Gardening by Mistake

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.

Several days ago I posted Roses, Lace, and Aliens and included two pictures of some odd looking echinacea flowers. A reader (Barbee) saw that and told me I might have a problem. She referred me to Mr. McGregor’s Daughter‘s blog where this had been discussed recently. The pictures I saw there didn’t look the same as what I found on my plants, so I asked MMD and readers to please look at mine and tell me what they thought. MMD graciously looked and took the time to break the news to me: my echinacea has a problem.

I followed MMD’s suggestion and found a post in the Perennials forum at GardenWeb. That gave me the word phytoplasm to follow and that led me to the MoBot website. It so often seems that a stop along my research trail is at the MoBot website. In this case, MoBot has provided great information on my problem: Aster Yellow. I had never even heard of this before. Clearly, I haven’t grown asters (although I did plant some this year). It turns out that a whole lot more than just asters are vulnerable to this condition and the condition is irreversible.

My thanks to Barbee for alerting me to my likely problem and to MMD for confirming that it was, indeed, a problem.

I’m going to cut all the normal looking flowers and have one heck of a bouquet to enjoy inside before I remove that infected plant.