Welcome to the Winter Garden

Here is what's going on in the Winter Garden, that is, my living room. (I live in a bachelor suite, so my "living room" is also my bedroom, music room, office, kitchen to the extent that there is no wall between the two, and tropical plant conservatory.)

• Planter #8: one Passiflora edulis that survived my complete lack of effort and some overwatering over the summer. Also there are some seed pods I harvested off an unidentified yellow-flowering plant in someone else's yard, and an avocado pit that I've buried in there, but I'm gonna dig it up because it's probably just rotting instead of sprouting.



• Planter #9: the oriental lily, having now shed all its leaves and been cut back to the ground; the alleged "blue" geranium, still alive, still not blue; and two or three globe thistles, one of which is putting forth some new growth. I don't expect much from any of these, but that's no big deal. I'll get more globe thistle seeds in the spring, and the other two never meant much to me.



• Planter #10: two pear trees.



• Planter #11: the Hope lemon tree, beautiful as always though currently dropping leaves. I gave them 6 L each of water around October 13, when they seemed to be finally thirsty, and as a result they are again showing signs of being over-watered. In addition, they are getting no light lately, October being a particularly bad month for sunlight. People think we lack light in winter; in reality, the real winter months have lots of beautiful sunny days, but while the lake is open in October and November, we get mostly overcast skies and precipitation. It's depressing for people, and makes lemon trees pale and sad.



• Planter #12: the Faith lemon tree, again showing its strength compared to Hope by not complaining so much about the circumstances. On the other hand, and I'll tell you more in a later post, Faith has the problem of very poor branching habits so far, so that I have the choice of pruning almost everything off or letting it go on with really crowded branches until a path suggests itself.



• Planter #13: two pear trees.



• Planter #18: baobabs and lychees. This planter is now in a dark corner against the heat register, after I read a post on a gardening forum from someone who couldn't get his kaffir lemons to sprout until he built them an incubator and raised the temperature to 35 C. That reminded me that my original baobabs were sprouted in June, so in warm weather, and my lemons were sprouted by leaving them against the heat register for a month. So I hie the planter thence, and sure enough, now I have a digitata sprouting. Perhaps even two digitatas, as I planted the dried-out (I thought) seeds from the previous attempt, and I seem to be seeing two roots. However, time will tell. At least one za seed is not sprouted yet; I know because I removed some surface mold with a fork and found it, the mold, had reached the seed. So I washed off the seed, which seems healthy though not cracking yet, and replanted it. As for the lychee, I'm not touching it. I can see its shiny carapace, so I know it hasn't rotted yet, and there is no point in disturbing it yet again.



• Planter #19: Deng Xiaoping



• Planter #20: the peony, which is of a variety called "Shirley Temple". I don't like that name, but the catalog photo was pretty. This afternoon I decided to make sure I had the planting depth right, so I dug it up, measured 1 3/4 inch up each stalk, tied a string marker there, replanted it so the dirt came up to the string, and then removed the strings. We construction workers like this sort of simple-minded trick. So now the peony is also by the heat register, awaiting its fate.



• Planter #21: the Asiatic lily / grotesque carnivorous alien bulbs. This one is in the kitchen right now, but I might move it to the heat corner... later. If the fancy takes me. And if I get around to tidying up that corner, which was recently occupied by some sort of amorphous clutter.



• CryoVat: there are actually two cryovats going right now, one for cherry pits which I plan to destratify in two weeks or so, and one with holly seeds which still have six weeks to go, and even so, I mentioned it before, can take "18 months to three years" to sprout. I'm not sure where I got the idea that I want to be challenged by my garden, but apparently, that's the path I'm taking.

Meanwhile, on the balcony:

• Outdoor CryoVat: Planter #17 is out on the balcony with dogwood and cotoneaster seeds. Like I said before, I figure that since it worked for the maydays, it should work equally well for anything I harvest around town. Meanwhile it's also contributing to my heat reservoir, if only a little.



• In the Winter Hut: the Jungle, with bulbs of tulips, daffodils, and stuff I don't remember the name of which is welcome to die; and also hollyhocks and flax from this year, which I hope will live to fight another year. Also, Liu Shao-ch'i and Peng Dehuai, which I really really really hope will make it. Inshallah.

So now you know.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Bloom or die

I weeded out this plant from the Jungle. I think it was the last of the four o'clocks. It had no buds and was shading my interesting plants, and I don't really care about four o'clocks. They sounded interesting, but if they're going to take forever to bloom and shade my other plants, I don't want them.

Right now, everything that isn't a) something I recognize or b) blooming or about to bloom gets to die. I don't have time for weeds anymore this late in the season.

It's a jungle out there

I didn't do individual photos because those plants who have had significant changes already got their own posts. For the rest, mostly they're growing a lot of greenery. The Wall of Insanity, having reached the railing thanks to my bait, is now colonizing it with great gusto. One might even say élan. Some of the vines have already reached the top of the railing. Now let's get some flowers going, m'kay?

The Jungle is junglelicious as always. I killed the Head Zombie, detangled it from the convolvulus and replaced it with a 4' stake. So, the "non-climbing" convolvulus is at the top of the stake already. There is still only one vine of convolvulus blooming in the entire Jungle. The poppies are just hanging there looking lame. The four o'clocks and phacelias have some buds. The globe thistles don't seem to be making progress, having let themselves get shaded by everybody else. I'm gonna buy more next year and figure out a different approach. Other than that, there is still all sorts of stuff growing in there, and we'll know what it is if it ever flowers.

Everybody else is doing fine with not much change from last week, except the rose cuttings. They had so much fun in the fun gel, they partied themselves to death. See what fun will do to you? So, I got new ones yesterday. If those don't work I might have to wait until next year to try again, because the mother plant is running out of suitable growth for cuttings. Assuming I have any idea which growth is suitable for cuttings.

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.

Lawn zombies

There was a zombie growing in my lawn. I'm pretty sure it's a columbine, though I didn't seed any in 2010. I decided to transplant it to the Jungle. Let me tell you, you have to look long and hard to find a spot in the Jungle to plant anything these days. I think I may have gotten a little carried away with seeding. On the other hand, had they not taken so long to start growing, this would never have happened. I'm totally blaming the seeds. Now I'd like to get some bells of Ireland to throw in there. I've tried them twice and never got anything, and they don't seem to be coming up as zombies either.

Take that, zombie plant!

I chopped off the head zombie. There was a storm in the night, and this morning the evil thing was lying down on my globe thistles. It wasn't broken or anything, just floppy. I righted it two or three times and it kept lying down again, so I amputated it. Because the main stalk was about as thick as my little finger, I figured pulling it out would disturb all the plants that are growing around it, so I cut it off at the base with the pruning shears instead.

That's the great thing about gardening: I'm sole master after God. You cross me, I can kill you any time I want. I hope the example of this zombie plant will teach the others a lesson.

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.