Tuesday, 23 April 2024
at home
Allan went boating, which will be tomorrow’s post. I spent the afternoon planting veg seeds in the fish totes, not my favourite thing.
These:
Between rows of mustard, chard, lettuce, and beetroot (one of my favourite veg to grow), I planted radishes from a number of old packs of seeds. I have a hard time throwing old seeds out, so it is an experiment to see if any of them germinate. I have only found success growing radishes in the fish totes; in the ground, they get worm-eaten.
I have to fish up an old photo to illustrate the totes (there are seven of them) because I was so busy with the seeding that I didn’t take any photos.
The peas and the broad beans that I planted have come up except for one row of Sugar Sprint peas from a packet that was four years old, which I replaced today with some new Sugar Snap peas.
The little pond at the stern of the garden boat had fallen so low that I was afraid it had a leak. Yesterday, Allan ran a hose to it from one of the water barrels yesterday. I was so pleased to see that it had held water overnight, thus not leaky.
I will have to lie down on the ground to clean up those saraccenia along the edge. I don’t look forward to that because it will be hard to get up again.
It has been so dry that I went around with watering cans to my new plants. I panicked when I saw this tag, of a plant that had long been on my Plants of Desire list, just laying loose on the grass path. (I have not complained about the horrible cold north wind we have had for the last several days, only because I am writing this a few days later so it is not fresh in my mind.)
Had I lost it? Had a slug eaten it? I visually scoured the bed, not even knowing exactly what it looked like as this is the first time I have grown it, and finally found it (I hope!). What a relief!
I dug up three clumps of eucomis (pineapple Lily) that were now hidden because of the expansion of the east garden bed and was pleased to find huge bulbs underneath. They are now closer to the edge.
In the early evening, I finally tackled the Phormer Phlox bed, where the white phlox, probably ‘David’, well behaved for years, had a couple of years ago gone berserk and started to run around like crazy and grow into the roots of everything else in the bed.
I battered away at it and made some progress, giving up when the wind got too cold to endure. This summer, I will only add annuals, like my cosmos collection, to this area so that I can easily weed it again in autumn.
I will prevail! I also have found that as the phlox aged, the foliage tended to show disease more often and it just completely fell out of my favour. Tony Tomeo recently wrote a post about whether or not is a weed, to which I wrote a long comment which for some reason I was unable to post. The mass of it in my garden all seem to be interconnected and spread by running roots. Perhaps I will not be able to entirely prevail. A bit of white phlox here and there would not be the worst plant in my garden.
Behind the weeding area, my enkianthus, a shrub that I love, is blooming with its little bells.
I also admired the unfurling golden leaves of another favourite shrub, Corylopsis spicata ‘Aurea’. It is still quite small and has not yet given me the dangling early spring flowers that my Corylopsius pauciflora provides.
The view north from where I was weeding shows how much the garden has changed, in that the angelica, with big foliage to the right of the path, which used to be in the middle-ish of the east bed, is now on the edge of the reconfigured path. It was too big to transplant when I suddenly decided to change things.
I have been having a hard time thinking about working, even the one or two days a week that our remaining little jobs require. I put some numbers on the work board to represent the maximum number of work days left in the year, so that I have something to cross off.
I enjoy working and yet I am finding it harder to work one day a week than last year’s three or four days, because I get into the delightful habit of being at home. My crisis of gardening confidence is also a factor, I suppose.
Re another item on the work board: As I write this the next day, I was all ready to type out and print a letter to send to a blogging friend who wrote me a long and interesting letter almost a year ago. But I could not find her address, so now I will have to quest for the envelope. If only it had been an email exchange. Sentimental as the idea of letters on paper might be, it turns out that I am very bad at them; if I had responded in a timely way, I would have still had the envelope at hand. So friend, if you are reading this, I am sorry to have been so remiss.
I can not even find the comment. I do not know how all this stuff works.
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I couldn’t make the comment on your blog….don’t know why.
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Was the comment a while ago?
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Yes on your post about white phlox.
>
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Well, I got a message about a link. Is it all working adequately now?
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Yes indeed.
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I hope the phormerly pheared phlox becomes a phriend, again.
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I hope Mr Tootlepedal sees this excellent comment 🙂
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I did. How I lauphed.
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😀
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Your commitment to enhancing the beauty of the land is evident in the passion and enthusiasm you bring to each project.
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Thank you. I looked at your website, gorgeous gardens and I love the pond with waterfall.
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