This year’s Coleus cuttings, taking on good mature shape and color. One of the secrets of coleus is that as the plants grow larger, their leaves develop new variations in pattern, so you may get dramatic veining, or something like the third from left, top row, which without the camera flash has an almost purple border with spiky red and magenta centers, surrounding a pale yellow. I also have two pretty freckled plants, one that mixes an almost true red with burgundy, and one lime-yellow and magenta. When you clone off the tops, you get bigger and better specimens, though they won’t produce the same plant from seed.

 

An inside view of the Dordogne tulip, one of the prettiest. It combines well with Apricot Beauty, which is shorter and smaller, but not as exaggeratedly as the camera implies.

 

Apricot Beauty’s hue and luminescence (and also a few speckles of deer repellent).

 

These little waxy-leaved plants are baby hellebores that have seeded themselves below the parent plant. I harvested out three last year and it looks like I’ll have to find room for some others.

 

What there is to see in a dandelion flower enlarged.

 

 

I’m always looking for ways to repurpose all the free plastic stuff we get from packaging. It seems a little silly to buy picnic or party dishes, and then dump dishes we could harvest from our groceries, into the recycle bin. A lot of recycled plastic won’t be reused, due to lack of facilities, lack of demand, lack of profits. And recycling centers vary in the types of plastic they can pass on to companies willing to take them.

The potato chips are in a dome top from a store-bought cake. The other goodies are in trays that chicken comes packaged in. No problem, because these can go in the dishwasher; soap and hot water make them fine for general use.

The chicken trays are actually studier, a little nicer for size and balance, than picnic plates, and the sides are higher. You could easily help yourself to twice as many hot wings as shown above. And if you need drink cups, you can hang onto ones from fast food lunches—soon you’ll collect a complete service for any number of BBQ guests.

Plastic silverware doesn’t seem necessary…the point of picnic dishes is that they’re safe to jog around in the trunk of a car, unbreakable. So your own silverware from home should do.