Gardening by Mistake

I was delighted recently to discover a new plant, grown from winter sowing, is a first-year blooming plant: ruellia humilis. This is a native to Missouri, familiarly called the wild petunia, although it is not related to petunias. There are other reasons to like this perennial aside from its early bloom. It is one tough plant, dealing with a brutally sunny spot and getting only rain for moisture, not to mention our high humidity.  That’s the beauty of a native plant in its preferred environment!

Another winter-sown plant has turned out to be a first-year bloomer as well: agastache foeniculum. This one is not technically a native to my area, although it’s a native in neighboring states, so I cheated an included it for this year.

The flooding we had this past weekend washed away part of my pocket prairie. That is, I’d put down a thick layer of cardboard topped with leaves in an attempt to smother all the nasty stuff growing there already (like poison ivy– what fun!) before I planted my prairie plants.  That seemed to be working beautifully. The water washed away the leaves and some of the cardboard. Once I can get out there again without walking through water an inch deep, I’ll see if I can’t repair some of the damage. The fence at the far end of the garden caught a lot of the leaves, so I might be able to haul them back to the prairie area.

The fact that I hadn’t been able to plant my prairie seems like a blessing in hindsight. I’ve been frustrated that I couldn’t get that planted this year but there’s an upside. It would be worse to get it planted and lose a bunch of plants to the flooding. The prairie didn’t get done this year for two reasons: the first was that the cardboard and leaves hadn’t decomposed as I’d thought they would. Hopefully that won’t be the case next year, and if it is, I’ll consider removing the cardboard since it will have been smothering things for over a year at that point. The other reason was that I had the darndest time getting the native grasses to grow, and at a certain point it became personal so that I’m determined to do it myself rather than buy plugs or small plants.

I did end up getting big bluestem to grow… I thought. In fact, it grew much more vigorously than the little bluestem. And when it got big enough, I couldn’t see that it was different from some invasive weed grasses. I just don’t know enough about the various grasses to know for sure. The big bluestem seed came from a trade, however, rather than a commercial source, so I worried that it was mis-identified. I certainly didn’t want to plant an invasive non-native grass in my garden. I have enough of that to pull as it is! So that went bye-bye.

So I’ve come up with a different approach to getting my prairie. I’m going to try some native grasses that are supposed to be easier to grow. And I’m going to keep trying the big and little bluestem at the same time.  As I said, that’s become a personal challenge. I’ve ordered the seed and I’m going to get busy with it as soon as it gets here. If I can get some germinations, the plants will still have most 4 months for growing.  They might be large enough for planting next year.

I think the last of the rain we got in our recent deluge was Sunday morning. Before it had all started Saturday morning, I’d put a cover over one tub of plants I didn’t want to drown. I left it covered. In fact, I forgot it was covered until about 30 minutes ago. It was a beautiful, mostly sunny morning. Rain was supposed to be out of our forecast except for about a 20% chance of rain.

I guess we’re that 20%. In the blink of an eye, clouds covered the sky and rain started pouring down. And it continued to pour for about 20 minutes now. A heavy downpour. My plants had been uncovered for about 10 minutes. They are now floating. (I didn’t notice the clouds until the rain began pouring. I wasn’t interested in getting drenched, so the plants remained uncovered.)

I keep going back to one of the WS lessons I wrote about previously: next year, I’m using drain holes in my containers. Being able to bottom water by pouring some water into those tubs is nice. But the rest of the time it’s a real nuisance. Next year, I’m going to lose a lot fewer plants because of this.

A reader wrote and asked for information for germinating liriope muscari.  A study was conducted at the University of Kentucky to determine the “optimal temperature requirements and stratification period required to break dormancy in Liriope muscari.” The write up of this study and its findings is a PDF found here. This is the information upon which I based my treatment of the liriope seeds I received in January.

I’ll have more to share about my experience with growing liriope from seed in a few weeks.  Believe it or not, I just potted up more of the seeds from my original batch in January. These were handled differently and I’m waiting to see the results before I write more on it.

A good general write-up of liriope can be found here.

Whew! I’m tired after several hours in the garden in the worst heat of the day. (Not good planning on my part.) I got some weeding done and, most importantly, planted another 29 perennials (all grown from seed through winter sowing) in my garden beds. That was a big chunk of the plants that are of a size that I feel is big enough to be planted in the garden. I have a whole lot more on the patio that are not yet big enough. That’s 51 perennials I planted this week and a total of 94 perennials added to the rose beds so far this year.

If there is only one thing I’ll take away from my first year of WSing, it will be to cover all my pots with screen before the spring seeds start flying. I spent more than 4 hours today weeding my little pots. I’ve gotten 80 pots cleared out, but that still leaves another 120+ to deal with. I suppose there are a couple good points to this: It’s a reason to give each plant a close examination and it gives me some idea of what I have out there and how many of each. One thing I’ve noticed: the echinacea that survived the big flood might as well not have. They are pitiful little things. For now I’m leaving them alone, but I may decide to yank them and use their pots for something else. All the rain we’ve continued to get post-flood has made them extremely unhappy.

This past winter, before I sowed my pots of aster oblongifolius, I checked to see what information I could  about germination rates. I read more than one person say it has a low germination rate. Since I really wanted to have some, I sowed a lot of it. Well, it turns out the lowest germination rate was about 50%. So of the gazillion seeds I sowed, I now have about half a gazillion seedlings. Oh my goodness! It’s a good thing my parents just moved and my mom wants a butterfly garden. Guess who’s getting a lot of asters!

It’s not turning lemons into lemonade, but I did take the pots that had dead seedlings from the flood and replant them with new seedlings. (When I did this I discovered that one of those pots has its own resident worm! I left him there. If he stays there, he’ll be providing a gentle fertilizer.) My winter sow bin is still loaded with pots of seedlings needing to be individually potted up. The pots with the most recent germinations have tiny seedlings at this point, but the older pots have seedlings that really need their own homes now. Getting those pathetic (and accusing) empty pots filled up was a good impetus toward making progress. So yesterday I got 3 tomato plants (Tom Thumb grown from seed) potted into their large containers for the year and I potted up to larger pots  7 purple prairie clover and 6 New Jersey Tea plants (my plan for the front border calls for 12, so I’ll be starting more), 5 gaillardia grandiflora, and 21 pots of campanula rotundifolia. The next candidate for a pot full of seedlings to replant is solidago nemoralis. I’ve got to take a look at what’s already out there and see what I might be able to plant into the garden– I’m going to need those pots for the other seedlings! I’m also going to need another bag of potting soil!

A week ago today I was busy squeezing water from water-logged pots. As I feared, I lost a bunch of plants. I haven’t taken a complete inventory, but of the 40 pots of mostly echinacea ‘Prairie Splendor,’ I’ve lost 29. Ouch. That one will be going on my list of seeds to start more of.

I also lost a couple of my New Jersey Tea babies. They are adapted for our dry prairies and they did not appreciate all that water. I potted up to bigger pots my remaining 6. I need at least 12 for my front border. I’ll be starting more of these, as well. There’s no way they’ll be large enough to be planted out in the fall, so I’ll be growing these under lights all winter or they’ll go into a cold frame for the winter.

I may have lost an entire tub of echinacea ‘Prairie Splendor’ seedlings. That’s 40 plants. And that’s not the end of my likely losses, either. So what happened?

Quite simply: the tarp didn’t work. And, worse, I thought it had, so I didn’t check on the plants. It looked like more rain yesterday, so I didn’t want to pull the tarp back and then have to fight with it to cover the plants again. Now, of course, I wish I had. The plants floated in water 24 hours longer than they should have.  Some plants have taken it remarkably well (at least so far) but others, like the echinacea, are looking pretty horrible.

I spent a couple hours Monday emptying the tubs and literally squeezing water from each pot before putting them back in their tubs. I was trying to figure out some way to wick some of the water out of the pots while I did this. I had an idea and I’m just trying it out. If it works, I’ll post it. One good thing is that it was windy Monday. That should help a bit toward drying out the soil.

There’s another lesson in this: have drain holes. I purposefully did not have drain holes in my tubs (obviously each pot has them) because I thought I could bottom water that way. I wasn’t thinking ahead at that time to the spring rains that come inches at a time. Doh! I’m trying to decide now whether I want to add holes at this point. I’m leaning toward no, aware of the fact that I’ll have to do better with covering them the next time it rains.

I’m mad at and very upset with myself about this. Some of the plants out there I started in November (New Jersey Tea and some native grasses) and grew over the winter under lights. The bulk of them are from winter sowing which I started at the beginning of January. Months and hours of work and care, floating. It’s not just that time and effort that upsets me, but also the fact that I lose an entire year for anything that doesn’t get planted this year. In the case of some of the bushes and slower growing perennials, that’s important.

I’ve already had doubts about my ability to ever turn these garden beds into something I can be proud of. The ongoing flooding in the garden and this just magnifies my doubts and feelings of being overwhelmed.

I’m not even going to number these. I managed to commit a whole bunch in a short space.

Yesterday we got rain. It had been 2 weeks since we’d had any and 5 days since I’d watered my WS seedlings. I figured they’d probably like another drink. The forecast was .1 – .25 inches– a great amount for my pots in tubs.

Ha! THREE inches later, my pots are literally floating in their tubs, and that’s after I dumped the tubs out about 1/2 way through. Those poor, poor babies.

Fortunately, tubs of floating pots accounts for “only” 140 of my seedlings. The other tubs were also emptied 1/2 way through the rain but I covered them with a tarp. I haven’t yet checked to see if they got flooded somehow anyway— I’m kind of afraid to. I do wonder, though, why I felt like I didn’t need to cover the 3 tubs on my deck when I covered all the tubs down on my patio. The brain works in mysterious ways. My brain, anyway.

So, one mistake might have been to believe the forecast. Or maybe it was not double checking it once the rain started. A definite mistake was not covering those 3 tubs of pots after I drained them the first time.

I’ve emptied the tubs at this point. Later, I’ll be heading back out to squeeze some of the water out of the pots. They are that saturated.

There’s a good chance of more storms tonight. Ack.