More Garden Progress

Blood root. I planted some over a decade ago, and the ants 

move the seeds around to make new colonies. 

My records show this is the normal date for it to appear.

It’s usually the first of my wildflowers.

This is my happy place, my reminder that life goes on. I have been out there every day, grubbing in the dirt. This year is odd in my yard, and not just because everything else in the world is off kilter. It’s this screwy year of no winter that  upsets the balance. Unseasonably warm, some plants are sprouting early, while others remain dormant. The difference is driven because plants’ annual cycle can be driven by different factors - temperature, certainly, but also day length and rainfall. So those plants driven out of dormancy by warm weather are sprouting, and those keyed to the light are stubbornly sticking to the schedule they evolved for eons ago. My roses leafed out early, but my wildflowers lag behind. It’s interesting to watch. But it’s also daunting to think about how climate change will affect this - those plants that can adapt to the temperature will do better in the long run.

I’ve done a great deal of garden cleanup. Some of this should have been done last fall, but I leave perennial plants standing over the winter, to provide cover and seeds for critters. Leaf bags are filling up now, though I also have a vacuum mode on my leaf blower, which shreds (dry) leaves into a bag. It can then be used as mulch. I’m also weeding - most of what has sprouted so far are weeds. There are a lot in the garden spaces, because I have only mulched sparsely and the plants are not yet big enough to crowd them out.

So garden areas I’ve cleaned up so far (notes to myself, cleanup means remove debris and weed):

• My back vegetable raised bed
• My back-of-the-house flower bed
• The three little raised beds on the street side
• Both “down” and “up” on the rounded corner
• The sunny slope, from the street and stairs up to the bushes
• Only some of the front garden inside the fence
• Along the fence by the back patio

My Home Depot garden: Daffs, Hostas, Daylilies, and
Three invisible Blueberries that will leaf out later

The plants I mail-ordered are starting to arrive, plus I picked up a few tidbits at Home Depot. I’ve also got seeds to start, both vegetables and flowers. I planted lettuce seeds in a pot on the patio where later I will do annual herbs (protected from deer by the Big Fence, but it requires protecting from The Very Hungry Labrador, who likes to eat potting soil).  I transplanted six broccoli plants into the back vegetable bed.  I bought a dwarf Alberta spruce and put it in a pot. I put in three hostas from Home Depot along the fence by the back patio. I planted a (jarringly hot pink) moss phlox by the front steps. This last is blooming right now because of forcing by the grower; in subsequent years I believe it will settle down and bloom with other things, and thus be less jarring.

Much work still to do! Because of my previously placed orders, I’m set for a while with projects and planting without needing to venture out to a store. I’m going to order mulch from the high school sale, where it will be delivered in bags at the end of the month. I do consider garden supplies to be essential, and I’m still full of unwarranted bravado in my risk calculations. But I won’t go to the nursery for a while, hoping it remains open so I can go later. I have plans to do a pot farm, because I own a lot of large pots and filling them fits my longer term strategies for less weeding. I’ll need big bags of potting soil, which my local hardware store will load into the car for me. That can wait a bit, because I’ve got an unopened box of plants to tend sitting on my porch right now.