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Dec. 22nd, 2018
Fighting the garden
Dec. 22nd, 2018 08:47 pmI ordered a literal ton of garden soil, composted manure, mulch, etc. from Lowe's to execute my Grand Garden Vision during the extended break from work between holidays and the bout of cool weather that makes working outside bearable. Most of it got delivered today, so I spent six hours fighting with the yard.
We've had massive dumps of rain and attendant windstorms in the past week, and so far my Christmas senna has proved impervious to any attempts at staking and keeps falling over onto my rollinia sapling. Fortunately, it's in a cinderblock planter, so the current brilliant plan is to see how it does with loops of jute twine anchoring it to the cinderblocks. I'd prefer not to take it out. It's invasive, but it's easy to control by clipping the seedpods before they ripen. It's also very pretty and has proven productive as a butterfly plant in the past season, though I don't think any of the caterpillars ultimately survived contact with the local paperwasps.
But the fruit trees come first, and it'll damage the lychee sapling if it goes in the other direction, which isn't an option--that one's finally showing a lot of new growth, and I'm optimistic about it fruiting within the next five years if it stays happy. The rollinia had a long scrape from being flopped on, which I treated with neosporin and crossed fingers, and I staked it upright until it stops looking so squished. Supposedly I could see fruit as early as next year from that one, though it would be in the plant's best interests to nip anything rather than letting the plant waste its energy trying to fruit.
One of the new planters is going in where a patch of Jamaican porterweed got consumed by a sprawling vine, which meant digging the whole thing up and ripping everything out by the roots so it doesn't invade the new planter. A half-dozen baby porterweeds were in the way, so they've been transplanted to pots. I'm hoping they survive, since they reseed readily, butterflies and bees absolutely love them, and my mother's been asking for some to try out in her yard for a while. They were fairly deeply embedded in the sod, though, with roots wrapped around grass rhizomes, so we'll see if they were damaged during the extraction process.
The endgoal of the multiple new planters I'm adding is to get everything I reasonably can out of pots and into the ground, since it's easier to keep everything healthy and functioning that way and should ultimately take less water once everything is established. And if it doesn't, I suppose that's what the two new 50-gallon rain barrels are for. It turns out the clerodendrum is finally flowering, which I hope I didn't disrupt by transporting it. If the weather holds tomorrow, I can retrieve the trellis I made for the second planter and finally get the passionflower vines a coworker donated to the cause in the ground and trained to it.
We've had massive dumps of rain and attendant windstorms in the past week, and so far my Christmas senna has proved impervious to any attempts at staking and keeps falling over onto my rollinia sapling. Fortunately, it's in a cinderblock planter, so the current brilliant plan is to see how it does with loops of jute twine anchoring it to the cinderblocks. I'd prefer not to take it out. It's invasive, but it's easy to control by clipping the seedpods before they ripen. It's also very pretty and has proven productive as a butterfly plant in the past season, though I don't think any of the caterpillars ultimately survived contact with the local paperwasps.
But the fruit trees come first, and it'll damage the lychee sapling if it goes in the other direction, which isn't an option--that one's finally showing a lot of new growth, and I'm optimistic about it fruiting within the next five years if it stays happy. The rollinia had a long scrape from being flopped on, which I treated with neosporin and crossed fingers, and I staked it upright until it stops looking so squished. Supposedly I could see fruit as early as next year from that one, though it would be in the plant's best interests to nip anything rather than letting the plant waste its energy trying to fruit.
One of the new planters is going in where a patch of Jamaican porterweed got consumed by a sprawling vine, which meant digging the whole thing up and ripping everything out by the roots so it doesn't invade the new planter. A half-dozen baby porterweeds were in the way, so they've been transplanted to pots. I'm hoping they survive, since they reseed readily, butterflies and bees absolutely love them, and my mother's been asking for some to try out in her yard for a while. They were fairly deeply embedded in the sod, though, with roots wrapped around grass rhizomes, so we'll see if they were damaged during the extraction process.
The endgoal of the multiple new planters I'm adding is to get everything I reasonably can out of pots and into the ground, since it's easier to keep everything healthy and functioning that way and should ultimately take less water once everything is established. And if it doesn't, I suppose that's what the two new 50-gallon rain barrels are for. It turns out the clerodendrum is finally flowering, which I hope I didn't disrupt by transporting it. If the weather holds tomorrow, I can retrieve the trellis I made for the second planter and finally get the passionflower vines a coworker donated to the cause in the ground and trained to it.