[Cross-posted at My Left Wing]
Good morning, and happy monsoon season! Welcome to Saturday Morning Garden Blogging.
Last week the word in Colorado was dry. And then, on Sunday, the rains came. Oh, it has been a blissfully wonderfully week of weather here on the Front Range. It started Sunday, with a nice downpour giving us more than an inch of rain, and I've had rain ranging from light sprinkles overnight soakings every day since, with temperatures staying pleasantly in the 80's. Today is even better, forecast to stay in the 70's.
The monsoons have been an iffy proposition during our last several, drought-pattern years. Some years there's been no monsoon at all, or we've had very weakly-established, abbreviated patterns. This year the monsoons are a bit early, the pattern of warm sunshine early in the day, with clouds and showers starting in the late afternoon and evening very firmly established. It is a blessing after our very dry, hot spring.
The daylilies are now starting to strut their stuff.
A word to the budget minded: now is the time to start checking your local nurseries for discounts. The main planting season is past, the fall season hasn't started, and nurseries have excess stock that they need to move out. Many of the plants will be leggy and/or pot bound, but given the proper, ruthless treatment, they can thrive and, while not being showy this year, they'll be wonderful next year. An added incentive is, you can look around your perennial beds and see what areas need filled in, where you need a boost of color among plants that have already passed their blooming season, or replace plants that didn't survive over winter.
On Thursday, I took a trip to Paulino Gardens, where the majority of the stock has been discounted by 40%. I bought dwarf bearded iris, dwarf lilies, twinspur, a pink and white coreopsis, three types of agastache, a skullcap and a verbascum, along with some annuals to provide shots of instant color in drab spots. The coreopsis, in particular, was in rough shape. It was extremely pot bound, and so leggy and tall the pot wouldn't stand upright.
The first step was cutting off the top half of the plant, including all blooms. I then plunged the pot in a bucket of water and let it soak for a time. When I removed the pot, the entire root mass was encased in a caul of fine root hairs. I snipped through the mass with a scissors, and pulled off the majority of it, exposing the larger primary roots. I then plunged it back in the bucket of water and swished it around a few times, further releasing the primary roots that were tangled up in the potting soil and pulling them free, taking special care to pull down the roots from the center of the root mass.
Now, instead of a tight, palm-sized lump of compacted root, I had a loose, hand-sized mass, ready to spread into the ground. Dug a hole, plopped it in, gave it a shot of water, and moved on to the next plant.
The afternoon rains prevented me from finishing the job, so today will be spent planting the remainder, either in the ground, or in pots. The veggie patch is exploding, so cucumber vines need to be trained onto their arch, and I'm still debating whether to finish removing the pea vines. It's weird -- in the cooler weather of the past two weeks, those pea vines that hadn't already yellowed have begun putting out new blossoms, and new growth from the bottom. I'm thinking of leaving them in -- I'm in no great hurry to pull them -- just to see what happens. Will I, perhaps, luck into a secondary crop?
The first batch of corn is starting to tassel, but I'm afraid a lot of the cauliflower is a lost cause. With the very early hot weather, several plants bolted before the heads formed, so I'm cutting those out and tossing them in the composter. There's hope, though, with the purple cauliflower; it's just beginning to blossom.
And the next batch of lilies, planted last fall, is starting to open. This is a miniature, only a foot or so tall. I have nice fat buds on several other varieties and, like a kid at Christmas, I'm anxiously awaiting their opening -- especially since the experience of the FNOL's (those will be moved to the back yard).
Also on tap is mowing the grass, which is filling in beautifully. Although there are still a few bare spots, and some thin spots, by the end of the summer those will largely eradicated by the spread of existing grass. I now engage in at least one session per day of Zen Weeding -- when the Dadster has game shows blaring, or has turned on FauxNews, I go outside, let my eye wander across the grass patch until it encounters an incongruent leaf pattern, then pinch tiny weed seedlings out of the grass, letting my mind wander along with my eye. I'm approaching the place where it's actually becoming harder to find weeds. I got most of the dandelions out on the 4th of July, the steady rains having soaked the ground to where the roots could easily be dislodged with a small amount of assistance from the water-powered weeder. There are a few more, but not many.
So, what's happening in your gardens?