Who are you, and what are you doing in my garden?

A pansy. Yes, it's a very crappy photo of a pansy, but that's not even the biggest problem. I planted several varieties of pansies. Expensive ones, might I add. Which I selected carefully from among the immense variety of pansies in my catalogs, because of their beauty. This is not one of them.

I don't know where this thing comes from, but it is NOT any of the pansies that I was expecting. I'm most aggravated. Especially because the dog has been quite determined to destroy all the pansies, and there might not be too many besides this one.

Poop.

Perennials, schmerennials

My perennial garden, a month after planting. Now that I can compare my perennials to everyone else's, it's becoming really evident how much sunlight my plants are missing out on. Some people's gardens are getting more than 20 hours of sunlight right now; mine gets barely eight in the sunniest spot, which is where I put my J.P. Connell. Of course the fact that all these perennials were just planted this spring also slows them down compared to established plants, but I blame mostly the sunlight.

More specifically, here is how everyone is doing.

• J.P. Connell is putting out tons of leaves. Not a lot of height being gained, but certainly the leaves are doing great.


• None of the tulips came up. That's too bad, but then again, it would be foolish to underestimate a plant. Maybe they're biding their time.


• Only two of the three double oriental lilies came up, and I can't remember where the third one is, otherwise I'd dig and see what's happening. Now the thing is, there are three of them because they came as a set: Soft Music, which I really liked, Lodewijk, which I really really really really liked, and Magic Star, which I bought because it was included with the other two. So if the missing one is Soft Music or Magic Star, well, that's one thing. But if it's Lodewijk, I'll be very sad. On the other hand, now that my garden is essentially complete, I can afford to buy a few more Lodewijks next spring if I have to.


• The Celebrity peony (the $40 one) is putting out canes. Not nearly as fast as everyone else's peonies that get three times as much sun, but it's alive and well. You can't be in a rush with peonies anyway, they live 20 years and don't like having their roots disturbed, so it's pretty fair that the first summer is a bit slow.


• The Shirley Temple peony (the $12 one) has live roots, but so far no canes. I wonder if I should have buried the entire thing like I did with Celebrity. But, again, if it fails, there is a lot more room in the garden budget for next year, so I can replace it. In fact, I can replace it with something much fancier, from a peony specialist.


• The Asiatic lilies are... still alive, I guess. They got horribly burned and beaten by the cold north wind since they've been out there, but the roots are alive. The orange one that wasn't what I ordered is even looking like there is new growth on it.


• The Stargazer lily is out there somewhere... maybe. It hasn't come up. But since I paid $6 for it and it gave me some lovely flowers last year, maybe I've got my money's worth out of it.


• The dicentra stopped blooming, but the leaves look very happy.


• The toad lilies are all alive, though not growing quickly.


• The anemones are growing. In fact, they may be the fastest-growing bulb I have.


• The ranunculi which I bought from my work's fundraiser haven't come up, but it was more for a good cause than because I wanted ranunculi anyway.


• Someone donated a foot-tall lilac. They grow everywhere in her yard because there used to be a big one that the landlord cut down. Anyway, it's wide awake. I put it in the shade, since they seem to be highly shade tolerant.


• The flax finally seems to be prospering, though there isn't nearly as much as I should have got out of four packets of seeds. Hopefully this time it will establish itself and I won't have to do it again.


• The pansies are sprouting, but since the dog picked that spot for her bed at first, I suspect most of the seeds stuck to her fur and are gone.


• The hollyhocks are also sprouting.


• The California poppies are also sprouting.


• The pear trees are not moving much. They withstood the wind very well, but I suppose it must still be a drag.


• The two mayday trees haven't leafed out yet and have no new growth whatsoever, even though they're alive and they were growing inside the winter hut. I might have to get more seeds in the fall.

That's pretty much the things I know about. I know I seeded some other things, but I don't know what I put where or what they look like as sprouts. There are certainly many shapes of sprouts coming up. I suspect some of them are from the bird seed mix, but clearly some are weeds. Luckily, I now know a black mustard sprout when I see it, so I've been able to pull them when they're less than an inch tall and still harmless.

Perhaps the greatest sign of progress is that I have not dumped thousands of seeds indiscriminately because "nothing is coming up." So it looks a little sparse right now, but when everything gets moving in July, it's gonna look pretty good, if I do say so myself. On the other hand, it certainly doesn't make for a lot of blogging.

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.

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.

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!

More of the same

Pansies, phacelias and five-spots looking good. The rest... still waiting.

Daily pansies

There are now five colours: purple, blue, orange, yellow and red. I think that's all this mix is supposed to produce. If you want the same, since it's obviously beautiful, you can buy it here.

For next year I've found a black variety from my supplier of rare seeds. I think I'll be moving them to a bigger pot, too.

Continuing progress

At least the pansies and poppies are true to type and multiplying. The Star of Yelta in planter #14.1 as well, though that's not exactly a desirable circumstance. Also, I discovered I don't like the smell of pansies, but it's not very strong so that's ok.

Yellow pansy

More pansies

The purple one is at an awkward angle and like I said, the colour messes with my camera's head. Half the time the autofocus can't even find it. The stem of this flower has been hanging over the edge of the pot for weeks and I had meant to cull it, but never got around to it because it didn't seem to do any harm. Good thing I didn't, this is my favourite pansy so far.



Light blue pansies. I like blue, but I have to admit the purple one is way more spectacular. I'm keeping a close eye on the timing of these, because I'll use their timeline to calculate when the purple one probably flowered.


Yellow bud.


Ensemble. It's a crappy photo, but I think this is gonna look really good when it has more than three flowers on it. I'm sure glad I planted them.

The second pansy

It's opening pretty slowly. Makes me wonder how long the other one was open before I noticed. There are actually two of this light-blue colour. There are also two pale yellow buds and one that looks burgundy, but maybe it's another purple one.

I'm sure glad I've succeeded at last. Pansies rock. Why is "pansy" an insult? Pansies are awesome. Baby's breath is a crappy flower; let's make that an insult.

When did THAT happen?

In all that, I totally failed to notice:


A pansy! The camera systematically failed to capture the colour properly in six tries, for some reason. It's a beautiful deep purple.

I wonder when it hatched, because it was on the dark side of the pansies, and the only reason I noticed it is because I decided to eat "al fresco" with the dog, and since there is no room for a chair and table on the balcony, we were sitting right on the floor. And from that level, I noticed something purple among the green, turned the pansies around, and there it was!

That's awesome. I tried pansies last year and failed. This year I planted something called "matrix jewel mix" from Veseys. So far, I'm very pleased.

By the way, I'm making a list of my suppliers in the sidebar, so if you see something here that you like, you can go buy it too.

In other news, there are now some buds among the nemophilas as well.

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.