Incurve, 8-Anemone, 10-Quill, 11-Spider

After the number is a letter for the size of individual blooms A-large, B-medium, C-small

The next batch of numbers and letters are dates – S September, O October, N November those are followed by either a M or and S, M for medium, and S for short plant height.

Wow, 10 new plants! I won’t be ordering for a few weeks and I may have to pair this list down even further. But if I order ten I think I get a free one. Ah freebies, reminds me of the debt crisis.