Water, water everywhere

I dug up the last patch of daffodils the other day. They had sprouted every year for the 20 years we've been in this house, and bloomed less and less every year; this year they gave us only one or two blossoms. I was surprised to see how deep the bulbs were in the ground. A good ten inches below the surface, there was a ball of bulbs about the size of a small cantaloupe, 41 bulbs in all. I'll be planting them everywhere this fall.

The birdbath, with its little solar-powered fountain, spreads enough water around its base to keep the soil molst. I'm thinking of moving it a little ways down the gentle slope of my little garden, so I can put bush monkey flower above and Allegheny monkey flower around it. That should fit in nicely with the blue and orange theme.

Len the Power Washer was here yesterday. Nearly did in my herbs, and then this morning we got about 2" of rain in a few hours. Hopefully it will help the clover in my garden fill in. The grass and clover in the corner of the yard is growing - I guess what's going to germinate has germinated by now. There are bare spots, as I expected there would be. I'll overseed, and maybe put some straw down on top of it this time.

Olly and the jalapeños

A week or so back, I planted some sunflowers in peat pots (not the way I'm supposed to do it, I know). I put them in the ground today. Well, some of them. There were six peat pots, and I put two seeds in each. They're supposed to sprout in 7-14 days, but after 5 days there were seedlings in 5 of the 6 pots, ranging from 1" to 3" tall. I put all six peat pots in the ground. I broke the largest seedling in the process so I hope maybe its roommate will come through for me. I planted the sixth pot even though nothing has sprouted in it; I'll watch it for signs of life and watch the others to make sure I don't need to thin out the slow starters. And if the power washer who's coming in a couple of days should trample or drown these seedlings, I have a whole packet of seeds, and I'll plant them according to the instructions next time.

The clover I sowed for ground cover in the garden is germinating nicely. I hope the ground will be covered with live mulch in a couple of weeks. I'm hoping this clover is Dutch - the package just said white clover. It will be a bit ironic if the clover in the garden is the uninteresting, low-growing stuff while the Dutch clover I sowed in the yard last fall forms these beautiful mounds of foliage.

Had some tree work done today, only to notice a dead tree inn the yard after the workers were gone. Humberto and his tree guy walked all over my new grass, and ten red broken twigs and leaves off of it, and it still looks good! It's still coming in, but it doesn't look any the worse for wear. 

Olly and the jalapeños

When I bought the daylily, the Blue Hill sage and the catmint to start my little garden, I happened upon a set of 4 little jalapeño peppers and bought them on a whim. I planted them in my second-largest pot (the largest already contained my herb garden: sweet basil, lavender, thyme, oregano, dill and lemon grass) and they immediately started growing. Olly the Double Doodle, Olly the Worry Wart, always wary of anything new, soon pulled one of them out. OK, no big deal, the pot probably wasn't big enough for four plants anyway. The other three were still intact. Knowing my dogs were averse to mint-family plants, I surrounded the survivors with pots of common mint, spearmint, and the aforementioned herbs. That, I reasoned, would keep Olly out of the jalapeños.

Then came the frost warning. I knew I should have waited another week or two to put these plants out; the jalapeños and some of the herbs had been hothouse raised and would not appreciate getting frozen. But I had a plan for a light frost: I put clear plastic bags over the herbs and the peppers. And the plants survived the frost.

Did I mention that Olly is wary of new things? This is Olly the Raccoon Slayer we're talking about here. Those plastic bags, undulating in the morning breeze, were just too much of a menace to be ignored, and he soon made short work of them. Most of the herbs were unscathed; the oregano will recover. But all three jalapeños suffered collateral damage, two them badly broken and all three uprooted. But the roots of all three, still barely more than seedlings, appeared intact; so I stuck them back in the moist potting soil and put the pot on top of our standby generator, maybe two and a half feet high. The pot stands another foot high, and I put the pot on the back of the generator, a foot and a half back from the side he would have access to.

But this is Olly the Champion Counter Surfer we're talking about here. So three days later, I noticed dirt in the gravel around the generator - and looked up to find the pot gone! It hadn't gone far, but it was behind the generator, wedged against the siding on the house. Leaning over the generator, I managed to grasp the heavy pot with my fingertips, pull it back up onto the top and pat the peppers back into place. I moved the pot to a planting table on the patio maybe a foot taller than the generator, with a second shelf on the back that would block Olly from pushing the pot off the back. 

The dog is nothing if not persistent. It wasn't long before I cam home from a meeting one evening and Jan said "He was only outside for five minutes. I heard a sound like breaking glass..." There on the patio were the remains of a large ceramic pot, a large pile of potting soil, and three small jalapeño plants, dislodged but again undamaged.

The three jalapeño plants now live in separate pots (the thin plastic kind you bring plants home from the nursery in) on that second shelf, all three looking happy and healthy and showing new growth. 

I await Ollie the Interpid's next move.

Lest we forget

I have recently been bitten by the gardening bug. I have no idea what I'm doing, but I expect to have some fun learning. I want to chronicle my adventures as I get into what promises to be a lifelong hobby, and I want to start from the beginning. 

Last fall I bought a bag of 50 tulip bulbs. I found places for half of them. The rest overwintered in the bag, out in the (unheated) garage. In early March I decided to try my hand at forcing a few, and in the process of getting them started, I noticed they and a lot of the others in the bag were starting to sprout. So one cold, rainy day I grabbed a spade, dug some shallow grooves in the soft ground and tucked in the remaining bulbs. I knew they should have been planted deeper, and I knew they should have been planted earlier, but I had nothing to lose; they weren't going to last until fall anyway. By this time the ones from last fall were already poking their leaves out of the ground, so I knew these plants were way behind. They might not bloom this year, I told myself, but they can grow some leaves and feed the bulbs and bloom next year if they survive.

Much to my bewilderment and joy, everything worked! The forced bulbs bloomed, the tulips from the fall grew and bloomed and looked wonderful, and every one of the too-shallow, too-late bulbs sprouted - and about the time the blooms came off the fall tulips, virtually all the spring tulips bloomed and looked even better! 

I had long wanted to do some gardening, and my success with the tulips has provided the final kick start. I've planted a bunch of stuff since then. As I said, I don't know what I'm doing but I'll learn, and learning is always fun.