Garden / Gardening 2022

Oops. My autocorrect Etsy into eBay. That’s strange

I ordered a batfaced Cuphea for too much money from Etsy because they’re hard to find. The damn seller put it in the mail already on April 4th. I thought maybe Etsy garden people were a little smarter than that, but I’m wrong. You don’t send a hot weather native of Mexico to the northeast the first week of April. But the seller is from FL, so it’s a Florida Man ir Florida Woman & I should’ve written a note. “Dear Person .. hold onto this until 3rd week May”

I would’ve waited til May to order it but seller said it was the last one. That was probably untrue

I discovered Cuphea last year. A new family took over the local garden center and they were selling lots of them. I ordered 4 honey bells Cuphea from Burpee. Probably shouldn’t have done that. Four is too many. But they were only selling them in bundles.

I put in a black currant bush of a type resistant to the pathogen that harms white pines. The variety is called Black Consort. It is self-fertile, but I am considering adding another currant bush as they have more fruits when there is more than one bush planted. There is a type called a clove currant whose flowers smell like cloves, which sounds marvelous. I like red currants too. What do the pink and white varieties taste like? I've never seen them either fresh or made into jam, liqueur, etc.

I grew a lot of nectar plants last year for the bees, butterflies and hummingbirds. Zinnia, coneflower (native, not hybrid), black eyed Susan, sunflower, cleome, annual salvia ( salvia Amistad …the best salvia in the world for hummingbirds… Rocking Fuschia salvia and Deep Purple salvia) and they brought the hummingbirds in (so did my butterfly bushes).

I couldn’t keep cosmos bipinnatus because the rabbits ate them, but I managed to grow sulfur cosmos, the yellow & orange cosmos.

I’m trying plains coreopsis this year. I grew rose campion a few years ago and was assured I’d have plenty of volunteers from the original plants, but I’ve only ever had one little leaf rosette come back. So much for rose campion.

I’m doing chives this year. I might use them in salad. I like their look & am hoping they’ll keep rabbits & deer away.

Wish I could find something to take the place of hostas, which get devoured every year.

I have 2 window boxes on my shed. Planted mildew-resistant impatiens Beacon mix last year in both boxes. Funny thing…..the window on the right of the shed door was eaten right up. The window on the left side wasn’t touched.

Regarding the nectar plants I mentioned in first paragraph… turns out lots more things besides butterflies, bees & hummingbirds like them. Flies, gnats, leaf hoppers, aphids, ants, stink bugs ……

I’m growing this from seed this year. Verbascum chaixii album. I have s feeling it’s a lot prettier in a picture than IRL

I’ll never forget gate and garden… those were the days.

I've ordered plants online. You do take a chance, but if you're looking for reviews (outside of the online site itself), I go to Dave's Garden and type in the nursery name. You'll get a lot of reviews good and bad. If you don't belong to Dave's Garden (have to pay a fee), you can google....Dave's Garden reviews of _________ (type in the online nursery). I've ordered from Proven Winners and Bluestone Perennials. I've had pretty good luck with both...though one or two plants may not make it. Bluestone Perennials is pricey though...and you get a 4" coconut coir pot, that can be planted in the soil, without removal. Supposedly, it's biodegradable. You can remove the coir too...if you want. Anyone have recommendations of online nurseries that you've had good experience?

Gardening is highly erotic to me

Santa RosaGardens no longer sells those great 3 packs of flowers they used to. You’d get 3 echinaceas for something like $7.50. Those were the days.

My ranunculus that I planted at Christmas from the Carlsbad Flower Fields are just starting to bloom. I planted pink sunflowers and pink zinnias and pink foxgloves. My back garden is full of cosmos from Wildseed Farms in San Antonio. Lavender is starting to bloom and smells awesome

R11, what’s your gardening zone?

I grow both borage and hyssop (regular, not anise) for pollinators. The bees love them. I've also found that bronze fennel is excellent for attracting beneficial wasps that help control garden pests like tomato hornworms.

Yeah but wasps eat monarch caterpillars

[quote] I've ordered from Proven Winners

I’ve never known proven winners to sell from their website.

They do R15. I ordered some plants online, but not everything is available on their website. They steer you in the direction of retailers. I was eyeing some Russian sage for a while on their site...could have ordered online. Then, when I made my decision...you had to get them through a retailer. I guess it's a hit or miss...a window of time that it's available online,

*when it's available online^^

Im pissed at online nurseries. Too many times I’ve paid a premium to get plants delivered in spring because certain plants don’t show up in garden centers or big box stores until mid or late summer. I figured if I ordered them early, put them in a sunny spot I’d have them for a much longer period for birds, bees and butterflies. Some plants, eg, touted as plants that “hummingbirds love” turned out not to even bloom until after hummingbirds are gone. Buy early I thought. Also, sometimes yiu can’t get certain plants at your local store so if you really want a certain plant you can only get it online

So I went with online nurseries and got TEENSY TINY plants that never grew. One year I bought a plant the online catalogue showed as having big red flowers. Bought it, planted it. It didn’t bloom. I tore it out next year because it grew huge with just a lot of foliage, taking up space where I’d rather have flowers. Turned out it was a plant that didn’t bloom until it’s second year. So I threw it out before it flowered. Passed me the fuck off that when I went back & looked at the description it was mentioned in tiny letters that they were sending a first year plant that wouldn’t bloom til the following year. Excuse me, I paid a fucking fortune to have these small plants delivered in 2018. I want them blooming in 2018. Send me second year plants or don’t show the plant blooming full of flowers. Or have large type “Blooms next year.”

Every year I used to buy some kind of pink agastache from a different online nursery. Rosey Posey agastache. Pink Pop agastache. Kudos series Ambrosia agastache. All from different online retailers, all never grew beyond the tiny pot they came in. It’s not like I don’t know how to grow plants. I’ve been growing them for 25 years. Seeds, seedlings, full grown plants. Pink agastache sucks unless you buy it at a store fully grown or you live in a warm winter zone. They don’t get big enough by the time the summer ends. They never come back.

Now I stick with lavender hyssop seeds and grow them myself. They’re not pretty but bees love them.

Veronica is another plant that’s iffy. I have a pink one I bought fully grown from Walmart about 10 years ago that comes back fine every year. It’s even in an area that’s a bit shady. Vigorous as hell. But every other Veronica I’ve bought either never comes back or comes back as a small wisp the following year. So I try to find the same variety Veronica….I find it from Bluestone, buy it twice. It dies both times after never growing. The plant is too damn tiny. Now I can’t even find that variety anymore because growers are flighty and come up with new varietals every year & drop the old ones,

I had 2 Nikki hydrangeas pulled out from both sides of my back porch. My damn landscaper wouldn’t cut them back enough & they grew too tall & wide for the space. They were covering the AC duct and my oil tank pipe. I plan to replace with Brown Eyed Girl sunflowers. Very floriferous and they’re annuals that die back to the ground in winter. They only have nectar though, no pollen. I’ll plant some real sunflowers so bees can get some pollen. Put them in big pots so they won’t escape into the area near the AC duct and can be moved away from oil tank pipe in winter

Nikko, not Nikki hydrangeas

I find etsy a little more reliable than ebay. . . you can find more people that know the exact state and quality of their seeds. albeit, the search system requires a bit of finesse.

I ordered from Etsy and the seller didn’t cold stratify the seeds, so I have to refrigerate them. Grr. If you’re a seed seller and your seeds need to be cold stratified, you should stratify them. Or say in the online description that they’re not stratified.

Another seller sent me a plant way too early. I order from online nurseries as early as Feb, but they don’t send plants until May because of my zone.

I’ll probably buy blue tansy from Etsy, though. Seed companies are ridiculously expensive selling things like blue tansy, which are essentially weeds.

My neighbor shouted to me to say out of her garden. She doesn’t even have a garden! What a batshit crazy thing to say!

Btw… I didn’t respond to her at all. I just kept on walking.

For those that don't know this.....I was at a greenhouse one day and the owner said to me do you want some wild garlic? I said yes, how much? He said free, just dig it up it's all over the place. I did and planted some in my gardens. It was Years before I realized that I had not had a single aphid on any of my roses in years and realized it was the garlic. I planted that garlic everywhere and it constantly reseeds itself. If I get too much of it, I use it for cooking. It has a really mild garlic taste and fully mature they are about the size of a filbert.The Latin name for it is Allium vineale.

Interesting r25 do you eat shit?

All the little white throated sparrows are singing their hearts out. I’m putting out peanut butter suet for them to tank em up for their takeoff flights. They’ll be leaving very soon.

The little spring peeper who’s been peeping in my back years for weeks has stopped it hope it means he found a mate.

I ordered 4 Mexican heathers from Amazon. I had bonus points so the whole order only cost $6. I’m going to put them in planters on my deck, where it is very, very hot. I grabbed one at the end of last summer from my local garden center and noticed hummingbirds liked it. I’d never had one before, though I’d seen them used as edging. Didn’t realize it was a hummingbird plant.

First hummingbird at feeder today.

Can anyone tell me what the small grass is in the front of this border in between the white calamint and the allium? I like the way it breaks up the repetitive monotony of the flowers but isn’t too wide or tall. I’d like a small grass like that in my front border but when I search for grasses I only get tall and wide grass, or dwarf beach grass.

^^Honey, I have no fuckin’ idea.

Something ate my salvia amistad. That’s insane. Deer and rabbits hate salvia.

They also ate my sunflower. I can understand that. I did try to protect it.

I want to plant some common and uncommon narcissus this year. Particularly narcissus biflorus, whose perfume is different from every other jonquil, and some jonquils I don't know the name of, but aren't sold retail because they look ratty, yet smell divine. Much nicer than the ubiquitous paperwhites or Soleil d'Or.

That's cool R25. Dual purpose...pest deterrent and can eat it, too. No chemicals needed.

I grew borage from seed this year because all the nectar gardening sites swooned over it. “Nectar for days! The pollinators love this one. A favorite of bees and hummingbirds.

Haven’t seen one bee near it. They’re all on nepeta instead. Hummingbirds fly right past it to my Cuphea. Lemme tell you - borage is an ugly plant. I planted it in deep containers in case it’s invasive and boy I’m glad I did. But now my back porch looks like a weedfest. It’s got a giant stalk and leaves that droop in daylight. Also grew bugloss and that’s looking like an invasive weed.

It’s the Greg of gardening!

I brushed my cat’s hair every day, gathered it all up and put it on my plants to deter rabbits. It didn’t do a thing to keep them away. I just found out it’s because my cats don’t go outdated or hunt. They don’t produce the right hormones or oheromes or whatever to scare rabbits away.

Has anyone planted atomic tomatoes? they are black and purple and get some red streaks when they are ripe. I just ate my first one today and it was delicious. Sweetest tomato I have ever had.

I hate tomatoes

My tomatoes are just now fruiting after our very strange summer. First too cool and rainy in May and June - then without even a hint of transition extremely hot and dry (upper 90s all summer, with a few 100 days sprinkled in). If the weather settles down and stays moderately warm, I'll have a bumper crop of tomatoes in late September. If we have an early frost, I'll be saving green tomatoes in cardboard peach flats for weeks waiting for them to ripen. I didn't plant my beans until late June - again, too cold and wet. They are now covering my wire fences up to the top. I have a Romano flat podded type, and two different varieties of runner beans - regular orange flowers and white and orange (I think it's called painted lady). Got my first bean pods this week, and now a few more appear every day. Same with my yellow squash. My cuphea plants as usual are attracting hummingbirds like crazy, especially in the past3 weeks or so. The hummers go back and forth between them and my hanging fuchsia baskets. My Grandpa Ott morning glories have been doing their thing for the past 2 weeks. I pull most of them when I see them in spring because they are prolific self sowers, , but even so, enough survive to make a very nice show of purple flowers from now until frost. I also planted four o-clock seeds late this year (June). Finally they have thickened up and are starting to branch, so I think I'll get my first flowers in a week or so. I planted them very close to the house foundation - I'm hoping they'll return next year from the roots and possible bloom earlier. I won't know what colors I'm getting until they start to bloom.

My 16 year old dog passed away last month, it was absolutely heartbreaking, she was my first baby. We got her ashes back and I mixed some of her ashes with zinnia, cosmos and sunflower seeds and planted them in my garden. She used to love to stand in my raised garden bed. Now everything that I planted is growing and my doggie will always be in my garden.

I bought a dwarf butterfly bush at lowes and thought ”It’s a hybrid , so it probably won’t attract butterflies so much. It will just look pretty.”

Well, it’s pretty and it’s attracting butterflies. And it’s growing well (always deadhead butterfly bushes). I wish I’d bought more. It’s in the Buzz Hot series. I can’t remember if it’s Buzz Hot Raspberry or Buzz Hot Magenta but the panicles are really bright & shimmery