The 2024 garden year has been an interesting one. As always, I started with grand designs and maintained my momentum better than usual this year. It was not perfect, of course, but there were some great successes and important lessons.

I had two main areas of focus this year with my seed-starting efforts. First, I wanted lots of flowering plants for containers to provide a long season of bloom. Second, I wanted some backup plants to poke into the memory garden when the perennials there faded.

The following seed starting was very successful: violas, cosmos, nicotiana, impatiens, rudbeckia, china asters, and black-eyed Susan vines. I also had a lot of success with parsley, thyme, oregano, and marjoram. Nasturtium seeds were planted directly in most of the pots in the driveway, as well. Geraniums were grown from cuttings last fall and in early spring.

Lessons:

• Repeat the violas, cosmos, and nicotianas, but time the seed starting and transplanting a bit better.
• Repeat the impatiens but pick a color mix with fewer loud oranges and reds–obnoxious!
• Repeat the rudbeckias but time the seed starting and transplanting better–keep up with their growth (fast!)
• Repeat the china asters, but keep them in smaller pots longer before putting them out into larger containers–they did not fare well on their own
• Repeat the black-eyed Susan vines, but pick the reddish or white cultivars
• Repeat geranium cuttings but focus most on Petals, the variegated one that looks good all year.

My biggest successes in the patio pots along the driveway were not propagated from seed–they were the Douglas asters I started from cuttings back in the spring. It turns out they are fantastic in pots!

These cutting-grown starts have been blooming for a month and look to have another month or more to go. Native pollinators love them!

Here are some other plants blooming around the garden this week.

We spent some time east of the Cascades over Labor Day and stopped in Omak at a plant shop (a “grow” shop is possibly more accurate, as their focus seemed to be 90% on cannabis). I looked around at the sad houseplant display and found two near-dead streptocarpus and a tiny hoya that I adopted.

Here they are after a brief resuscitation:

The last new item in the house is a pot full of seeds that I found in my backpack that had to be washed after an exploding kiwi incident. Here is the pot. Not exciting now, but full of promise and mystery!