All plants come to those who wait

I received a spring bulb catalog from Veseys.

Again?

I already ordered spring bulbs. From the advance spring bulb catalog. I'm getting a forty-dollar peony, two types of windflowers even though they're not hardy up here, and some very fancy oriental lilies. And toad lilies. Whatever that is.

So I flipped through the spring bulb catalog, secure in the knowledge that I need nothing, because I ordered my advance bulbs. In advance. Neener neener. You can't tempt me with your free shipping offer.

And then...

on page 59...

J.P. Connell.

The rose I want above all roses. I didn't even think Veseys had roses, and of all the hundreds and hundreds of roses, they have only 12 in their catalog. And one of them is my J.P. Connell.

For months and months, I've been looking for a supplier. Many nurseries won't ship to the Northwest Territories, because they don't want to risk the plant dying in transit. Or they will ship, but at an exorbitant price. Or they will ship, but they have a bad reputation. Or they will ship, but they don't carry J.P. Connell. I was starting to think I'd have to drive down to Alberta to get some, and that's a $200 trip at least.

And now Veseys has J.P. Connell, at a reasonable price, with free shipping. No.1 size plant on its own root. And even should it die in transit, it's only $23.

BOOYA!

After that, of course, I had to go through the whole catalog again with a fine-toothed comb, in case they had something else that I always wanted and couldn't find before. (Ok, "always wanted" is an exaggeration. I've been gardening since 2009, and I've been wanting roses since late summer 2011. It's really more "things I've never heard of before but suddenly must have anyway".)

Well, they certainly have some handsome lilies. And peonies. And a... black geranium.

Baaaaaaaaaahahahaha!

As if. My blue geranium was purple. My black lilies are orange. Sure, I'll buy your black geranium. And some snake oil, and ocean-front property in Arizona. After all, I do get free shipping.

You're never bored when you have a garden.

Foiled again!!!!

Well, the experiment with the sand-perlite-manure mixture was a complete failure. Whereas soil retains too much moisture, this mix retains too little, so all my seeds dried out. That would be my last four apricot seeds, which I had religiously stratified for the whole duration; my remaining baobab seeds; and my lychees. Fortunately, one of the lychees was not yet germinating when I moved them to the sand planter, so now it has a root that looks like it might still be alive. I'm not 100% on that, but it might still be alive. So I moved it to yet another baobab nursery planter, with the new baobab seeds that I recently received from my supplier. This time I'm doing one seed at a time (one from each species, I mean), and the mix is mostly soil with some perlite in it. Perlite improves drainage, so, we shall see.

No chance of more apricots or lychees until next year, though. What a nuisance. I hope that one lychee is still alive, but I'm not optimistic. Also, I was gonna get some catalpa seeds, but my supplier of rare seeds doesn't have them right now, and I can't find them anywhere else online. So if you know anyone who sells catalpa seeds, let me know.

Meanwhile, I brought in the Guerilla Planter, with Deng Xiao Ping, the chief aster, and, as it turns out, four pear trees that have survived being completely ignored all summer. In fact, maybe complete ignorage is better for trees than constant fussing. In any case, all four look wide awake and full of ideas. This poses a problem as to potting. Pear trees make taproots, so I don't doubt those four little trees are down to the bottom of their planter, and I'm going to need (four) tall planters for them. On the other hand, since they have taproots, they're probably not crowding into each other, and therefore repotting is probably not urgent. So maybe I can leave them alone until somewhat later. The bigger issue is that both pears and chokecherries are seasonal trees, which is to say they need a period of dormancy. Deng has shed most of its leaves, as have Liu Shao-ch'i and Peng Dehuai. Those two are staying on the balcony for the winter; Deng and the pears are inside, and the pears are bright green and not looking at all disposed to go to sleep. Will they survive a winter in the house, or will they die from sleep deprivation?

The next day, I also repatriated Planter #9, which contains the last surviving "blue" geranium, still decidedly purple but also very much alive; my oriental lily; and the globe thistles. Again, these are hardy plants, therefore I doubt they'll be happy in the house all winter, but then again, they have disappointed me, so if they die, so be it.

But that's not all! I still have seeds in the fridge! The holly seeds moved from warm stratification to cold stratification on October 10. I also have a bunch of cherry pits that have been stratifying since September 11. According to my sources, cherries are inconsistent in their stratification habits and can start sprouting even before being warmed up; I'm thinking I'm gonna give them six weeks.

Also, I have more seeds stratifying outside! The fun never ends here. I harvested some berries off some shrubs that had nice fall colours. One is cultivated and seems to be intended for a hedge some years from now. I believe it's called Peking cotoneaster. The other grows wild all over town and is possibly a red osier dogwood. Or some other kind of dogwood. I planted both in Planter #17, formerly home of the pumpkins. They'll die, or they'll come up in the spring. Stratifying outdoors worked out perfectly for the chokecherries, so I'm taking the view that anything I harvest out of doors (rather than from fruit bought from the store) can stratify outside.

What else... Faith and Hope are doing very well, thank you. They've been inside September 11 and are both putting on some growth. And I just bought two mandarins today, which hopefully will have some seeds in them. I'm not hungry enough to eat them right now, though. I wonder whether they need stratifying or not. China is pretty cold, but I can't think of any other citrus that needs stratification. I better google it.

That's about it for plants I'm working on right now, really. Out on the balcony, there are a few things still in bloom: poppies, "Baby Blue Eyes" nemophilas, English daisies, bellflowers, which finally bloomed on September 15 and are completely underwhelming, one convolvulus, one dianthus, and pansies. The morning glories still have flower buds on them but have been unable to open for some time now because it's not warm enough. Likewise the marigolds formed buds, to my surprise, as far back as September 11, and have been progressing slowly ever since; I doubt they'll succeed in flowering. Among the morning glories, the following cultivars did not bloom: Heavenly Blue, Kniola's Black Knight, Chocolate, and Blue Star. The thunbergia vine, cypress vine, and Darth Plant also did not flower. I'll be planting Darth Plant again next year, but not thunbergia. Undecided about cypress vine.

Also undecided is what I'm gonna do with the colossal amount of seeds I've harvested off my morning glories. The obvious answer would be "plant them", but with very few exceptions, they're from Insanity Leader, and therefore all varieties I've done several times. For next year, I'm going to get all the same varieties I had this year, and any more I can find, but I'm gonna plant one variety per container, and keep them all straight and orderly; that way I'll know what seeds I have. The current collection of seeds is really of no use to me, so I could either find somewhere inconspicuous to dump them, in which case I suspect they'll run over the town, or throw them in the garbage, in which case they will colonize the dump. Or scatter them at the dump and call it "beautification."

At this time, to be honest, I'd really like to get a nasty frost to kill everything non-hardy, so I can start winterizing. It's not really fun watching plants that aren't doing anything, and if this warm fall gives way suddenly to winter, I'll be out there in nasty weather cleaning up, and I'd rather not do that.

So, now you know.

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.

I am not amused

I finally get a reply from my supplier for the blue geranium. Did they tell me anything about why my geranium isn't blue? No. Instead they're sending me a new one.

What????

I don't want a new geranium. I already have one and it sucks. I have no desire to waste more garden space on geraniums. I never even liked geraniums. I just want to know why it's not blue.

I am NOT amused.

What a gyp...

My geranium bloomed.

What does that have to do with a picture of something that is neither a geranium nor blue?

My point exactly.

The supplier's photo looks like this:


Ok... I can see the similarity in shape, but why is mine mauve? I hate mauve. I want my BLUE geranium, dangit!

I've emailed the supplier for help. Maybe it needs different nutrition. How disappointing though...

Meanwhile...

The poppies are still not open. The first bud appeared nine days ago, and I'm still waiting for it to open. Let's go, you plant! You're a weed, you should be moving a lot faster than this. Sheesh... There must be about two dozen buds now, but it hardly matters how many buds you have if you don't open them.

Other than that, the pansies and geraniums have buds. And that's it for now. Except of course Insanity Plant, which is now resigned to its new situation and flowering handsomely. On Sunday I counted 26 flowers open at the same time, which is the most I've ever seen it do. That's the great thing with Insanity, you can be sure it will never fail you.

Weekly garden update

Actually, it's been 11 days. I'm sure you're desperately yearning for garden news, yes?

Let's start with pumpkins.


The pumpkins are taking over the world. They're huge. And this year they have very tough sturdy stems, which look promising. But now they've reached down to the concrete, so I really need to get them some rigid insulation to sit on, otherwise the concrete will burn them yet again. Other than that, I was worried that they'd be damaged when the dog and I rub against them in our comings and goings. I was wrong. Turns out pumpkins have nasty little pointy hairs on the underside of their leaves which scratch you when you walk by. The dog doesn't care. I, of course, get a skin reaction. I have skin reactions to pretty much everything under the sun anyway. In any case, I have great hopes for the pumpkins this time around.


The asters. I found out why it takes so long for asters to bloom: because normally they're a fall-flowering plant. I guess they don't realize that up here fall is RIGHT NOW and they need to get their butts in gear if they're planning to flower at all. But since you can't talk sense into a plant, I guess I'll bring them inside in the fall.


The pansies. I haven't thinned them yet because they're not complaining. Being that they're perennials, I don't know if they even plan to flower this year at all, but they're making pleasant verdure at any rate.


English daisies (left) and geraniums (right). Again, English daisies are perennials, so they might not bloom this year at all. Maybe now is the time to thin them; some of them seem to be getting a bit stretchy.

The geraniums have picked themselves up quite a bit since the last update, but they're still nowhere near blooming. I'm now puzzled as to their lifecycle. The Veseys growing guide says they're annuals, the supplier says perennials. Maybe because Veseys is in Canada and the supplier is in the US, they might be hardy to their climate but not to ours. Oh well. I'll bring them inside in the fall regardless, and we'll see what they do for next year. But I do wish they would bloom though. I was so looking forward to them.


The Wall of Insanity is finally understanding how things work. I tricked them with strings, as you can see. At first they were like "meh", but then they grabbed on to the strings with a vengeance, and now they've reached the railing. Madness will now ensue... I hope. That being said, they still have at least another month until they bloom. Sigh... At least now I know how long it takes them to start climbing, so next year I will start them inside about five weeks early. Darth Plant is still in there somewhere, but making no progress at all. It's too late in the year now to do any more seeding, so I'll have to try it again next year. You can see also that some of the maydays have been migrated to the gaps in the Wall, but that will have to change yet again as the Wall starts to shut out the light.


Nemophilas and California bluebells. You can see the bluebells on the outside with the different leaves. They're just starting to bud. I'm expecting them to bloom in about a week to ten days, and the nemophilas about ten days later, based on their performance in 2009.


The lemons. Not much change there. They seem to like it on the balcony, but being trees, they have their fast growth in the spring and slow growth in the summer, so there isn't much to see right now. As long as they're green and have leaves, that's satisfactory.


Same with the maydays, slow summer growth. Here you can see Deng Xiaoping in front and Liu Shao-ch'i in back. To the right of Deng Xiaoping is its aster roommate. They're now the same height. Spooky!

And now here is a bigger problem:


Remember those pear seeds I got tired of stratifying and threw out there to rot?

Oops...

So now I have five pear trees. The first to sprout is still with Peng Dehuai and is doing fine, but I can never get a decent photo of it. The second one died. I checked on it because it wasn't progressing, and its root was gone. I don't know why, but sometimes plants' roots disappear and they die. So I put more seeds into the CryoVat... but meanwhile, unbeknownst to me, these four sprouted in Deng Xiaoping's planter.

Uh-oh.

I'm going to end up with a veritable army of pear trees now. Then I'll have to cull them down to two. I hate culling trees.


The Jungle. You can't really see anything, but that's pretty much how it goes with the Jungle. The gigantic thing on the right, with its many branches, is the Head Zombie.


This is a very-close-up of the Head Zombie. First of all you can see it looks like it's all coated in coarse salt, or ice, or something, but it's not. That's just the way it looks. Second, do these look like petunia buds to you? I have no photos at all from last year's petunias. Also, they can't be petunias, because on closer inspection of my logs, it wasn't the petunias I dumped into the Jungle, it was the lavateras. And I have photos of lavateras and their leaves look nothing like that. In fact I have no photos of anything at all that looks like this. Also, it's now two feet tall. I think I'd have noticed a forest of two-foot-tall psycho plants taking over my balcony last year. I can't find anything like it in my book, either.

Whatever it is, I'm going to kill it. It's way too aggressive for my garden. But I want it to flower first, so I'll know what it was. In the meantime, it's making itself useful as a climbing pole for the "non-climbing" convolvulus. Non-climbing, my foot. It's climbing all over the place. Not as fast as a morning glory, maybe, but it's definitely climbing. And it's budding, too. At first I thought the four o'clocks were budding, but no, it's a convolvulus vine that's wrapped itself around a four o'clock stem and is making buds.

Meanwhile, the "short" poppies are also making buds. Several buds. They'll flower soon. It's too bad that the "short"poppies which were seeded close to the edge grew so much faster than the "tall" poppies close to the center, because now the tall poppies are in the shade and getting nowhere. Tying the "short" poppies to the railing seems to have helped, but I doubt the tall poppies will catch up now.

The flax is still healthy. It's not supposed to bloom this year, but I'm hoping to get lots of stalks to give it a better chance next year.

What else is in there... Globe thistles: still growing, but they're shadowed by... something or other. They're perennials anyway, so I suppose they don't plan to flower until next year.

Bellflowers: growing, but were shadowed by the poppies for the longest time, so they're very late, and they're also perennials.

Shastas... Er... What is with the shastas anyway? Let me have a look. Ok: the shastas have lots of leaves, but nothing that looks like a stem that might some day turn into a flower. Crud... You know what? Next year I could dig some from the library's flower beds, that would be way easier.

Four o'clocks are prospering, but again, they're planted in front of supposedly taller plants that happen to grow much slower and are now in their shadow, so I'm not pleased. Had I known how fast some things grow and others don't, I'd have planned this better. Or... not. The Jungle isn't exactly a paragon of planning. Anyway, I chopped another one down today. I don't even care about them, they're just something I grabbed at the store in passing. I don't even know if I'm gonna like them. I killed most of the zombie that was making those strange pseudo-flowers I posted the other day. I left one stem because it's leaning far out of the pot and not really shading the others. Now there is room for the middle plants to get some light; hopefully they'll put some growth on yet before it's too late.

Hollyhocks are looking good, they made big leaves fast enough that they're not starved for light. Lupins and... well, I don't know about delphiniums, but the lupins are definitely prospering. But again, all these are perennials and might not flower this year. But at least this time I know that a lot of my flowers won't flower this year. I didn't know that the last two years. You live, you learn.

The ornamental grass is still there. All one stalk of it, as far as I can tell.

Other than that, it's all a bunch of stuff I threw in there for no apparent reason, and I have no idea what's what. It will be a surprise if/when anything blooms, I guess.


Ensemble. You can see Insanity Plant at the back. It's no longer trying to get taller, and is finally starting to bloom fairly regularly again. I hadn't seen a Star of Yelta on it in some time, but now there are two ready to flower tomorrow. Insanity Plant is indestructible.

The lawn is doing fine, clearly. The oriental poppy is still inside and according to my googling, it only flowers once a year, so there won't be anything to report until next spring. And the roses are having fun in the fun gel. And I suppose it's just as well that they're roses and not peonies, because according to my reading, roses are really easy to root, whereas peonies are anything but.

So, that was the garden for this week.

Darn you, geraniums!

I suddenly realized that my blue geraniums, which I thought were annuals, are actually perennials. So that explains why they're taking so long to grow. Also, that means they might not flower this year. Boooooooohoohoohoohoo! I'm so sad. I really want my blue geraniums.

Poop.