The Great Autumn Migration 18 October 2008

The great autumn migration has begun – the moving of tender plants from outdoors to indoors.   At sunrise today it was 38 F, not factoring in the brisk wind.  It’s supposed to reach the mid-30s tonight, and there’s a larger chance of an actual frost tomorrow night.  Yesterday I moved the potted tender plants indoors (except for the petunias, which were already not doing too well, and the potted purple basil, which was already flowering anyway), and the number of plants in my apartment has dramatically increased:

Before the First Migration:

• 12 catci
• 3 aloe: 1 Aloe vera, 1 Tiger’s Jaw aloe, 1 miniature aloe I got at the fall plant sale
• 3 other succulents: a Christmas cactus (also from the fall plant sale), a jade plant, and an echeveria
• numerous other houseplants: umbrella plant, variegated ivy, dieffenbachia, 2 sad African violets, 2 philodendrons, pothos, spider plant, tender cyclamen, and an unknown variegated plant

After the First Migration, this is what has been added:

• 7 pots of tender geraniums, 2-4 plants in each pot (mix of ornamental & scented ones)
• 2 pots of tuberose bulbs (1 pot single-flowering, 1 pot double-flowering)
• bay leaf tree
• lemongrass
• brugmansia ‘Charles Grimaldi’ (one of the oldest brugmansia cultivars still available in the US)
• a pot containing 2 fucshias and a tender sweet violet
• tweedia
• gotu kola
• cestrum ‘Orange Zest’
• snail vine

And I still have to pot up some things that are out there in the garden.

[The brugmansia and some of the geraniums have already survived one winter inside.  The rest of the plants are spending their first winter indoors.]

These are the plants I’m most strongly considering adding to the indoor fray:

• My three rosemary plants (‘Arp’, ‘Tuscan Blue’, and ‘Irene’)
• Flowering tobaccos – supposed to be easy to overwinter inside, according to a book I read this month
• Coleus plants & irisene & Persian shield & quicksilver (all foliage plants)
• Salvia discolor, which is difficult to find in the US
• Cuban oregano (a relative of coleus, it looks like a very fuzzy one), which is common as a houseplant so should be easy to overwinter, and is difficult to find in my region
• Lantana ‘Samantha’, the variegated lantana I grew this year
• Salvia ‘Indigo Spires’, which is not hardy in my climate, and is currently blooming away in the garden
• Agapanthus

Exactly where I would fit all these, I am not yet sure!  The table is already nearly full, and that’s with some of the tender plants being elsewhere in the apartment.

On top of that, when I went to the nursery greenhouse today to get a present, I ended up getting two blooming African violets and a begonia.  The begonia was because I’d never seen the cultivar ‘Escargot’ locally and I find it so charming (its leaves intricately curl like a snail’s shell), and the African violets because having sad, diseased ones makes me sad, and now that the A/C is out of the east window, African violets will do so well there (I know because before they became diseased at some point after being moved out of the window to make room for the A/C in May, my older African violets were happy in it), and so I got a couple of blooming ones.  I think I’d best put a moratorium on further plant purchases, though.

(I apologize for the lack of apostrophes in captions; WordPress’s photo software won’t allow them.)

Tender plants, just brought in yesterday: Brugmansia Charles Grimaldi is the huge plant in the foreground.

Newly indoor plants from the other side. My apartment kitchen is very large (by city standards) but makes very poor use of space, with most of it simply empty floor/walls. I take advantage of this in winter by setting up a large card table and putting most of the tender plants on it. One of the two windows faces south and the other faces east, so it gets heaps of sunlight in wintertime.

Brugmansia Charles Grimaldi, newly indoors & with six buds: I felt badly bringing this inside since it seemed to be doing so well outside, but kept reminding myself that a slightly sadder indoor plant was better than a newly dead (frost-killed) outdoor plant. I will be curious to see if its buds open indoors.

Tuberose, blooming indoors: The last tuberose was budded instead of blooming when I brought it in yesterday. Overnight, the first bud opened! This is the double-flowered variety. Tuberoses, popular in Victorian days, have a scent that makes me imagine that this is what Tahiti smells like.

Pothos (foreground), one of the philodendrons, and five of the tender geraniums (4 scented, 1 ornamental).

A closer look at the geraniums from the last photo. The 4 scented ones are some of the scented ones I mentioned here that I got at the end-of-season sale at the nursery. The pink-flowered ornamental one is the one I got at the farmers market this year.

Gotu kola, newly indoors: I have yet to find anything on overwintering gotu kola, a tender medicinal plant, so thus far I am making it up as I go along. I set it on the window seat when the sun lights it, and move it up to a shelf (out of kittypaw reach) the rest of the time. The pot is one I bought from a local potmaker last year.

Cacti in south window: The cacti seem to do well all year round in this south-facing window. If you look closely, you can see the Earth Machine composter in the background, which I now use to store finished compost that hasnt been sieved yet.

Houseplants in eastern window (L-R): Tiger Jaw aloe, 2 African violets, spider plant, another philodendron, jade plant.

Aloe vera: After taking the above photos, I rearranged one of my kitchen shelves to make a space for the Aloe vera, which loves such a direct-sun spot as this and which should be safer away from the newly indoor plants (just in case any have brought along a disease or pest).

The aforementioned present that I got at the greenhouse today, an indoor orchid. I wont be visiting till tomorrow, so for today I have it in the kitchen, sequestered from the other plants to limit chances of disease/pest transfer.

While away / Since returning 15 August 2008

While I was gone, one of the places where I stayed had an organic garden on the grounds.  The garden was gorgeous and a lot of wildlife inhabited it.  Three hummingbirds seemed to live in the garden, and spent a lot of time nectaring at the flowers in it.

Hummingbird at cleome in Santa Fe foothills

Another hummingbird at cleome

Yet another hummingbird at cleome

I took a ton of pictures of the garden and will post more another time.

…

It’s been raining almost every day since I returned from New Mexico, so I’ve done little in the garden but weed.  (How easily most weeds slide out of soaked soil!)  I’ve still got a big pile of plants to plant, and I’ve added more to it.  The nursery is in the midst of their sale frenzy, and no surprise, as it’s the time of year nurseries go crazy for sales.  They are selling off their remaining herbs at $1.98 each, so I bought several.  I’ve got another horehound and another oregano ‘Hopley’s Purple’, as well as a “true oregano” (as the tag calls it), a basil that was starting to bolt (I saw how much the bees were going crazy for the flowers on the already-bolted basil plants, and bought it just for them), gotu kola (a medicinal herb that’s tender here and which I’m going to attempt to overwinter indoors), and four scented geraniums – lemon rose, ginger, lime, and an untagged one that smells sort of like an organic suntan lotion and has beautiful small, crinkly leaves that seem on the silvery end of green and gorgeous small white flowers (it’s the only one that was flowering at the nursery, and the last of its kind so I couldn’t check the tag of another pot of the same cultivar).  That beautiful variegated scented geranium I got in spring hadn’t fully sold out, much to my surprise, so I almost got a second one, but decided that was excessive.

The nursery got another delivery of annuals yesterday, so I went back today to get some more plants and a couple of window boxes to put the scented geraniums in.  I got four mums to pot up and put on either side of the building’s front door (and the pots to put them in), three ornamental peppers to replace one of the pansy patches that died while I was gone, two large pots of pansies to replace the other two mostly dead pansy/viola patches that also died while I was gone, and a gaura, which I got just because the bees and I like them. Later today I potted up the scented geraniums and the mums.  I put the yellow double mum and the single mum with red petals and a yellow center in one pot and the double dark mauve mum and the double deep orange mum in the other pot, and they’re now framing the doorway, making the building look much cheerier.  I bought less expensive pots for the mums than I normally would as I live on a busy street and am assuming there’s a possibility they’ll be stolen.  (While I was gone, a marigold plant was dug up and taken, and several clusters of ripe parsley seeds were simply broken off the plant and removed by another thief.  Such is gardening in the city.) The ornamental peppers were the nursery manager’s idea.  She thought it would be neat to have something so different in one of the spots where the pansies had been.  She knew the delivery was coming in on Thursday, and advised me to wait for them to come instead of impulse-buying a less fitting filler.

I still need to place my fall-planted bulb orders.  I know that I’m getting the orders in so late that I’ve missed out on some of the returning customer discounts and early bird sales and such, but I’ve had such a busy past month I just haven’t had time to even organize it all.  Yesterday I sat down and wrote out my annual list of bulbs I think would be good in the different microclimates, and soon I will go through and see what’s still available on Old House Gardens’ website and place an order.   After I see what I get from them, I’ll think about what else I’d like to order and from whom.  I also especially like Odyssey Bulbs and Brent and Becky’s Bulbs. Ideally I’d like to add some more colchicums to the colchicum bed since they seem to do so well there, but I don’t know if I’m too late to order them (they are not just fall-planted but fall-blooming, so they usually need to be ordered earlier than bulbs that simply are stuck in the ground in autumn to bloom the following year).  I didn’t understand the full glory of colchicums till I created this bed last year.  Being able to see them up close in a raised bed shows their best side.

This week in the garden 29 May 2008

The local farmers’ market started yesterday. I always get at least two lavenders there – ‘Lady’ and ‘French Fringed’, which are consistently sold by one of the longest-running organic farms there and not usually hardy here – as well as cooking thyme if it hasn’t survived the winter and some six-packs of annuals. So this week I got both lavenders and the cooking thyme, as well as lemon thyme, an especially pretty geranium (this one has petals with bright pink outer petals and white inner petals, as well as unusual leaves that are much darker in the rest of the leaf than the very outer edges) and six-packs of marigold ‘Safari Red’, marigold ‘Honeycomb’, and generic mixed gazanias, all from one farm I’ve been buying plants from for many years.

I also found out that the farm that’s been selling the best, most robust perennials I’ve ever had the pleasure to grow is leaving the business after sixteen years, and next week will be their final time at our farmers’ market, so I got two perennials from them (at least half their week’s plants had been sold in the first half-hour of the market by fellow panic buyers, so by the time I stopped there, their stock was already limited), monkshood ‘Sparks’ AKA ‘Spark’s Variety’ and delphinium ‘Butterfly Blue’. The farmers told me that unlike other delphiniums, this one prefers full sun and likes hot conditions, so that’s where I planted it when I got home yesterday, and so far it’s doing great even though I haven’t even taken the time to hand-water it and it’s almost eighty F and brilliantly sunny today. According to the farmers, monkshood ‘Sparks’ can easily attain heights of six to eight feet (two-plus meters) and is completely unfazed by strong winds. Today I poked about a bit online and so far, nothing comes even close to that estimate. However, I think it’s the monkshood grown by a local gardening friend and hers easily reaches five feet, often more. I don’t know if New England is a better place to grow it than the climates of what I’ve been reading or what else. I’ll be curious to see what height it gets to in the garden here.

There’s a new farm at the market this year that specializes in herbs, and yesterday they had a stand full of herb plants, but they didn’t have any signs identifying themselves as organic and the staff wasn’t the friendliest yesterday so I didn’t ask them about it, and am not sure yet whether they use pesticides/etc. or whether they are like some of the other farms and just aren’t certified as organic despite using all-organic practices (which means that they’re not allowed to use the term, now that the US government has a certification process for it). There are a few other farms at the market that are the latter, so I know it’s a possibility. Hopefully I’ll get to ask them next week. They had some gorgeous geraniums, but I forced myself to stop at buying the one from the other farm. My geranium fanaticism is getting to be a bit much.

On Tuesday (the 27th) we had severe storms, thunder rattling the buildings with rain coming so fast and thick that the gutters couldn’t hold it all and it rolled off the roof in waves, pouring past my windows as I stood at one watching newly fallen rain blow off other roofs before it even had a chance to roll off. This rain has apparently been most excellent for the garden, as so much more has been happening in it since.

For example, some of the California poppies have finally abruptly budded; here’s one:

The sundial lupine has continued its blooming progression:

A third bud has formed since the rain, too.

The blue-on-blue felicias have gone crazy, tons of their buds opening now.

The salpiglossis have budded:

Shown here with stock (peach bloom in center), euphorbia (upper left), and quicksilver (silvery fuzzy leaves on right).

Some of the new stuff —

Marigold ‘Honeycomb’

It is one of my favorite marigolds.

Marigold ‘Safari Red’

Lemon thyme

Gazania (orange) with pansies and a snapdragon

Most of the gazanias at the farm stand were already blooming. I picked a pack in oranges and yellows to balance out the (still not blooming) ‘Talent Mix’ gazanias I bought at the nursery. In my experience ‘Talent Mix’ tends to bloom primarily in mauve and pale yellow.

Another gazania (two blooms)

The two bronzy-leaved plants and the variegated one are all lantanas. The two are ‘Lavender Trailing’ and the third is a new-to-me (not sure if it’s new-in-general) one, ‘Samantha’. I’ve grown ‘Lavender Trailing’ several times before and it’s the one lantana I try to grow every year. ‘Samantha’ is budded (has been since I planted it) but has not yet bloomed. It’s supposed to bloom in a lemony yellow.

Another gazania

I don’t know if you can see the tiny pollinator on one of the perennial sweet alyssum blooms down below the gazania in this shot. This is the first year I’ve grown perennial sweet alyssum and I’ve been amazed at just how big a hit it is with small pollinators (many of whom also go on to either kill pests or lay eggs that turn into hatchlings that kill pests).

One more gazania

Dianthus ‘Double North’ with lavender foliage and iris foliage

This one’s new at the nursery this year. I got it there recently and planted it yesterday. It’s got a nice fragrance.

The front garden, half in sun and half in shadow:

Skipping ahead 24 May 2008

I hope to write some longer posts about things that have been going on the past week-plus in the garden (bits of it summarized in the post before this one) but for now I’m going to talk about today.

The Carolina lupine/false lupine (Thermopsis villosa) has been blooming for several days.  Here’s what it looks like as of today:

The sundial lupine (Lupinus perennis) has been budded for at least a few days.  Here’s its biggest bud as it looks today:

The pansies have been doing better in this mild weather with sporadic clouds and drenching sometimes-rain. Here are the pastel ones with so many other things.

Creeping snapdragons (in pink and yellow) in front of the pansies; African daisy (orange) and perennial candytuft (white) and felicia (budded by the candytuft) directly behind them; the edge of the perennial sweet alyssum (bright yellow) and bacopa (light lavender) to their left (with a seedling).

Here’s a closeup from the same section, some of the pansies with one of the creeping snapdragon blooms

So cheerful that maybe it should be illegal, isn’t it?  I’m so glad the slugs have finally stopped eating all the blue-and-yellow pansy blooms.

More pansies, this time with violas and sweet alyssum:

The sometimes red, sometimes yellow, sometimes both viola is that new(ish) one ‘Tiger Eye’ or Tiger Eyes’.  Interesting, the color seems to vary depending on how much sun vs. shade it gets.  From what I can  tell so far, the more sun the bloom gets, the yellower it is. The more shade, the redder.   Additionally, see how well the sweet alyssum has filled in?  I’m glad I planted it spaced instead of all crammed together.

The focus of this shot is euphorbia ‘Diamond Frost’, that I talked about here around the time I got it. I wanted to take a photo to illustrate the airy look I was talking about.  It is that airy green plant with white-with-green-centers flowers in the middle of this shot.

Blurry in the foreground are lamb’s ears ‘Silver Carpet’, dianthus ‘Beatrix’ (blooming earlier than it naturally would because I ordered another one from Select Seeds this year in case the two I grew last year had winterkilled, as it was my best-performing dianthus last year, blooming in flushes sporadically all summer and a bit into autumn; I am guessing it has some border carnation heritage), and California poppy foliage. In the background is echinacea foliage and bearded iris foliage, amongst other things.

The agastache I got this week at the nursery

Rose campion ‘Gardener’s World’ (center, silver stalks/leaves) looks like it’s going to bloom soon:

I planted this last year, but it didn’t bloom, just formed a rosette that survived until an ice storm coated the garden in early December.  In the foreground are dianthus bloomstalks with buds, a pansy, one of the two Small’s penstemons I planted this year (reddish leaves), and the variegated catmint I planted this year (at the foot of the rose campion). Directly behind it is one of the lavenders that survived the winter.

This is one of the two creeping bellflowers I planted last year:

It survived the winter more robustly than the other one, though you may be able to see that it hasn’t crept as far as last year (a little bit of its remnants from last year are still visible).  It looks like it’s formed a couple buds.  I can’t remember which species of creeping bellflower it is so I’m not positive when it’s supposed to start blooming.  This one is planted near the sweet alyssums, close to the retaining wall’s edge and in the windiest section of the garden.  The other one is planted towards the other side of the bed (also close to the wall’s edge) and only within the past week or two did its leaves get big enough to become recognizable.

Stock, still blooming

The single-flowered ones are getting much leggier much faster this year than the doubles.  I don’t know why.

One of the new-this-year euphorbias (the purplish-red leafed one) has been blooming its heart away. I planted salvia ‘Brenthurst’ next to it this year.

It’s not a color choice I would choose for the long-term, but the fact that the euphorbia is going to go out of bloom led me to do such a risky color pairing.  I grew salvia ‘Brenthurst’ (tender here) last year next to the tender foliage plant quicksilver, which has very silver, very fuzzy, very large leaves on reddish stalks.  I decided to do the same again, but for now quicksilver is getting its footing, like it did last year.  (It needs a period of adjustment to my garden’s dry, windy, hot conditions and then it will flourish.)  So for now I have the quicksilver leaning against the stock clump for support, and the salvia with the chartreuse euphorbia “blooms” (I imagine they’re really bracts, like they tend to be on euphorbias). Last year ‘Brenthurst’ took some time to adjust to the wind conditions in the garden, but it seems to be doing better this year with them (and have we ever had some very windy days, for here, since it was planted). I think it might be because this year’s plant has more stems and is less leggy than last year’s initially was, but I’m not positive.

The perennial candytuft has been doing great. Here it is with a small insect on one of the blooms.

In the background in the above shot is what’s in focus in the below shot, a white-flowering heliotrope,  drooping.

Heliotrope is like quicksilver – it needs some time to adjust to this garden’s conditions.  This year I mulched it with compost, hoping that would help, but it seems to not be making much of a difference so far.  For heliotrope, it needs a little time to develop a taproot.  I know of heliotrope’s taproot (which I haven’t seen mentioned in any references, though perhaps I just haven’t read the right source) because I once kept one in a pot and was so pleased at how well it was flourishing, and then went to move it – and realized it was doing so well because its taproot had gone out a hole in the bottom of the pot and rooted into nearby soil.  This white bloomer is much less common than varying shades of purple.   Heliotrope blooms smell like vanilla.  Newer cultivars don’t always have as much of a scent as the parent species and older cultivars, so if you’re buying it in a nursery, sniff ones with open blooms to see.

I got a tip this morning that the big-box grocery store, of all places, had decent-quality geraniums on sale at around $1.75 each.  Apparently word had been spreading on the steal of a price, and the tipster warned me that they might be sold out by now.  I went down there this morning – geraniums are enough of a weakness for me that I overwinter them – and bought six in interesting colorations.  I’ll pot them up soon (meant to do it today, but the day has gotten away from me).

More another time.