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.