This stuff will ruin your mind!

Gardening messes with your head.

Consider this. I cook for my dog. I've done so for the last four years. Each batch of dog food requires a dozen eggs. Then I throw out the shells.

But... I read somewhere that eggshell is good for plants.

Really?

Ok, whatever.

So first I cooked dog food. Then I painstakingly crushed all the eggshells into tiny bits, measured it out (it yielded 4 oz of eggshell), split it evenly between my two lemon trees, and carefully raked it into the dirt.

Good grief... I think even cat ladies laugh at me.

Baobab Friday

Adansonia digitata, now three inches tall. As you can see (or at least I can), the baby leaves have fallen away and now it's just a tree with adult leaves. Banzai!

As for Adansonia za, it entered immortality... some time this week. It's hard to tell with a tree, exactly when it dies. But it's not only merely dead, it's really most sincerely dead. So I boiled another seed and put it in with Adansonia digitata. It should sprout in about two weeks.

And that was Baobab Friday... on Saturday.

Baobab yesterday and baobab tomorrow

It seems I forgot to download the latest baobab photo onto my laptop this morning, so no baobab today.

I know. I'm sad too.

More on this tomorrow.

AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAGH!!!!!!!

I SLEW MY HEAD PUMPKIN!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAGH!!!!!!!!!

AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAGH!!!!!!!

.

.

.

AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAGH!!!!!!!!!!!

I slew my head pumpkin.

The candidate on the north vine had died, it was in my way, and its leaves were tattered and brown from being in the way of traffic all the time. I decided to cut it off. But I made a mistake while trying to trace the vine to its origin, and cut off the east vine instead.

AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAGH!!!!!!!

He was a prince among pumpkins. The Jack Layton of pumpkins: a true leader, dead before his time.

On the other hand, it appears on closer inspection that there were brown spots on the bottom, so maybe it was gonna rot and die anyway.

I still have one left, on the south vine, which was the healthiest vine anyway. This candidate is sitting on the lawn, where I had also recently relocated the late Great Pumpkin. Maybe the lawn is too humid for them. So, I put a chunk of rigid insulation under the Last Pumpkin. But even if that one makes it, it's eleven days behind the late Great Pumpkin, and that matters this late in the season. But maybe with only one vine instead of three, it will grow faster.

Well, it was only a pumpkin. I know a guy who ran over and killed his own daughter while drunk-driving. All I did was kill my pumpkin.

Pumpy-umpy-umpkin

This is my lead pumpkin. It's firm and firmly attached to its stem, and shows no sign of wanting to let itself die. On the other hand, if you read my interview in the local newspaper, where it says the pumpkin is "the size of a baseball", that's not true, nor did I say such a thing. This here pumpkin is a total of two (2) inches in diameter. World's smallest baseball... but it's the biggest pumpkin I've ever grown yet. I hope it doesn't die soon.

There are two more candidates, one on the north vine, pollinated August 19, looks like it's gonna die, and one on the south vine, pollinated yesterday, no idea yet whether it will live or die. And I've been saying the boss pumpkin is on the "south" vine but it's really on the east vine. So now I have one candidate on each vine. But really I'm gonna chop two off pretty soon. It's only three weeks to first frost, there's no point keeping these late-blooming pumpkins around.

Er... What's up, Doc?

It occurs to me that I shouldn't have planted all my morning glories together, because:


What is this, exactly? Scarlet O'Hara? Crimson Rambler? The pink thing from the mix?

I'm calling it Scarlet O'Hara, but your guess is as good as mine.

Also:


The colour didn't work out all that well, on account of it being white. In reality it was more ivory with a pink aura around the centre. I have never seen a photo or read a description of any such thing. It's not Pearly Gates and it's certainly not a moonflower. In this photo you can see faintly some streaks of colour on the bottom right petal, so I'm calling it part of the Carnival mix, which also produced this:


The autofocus doesn't like it, but it's really pretty.

I've been trying to find an authoritative treatise on morning glories, but no luck so far. Maybe I'll have to write my own some day... if I can ever figure out all the different cultivars. I'm still not sure whether Star of Yelta, Feringa and Grandpa Ott are all the same or all different, and I have several colours that came from mixes and don't have any particular name.

Then once I know everything about morning glories, I'll have to do the same with pansies.

Sweet Enola Gay!

That pink bud that I was pretty sure was a dianthus opened, and it's this:


A lavatera. Good thing I didn't put money on the dianthus hypothesis.

Why is there a lavatera in the Jungle?

Because last year I had lavateras in Planter #2, which I then dumped into the Jungle at the beginning of this year. Actually, I'm surprised there hasn't been more surprise stuff coming up in the Jungle from previous years.

Well, now we know. Never bet on what's in the Jungle.

BOOYA!

Wow. I never even won anything before, except in Pony Club but that was more the pony's doing than mine.

The judges had mentioned a "small cash prize" and I figured if I won (which I didn't think I would) I could use it to buy fall bulbs, since it's not committed elsewhere. Turns out the cash prize is about three times what I expected. Mmmmm... Bulbs...

And the baobabs did get mentioned, by the way, though the presenter forgot what they're called. See, it pays to have your own baobab!

Baobab Friday

This is Adansonia digitata. I'm sure you all recognize it by now. You'd see it walking on the street and you'd be like "OMG, you're Adansonia digitata!!!! Can I get a picture?" It has shot up another 2/3 of an inch this week to the towering height of 2 13/16. Inches. Majestic, isn't it?

What you probably don't realize from this photo is that it's sitting right in the picture window. Not "on" as in on a sill, since there is none, but right in the window frame. Because I've been keeping the baobabs inside at night as it's getting colder, and on rainy days, and instead of moving it out this morning to get the sun, I simply set it in the window like that.

As you can imagine, moments after this photo was taken, I knocked it over with my knee while entering from the balcony. It fell right upside down and all the dirt spilled. "Oh no!" I thought, "I've slain my mighty baobab!"

Not even. When I righted the pot, two thirds of the dirt had fallen out, but the baobab was sitting right there, completely unfazed, with all its dirt right in place. Like James Bond, coming through crazy adventures looking fresh out of an Oscar de la Renta ad. Which tells us one important thing: this baobab has a sturdy root system. And another thing I learned while scooping the displaced dirt back into place is that, as I suspected long ago, the other two seeds have vanished. I figured the Magic Fungus must have eaten them. In theory, seeds can lie in soil for months and sprout when the time is right, but in my garden, that doesn't happen. If you don't start growing fast, the fungus eats you. I'm thinking I should get some fungicide for next spring.

Meanwhile, Adansonia za is definitely knocking on heaven's door, and I'm sure the other two seeds are long gone too. So, I just boiled one of the two reserve seeds, and I'm gonna change out the soil in that planter. Maybe I should sterilize some soil, but it's a touchy thing.

Anyway, that's Baobab Friday.

Two views of the Jungle

Here you can see the poppies, convolvulus, forget-me-not, a morning glory that's worked its way over from Insanity Plant, and if you have really good eyes, a Five Spot nemophila. In the bottom right corner you can see the top of the asters, and in the bottom left, the huge green leaves are the hollyhocks. And of course that tower of green on the left side is Insanity Plant.

One thing you can't see is that there is also a big and healthy clump of California bluebells, whereas the ones in the window boxes are long gone. But it's leaning outside the railing and impossible to get pictures of.


And these are obviously my poppies. You can see one Iceland one (the yellow spot on the left). There is also an orange one but you probably can't see that one. The Iceland poppies have been holding their own, but most of this is Flanders. I don't mind, and for next year I want them to lean out over the street like this again, but next year I'm gonna plant fancier varieties that don't come by the thousands. Or maybe I'll seed fancy varieties early in the spring, and once they've got a good headstart, I'll seed a pinch of Flanders, for volume.

Asters, pansies and English daisies

Asters are at the top, and as you can see, they're thriving, and they're all pink. Either the other colours take longer to flower, or this "mix" is not very well mixed.

Pansies are at the bottom, obviously, and looking more jungleicious all the time.

And on the right are the English daisies. Half of the English daisies. The other half, that I repotted a while back, is looking like this:


Hmmmmmm...

What I seeded are two mixes and one non-mix. All three packs had pink, the two mixes also had white. So why are all the pink flowers in one planter and all the white ones in the other? Is this another case of colour being dependent on sunlight? If so that's a rip-off. If I buy a mix of pink and white I expect to get pink and white, not pink if I put it in the sun and white if I put in in part shade.

Well, there is time yet. Four more weeks until first frost.

More nemophilas

These are the Baby Blue Eyes nemophilas, which are currently looking quite awesome. Too bad they didn't do this a week earlier for the Yards in Bloom people.


And these are Penny Black. They're smaller than the other two, but they're black. Ooooooh... black flower!


Also, the Wall of Insanity is trying to take over the window box.

Next year I'm gonna do something neater with these. They come by the thousands in a seed packet, so I could have them in every planter if I wanted. So I haven't quite decided where to put them, but I sure won't plant all 4000 together like that.

Another mystery plant

Actually, I have a guess on this one. I planted only three pink things in the Jungle: candytuft, dianthus, and four o'clock. But I whacked all the four o'clocks long ago, and candytuft makes clusters of tiny flowers, so this has to be a dianthus. Nonetheless, I'm not putting any money on it. All kinds of strange things are apt to happen in the Jungle; for all I know it's a tomacco plant.

Keep up the good work, pumpkin!

This is the current pumpkin candidate, six days after fertilization. It's in good health and I think it's even getting bigger.

Meanwhile, another female flower opened on the north vine, hidden between Insanity Plant and the Jungle, and although I had been keeping an eye on it, I didn't check this morning, and so I never noticed until after ten, when all the flowers were already wilting. I did get it fertilized, but that goes to show how high-maintenance these things are if you don't have a good supply of pollinating insects. The window of opportunity is about four hours, I think.

There is one more female bud on the south vine, which I expect to open tomorrow. Then I'd have three candidates. I hope one of them gets growing fairly aggressively so I can whack everything else; it would cut down on competition. Inshallah. (I'm a Lutheran, but Muslims have way cooler sayings than we do, so I use theirs.)

More dumb things I read in a book

It's funny, usually I'm a big fan of learning from books, then getting experience once you know the book. And usually I think if you're not doing what the book says, you're an ape and you shouldn't be a construction boss. (Don't mind me, I have a hate on for stupid construction bosses. And stupid bosses in general. But anyway.)

Apparently, this doesn't apply to gardening, because I keep reading books on gardening and like I said, each is dumber than the last. Some dumb things I've read in books so far include:

• Don't plant all your blue flowers together.


• Use treated lumber to make raised beds in your vegetable garden. (Seriously, do NOT do that. Treated lumber is treated with really evil pesticides which are carcinogenic and leech into the ground, thence into your vegetables. Some of it also contains arsenic.)


• Always plant odd numbers of each variety together.


• Don't have more than one garden gnome.

And the dumbest thing so far which I just read today: if a plant fails, never ever try it again.

What sense does that make? If a plant fails, figure out why and what you can do different, and try again. Unless the plant is very expensive and the odds of it succeeding are very low, what have you got to lose by trying again? I'm growing baobabs. If they fail, I'm sure as heck gonna try them again. I've tried flax three times and I'm getting closer to not failing every time. I had to do pansies two or three times before I got any flowers, and likewise asters, and now they're beautiful.

Like they say, quitters never win, winners never quit.

The enduring saga of the globe thistles

Now that the tall plants are tall and the shade plants are dead, I'm at last able to see what's growing under everything. And so I found my globe thistles, all still alive, but none more than 5" tall. There is one rogue among the flax, the first-born off to one side, and three in a clump about one inch apart. So I decided to try transplanting them together with the geranium and the lily. It's my pot of indeterminate perennials, that may or may not live until next year.

I dug my trowel into the soil about two inches on each side of the clumb of globes and it came out of the ground in one nice cohesive root ball, with about three inches of soil. I don't think that's a really good sign, because a perennial should have a lot more root by now; on the other hand, that means I didn't do them any harm. But while digging them new digs (haha, a pun!) I hit the root of the lily. The good news it, it look very healthy. The bad news is, you're not supposed to ding roots with a trowel.

Later that day, I looked them up in Lois Hole's Perennial Favorites and found that they're supposed to spread 18 to 24 inches, and they're supposed to make a really long taproot. Also, they bloom the second year.

Hmmmmm...

I suspect that if I'm gonna have any success growing perennials, I'm gonna have to mend my ways and stop crowding dozens of seeds per square inch. Annuals can live like that and they'll soon be dead anyway; perennials can live a long time and become quite large plants, if I'd only take care of them.

What I don't get though, is why if you break the taproot, the main plant dies, but if you try to get rid of the plant and leave some of the taproot in the ground, a new plant comes up. Why does it regenerate one way and not the other? Or is it only the weeds that can grow from a chunk of a taproot, and the desired plants that die when you break the taproot?

Who knows these things.

High-maintenance gardening

I've been reading gardening books lately and they seem each more worthless than the last. And one thing they all advocate is "low-maintenance gardening".

Really?

I love doing maintenance in my garden. Otherwise I wouldn't garden at all. In fact I'd like to be doing more maintenance right now.

Today I'm angry, bored and out of sorts. So, I messed with my garden. First of all, Insanity Plant was leaning more and more, and after this afternoon's fit of wind I couldn't get it back to normal. I cut off the top, thinking it was top-heavy, but that didn't help. I tried to rotate it so I could tether it from a different angle, but it was strangely immovable. So I investigated and found it had wound itself around everything it could: the pumpkin vine on the floor, the hollyhock in the Jungle, which it broke, the poppies, the balcony railing, the old chunk of cable, everything. And it was tight, too. I had to cut off some stems of various things to get it to rotate to a better angle, and now it's upright and stable with I think one guy line left and all the rest of the work done by its own vines. I think I'm gonna change its name to Codependence Plant.

The other thing with morning glories is that they make lots of yellow leaves. This doesn't seem to bother them much, and in any case, it's fall, leaves should be turning yellow. You just pull the yellow leaves and move on, but there are always more you can pull if you're angry, bored and out of sorts. Also I've been harvesting its seeds, and that takes a lot of looking through the foliage. I feel like one monkey grooming another, but then again, gardening makes me feel like a monkey in a weird behavioural experiment anyway. And besides, I'm in a bad mood and it suits me to think angry thoughts about monkeys.

Once I got things tidied up around Insanity Plant, that gave me access to parts of the Jungle that I hadn't even seen in weeks, which needed lots of tidying too. Then I swept up the debris and tried to move the pumpkin vine out of the way, and cracked it again. The current pumpkin candidate seems in good health so far, but its vine is cracked in at least three places now, so I don't know if it's going to die or if that doesn't bother it. I relocated it out of the way of traffic, more or less, but I'm pretty much resigned to having no pumpkins again this year.

After that I picked the yellow leaves out of the Wall of Insanity, and then I looked at the geraniums.

Ha. They look like death on toast.

So I brought the planter inside and started by skimming off a layer of soil because it had mold. Then I snipped off all the broken stems, dead flowers and damaged leaves. Then it was still an ugly, tangled web of deceit and ugliness, and it seemed to have an awful lot of stems considering only three seeds sprouted at all. But I finally identified the three loci from which it was growing, and I decided to pull two of them.


That's the geranium roots. All that for five ugly purple flowers? What a waste. I kept one, so it can try again next year, but I'm totally displeased with them. Then I dug up my oriental lily. I didn't knock the dirt off its root to see what it looked like, as I'm not trying to kill it. I moved it to the geranium pot and then put the pot back outside. That's gonna be a novel experience since it's been inside and in full shade all its life. And I do mean "full" shade, as in no direct sunlight whatsoever. The stem is very sturdy, but since it's still windy out, I put it between two planters of the Wall of Insanity, where the vines can give it some shelter and support.

Then this allowed me to put the 14" planter out on the balcony, which frees up some room in my living room, where it was looking ugly anyway.

After that I was still angry, bored and out of sorts, but at least I had killed a lot of time. Then I killed some more by looking through the plant catalog and thinking about what I'm doing next year. Though that's really impossible to predict, as I don't even know when I'll ever have money.

I'm going to bed now.

Death to daisies!

I whacked my Shasta daisies yesterday. They weren't anywhere near flowering and meanwhile they were interfering with my asters and pansies, and competing with the rest of the Jungle for resources. And like I've said before, at some point you have to bloom or die. So I killed them.

I wonder why I'm not succeeding with them, though, because the first year, when I planted a random wildflower mix and didn't have a clue what I was doing, I did have some daisies. They must have been a different variety. Or maybe something much more else, like a brachycome.

Ok, no more Shasta daisies, at least not for now. But for next year, I need something white, medium height, early flowering and not too agressive, to mix with my blue flowers. And until I get more seed catalogs, all I have for candidates are white zinnias, white osteospermums, or white geraniums. Or baby's breath, but I hate baby's breath. Or I suppose the verbena mix is blue and white.

I can't say I'm feeling very enthusiastic.

Gardening post-season

Actually, we're not quite reduced to that yet, but fall is progressing more and more rapidly. Yesterday I saw a flight of cranes going south, and more of them today. And my water curve is finally going down, and it's night at nights, and all that.

Yet, the garden is still growing. Something in the Jungle is making pink buds, and there are buds on the Wall of Insanity that may finally be something other than Star of Yelta. The nemophilas bounced back with a fourth wave, namely the Baby Blue Eyes. Nice to know for next year that the three varieties flower in succession: Five Spot, then Penny Black, then Baby Blue Eyes.

The downside of all this is that there isn't much gardening to do just now, and I'm bored. I could whack the pumpkins, but there is still hope. The asters and pansies are thriving. The English daisies are coming along a bit. The Wall of Insanity hasn't even started yet. The Jungle is full of mysterious lifeforms. I can't start more stuff, except trees, and I can't start decommissioning anything yet. Nothing needs repotting or weeding or anything.

What to do...

I'd like to buy a big garbage can and start dumping used soil into it so I can amend it, but it's not a good time to spend money.

I'd like to move the maydays to smaller planters, but I don't know how big their root balls are. I suppose I could check.

I'd like to move A. digitata to a bigger planter, but there's no need for that yet.

I'd like to kill the geranium, but the foliage is thriving and it's supposed to be a perennial.

I'd like to get the oriental lily into a much smaller planter, as I gave it the biggest I had because it was supposed to spread, and it hasn't. They should have mentioned that it takes years to spread out.

I'm bored and broke and I'd like to do some gardening, and nothing needs gardened. Some days I'm not in a very good mood.

My troubles are over!

Obviously not, since I'm still alive. And still not at work, either. Money would solve quite a few troubles.

However, should I ever go to work and have money, I've found a planter that will solve most of my gardening problems. It's 39 1/4 by 39 1/4 by 16 inches. That's huge. It's 60% of the surface area of all my planters combined, and more volume than I have right now. And because it's just one planter, it wastes a lot less space than making up the same area out of a collection of small planters, and, perhaps even more importantly, it's gonna be way easier to winterize. (One of these days I'll write a post about the physics of winterizing planters, but I'm lazy.) AND it's self-watering!

The things I could do with such a planter... I could plant the 106 tulips and the 118 asters, and then some. I'd put my collection of nemophilas along the front, as they're heavy drinkers and the window boxes don't really suit them. Or maybe my collection of pansies. And I could put my collection of morning glories along the back, with a big trellis for them to climb, creating an even more gigantic Wall of Insanity. I could put peonies in there. Or pumpkins. Peonies and pumpkins. It would be the New Jungle, except it's five times the size of the old Jungle. It would rock like no container has ever rocked before.

The things I could do, if only the Prairies hadn't had a wet spring...

Oh no you di'n't!

I went to the grocery store on Sunday, according to plan, to get some more apricots. They've gone way up in price and are in mediocre condition and rather watery, but that's to be expected. What I didn't anticipate is that the grocery store also had... lychees.

Oh dear.

Lychees are tasty, though I wasn't particularly interested in eating those as they had mold on them. But also, they have big seeds in them.

Seeds.

Mmmmm... Seeds.

So, I bought some lychees. Even though they had mold, they were incorrectly labelled, and the cashiers don't know what they're doing so they charged me for a different product.

Lychees are sub-tropical, so they don't need stratification. And the skin is hard and scaly, so the mold hadn't reached into the fruit.

Now I have four lychees seeds waiting to hatch... plus five apricot seeds in cold stratification and 35 holly seeds in warm stratification.

I really need to go to work. And stay out of the produce section.

You know what I was thinking?

Obviously not, since I haven't told you yet.

First of all, since I've been hatching the concept of the hot box, which is all summer, I have entertained the possibility of using a heating pad or heating tape. If I put it on a timer so it doesn't run all day, there should be a way to maintain a safe temperature inside the box without running up a massive power bill.

But the new thought that occurred to me this evening is that my balcony should be a warmer zone than most gardens in town. First, it gets north-east to south-east winds, which aren't the most common. I should check the almanac to make sure, but I'm pretty sure we get more wind from the north and north-west, and I'm sheltered from those. And second, I have the kitchen window and the picture window looking out on the balcony, and the way this place is built, the heat loss from these two windows in winter is absolutely grotesque. The landlord's loss, however, could be my garden's gain. I can make a windbreak and put the less hardy plants in front of the picture window, where it's warmest.

If I can gain five degrees compared to unprotected locations, then I'm no longer zone 2 but zone 3. Can I? I have absolutely no idea. But if I can, most of my trees would no longer be at risk. And even if I can't, the heat gain in front of the window plus a hot box should be enough for the zone 4 plants, even though they'd be a little challenged. And with that plus heating tape, I might be able to winter the zone 5 plants.

Clearly, this will take some experimentation, and the first thing I should do is mount a thermometer out there so I can measure the heat gain objectively.

Of course this all sounds like a great idea right now when I have a migraine. I hope it's not completely ridiculous tomorrow when I will hopefully feel better.

If I had a million dollars...

I don't need a million dollars, but if only my job would start before it's too late to order fall bulbs for this year...

You know what I'd get?

Me neither.

But in the Book of Evil, there is a really good-looking tulip collection. 106 bulbs for $67.70. The tulips are the cheap part; the fact that they go 9 per sq.ft. and need about 10" of depth is the problem. That means I would need 12 sq.ft. of planters and 300 L of soil. Then I would have to winterize the whole thing, too. It would cost hundreds of dollars. But man, would it rock Yards in Bloom next year!

Garden Ninja is getting aggravated

I got concerned about my apricots again, partly because of something I read that suggested I planted them way too deep, and partly because the soil just wasn't drying out at all. Even the surface remained wet. Not moist, wet.

So, I dug. And I dug. And I dug.

Finally I got to the apricot seeds and...

they...

had...

liquefied.

I kid you not. They were liquid. Vile, gelatinous, foul-smelling white liquid. All five of them. It was disgusting.

So I cracked some other pits that I had saved just in case, but they had been sitting too long and were all dry and useless.

Fine. FINE!

I'll buy more tomorrow, assuming the grocery store still has any. I don't care if I have to eat a thousand apricots, I will grow a tree. The more they thwart me, the less I'm letting them get away with it.

Things you didn't know about physics

Actually, I don't know about you, but I've literally forgotten more about physics than most people will ever know, insofar that I've forgotten pretty much everything I ever knew. And I used to know... some.

So here is the thing with the winter preparation. We posit that my trees are gonna be hardy to zone 5 and I will leave them outside until the end of December. This means that they're allowed to drop to -30 C over three months. Therefore, how much insulation do they need?

The answer, in reality, would be complicated, because the temperature outside the insulation will drop gradually. But let's assume the outside temperature is -30 C the whole time. Then, we need to know how much energy is in the pots to begin with, which if I recall correctly, would be something like heat capacity times volume times temperature. I'll have to google it, but it sounds about right. We assume the starting temperature is 0 C, and then this would give us something in Joules. Then we divide it by the 7.8 million seconds the trees have to survive the cold, and that would give us something in Watts. From there we get the RSI, which is in units of K.m2/W. We have the Watts, we have the temperature difference (the K), and I determine the surface area. And an inch of rigid extruded polystyrene has an RSI of 0.88.

Therefore, in the unlikely event that I'm not mistaken, the answer would be:

Inches of rigid = (30 K) (2.23 m2) (7.8 x 10^6 s) / (heat capacity of soil) / (3.1 x 10^-2 m3 of soil) / (273 K) / (0.88 K.m2.s/J)

Anyone want to check the units? I don't feel like it just this instant.

Oh, fine, I'll do it. What are the units of heat capacity? J / m3 / K? I don't remember. But other than that:

K x m2 x s x m-3 x K-1 x K-1 x m-2 x s-1 x J x m3 x J-1 x K

K's cancel out.
s's cancel out.
m's cancel out.
J's cancel out.

Yep, looks about right.

Now I don't even have a preliminary guess on the heat capacity of soil, but seeing that there is a multiplier of a million in there, I'm gonna have to hope that it's a really huge number.

In the quite plausible event that I can't insulate enough to achieve this temperature curve, I can compensate by filling the hot box with ice.

That's right, ice. Why would I fill my hot box with ice? Because it has a high heat capacity, therefore, it's gonna be a reservoir of heat. If we start with more heat inside, we can afford to lose more of it. Ice usually comes out of the freezer at a temperature of approximately -18 C, but I could heat it up to near zero before putting it in the box. Even better, I could fill the hot box with water, but then, first of all I'd have to make my hot box waterproof, and second I'd have to allow for the expansion of the water as it slowly freezes over three months. The much bigger problem I'd then have is how to break my pots out of the ice, so that a) I don't have to try and drag a huge block of ice into the house, and b) I don't have a huge block of ice melting in my house. Maybe I need a box within a box.

Who knew gardening was so complicated?

Shows how much you know

I really need to know my hardiness zone. Of course the situation is different on my balcony, because it's a balcony, but still, I really need to know my hardiness zone. Now you might think I'm in zone 0a, seeing as I already said that, but it's nonsense. Almost nothing grows in zone 0a, and clearly that's not the case here. So where exactly are we?

Hmmmm...

Well, I know the chokecherry, Prunus virginiana, does very well here, though maybe it doesn't get as tall as in other places. Therefore whatever P. virginiana is rated for, that's what I'll call my zone. And according to my sources, it's zone 2. Ha! In your face!

Of course you need to know whether that's a USDA or Canadian zone rating, but since I find the same rating from US sources and from the University of Manitoba, I'll just say I'm in zone 2.

Now the thing is, how are my other trees rated?

• Chokecherry: zone 2-6


• Apricot: zone 4-9


• Holly: zone 5-9


• Pear: zone 5-9


• Lemon: zone 8-11


• Baobab: zone 10

Is that all I have for trees?

Oh good. Only six species. There is a limit to this insanity after all. Ok, so the thing is, the least hardy ones are actually the easiest ones for me, because they don't require frost, therefore they can just spend the winter inside. Not ideal, but good enough. So that takes care of the lemons and baobabs. The chokecherries, being very cold-hardy, can probably stay outside, as long as I find a way to insulate the pots enough. The difficulty is in the half-way trees, which can't take -40C, but need a certain amount of cold weather to get dormant. Though no one ever tells you how much "a certain amount" is.

I'm thinking the solution might be to insulate the pots and leave them out until Christmas, and then bring them in. They might not like the sudden transition from cold to hot, but December temperatures here are probably within their comfort zone, and after Christmas the light increases so it's probably ok if they come out of dormancy. In any case I can't do it the other way, as in keep them inside until April and then kick them out early, because that would obviously kill them.

Now I just need to figure out the R-values of snow and dirt so I can build adequate hot boxes for everyone, and we're all set. Or... something.

Another Yards in Bloom challenge

Yesterday the Yards in Bloom person dropped off my invitation to the awards brunch, which is next Saturday at 10:00 am. The RSVP deadline is tomorrow, and I have two tickets.

Hmmmmmm...

Seriously, I haven't had a date in 4 1/2 years, what are the odds of finding someone to come to the brunch with me, let alone by tomorrow? Of course it doesn't have to be a "date". I could bring a friend. Should I say I will come with a guest, and then invite a friend? Or say I will come with a guest, and scurry all week to try and find an arm-candy to come with me? What are the odds of that? Or should I just go by myself?

There is this really handsome RCMP member ("cop", for the non-Canadians) that I like to look at. In fact I've been looking for crimes to report ever since I met him. You have no idea how little crime really goes down when you're looking for some. So I could find out if this guy is single, and if he is, I could ask him to be my escort for the brunch. Tell him it's community service, he's doing a good deed for the perpertually single, etc. It's a brunch, not a dinner, so that doesn't put him in an awkward position. But of course he's probably not single, because they rarely are. And even if he was, it would probably just creep him out.

I suppose I'll just go by myself.

A questionable point of arithmetic

Ever since the asters came through for me on Judging Day, I'm tempted to plant them again next year after all. Even though I clearly said, many times over, that I wasn't ever doing it again. One of the great things about gardening is, I'm not accountable to anybody. Sole master after God. If I want to change my mind about asters, by gum I will.

So I look in the Book of Evil to see what choices it offers me for asters. They appear to have seven options, of which three are not pleasing to my eyes, one is what I've already got, one is all blue, and two are mixes. Now I don't want the one I already have, because I already have it and it's not "mixed" enough. And I don't want the all-blue one, because I got burned by blue hybrids this year already. Next time I want blue flowers, which is all the time, I'll plant the ones that are naturally blue, not the evil mutants.

That leaves "Idyll mix" and "Duchess mix". Idyll has six colours and costs 3.25 cents per seed. Duchess has twelve colours and costs 0.61 cents per seed. Does this cost thing matter? Possibly. Because sometimes the price reflects how much work went into making the hybrid, and therefore how messed up they are, genetically speaking. The Island of Dr. Moreau of plants. And really messed up hybrids, as I've learned to my chagrin, don't always perform well.

So the Duchess hybrid may (or may not) be more reliable than Idyll, and also, it has twelve colours. That's pretty fancy. On the other hand, it's about 400 seeds to a package and it grows two feet tall, so that's an issue. I'm not seeding 400 asters, and even if I did, they wouldn't all come up. Therefore, I asked myself, if I have 400 seeds, being equal proportions of 12 different colours (an assumption that may not be correct), how many seeds do I have to sprout in order to be certain of having one of each? The answer to that is obviously 368, which isn't helpful. So what I need to know is, how many seeds do I need in order to be reasonably confident of having one of each colour?

Aye, there's the rub. I've never been any good at probabilities. So I did some calisthenics in Excel and I came up with the following answer:

• If I sprout 32 seeds, I have a better than 50% chance of having at least one of each colour.


• If I sprout 41 seeds, I have a better than 75% chance of having at least one of each colour.


• If I sprout 50 seeds, I have a better than 90% chance of having at least one of each colour.


• If I sprout 73 seeds, I have a better than 99% chance of having at least one of each colour.


• And if I sprout 118 seeds, I have a better than 99.99% chance of having at least one of each colour.

Again, this rests on the assumptions that (a) there are equal proportions of each colour in each packet of mix and (b) I have a clue what I'm doing. There is no reason to make either of these assumptions, except for the fact that without them, I would have no numbers at all.

Second, the Book of Evil says they spread 12", so each would need a 12" planter. Each. Each of 400 seeds. Hahaha! As if! The utmost I could conceivably grant them is the Jungle, which is 2.18 sq.ft. So if I want to put 118 seeds in the Jungle, they will be on average an inch apart. Well, that's too darn bad. This is my balcony. If you can't live in 1/144 of your normal space requirements, you're just gonna have to die.

The other thing is that the "Pot & Patio" mix I have now is described as "early blooming", yet it took 90 days. Makes me wonder whether those other mixes would ever bloom at all. Maybe I should do a trial run in a small planter, see how long it takes them, and if they work out I can give them the Jungle in 2013.

Anyway, it's a thought.

Baobab Friday

The highlight of everyone's week! (Right?)


Adansonia digitata. As you can see, the leader with the six adult leaves is now at last taller than the baby leaves. It has now achieved the prodigious height of 2 1/8 inches, making it, I believe, the tallest baobab in the Northwest Territories. And if everyone else starts growing baobabs in the Northwest Territories, you're stealing my bit.


My poor Adansonia za, on the other hand, is looking rather worse all the time. It doesn't have a leader, the one and only adult leaf has made no progress at all in the last month, and the one baby leaf is pretty much dead. That leaves it just one baby leaf to keep feeding itself. I'm now bringing it inside at night and whenever it rains, so it will stay warm and dry, but it could very well be too late already. Luckily there are still two seeds in the dirt and two more in reserve, so all is not lost.

Garden Ninja and the Test of Patience

I just got my order from my supplier of rare seeds. It contains shooting stars, jacks-in-the-pulpit, and black pansies for next year, and holly. I've been coveting holly for a while. It was one of my favourite trees growing up, and it would be nice to have some around the house at Christmas.

Ok.

Directions for growing holly from seed: soak in water 24 hours; warm stratify 60 days; cold stratify 60 days; the seeds will then take 16 to 36 months to germinate.

Yes, I typed that right. 16 to 36 months to germinate. Plus the four months of double stratification (and you know how I feel about stratification). Ok, so I should have sprouts shortly before Christmas 2014. Sprouts, mind you. Not trees. Sprouts.

So the first challenge is, which of my planters do I want to devote to bare dirt for the next three years while we wait for the holly to sprout?

The view from inside

This is my view, just before the judges came by. Doesn't look too bad, if I do say so myself.

The view from the street

To a great extent, my garden is meant to be viewed from the street, and indeed a few people have noticed it from the ground. So here is what it looks like to the viewer:


On the left you can see the last of the nemophilas. The Wall of Insanity isn't forming a single, united mass as I had hoped, but I'll see to that next year. You can see some of the Star of Yelta flowers on the right. Next are the asters, with some pumpkin flowers showing behind them, and if you look carefully, in that little white planter you can see A. digitata. Though probably not at the resolution you guys are viewing. The dark blue flowers to the right of the asters are California blubells, and the lighter blue flowers further up are forget-me-not. The red ones, obviously, are my poppies, and the two white spots, if you can see them, are a white Iceland poppy and a morning glory that has been climbing up the poppies from the Insanity Leader and blooming outside the railing in the free world.

I hope the ones on the right will still be a good show when the Wall of Insanity finally blooms.

What else is in bloom

English daisies. This was the first one, which opened August 3. There are currently four: this one, another pink one with lots more petals of which I botched the photo, and two white ones. This isn't exactly what I was after. I want the ones that make a round mass of petals so you can't see the yellow center at all. However, what I seeded is a mix and there is plenty more that haven't flowered yet, so the right ones could still be out there. And if not, there's always next year.


Asters. Yea verily, asters finally bloomed. I logged the date officially as August 4, but it took a few more days to reach this state of full openness. The strange thing is that I seeded a mix and yet only these bright pink ones are flowering. Oh well... I don't mind them. As much as they've aggravated me in the past, they're good flowers, and they did have my back when the judges came through, so maybe I'll plant them again next year after all.


Convolvuli. I'm still perplexed that only dark blue ones came up when I know I seeded a mix, but oh well. I like the dark blue ones.


Forget-me-not. They're making quite a good show, actually. I'm definitely getting them again next year.


Star of Yelta in the Wall of Insanity. This one is blooming very profusely, whereas the one at the other hand is blooming very little. Yet the difference in sunlight is less than two hours between the two. Then again... two hours is 25% less sun, so maybe it is indeed a question of sunlight. Or, maybe I just got a particularly vigorous one by chance.

Also, poppies are blooming profusely now, but mostly they're outside the railing and we don't see much of each other. There are some nemophilas and California bluebells left, not enough to make a decent photo. The geranium not only never turned blue, but also got trampled by the raven. The new plant hasn't come in the mail yet and I'm not really antsy about it.

The pansies' new digs

This is the pansies a week ago, in the green 8" planter.


And this is the pansies on Wednesday in the 13" square planter. Looks much better, doesn't it? Admittedly, I had to stake them because I set the clump in the pot at a bad angle. Nonetheless, this looks much happier than before. And all thanks to Ioana.

My pumpkin died

I looked at my pumpkin on Wednesday and it looked like this:


Hmmmm... That doesn't look right. So I poked it and it fell off the vine. Poop...

There is one more female flower bud that looks promising; if that one fails, I'm gonna get rid of them for this year. Maybe next year I'll get a plot at the Community Garden, then they'll have more room for their roots and they can pollinate with other people's plants while I'm away.

I MUST have this product!

I received my first plant catalog. I knew plant catalogs would be a bad idea. They're full of temptations. In fact having perused one, I'm now quite certain that The Fall had nothing to do with snakes. What really happened is that Eve ordered the seeds of the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil from a seed catalog.

So of course I've picked out a whole bunch of stuff that I would never have put on my shopping list otherwise. But even before I opened the catalog, I was coveting the product on the back cover: the Time Lapse Plant Camera.

As the name entails, it's a camera that takes photos at regular intervals so you can make a time-lapse video. And it's "weatherproof", so you can put it in your garden.

O.

M.

G.

I MUST have a Time Lapse Plant Camera! Now! Now! Now!

Of course it costs $119.95 and in any case there would be no point buying it now, when I'm at home and the gardening season is almost over. But as soon as work starts up, I'm buying this.

See? Seed catalogs are evil.

Run! Yards in Bloom are coming!

I was minding my own business yesterday towards one o'clock, when suddenly there came a tapping, as of some one gently rapping, rapping at my chamber door.

So I go look and it's the lady who manages rent collection. Well, my rent is paid in full, so I opened the door, and she says "the Yards in Bloom people want to judge your balcony."

Huh? I thought Yards in Bloom was looking for "neat" yards, not jungle balconies. But apparently, they went all around the Highrise and figured out every balcony that has flowers, and then they contacted this lady to see if they could come and judge us.

Er... ok, but my yard is a mess! The rent lady came and looked at it, as she's been watching its mad growth from the ground too, and gave me some tips about making it look tidier. Then I had about three hours to get it ready.

It actually did take almost three hours. How can it take three hours to make a balcony look "tidy"? I don't even know. I watered everything, dead-headed (which I never do because I like things to seed themselves), got all the yellow leaves off the morning glories, un-staked and re-staked things to make them neater, spent a lot of time trying to make the nemophilas look vaguely presentable, even though they're long past their prime and the raven trampled all over them in a fit of pique, swept, swept again, and then while I was rearranging things to look their best, I noticed that... the passion fruit seeds I threw in with Peng Dehuai who knows when had sprouted.

Aaaaaaaaaah! Not more plants!!!! I don't even know what kind of tree passion fruits come from. With good reason: they come from vines, not trees. And the last thing I need is more vines. Nonetheless, I transplanted them to the green planter. I'll get you photos later when I'm not too lazy to download my camera.

Ok. That's nothing the Yards in Bloom people need to know about. I'll deal with this problem later.

After about three hours, the balcony looked in fact quite nice. Of course most things are either done blooming or not blooming yet, but the pansies, asters, and some Jungle plants are looking good. Thank you, asters, for doing something for me after all.

Finally the judges come and make me sign some kind of paper and I see that one of the criteria is "has it been done before?" Ok, well, nobody else has a Wall of Insanity, let alone any baobabs, so I'm hoping to get some points for that.

Then they left.

I have no idea when they render their decision.

Well, it got my yard all tidied up. That was good.

Preliminary Plan #2... almost

Plan #1 lasted all of five days. This is exactly why my garden never goes according to plan.

The first revision to The Plan happened because of flax. I've tried flax three years and still fail. There are stalks in the Jungle, but they're overwatered and shaded by everybody else who grew faster. So, I had promised that if I failed again this year, next year they'd get their own planter. Would I break a promise to a plant?

At first I thought I could put flax and globes together. They don't have quite the same water needs, but flax is flexible. In any case, it would look pretty. But then, while contemplating my lemons' water problem, I thought I could plant the flax with the lemons, for two reasons. They're both good with heat and drought, and lemons don't like sunlight on their trunks, so the flax could shade them without competing for water.

Seemed like an excellent idea... until I read in Lois Hole, or somewhere else, that flax has very long taproots and can't be moved or eradicated. So it might not be such a good idea to mix it with any other species I value. So back to Plan A: grow it separately, and when it's established, I can dig a hole in the Jungle the size of the nursery planter, and move the whole thing, roots and all, into its permanent home.

At that point, however, it occurred to me: what if I don't want a Jungle anymore?

Gasp!

Surely I jest. I've always had the Jungle. Its constant failure to do anything I want is one of the defining features of my garden.

On the other hand, it's a nice big planter, and I could put peonies in there. Or roses. Or anything else that isn't just a random bunch of grossly overcrowded incompatible seeds. I could even put pansies in there, though it's a waste to put a short-rooted plant in a deep planter. Then again, I'm so impressed with my pansies this year, they're my new addiction for next year. I have nine varieties on my wishlist for next year already, and while they do well with overcrowding, it's still gonna take some room.

You know what else? For next year I'm ordering seed catalogs. That's worse. When I shop online, I can only spend so much time, so I grab more or less what I already know I want. With a seed catalog, I can look at it as much as I want and discover all sorts of things I hadn't thought of buying. Hmmmm... That's gonna cause some overcrowding, if I know me.

Maybe I could move the oriental lily into the hypothetical peony planter and then make a smaller Jungle in the 14" planter. It's half the surface area, which should put a limit to how crazy I can get. On the other hand, it's shallower, and most Jungle plants have long roots. But then again most Jungle plants live a rough life and then die, so maybe that doesn't matter much.

Clearly, I need a bigger balcony. I should get a boyfriend so he could rent the apartment next door and we could cut a door in the wall, then I'd have two balconies instead of one. (The landlord doesn't mind this sort of shananigans as long as you have the money.) Plus, the boyfriend could water the garden when I'm off to work.

Baaaaaaaaaaaahahahaha!

I crack me up. Like I'd trust a boyfriend to water my plants. Like I could even get a boyfriend if I tried. (I did try. It failed.)

Ok, so x-nay on the oyfriend-bay.

I think I'm gonna put flax with the lemons anyway. It sounds like they'll get along great.

The other thing is, next year I might not have any pumpkins.

Gasp!

Again: failing to grow pumpkins is one of the features of my garden. And while I have high hopes for the one this year, it's really not that likely to succeed. So why not try again next year? Because in a normal year, I would be at work, therefore not available to pollinate the female flowers during the few hours in August that they're open. And there's no point monopolizing a big planter and having huge vines all over my balcony if nothing will come of it anyway.

Hmmmmm... Maybe I should start by making a list of what will and won't be in the garden.

• Yes:
  
  • Lemons, maydays, baobabs, pears, apricots
  
  
  • Wall of Insanity
  
  
  • Darth Plant
  
  
  • English daisies
  
  
  • At least nine varieties of pansies
  
  
  • Nemophilas
  
  
  • Shooting stars
  
  
  • Jacks-in-the-pulpit
  
  
  • Flax
  
  
  • Globe thistle
  
  
  • Poppies
  
  
  • Convolvulus
  
  
  • Forget-me-not


• Maybe:
  
  • Blue geranium
  
  
  • Peonies
  
  
  • Roses
  
  
  • Pumpkins
  
  
  • Lavender
  
  
  • Shasta daisies
  
  
  • Hollyhock
  
  
  • Marigolds
  
  
  • Eschscholzia (or whatever it's called)
  
  
  • Columbines


• No:
  
  • Asters
  
  
  • Bellflower
  
  
  • Phacelia
  
  
  • Lupins
  
  
  • Delphiniums
  
  
  • Four o'clock
  
  
  • Ornamental grass
  
  
  • All kinds of random stuff

If I can at least avoid "all kinds of random stuff", that will be an improvement. But I said that last year already.

There's a raven eating my morning glories

All winter, I was feeding the ravens. More accurately, I was feeding A raven, because he established my balcony as his territory and kept all the other ravens away, except his girlfriend. Then in spring I cut him off, because he can get his own food when it's nice out. But he must be running out of food out there for some reason, because he's back on my balcony. He expressed some displeasure with all the vegetation that didn't use to be there, but once I put some bread and peanut butter out, he soon found his way around.

The thing with ravens is that they're not like dogs, they don't learn your schedule. Or they just don't care. So even though I've only ever fed the raven once a day, he keeps coming back and asking for more. And if I don't feed him, he yells at me. So today, having eaten his peanut butter, he's determined to get more. So he sits on the railing where he can look into the living room and yell at me, and he gives me these big long rants, and then from time to time he bites my morning glories.

Hmmmmm...

I don't really care, insofar that I have more morning glories than I know what to do with and they're indestructible, but the thing is, their seeds are psychedelic; I don't know about the rest of the plant, but I'm sure nothing good can come of having a bunch of stoner ravens hanging out on my balcony. Hopefully he's just shredding them, not eating them.

Also, he trampled all the nemophilas and the geraniums. Maybe that's my excuse for getting rid of the geranium?

A dripline dilemma

Frankly, the way things are going, I might not need the dripline at all this year, but supposing I do, here is the thing: all plants get watered on the same schedule, though some have more drippers than others. But this doesn't reflect their needs. The Insanities need to be watered at least twice a day, because their planters can't hold all the water they need for one day, let alone for one week. Others, such as the trees, need to be watered every two weeks. In fact, none of the trees are going to be on the drip line. I'm just gonna soak them completely and maybe give them some water globes. But the problem remains: some plants need water twice a day, others need it once or twice a week. Obviously I can't go by the less frequent schedule, because an 8 L planter cannot contain 14 L of water. Therefore the drip line will run probably twice a day, and the pansies, asters, English daisies and geraniums will be displeased.

Yay verily, you can't please everyone.

For next year, if I ever get to work, I could get two driplines, put them on a T, and have one run once a week for the low-water plants, and one run twice a day for the high-water plants.

One may dream.

One more thing I'm allergic to

Besides tobacco and marijuana smoke, cats, dogs, mosquitos, apple, poplar, almost all laundry detergents, most women's bath products (because of the fragrances) and... nothing else I can think of right now, it rather seems like I'm having an allergic reaction to the bone meal.

Sigh...

You win some, you lose some

My friend Ioana moved to Edmonton. That's sad.

On the other hand, she couldn't take all her planters with her, so she gave four to me. They're all square, which is awesome because that makes way better use of my limited space. The biggest one is labelled as 13" but in practice it's only 12", and 12" deep, so that's a cubic foot. I immediately repotted my pansies into it. It gives them three times as much surface area and seven times as much volume as the little green planter. Also, I got to break open Le Bag of Cow Dung. Good news: composted cow dung neither looks nor smells like cow dung. I also put some bone meal in there. It's supposed to promote roots and flowers.

To my surprise, when I got the pansies out of their pot, there were no roots showing. How can so much flowers grow from so little roots?

Well, whatever. If they want more roots, they have room to grow them, and if they don't, they'll just colonize the surface. Bearing in mind that next year there will be four times as much seeds in only three times as much room, though, it's still gonna be about as roomy as a Mexican prison in there.

I'll miss you, Ioana!

Apricot Friday

There is nothing to photograph in the CryoVat yet. I destratified it nine days ago, so I decided to check on the seeds. First observation: the soil is VERY packed and still wet. It's a cheap kind of potting soil that one hardware store sells $3 for a 17 L bag (versus $7.59 for the good kind at the other store) and maybe it's not as good. Or maybe I should have let it dry a little before putting it in the fridge. In any case, I dug around, again for the dual purpose of aerating and looking for seeds. I found some pear seeds that are rooting, and then, much deeper, I found some of my apricots. They are very much still there and have some small activity going on. Maybe they're just slow because the soil is so hard. Or maybe this is normal. My lemons took a whole month to sprout, and now they're two feet tall, so as long as the seeds don't get eaten by the fungus, there is hope.

Baobab Friday

No picture of Za today. It hasn't changed at all except the one true leaf is struggling. I think it's getting either not enough or too much water - most likely too much, since the soil is still moist. Maybe it needs to come inside next time it rains.

Digitata, as you can see, is doing fine. Its measurements are still the same, 3" wide and 1 1/2" tall, but it has five true leaves and they're growing. Soon, I think, they will outgrow the baby leaves.

I dug around with a fork, both to aerate the soil and to look for the other seeds. I couldn't find any of them, in either planter. Either they're deeper than I thought, or the damping-off fungus ate them.

As good as it gets

I hated that movie, by the way. But as for my aster, I think this is what it considers "open". By analogy with other plants, I suspect the petals are going to relax slowly over several days until it looks quite flat, then it will die. And when it stops blooming I'm uprooting it. It's already dead, it just doesn't know it yet. (I liked that movie at the time.)

Preliminary Plan #1

First of many, I have no doubt.

The Jungle: Hollyhock, forget-me-not, poppies, Shastas, lavender. Weed out everything else. NO MORE DUMPING EVERYTHING INTO THE JUNGLE! Oh wait, I said that last year.

Planter #1: Continue oriental lily, unless I can find a better planter for it.

Planters #2 and #3: Currently no plans; either out of service or overflow.

Planter #4: (currently Peng Dehuai) Pansies, including Matrix series Jewel mix, Amethyst mix and Ocean Breeze mix. Also Black Prince.

Planter #5: (currently Liu Shao-ch'i) Globe thistles and flax.

Planter #6: (window box) Nemophilas.

Planter #7: (window box) ?? An empty planter? Ha! I doubt that. Just have to find something short and dense.

Planter #8: (currently pansies) Convolvulus

Planter #9: (currently geraniums) More geraniums... sigh.

Planter #10: (currently English daisies) Jacks-in-the-pulpit

Planters #11 and #12: Continuing Hope and Faith.

Planter #13: (currently Deng Xiaoping and his revolutionaries) Dodecatheon, aka rocket ships or shooting stars.

Planters #14.1 through #14.4: Wall of Insanity! Booya!

Planters #15 and #16: Currently baobabs. Will depend on how fast baobabs grow.

Planter #17: (currently pumpkins) Marigolds. I feel like trying marigolds for a change.

Planter #18: (currently CryoVat) Darth Plant.

Planter #19 (currently English daisies) English daisies.

Planter #20: (currently empty, tall 12", which I bought cheap and late in the year and don't currently have a use for) Pumpkins. Possibly a different kind of pumpkins. I'm that wild. This should give them more room for their roots.

Planters not yet bought: All three maydays, best two pears, not sure how many apricots (assuming any even sprout), baobabs if big enough, and whatever other trees I happen to plant for no good reason. One per planter.

Giant wheely planter not yet bought: Peonies, assuming I get any. Or maybe roses.

Not asked back: Phacelias, even though I was attached to them at first, I think I've outgrown them. Asters, I tried three times and I finally succeeded and it wasn't even worth it. Bellflowers, delphiniums, lupines, ornamental grass, and whatever else is in the Jungle, because I never even wanted them in the first place. Flanders poppies, because there should be plenty of volunteers to go around the town by now. Cypress vine and thunbergia unless they start impressing me right about now. And next year, no more stratifying random tree seeds all over the house.

Hahaha! Like I'm actually gonna do anything I just said.

You know, in real life, I'm very strict, organized, good at planning, good at executing, disciplined, all that good stuff. You'd never tell from my garden. People tell me I should smoke a big ole' joint or something like that to "loosen me up"... They just haven't seen my garden. That's my wild side... and nobody knows it but you faithful readers who didn't read all the way to the end of this boring post.

You can't please everyone

It seems nothing is quite right in my garden just now. At first I couldn't get it soaked enough; then I couldn't get it to dry out. Now I keep trying to dry it out but still all the plants seem to be getting more and more water, except the maydays, which are drinking nothing. As a result, my first pear tree which was growing with Peng Dehuai wilted. The top of the soil was all dry; Peng did fine because of its deeper roots, but not the pear tree. I caught it before it was quite dead, so it might survive, but it's half the size of the ones in Deng Xiaoping's pot which are 18 days younger. Clearly, Deng is making disciples in toughness and rebeliousness. Their aster roommate is also leading the aster movement. It's like the Revolution planter.

I think the morning glories are all overfed, probably because they drink so much water that it makes the manufacturer's formula of "feed every time you water" invalid. They also have way too many leaves and not enough flowers, in my opinion, but I can't find a fertilizer in town with more P and less N. The first year I grew them, without any fertilizer, they were all flower and no leaves; now you can hardly even see the flowers.

The lemons, as I was saying, are overwatered and underfed. I looked at my watering log and I'm amazed how much water I've been giving those poor things. No wonder they're unhappy. I tilled the top of their soil to let the water evaporate faster, but I think it's gonna take a while to dry them out. Maybe I should plant some morning glories with them to soak up excess water.

The English daisies are inscrutable. The geraniums are not-blue from too much sun, but the Five Spot nemophilas are turning blue instead of white. The Penny Black and Baby Blue Eyes nemophilas are sparse and tiny, I suppose crowded out by the earlier-flowering phacelias and Five Spots.

The pumpkins are doing surprisingly well, but really, they're in a pot on a balcony. That can't be good for them.

The Jungle is a disaster, yet again. The Flanders poppies seem to be thriving, until you remember that they started out 4000 and have produced about three dozen flowers. The Shasta daisies are making leaves, but no stems. The globe thistles have disappeared from view, though I believe they're still out there somewhere. The flax is surviving in appalling conditions, given that it loves drought. The hollyhocks are making excellent leaves but nothing else. The lupines tried to grow sideways out of the pot and don't look like they're succeeding in this endeavour; the delphiniums are either identical to lupines at this early stage, or dead. The convolvulus, like I said, has only produced dark blue out of the entire colour mix, though that at least is doing well. The forgotten forget-me-not looks like it's made quite a few stems and might make a good showing yet. The phacelias and the one nemophila that's managed to bloom are eight to ten days behind the ones in the window boxes, which doesn't matter as it was just a way to dispose of excess seeds, but I think they've also strangled the bluebells, which were just a random store purchase anyway. I'm more noting their failure as a sign that I'm doing it wrong than because I care. And there are more things in there that I don't even want to think about.

One thing that's very noticeable in the Jungle is that almost nothing is growing in the centre, and whatever is near the edges is trying to move further out. Clearly, no one likes it much in there. The soil is permanently soaked; I suspect it's overwatered, though most plants look healthy enough. At least it seems neither over- nor underfed.

The asters seem ok. At least their leaves are healthy, and they're making flowers.

The pansies are kicking arse all the way, despite grotesque overcrowding. And the baobabs are alive, which is all I expect from them just now.

I know I said it last year already, but next year, I should plan better, at least for the Jungle. Or just stick to my plan better.

That's the good thing though. Like I keep saying, there's always next year.

43%

Not counting trees, grass and zombies, I've planted approximately 60 different kinds of plants. Though it's hard to tell, since some are mixes and I'll never know exactly how many colours they contained. And so far, 26 different kinds of plants have flowered.

43%.

I don't have a benchmark, so that's just a random number. Today, August 3, 43% of kinds of plants I planted have flowered.

Next year, I'll tell you if that was good.

And another one!

This is the third variety of nemophila, Baby Blue Eyes. There is one tiny one in the shadier of the two window boxes, whereas all the other flowers bloomed in the sunnier one first. So either it likes shade, or the other ones like sun more and are choking it on the sunny side, or there are some in the sunny planter and I haven't found them.


And this is the forget-me-not which did bloom today. It should look nice once more flowers open.

What's ailing my lemons?

I have to say, my lemons are never quite well, though they're very resilient. And in particular, Hope gets this thing where leaves will dry and/or turn yellow, starting from the tip, then the whole leaf, then if falls off. And some of the branch tips were turning yellow too. I cut them back a few times; usually that's enough, but one branch keeps progressing.

Hmmmm...

Whatever it is, it can't be contagious, because it would have been all over both trees by now, whereas it's just three branch tips on Hope and one tiny bit on one branch on Faith. And it's not deadly, because they're not dead. Nonetheless, I got concerned, so I googled it.

So. Either it's a horrible bacterial disease and they're both gonna die, which doesn't seem probable. Or, they're getting too much water and/or too little nitrogen.

I knew that.

I knew they're getting too much water because when leaves dry out I water. It works on everything else, why not lemons? So even though I can see that the soil is wet, I water them because the leaves are dry. And I knew about the nitrogen because even the good leaves are not very green. But to give them nitrogen I have to mix the fertilizer with... water, so it makes their water problem even worse.

One solution would be a citrus fertilizer, but not surprisingly, I've never seen any in this town. Not too many citruses up here.

The other solution is manure.

Yay! Manure!

I actually own a bag of manure. I paid good money in exchange for cow dung in a bag. Yes I did.

I have no use for manure in my garden right now, or so I thought. The reason I bought it is that I'm going to use it in the fall (I'll tell you all about it then) and if I wait until then, the stores might not have it in stock. So I bought it early. But now I have an excuse to use manure! Yay!

First I'm gonna wait till the soil dries out a little. Or a lot. Because you still need to add some water when applying manure, if I understand, and there is already too much water. Then I will add manure. Hopefully before the plants have to come inside, because I'm not really excited about cow manure in the house. It may be lots of fun outside, but I like my home dung-free. So hopefully it can be applied outside and settle in before having to come into the house.

Gardening totally messes with your head in some ways.

Garden Ninja hits a snag

I got bored of waiting for the seed pods to open on the peonies, so I picked one and cut it open with a knife. It was full of tiny white seeds like those in a bell pepper. Hmmmmm... That doesn't look right.

So I googled and I read that most peony seeds from hybrids are in fact sterile. Dang! There goes Plan B. And even if you get fertile seeds, they have to be stratified not once but twice: first warm, until they make roots, then cold for months, until spring. And you know how I feel about stratifying.

Next, I asked the Head Librarian if I could dig a bulb from their peonies, since they have a variety that no one else has. But she said she'd rather not as there is "only one plant". Hmmmmmm... In fact there isn't "only one plant" as herbaceous peonies multiply by their roots and can be divided every three years at least, but, it's her plant, I'm not gonna argue with her. She said I'm welcome to the seeds...

Hm. This is proving tougher than I anticipated. If the library won't let me dig bulbs, I'm doubting the goodwill of the total strangers on whose private properties are two of the varieties I want. So we might be back to Plan C: money.

But at least I know I can get a white one from Ioana. That should get my feng shui started in the right direction, at least.

Something in the CryoVat is sprouting

I destratified the CryoVat a week ago. Have I mentioned that I don't have the patience to stratify? In any case, I give my plants a lot of credit, but I don't think they know the difference between 23 days and 28 days of stratification.

So I put it out on the balcony and ignore it for a while, and yesterday, a sprout! Yay! A sprout! Woooooooooo!

Sadly, it's a pear. And I already had six pears, so that's no good. On the other hand, pears are "supposed" to be stratified 60 to 100 days, yet apparently they'll sprout at 23 just fine. A fortiori the apricots, which are "supposed" to be stratified 28 days, should have no trouble at all. They're probably just slower because they're bigger seeds.

One may hope, anyway.

Female pumpkin flower!

I can't believe my pumpkin flower went from this:


to this:


in just three days. Especially while the aster buds have taken two weeks so far to open halfway. "They" should cross asters and pumpkins, see if they can make a fast-opening aster. Or a bright pink pumpkin. Baaaahaha! That would be awesome.

Anyway. I only have two male flowers today. Since they're on the north vine and the female flower is on the south vine, I like to believe they're two different plants and I didn't just fertilize one plant with itself. Time will tell, I suppose. Not that I have any way to know whether a pumpkin is "normal" or horribly inbred.

The timing of this flower definitely shows why it's useful to pollinate by hand, though. Since it's cool and cloudy today, there aren't any insects of any respectable size on my balcony. In fact, I've only seen one wasp all summer, and there hasn't been a bumblebee up here in months. So if I had to wait for insects, I'd never get any pumpkins.

Notice also the difference between the female flower parts above, and the male flower parts which are like this:


I think I like plants a lot better than people.