Eva Luna and others … I am excited about columbine (it’s way too hot where I used to live, so this is the first time I can grow it) and I have seeds in the fridge.
Is it true that this year’s plants won’t bloom yet? If I start the columbine seeds I have this year, will I get flowers next spring?
Bonus request: I’ll take any advice about poppies, too. My late husband’s mother always has larkspur & poppies each spring, just blanketing their backyard. It’s stunning, and I’ve never had success getting either established.
In general, Aquilegia (columbine) will flower the year after being planted from seed, but there are newer varieties reputed to bloom the first year if seed is started early enough.
I have no idea - my columbine was obtained as plants from a local person who was thinning out hers! She just gave me a poppy for the first time yesterday, so that will be a learning experience for me, too. (I think I grew some poppies 25 years ago, but I have zero memory of the details.)
When my columbines self-seed, they bloom in the first year. If you mean California poppies, they don’t like transplantation, some sow them directly in the ground.
My daughter and her partner rented the house next door to me and this year we’re going all out on the gardening. The Almost Son In Law cleared about 400SF of 10 foot tall blackberry canes (we’re in Left Coast Portland and the blackberries are invasive and hellish) and English ivy, then rototilled and build planter boxes. He tilled up a spot on the west side of my lot as well and I built three 8x4x1 foot beds, two of which have wire fencing trellises (looks like Conestoga wagons without the covers on) over the back end of the bed. The trellises are for beans, peas, cucumbers and melons, and I also have onion sets, long standing Bloomsdale spinach, kale, peppers (gypsy medium hot and red bells) basil, lettuce in myriad types, broccoli and several different kinds of tomatoes–mostly paste and heirloom varieties. They have similar stuff and also a shit ton of corn, squash, arugula, eggplant, cauliflower, brussels sprouts, chard, alliums of many kinds, sunflowers, and watermelons. I scored a bunch of seed potatoes in several varieties and we’ll be planting those in tall baskets as soon as the ASIL takes the truck over to get a bale of straw or three for mulch.
I’m also working on a part shade garden with wildflowers in the back yard to encourage the bees, hummingbirds and butterflies. And a bunch of containers in full sun for flowers–heliotrope, lavender, celosia, salvia, and a crazy decorative fuzzy Cuban oregano that looks like a succulent. It was too goofy to pass up. And this is just the new stuff–I already had blueberry bushes, an herb garden, a strawberry bed and several gooseberry bushes.
Basically we’re going to see how much food we can squirrel away that we grew ourselves. In case of zombie apocalypses, y’see.
I’ve remodelled my garden and had raised beds put in. Well, I had builders round in early March and they got as far as building the beds out of breeze blocks, then the shutdown came in. So we’ve had to lay the gravel and tile the beds in brickslips ourselves, which has pretty much broken me.
And I’ve been ordering plants online like crazy. I know I’ve got too many beans. Not even sure I like them that much.
What’s in my garden? Aphids! They’re on the tomatoes (they pretty much leave the herbs alone). Ergh. And I’ll have to keep spraying them with soap over and over for the next few days since it has been/will be raining.
Put out seeds today for morning glory “Heavenly Blue” along with moonflower and a rainbow of four o’clocks along the side fence, where I can (hopefully) see them from my kitchen window and from my side steps where I sit sometimes.
I also stuck a few four o’clock seeds by my front door, where I’d see them as I’m pulling in & they’re more visible to neighbors and passers-by. It’s a terrible spot, though, as evidenced by the fact that dandelions struggle to thrive there. We shall see!
I am posting this here mostly as a reminder to myself, to go water them occasionally!
The spinach is already bolting. Naughty! Bad spinach! Well, it is in the mid 80s today. Hopefully the lettuce will hang in there, it’s barely grown the 1st pair of true leaves.
Alyssum is already popping up everywhere. I love that stuff.
I finally got to do some planting this weekend despite the freezing weather and touch of snow. I’ve got a thai chili and a jalapeno that I over wintered and I’ve harvested off both plants already this year. Last year I went crazy with the tomatoes and the elk ate them so I did extra work and got nothing. So this year everything is in pots and on my deck hopefully with that combined with planning on spending the summer working from home we can at least keep the critters away.
I planted 1 beefsteak tomato hybrid, 2 cucumbers, and my daughters sprouted some pinto beans that I potted.
It won’t be much but I’m hoping to do some spicy pickles in the late summer and early fall.
So the front garden got tiger and day lilies, pansies, lobelia, and a hanging basket of purple verbena and petunias. We also have chives, Oh Og do we have chives! The snow wasn’t even cleared off the soil and they were already poking through! The scapes are just starting to come up so I’ll be frying those up soonish.
The trug (raised garden bed on legs) has tricolour sage, english thyme, hot peppers, swiss chard, and marigolds. We also have eight tomato plants, two cherry, two roma, one beefsteak, one manitoba, and two tomatillo. They’re in pots at the moment co planted with marigolds but I’m building a raised garden bed for them this weekend.
Being an “essential worker” I’m not in quarantine so maybe it doesn’t count, but I did start a container garden this morning. Chard and lettuce. As soon as I find my marigold seeds from my old homestead I’ll see if there’s any life left in them.
I don’t know if it’s a quarantine garden exactly, as we garden most years. But it’s a little more involved this year than in years past.
So far, we have some Porter Improved tomatoes, sugar snap peas, blackeyed peas, scarlet runner beans, okra, chard, spinach, lettuce and a watermelon plant.
The herb bed has oregano (feral), dill, basil and some others that didn’t sprout. We’re going to try again on cilantro and parsley.
I decided to order a packet of kaffir lime seeds. They have lousy germination reports, but what the hell. I cook a lot with lime leaves and this seems like a nice little houseplant for that purpose.
I’ve been enjoying sauteed radish greens; still on the first seed packet and now growing the tops in a cold frame.
Oh, and some sunflowers (a few black oil seeds from a bag of birdseed mix - I’ve always had the best luck with those) and a few sedum/stonecrop bits from my “pieces o’succulent” zip baggie.
It’s just now started raining - thanks, perfect to gently water 'em all in.
My lily of the valley have exploded, as usual. They smell divine, but dang they’re invasive. Peonies have buds. Day lilies are just about to bud. Some stuff I planted last year - hellebore and something I can’t remember- came back great. And, as usual, the lilacs, the wedding bush, and another large flowering bush are in full blossom right now.
A few weeks ago I had fun with the stimulus payment and went a little nuts with container planting. Only veggie were a few Roma tomato plants, potted a bunch of herbs, and then did up close to 30 pots of flowers. Everything from black petunias, bright orange Shasta daisies, hyacinth, snapdragons, pansies, a gorgeous datura, a few different types of begonias, lantana, marigolds, alyssum as filler…more that I’ve forgotten. I also added a blueberry bush, a Warsaw Nike clematis, and a few coleus for color. There were a few other shade loving perennials planted, but… squirrels.
Then this weekend. I received a very nice raised planting bed. It now has jalapeños, Thai chilies, sweet green peppers, red peppers, green beans, peas, celery (thought I’d give it a go), broccoli, lemongrass, zucchini, and a few more herbs. Very random, but stuff I like. Plus some astilbe to replace the squirrel lunch and some more flowers to pot up. Some of the veggies and herbs I had started in pots, just transplanted into the bed. Oh, and I planted some offshoots from my sisters wild rose bush.
Lets see… in the back we’ve got peas, lettuce, spinach, green beans, wax beans, pole beans, cabbage, corn, onions, and tomatoes. In front we’ve got zucchini, tomatoes, and cucumbers. Flower-wise we just got some zinnias, vinca, and petunias. Oh, and a big hanging basket geranium
My ornamental plantings a.k.a. the Victor/Victorian garden are about 95% complete. Hardy bananas, Datura metel, Tropicanna Black cannas and a slew of temperennial sages are featured.
In addition to enough tomatoes and eggplant to feed the neighborhood, the zucchini and winter squash are in the ground, cukes and pumpkin to follow.
I was busy digging a hole for the Musa sikkimensis (Darjeeling banana) and looked up to see Pluto the field spaniel lying in his habitat on the other side of the fence, watching me with great interest. He would like to dig holes in the garden too, but will not get the opportunity.
The veg and herb garden is going great guns with tomatoes, lettuce, shelling peas, bush beans, edamame, kale, dill, mint, chives, oregano, thyme and cilantro. Flowers (after tulip/hyacinth/daffodils in spring) are taking a little longer to get going, but bleeding-heart, dianthus, aquilegia, lily-of-the-vally, white forget-me-not, and thrift are hard at work blooming, with roses and peonies waiting in the wings.
The newer butterfly garden (okay yes I do actually grow butterflies in the sense of rearing caterpillars, but what I mean here is a garden FOR butterflies and you knew that ) is being a bit more uncooperative. It’s a strip that gets about a half-day or more of sun, between a white wall (with partly overhanging roof) and a black asphalt parking space, so fairly hot and dry, although I do water it regularly in growing season. It’s about six inches of good compost on top of quite poor sandy rubbly substrate for which in the past only stuff like dandelions and plantains have volunteered, though I’ve had some luck with sunflowers there.
How should I transplant common milkweed, field thistle, and goldenrod into this area? I’ve had a try at digging up some nearby seedlings on waste ground and putting them in, but their unhappiness is apparent. I’d kind of like to jumpstart nectar and foodplant sources for butterflies, but if it’s just not gonna work I don’t want to decimate the local beneficial-weed populations by transplanting all of them into my butterfly garden where they promptly die.
PSA: Sadly, this windowsill regrowing process does not seem to work with the delectable and all-too-seasonal “ramps” or wild leeks (Allium tricoccum) of eastern North America. All I got was a decomposing stalk with a powerfully unpleasant rotting-onion smell.
) is being a bit more uncooperative. It’s a strip that gets about a half-day or more of sun, between a white wall (with partly overhanging roof) and a black asphalt parking space, so fairly hot and dry, although I do water it regularly in growing season. It’s about six inches of good compost on top of quite poor sandy rubbly substrate for which in the past only stuff like dandelions and plantains have volunteered, though I’ve had some luck with sunflowers there.