The colorful and fragrant sweet pea flowers are blooming so beautifully at my Bedford, New York farm this season.
The sweet pea, Lathyrus odoratus, is a garden classic - producing beautiful blossoms with the most amazing scent. Sweet pea seeds can be sown into small pots of compost in autumn and overwintered indoors, or planted directly into the ground come spring. We planted ours along the fence in my vegetable garden and some on the fence of my flower cutting garden. And, over the last couple of weeks we've picked bunches of gorgeous sweet-smelling flowers to decorate my home.
Enjoy these photos.
The old-fashioned varieties of sweet pea are grown for their vibrant colors and intense fragrances. Most sweet peas will begin blooming in late spring or early summer.
This one is a bright salmon to peach color. Originating in the southwest of Italy and the islands of the Mediterranean, sweet pea has been cultivated for use in gardens since the 17th century.
The flowers feature one large, upright rounded petal, two narrow side petals, and two lower petals. Luckily, the stems are sturdy enough to hold up their profuse flowers. Here’s a light lavender and white variety.
We planted sweet peas along the fence of the vegetable garden. Sweet peas work well here, attracting bees and other pollinators needed for the vegetables.
The leaves are pinnate with two leaflets and a terminal tendril, which twines around supporting plants and structures, helping the sweet pea to climb.
Here are the tendrils they use to grasp anything that’s a quarter-inch or less.
Sweet peas offer one of the widest color ranges in the plant kingdom, including crimson reds, navy blues, pastel lavenders, pinks, and the purest whites. These colors are found as solid colors, bicolors, and streaked or flaked flowers.
To keep the vine productive, it’s a good idea to cut flowers frequently and remove the faded blossoms. Some varieties tolerate heat better than others, so check the seed packets carefully when planting.
This crisp white one grows along the fence of my flower garden. White sweet peas are very reliable performers. As annuals, sweet peas thrive in full sun, although in warmer climates they do well in a location that receives partial sun, especially in the heat of the afternoon.
Sweet peas prefer rich but well-drained soil. A slightly alkaline soil pH of about 7.5 is ideal for sweet peas.
Here in my Winter House are several freshly cut bunches of sweet peas.
Once they are ready to be arranged, Enma removes each bunch and places them in a small tub of water keeping like colors together.
She gathers them one stem at a time holding them securely in one hand while she positions them with the other – blossoms faced out.
Here are the most beautiful salmon colored sweet peas.
After selecting a good amount of flowers, Enma cuts the stems with a very sharp scissor leaving them about six to eight inches long. When trimming, always keep in mind the size of the container.
Then Enma places them in the vase of cool water – they look so beautiful with their green straight stems.
Here, one can see the stems with at least a few inches below the water line. For the longest vase life, pick sweet peas when there are at least two unopened flowers at the tip of a stem.
Enma does the same with the other bunches, taking each flower and facing the open blooms outward so they look best. While sweet peas fill any room with sweet fragrance, they are a short-lived cut flower, lasting only four to five days in a vase.
This variety is flecked and shows such pretty purple and white blossoms. The first sweet peas were introduced to Britain in 1699 when a Sicilian monk, Francis Cupani, sent seeds to Dr. Robert Uvedale, a teacher from Enfield, Middlesex. They became hugely popular in North America, both as garden plants and cut blooms. By the late 1800s, growers in the US shipped trainloads of sweet peas all over the country.
Here is a bunch of solid colored pink sweet peas. To prolong the cut flowers, change the water in the vase once or twice a day, and place the vase of flowers out of direct sunlight and away from drafts.
And here are the cut pink and white sweet peas.
Once all cut, these flowers make a gorgeous arrangement – and I wish you could smell them; the fragrance is intoxicating. I hope you are able to enjoy the beauty of some cut sweet pea flowers in your home this season.
A new coat of paint can totally refresh and transform a piece of outdoor furniture.
Now that it's summer and we're able to do a lot more entertaining at home, I decided to have some of the crew work on a rather large project - repainting a number of outdoor metal furniture pieces one uniform color, Bedford Gray. Some of the items were old, weathered, and in need of attention, while others were simply the wrong shade or color. The first step was to designate a safe painting space. Then, the furniture pieces needed to be primed, dried, and finally painted with an oil-based enamel finish. This project took several days to complete, but I am happy with the final results and every piece looks great.
Enjoy these photos.
All the furniture to be painted was brought to the driveway in front of my Winter House carport. These pieces are fine, but I wanted them all finished in my signature color, Bedford Gray.
Some pieces were mismatched and in their original colors from when they were purchased.
And some of the pieces were a bit rusted and timeworn.
In one corner of the driveway, we put up a pergola from one of my previous outdoor collections and covered it with plastic sheeting. These plastic drop cloths come in a range of sizes and are available at most hardware stores.
Here’s Fernando securing the plastic to the frame using spring clamps. At the bottom, Fernando weighted the plastic covers with bricks.
Meanwhile, Carlos cleans all the furniture with a damp cloth, so the paint can be applied smoothly. Fortunately, the week’s weather forecast was perfect for this project. Ideally, temperatures should be between 50 degrees and 90 degrees Fahrenheit, and relative humidity below 85 percent.
Pete begins to prime the first chair. It’s important to coat the furniture with a good quality metal primer and to coat everything completely as bare metal rusts quickly. It’s also a good idea to practice on a piece of scrap cardboard first to get the vertical and horizontal spraying movements consistent before painting the real piece.
Pete puts several chairs together so as to conserve the primer and allow the spray to coat more than one chair at a time. Always spray the object using an even side-to-side motion with each pass overlapping the spray pattern by about one-third.
For this job, we needed a strong air compressor. Air compressors work by forcing air into a container and pressurizing it and then pushing it out though the tank and the paint sprayer.
The inside of this trough needed to be sanded first to create a smooth surface for better adhesion.
Here’s one chair all primed – in Bedford Gray.
By afternoon, most of the pieces were also primed. The primer dries very fast.
Next – paint. It’s crucial to use a high-quality oil-based spray paint specifically designed for outdoor use to prevent rust.
Fernando pours the paint into the sprayer’s reservoir. The color is just right.
And then one by one each piece is sprayed. Always use a mask even when working outdoors. When spray painting indoors, always ventilate the room well by opening windows and doors.
When spray painting, use thin, multiple coats instead of one thick coat to get the best result.
Look how smooth this chair seat is after painting.
And here’s the trough all finished. It looks so much better.
The furniture is left to dry completely inside the carport for at least 24 hours.
And once it’s dry, it’s ready to be used. Here are two newly painted benches in front of my Flower Room just around the corner from my carport. I think they look great in this space. I am excited to place all the furniture out for the season. Old pieces made to look like new… it’s a good thing!
My flower cutting garden continues to produce beautiful blooms.
This cutting garden has developed so well over the last few seasons. I enjoy comparing its progress from year to year and seeing where I need to add more plants to improve the display. It takes a lot of time to maintain a flower cutting garden this large. We are constantly weeding and watering, particularly during these warm summer months. This time of year, I have many Shasta daisies, balloon flowers, Black-Eyed Susans, yarrow, sweet peas, and more.
Enjoy these photos.
All these flowers are thriving in my cutting garden – there is always something new to see every time I walk through the beds. These are Shasta daisies. I have an abundance of shasta daisies this season – they always look so cheerful, especially when planted in large groups.
Shasta daisy flowers provide perky summer blooms with the look of the traditional daisies along with evergreen foliage. They are low maintenance and great for filling in bare spots in the landscape.
These are the showy flowers of rudbeckia. Rudbeckia’s bright, summer-blooming flowers give the best effect when planted in masses in a border or wildflower meadow.
In general, rudbeckias are relatively drought-tolerant and disease-resistant. Flower colors include yellow and gold, and the plants grow two to six feet tall, depending on the variety.
Here is one of many kinds of lilies that bloom in my flower garden. I also have lilies along my winding pergola, outside my Winter House kitchen and in the sunken garden behind my Summer House. My collection of lilies is a combination of Oriental, Asiatic, trumpet, and Orienpet lilies.
Lilies come in a variety of colors with multiple blooms per stem.
I also have many different irises in this garden. Iris flowers can begin blooming in late winter to early spring. Iris care is minimal once the growing iris is established. Iris flowers bloom in shades of purple, blue, white, and yellow and include many hybridized versions that are multi-colored.
Lady’s mantle, Alchemilla vulgaris, grows along both sides of the main footpath of my cutting garden. In late spring and early summer, the plant produces lovely chartreuse colored blooms.
Close to the footpath is this attractive Nasturtium. Nasturtium plants, Tropaeolum, are loved for their rich, saturated, jewel-toned colors. Planted in the spring they are fast and easy to grow. Nasturtium is a genus of about 80 species of annual and perennial herbaceous flowering plants. It was named by Carl Linnaeus in his book Species Plantarum. These flowers can vary in shade, but the most popular versions are orange, yellow, pink, red, or mahogany.
Nasturtium leaves are small to medium in size and round and broad in shape. The flat, bright green leaves are waxy, pliable, have a few veins running throughout, and are connected to a central stem.
These are the large leaves of Rodgersia – a genus of flowering plants in the Saxifragaceae family. Rodgersia are herbaceous perennials originating from east Asia. The common name is Roger’s Flower.
Achillea millefolium, commonly known as yarrow, is a flowering plant in the family Asteraceae. It is a hardy perennial with fernlike leaves and colorful blooms. The large, flat-topped flower clusters are perfect for cutting and drying.
The flower clusters or corymbs are made up of dozens of tiny daisy-like florets. Here’s yarrow in light pink. Yarrow flower colors range from white and soft pastels to brilliant shades of yellow, red, orange, and gold.
Butterfly weed is a bright orange showy native wildflower that’s easy to grow, cold hardy, and does well in poor, dry soils. Long-lasting clusters of small, flat-topped flowers are crowned with a yellow, sun-kissed “corona” and blooms from June through August. Butterfly weed is an important nectar source for Monarch butterflies and its leaves provide essential food for developing Monarch caterpillars.
Many of the poppies are still going strong. Poppies require very little care, whether they are sown from seed or planted when young – they just need full sun and well-drained soil.
Poppies are an attractive, easy to grow flower in both annual and perennial varieties, and they come in nearly every color of the rainbow.
Here is a poppy seed pod, which is what’s left on the stem once the flower blooms and the petals fall off. As the seed heads turn brown with ripeness, it’s time to cut them and harvest the seeds. One can tell when pods are ripe by shaking the stem. If the pod rattles, it’s ready.
There are still a few foxgloves here too. Here is a tall foxglove plant, Digitalis purpurea. These add lovely vertical interest to any garden. Foxglove flowers grow on stems which may reach up to six feet in height, depending on the variety.
The phlox is thriving in the garden. Phlox has superb heat and mildew resistance. Phlox is a tall and upright grower that’s great for the back of the border, or even planted at the edge of the garden among the shrubs. Phlox also comes in a range of colors from pure white to lavender to even red, and grows happily in most parts of the country. If properly planted and sited, phlox is largely pest and disease free too – a perfect perennial.
This is a balloon flower, Platycodon grandiflorus – a species of herbaceous flowering perennial plant of the family Campanulaceae, and the only member of the genus Platycodon. It is native to East Asia and is also known as the Chinese bellflower or platycodon. The opened flowers resemble those of bellflowers, and while most are deep blue or purple, white and pink varieties are also available.
Balloon flowers get their name from the unopened buds, which swell up prior to opening and resemble little hot-air balloons.
And growing on one side of the fence surrounding the garden are these dainty perennial sweet pea or everlasting pea flowers. The sweet pea is a herbaceous climbing vine with beautiful bright flowers that grow up to 10 feet long. I hope your garden is also doing wonderfully this season. Share what blooms you are growing in the comments section below. Have a great week.
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