All the Dirt on Gardening

Our garden was over run with Queen Anne's Lace, Daucus Carota, this spring and was just summarily removed. In the past we've intentionally grown Black Knight Ammi and this year the huge mess of Daucus Carota included some of that variety but mostly was the white 8-foot tall stuff you see growing in ditches and open fields. When the flower begins to go to seed, the heads curl up, forming a bird's nest shape so that's where that nickname came from. As its name implies the root is the shape of the carrot we eat though it is inedible. No one is precisely sure which Queen Anne the other name comes from or exactly how she came to be associated with the plant. Queen Anne's Lace flowers make beautiful cut flowers and a local flower vendor cut ours for a couple of weeks for her bouquets before we took it out. If you enjoy crafts, you can put the stems in food coloring water and make the flowers into a variety of bouquet colors. It is a beautiful weed but can tak...

Carrots have many relatives in the Ammi plant family, with Queen Anne's Lace probably being the best known. My favorite is the Black Knight Ammi which has actually deep purple flowers. They grow to 5-feet tall in our perennial bed and usually have to be staked. It's a hardy annual that sometimes re-seeds a little in our zone 7. Black Knight Ammi in our garden It's amazing that I got a photo of it without a pollinator - bees, skippers and butterflies love the flowers. Florists use a lot of Ammi as bouquet filler but mostly use the white and green varieties. This beauty, also called Black Knight Daucus carota var. sativus makes a wonderful cut flower. At the end of the season I collect seed heads and put them into a container without a top. Over the winter, I remove more and more dead material so I'm left with seeds, small stems and some chaff. Eventually I end up with what you see in the CD container here. Since they prefer 55-degrees for germination, the s...