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.

More of the same

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

Flower #2

Phacelia, or California bluebell. This was the first flower I ever grew, in 2009, as part of a "wildflower mix". It's fast and blue is my favourite colour, so of course this makes it one of my favourite flowers, but last year I didn't plant any, having misplaced the seed packets somewhere between Yellowknife and home. So I was hoping to get tons of them this year and that they'd reseed themselves, but it looks like the nemophilas are choking them out. Therefore, next year I will plant them separately.

One thing I like about gardening is, you can always try again.

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.

Garden update

The Jungle is thriving, as you can see. I've thinned out the poppies (top left) quite a bit, but we could still lose at least half of them.

The huge thing going up into the top right corner is one of the zombie plants. I removed all but two, because I'm more and more convinced they're petunias. Petunias are nearly indestructible, as far as I can tell, which would be an awesome quality if I liked them. As it turns out, however, I'm only moderately fond of them, so two is about as many as I want to keep.

The thing trying to crawl out of frame in the bottom left corner is a convolvulus. A convolvulus is "like" a morning glory in shape, but comes in different colours, and according to the seed packet, it "does not have a climbing habit" and grows to about a foot tall. I wish they had mentioned that it crawls quite agressively, and in particular, it keeps trying to crawl all over my globe thistles, which I don't appreciate. So I keep relocating it, but it always finds a way to crawl over something important, such as my poor little flax sprouts. I've never managed to make flax flower yet and I don't want it ruined by a convolvulus. If this trend continues, I might have to get rid of the convolvulus.

Other than that, the globe thistles are doing fine. Nothing particularly interesting happening with them. Likewise with the flax, the ones that sprouted are carrying on, nothing much to say about them.

The Shasta daisies are mostly hidden by the zombie plant here. Now that there is a bit of volume happening, their poor sprouting performance isn't so noticeable. And as we've seen with the poppies, there is such a thing as too much success.

The lupins, delphiniums and hollyhocks are starting to look quite solid, which they'd better because at this point anyone who doesn't get a move on is going to get crushed by the zombies, poppies and convolvulus, and that would annoy me extremely.

There is one pampa's plume that I can find, it's looking nice and healthy.

The four o'clocks are now also becoming very aggressive. I've pulled one out already and might have to whack some more. I wish seed packets would tell you when a plant has a tendency to take over the world like that, then I might not plant crazy weeds with my most valuable species all the time.

Hidden behind all this on the sunny side are all the little plants: bellflower, nemophila, California bluebell, and... other stuff that I forget. They are not doing well and the poppies keep flopping over them so they're not getting the sun. Clearly, this project wasn't very well thought-out.

Oh well. Let's move on.


The window boxes. As you can see, I've relocated the one from the sunny location next to the shady one. The shady one had much better sprouting than the sunny one, but the real reason I did this is because the sunny one was casting a shadow on more important plants. In any case, they're doing fine.


Pumpkins. As I've mentioned, I've never succeeded with pumpkins yet, but I must say, these are the best pumpkin leaves I've ever grown. I'm attributing this early success to the fact I thinned them out, but then again, it could be just because they're in a shadier spot than last year. If I'm understanding things, plants make bigger leaves to grab more light, so big leaves isn't a sign of success, just a comment on the light.


Here we have asters at the top, doing fine. The English daisies in that planter, not so much, but oh well. I got lots more. Asters are really slow-moving for annuals. I tried them two years ago and they never had time to flower. If these don't make it by first frost, I'll bring them inside and hopefully get something that way.

Bottom left is the vat of English daisies, looking verdant and enthusiastic as you can see. I really like English daisies, so I'm pretty excited to see all this growth.

Bottom right are my pansies. Not much to say about them... they're growing. That's what plants do.


The Wall of Insanity is also looking lush and determined, but hasn't reached climbing mode yet. I'll make a note of when they start winding around the railing, that way next year I can start them indoors and they'll be ready to climb as soon as last frost passes.

Darth Plant is still in there somewhere, but still losing ground compared to the Ipomoea vines. Oh well. Better luck next year.

Note also that the dog's lawn, on the right, is needing a haircut.


The trees. Everyone is doing fine. The lemons don't mind being outside, but then again, it hasn't been windy yet. The maydays are fine. Liu Shao-ch'i hasn't complained about being transplanted. The pear tree I thought I damaged is actually thriving so far, though I didn't get any usable photos of it. You can barely see it as a green dot in the far right planter in the back row. The other one is still in Deng Xiaoping's planter. I'll move it later, if it doesn't die first.

The far left planter in the front row is the geraniums. Progress is slow. Some leaves have been burned by the wind. My early optimism is beginning to fade.

Not pictured are the baobabs, the plum cuttings, Insanity Plant and the oriental lily.

The oriental lily flowers are now wilted. I'm not sure what it's supposed to do next or whether I should remove the dead flowers. I'll google it tomorrow.

Insanity Plant is sulking. It doesn't like change, so it has been flowering very little since I put it out on the balcony. Also, a lot of the leaves have been eaten by the wind. It seems to have given up on reaching the next balcony. I'm sure it will pick itself up, though. It's indestructible.

The cuttings are still having tons of fun in their fun gel. They're more or less upright and clearly alive. No roots yet, but that's fine. It's supposed to take weeks for the roots to form. Weeks of fun in the fun gel!

The baobabs are thriving. A. digitata now has a leader. Next baobab photo is on Friday, unless they do something unexpected in the mean time.

And that's pretty much what's happening in the garden.