Gardening Interrupted

Today brought a perfect representation of March weather: sunbreaks with intermittent downpours, thunder, lightning, and then a quick deluge of hail! I started garden chores around 9:30am and got a lot done today despite the weather challenges.

I started out by planting some 3-packs and 4-packs with snap pea seeds. My hope is to give them away to neighbors when they sprout and get a little growth on. I may use some to fill in my own pea trellis if the seeds planted directly don’t put on good growth.

I also raked away some mulch along the front of the native garden and sprinkled thousands of native annual and perennial seeds in a band about 10″ wide. My hope is that a bunch of different types will germinate and grow and I’ll get a sense of what grows easily in this neighborhood so I can put some seed mixes together to share with neighbors. I’m hoping for a grassy meadow-type effect with lots of wildflowers thrown in. The seeds certainly got watered in well enough, and hailed-in, which may or may not benefit them!

I’m hoping that come June this before picture will be in stark contrast to an after picture featuring hundreds of blooming and thriving native annuals and perennials.

I scraped a lot of debris and mostly Douglas fir cones from the sidewalk next to the memory garden and pulled some big fir branches out of there, as well, and moved them to the native plant garden so they can decompose there.

You can see the edging got messed up and some large fir branches in the bed, as well as all the schmutz on the sidewalk

All the scrapings get added to paths and mulches around the garden–while it looks like dirt, it really is compost from the fir needles, leaves, bark, and other debris that drifts onto the sidewalk. There is more clean-up to be done in this garden, but it can wait a week or two. Blooming now, the tail end of snowdrops and crocus, Colydalis solida, Erodium pelargoniflorum ‘Sweetheart’, and Iberis sempervirens.

Erodium pelargoniflorum “Sweetheart” blooming in the memory garden.

I moved from cleaning up the sidewalk to trimming way back a couple of Rose “Alister Stella Grey” growing in the raised veggie garden. I had started these from hardwood cuttings and they are doing really well, but are in the wrong place. I cut them down to stumps and may try to remove them to pots this year and give them away. I trained a thornless blackberry on the trellis the roses had occupied, so that should be a little more fruitful this year.

Already a bloody mess after tackling the roses, I moved on to the blackberry in the next bed over and pruned it back to a strong framework. It was a tangled monster, but looks a lot better after some courageous pruning.

The “before” of the wild blackberry tangle. I didn’t take an “after” photo, but trust that it looked much less tangled and much smaller. My thumb sustained a fairly serious cut from the thorns on this plant! We all got cut in the end.

Some more clean-up followed. I trimmed the Echinops ritro old stems down to the ground and cut the prunings into short lengths and left them on the bed, just in case insects were nesting in there. I also pruned the roses Bonica Improved and Collette a bit to hopefully increase the flowers this summer.

About that time a rain squall came in and chased me into the greenhouse where plenty of work awaited. The main project was to water everything. I pulled about ten watering cans full of water out of the rain barrel, but it was raining so hard, I don’t think the resident goldfish even noticed! The big project was to rearrange the plants and pull any Clivia from under the benches that are spiking so they will be front and center for their bloom show. I was very disappointed in the spike numbers I found this year. A large percentage of the plants do not have spikes and I don’t know why. I was more attentive to them than usual last year and they all seemed pretty happy coming into the greenhouse. I watered them all (first time since November) and am hoping some of them will spike later. I have one more shelf of Clivia plants to review next weekend, but right now there are only about a dozen spikes.

The good news in the greenhouse is that the Cymbidium orchids are spiking madly–at least six plants have a spike or two each, and opening the greenhouse door during the day seems to go a long way to keeping the humidity down and the aphids in check.

Yet to bloom are the Veltheimia bracteata bulbs. They slowed down during the very cold weather. Now they are stretching a bit every day.

When the rain stopped, I ventured out and deconstructed the plum tree and cherry branches that I cut a few weeks ago in the orchard garden. It takes a lot more time to cut them all in small pieces and spread them around the garden rather than packing them in yard waste, but I know it will be an investment the bugs and birds will appreciate. I chopped other pruned branches, too–and there is more to do in the coming weeks.

A highlight of the orchard garden is the Hellebore that sister Cate gave me a few years ago. It has quite a few flowers and seedlings all around it.

The last task I undertook was to cut back the rose at the end of the driveway. My goal was to get it down to a nub, but I was mostly done removing all the long canes when lighting hit, then thunder, then Leon yelled at me to get my ass in the house. A minute after I stepped inside, the sky opened in a monsoon of rain and hail. It was awe-inspiring and a bit scary. The sun is out again now, but I’ve got dinner to make and housecleaning to do–the wayward rose will have to wait for next weekend.