Distinguishing all kinds of peonies

I like growing as many kinds of peonies as possible so I've grown them from seed as well as purchased many plants to get together a nice collection. I'm not even too concerned about the names anymore, but I am able to tell their age, and whether they are herbaceous, itoh or tree peonies just by their appearance. I'm only selecting no more than 7 of each type as it would be too long of a blog post to post hundreds of photos.

Here are some 1st year tree peonies which are just starting to come out this year. They usually make no more than 1-3 leaves on the 1st year while there has been a case where I've gotten 6 leaves before. These have just started coming out after a good week of rain and temperatures slightly above freezing.

Blueberry shooting season

Blueberry plants are shrubs which mean they will sprout new shoots from their base. These new shoots can eventually be divided off to become new divisions, or left to grow. This ensures the survival of the plant. Shooting typically starts in the late summer, and continues until it is no longer warm enough to grow.

Here are a few pictures showing how this looks.

Some of my garlic emerging in the fall

It is around the time to plant garlic so I ended up putting them in rows, about 10 inches apart, while their individual distance is usually about 6 inches just to ensure they get nice and big. I tilled up the soil, and made separate beds so the cloves can dig their roots into the ground further which will result in larger bulbs next summer since they can take in more nutrients.

Here's one of my beds for soft neck garlic with last year's bulbils, and new cloves that haven't emerged yet.

Can tree peony seedlings grow more leaves in the summer?

One thing I have always wondered is if tree peony seedlings could gather up enough energy to produce even more leaves, or if what appears in the spring is everything that will appear for the year. Now that it has been nearly 4 months after the tree peony seedlings started to come up, some of them have started to grow more leaves. I think it depends on how good the soil is, the species, and perhaps if there is enough moisture.

Here are some of the ones putting on more leaves. The new summer leaves appear to be slightly larger than the ones appearing in the spring which means the plants have  already gathered some energy.

Progress on the pachira aquatica money tree cuttings

Back on May 5th, I divided up my money trees because they were getting too large. Here's the old blog. http://stevespeonygarden.blogspot.com/2012/05/dividing-pachira-aquatica-money-tree.html

As expected some of them either made sprouts which means they are also rooting, and some of them rotted. It seems like the general trend is that older sections of wood are better at rooting than the new green sections.

Here is the progress as of June 12th.

Original trunks.

My experience with growing blueberry plants after 3 years

I started growing blueberry plants back in 2009, and they finally started producing last year, and I'm finally starting out to figure out how to get good production on these plants. Here's the old blog on them. http://stevespeonygarden.blogspot.com/2011/04/over-view-of-blueberries.html

Here's a view from the distance on how all the plants are doing. I mixed in a lot of peat moss & pine mulch into the bed to acidify the soil so the roots can reach into the soil.

Update on the garlic

I have planted around 2000 garlic gloves last winter and not surprisingly, most of them are coming up now. I have around a dozen species, all in separate beds of both hard neck and soft neck species. I don't care much about the names since the foliage on them is very hard to distinguish, but I'll know they are different when I harvest them. One of the things I am noticing is that the ones planted earlier in october are just a little bit further along than the ones planted as late as December, but they seem to be catching up so planting times don't seem to be that big of a deal.

Here's my original species of softneck garlic which produces average sized cloves with a pretty decent flavor, but doesn't have a very long shelf life.