spring – Page 8 – Andrea's Gardening Blog

March 18: lots of transplants, ripped out mint and bee balm

March 18, 2018March 18, 2018Posted in Planting, spring, WinterTagged gardening, march, transplant1 Comment

I was supposed to sow seeds today. In order to do that, I needed to move a bunch of plants to open up the spots where the seeds would go. After nearly 6 hours of ripping out mint, digging holes, unearthing plants, hauling them up hills, reburying them, and watering them in, I am pooped. And I didn’t start any seeds.

Here’s what I did do. Everything is still dormant, so I’m hopeful they’ll get established in their new spots and continue growing unstunted:

Sprayed weeds and grass that didn’t get killed the first go round.
Ripped out the mint under the stairs — two wheelbarrows full! I’m shocked by how much it spread. It was like an infestation.
Moved pink hydrangea spot vacated by mint.
Scooted white hydrangea closer to driveway.
Divided yarrow: moved one division next to white hydrangea, moved one to bed 9 out back, moved a small offshoot next to bee balm on side of house.
Moved 2 milkweeds (and a 3rd tiny one?) to bed 3 out back.
Moved 3 echinacea to bed 3 out back.
Moved 3 clumps of bee balm to bed 9.
Ripped out the remaining bee balm from front bed.
Moved 4 baby echinacea to fenced veggie patch so they can be protected from bunnies while they get a little bigger.
Moved 3 rudbeckia from herb bed out front to bed at top of hill out back.
Planted 5 liatris corms in butterfuly bush bed.
Moved Shasta daisy to it’s correct place in the butterfly bush bed.

Bee balm is all gone

Second wheelbarrow of mint roots

Pink hydrangea in its new place

Liatris corms planted by stump, between large roots

Sulphur caterpillar unearthed when I ripped out bee-balm?

Back hill with some plants and lots of dead grass

I’ve got a to-do list at least as long as the one above to get to before I can actually plant the seeds. I’m bummed I couldn’t get more done today since we’re about to have 2 days of rain (and possibly sleet and snow). I guess we’ll have more rain in April, so everything can get watered in then. And this week I’ll try to chip away at my list :-).

March 11: tomato, Mex SF, and Scabiosa seeds sprouting

March 18, 2018Posted in Seeds, spring, WinterTagged gardening, seedlingsLeave a comment

We planted these seeds on March 4, 7 days ago. The Mexican sunflowers and tomatoes started sprouting on March 9. They are growing under a shop light, I think it’s this 2.8 ft LED one.

Grape tomato seedlings

Mar9: first grape tomato sprouts

Mar9: first Mexican sunflower sprout

All the sprouts! Bluestem grass, violas, Scabiosa, Mexican sunflower, grape tomatoes, better bush tomatoes

March 4: More seeds, transplants, and some corms

March 18, 2018Posted in Planting, Seeds, springTagged butterfly gardening, gardening, planting seeds1 Comment

I’m attempting to manage more than 2000 square feet of flower beds, starting half of that area from scratch and completely reorganizing the other half. My to-do lists are long, and I can’t remember everything I need to do. Or, as is more often the case, I get out there and start on the first true need, then get distracted by a thousand other things I also need to do, but aren’t as high priority.

So when I have a long list of things to do in the garden, and I don’t want to destroy my gardening notebook by dropping it in the dirt or spraying it with the hose, I take photos: of my list, of the bed designs, of the seed packets. Then when I’m out there, I know what I need to do, where plants need to move, and what depth to plant seeds.

I didn’t get to moving the Rudbeckia, pulling out the mint, or transplanting the hydrangea, and I decided to wait until it’s a little warmer to put the globe thistle in the ground, but we did get to these things:

– Pulled the purple vervain seeds out of the fridge (started Feb 11; should be able to expect seedlings sometime between March 18-25)
– Started indoors: Mexican sunflower seeds, Scabiosa seeds, and two varieties of tomato seeds.
– Transplanted 4 clumps of bee balm: 1 to underneath window on side of house, 1 to bed 3 and 2 to bed 4.
– Transplanted 2 Shasta daisies to bed 5.
– Son mowed grass.
– Daughter planted Liatris (blazing star) corms in bed 5.
– Daughter planted Crocosmia corms in bed 4.
– Trimmed lavender and transplanted to bed 5.
– Daughter planted tendersweet pea seeds.
– Finished erecting rabbit fence around veggie garden.

The high was 53 today, and the low tonight is expected to be 26. Now I just have to have patience to wait for the green. I hope everything survives!

The roar of spring

March 18, 2018Posted in springLeave a comment

In late winter I always want to know, “What was happening this time last year? How much longer do I have to wait until spring?” Here are thoughts from my main blog from March 3, 2018.

Butterfly Mind

March is lioning. Wind howled through the night on March 1st. It shook the house, rattled the windows, scoured the lawn of leftover leaf detritus from winter.

Now, Saturday morning, with a cat on my writing arm, I look out the window and see a red cardinal and tiny house finches perched on the bare branches of the oak, in the slant of morning sun, looking for the feeder we took down so it wouldn’t become a missile in the 60 mph wind gusts. Soft grey doves bob their heads searching for seeds on the ground. The birds twitter and chirp, awaiting their breakfast. It looks warm out there, but it’s not.

A couple of weeks ago, spring teased. For more than a week in February, highs were in the 60s and 70s. I took advantage of the weather. On lunch breaks and between swim meet sessions, I put on…

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Feb 24: tester transplants and outdoor seeds

March 4, 2018Posted in Seeds, spring, WinterTagged gardening, planting seeds, transplantLeave a comment

Spring is near! It’s been in the 70s most of this week, and today, before a few days of rain set in, I did the following:

Transplants

Transplanted 5 mums from out front to out back
Moved bottlebrush
Transplanted the only rosemary that still looks alive to out back by the birdfeeder. I’ll be surprised if this survives> I think I brok off some of its taproot, and the hole I dug for it wasn’t deep enough for its root. The shovel kept hitting gravel, making it difficult to dig any deeper. It also had very little root system, and no dirt clung to its roots when I moved it.
Transplanted a rue to the hill. Even after cutting it back, the rue was massive — probably a 2′ diameter disc of soil and roots
Consolidated 5 scattered creeping phloxes into a clump next to taller phlox out front.

Seeds

Last night I scraped each blue bonnet seed across an emery board to rough up the surface, then soaked the seeds in boiling water over night. After moving the mums and rue out of the way where I wanted to plant the blue bonnets, I smoothed the dirt as much as possible and drew a pattern in the soil for where I wanted to plant each seed type.

blue bonnet bed at sowing time annotated — Bluebonnet bed out front

I sowed chamomile, feverfew, and blue bonnet seeds and sprayed them in. Coreopsis seeds need to be sowed when it’s warmer. I can expect the seeds to sprout anywhere from 10-25 days from now, depending on the weather. It may take longer, but I think now that they’re out there they can make their choice about when to emerge.

Colder weather is coming — it will still be warm during the day but will drop below freezing at night, so we’ll see how everything does. Here are some photos of what the garden looks like in late February:

Blue salvia leaves emerging

Front bed in February

Phlox leaves emerging

Mums at top of hill

Hill bed transplants

And planning diagrams/seed packet instructions:

Back hill garden plan

Bluebonnet bed plan

Feverfew seed instructions

Chamomile seed instructions

Bluebonnet seed instructions

Early June: Who’s in the garden and what are the butterflies drinking?

June 10, 2017Posted in springTagged butterflies, butterfly gardening, juneLeave a comment

I think we’ve got all the plants in that we are going to put in. I’m sitting under the dogwood tree, reading Donna Tartt’s The Little Friend and watching for butterflies. We were thinking of sailing today, but there was no wind this morning — the flag in the Kroger parking lot lay limp against the pole, completely still — and since this is my only day off this week, we decided to stay home. I’ve been in the garden ever since.

Right now, many things are in bloom: yarrow, bee balm, blanket flower, Lantana, firecracker plant, Pentas, rue, echinacea, guara, Russian sage, roses, creeping thyme, lavender. The indigo salvia has already peaked, as has the regular thyme. The blazing star, milkweed, and zinnias are on the verge of blooming. The Black-eyed Susans and the hydrangea by the stairs are developing buds, and the Joe Pye weed, Shasta daisies, and hydrangea in the dogwood bed show no flowering signs yet.
Who’s around:

Bumblebees
Honeybees
Wasps
Robins
Blue jays
White butterfly (species unknown)
Orange butterfly (species unknown; not a monarch)

As usual, the rue is covered in bees and wasps. We’ve got blue jays and robins hopping around the front yard stretching worms as they pull them from the ground, and today I’ve started seeing butterflies.

Plants the pollinating insects are visiting:

Rue
Lantana
Yarrow
Catmint
Yellow milkweed

There’s a white butterfly that’s been fluttering around all day — I don’t know what kind it is — and I also saw an orange one stop for a long time to drink from the berrylicious Lantana (or whatever variety the pink and yellow Lantana is called) and then the yarrow. Out back, a white butterfly with a black spot on its wing stopped on the yellow milkweed within a couple of hours of me putting it in the ground.

I haven’t seen any hummingbirds yet this year — maybe it’s early yet. I know they liked the bee balm and the pink salvia last year. I’ve been surprised by the lack of interest in the guara, bee balm, and echinacea so far. The bee balm and echinacea are just starting to bloom, so maybe later in the summer they’ll be more popular.

I haven’t seen any birds or butterflies use the bird bath our daughter made me for Mother’s Day yet, and currently we don’t have any caterpillars that I’m aware of. The rue had a couple of swallowtail caterpillars a week or two ago, but I don’t see any now. I hope the wasps aren’t killing them.

White butterfly with black spot on yellow milkweed

June 10: plant yellow milkweed out back

June 10, 2017June 10, 2017Posted in Planting, springTagged butterfly gardening, gardening, june, virginiaLeave a comment

I weeded this morning, and while doing that, I moved some pink salvia volunteers from the front bed to the herb bed and to the meadow garden out back. I also moved some of the wildflower seedlings around by the mailbox to declump them and distribute them a little more evenly.

Both rounds of wildflower seeds are coming up out back. The only thing I was still missing back there was milkweed. I drove over to the Crow’s Nest nursery to see if they had any since they didn’t on any of my million trips prior to today.

They had $10.99 gallon pots (I think they’re a gallon) in yellow, orange, pink, and white. The only one blooming was the yellow one, and I really want something blooming back there while we wait for everything else to come in, so I got yellow though I had originally intended to get orange.

I put it in the ground on the hill today, and we’ve got one week to water it in before vacation.

Meadow hill: bee balm about to bloom, new milkweed

Butterfly already drinking from new milkweed

May 27: move Joe Pye; plant dill and gomphrena seeds; move zinnias

May 27, 2017June 10, 2017Posted in Planting, springLeave a comment

We had a full week if drenching rain last week. Poor Owen had soccer tryouts in the pouring rain for three nights in a row. I weeded yesterday and moved a bunch of the zinnia seedlings (planted April 13, ~6 weeks ago) to space them more evenly.