“I love spring anywhere, but if I could choose I would always greet it in a garden.”
― Ruth Stout
It’s really been an ideal spring for the garden so far this year.
Temperatures have been trending gradually warmer — not jumping precipitously to 90F and then back to the 20s at night, which causes flower buds to panic and jump ship — and we have had oodles of rain, including an inch in about an hour early yesterday morning. The forecast for yesterday predicated heavy rain, so I held off on planting seeds or little seedlings, and I’m glad I did. Those delicate ones will likely go in the ground Monday through Wednesday.
Yesterday, after buying a few (well-established) plants at a favourite plant sale in a nearby town, I got them into the saturated ground in various places around the yard, along with some Jerusalem artichoke tubers a friend gave me on Friday. (Click any photo for larger image.)
annuals and veggies
- 12 ‘Green Towers’ romaine lettuce – kitchen garden (more lettuce coming on Tuesday)
- 2 Sunsweet cherry tomatoes – new veggie bed (more tomatoes coming on Tuesday)
- 1 Italian flat-leaf parsley – kitchen garden
- 3 ‘Hip Hop’ euphorbia – supposed profusion of tiny white flowers all summer – front bed
- 3 ‘Kong Rose’ coleus – shade bed
perennials and shrubs
- 1 feverfew – edge of new veggie garden
- 2 bee balm (unknown type) – front bed
- 1 lilac (unknown type and height — but for $12 …) – new perennial bed
- 6 Jerusalem artichoke tubers – in back lawn near a compost bin because
I was surprised that I bought so little, and most of it annuals, at the plant sale. I was looking for something unusual and didn’t find it, even among the local hand-dug perennials. No common or uncommon milkweed, sweet Cecily, vervain, boneset (eupatorium perfoliatum), baptisia, amsonia, filipendula (meadowsweet), inula (horse-heal), kirengeshoma (yellow wax bells), tricyrtis (toad lily), chelone (turtlehead), penstemons, aruncus (goatsbeard), angelica, snakeroot (cimicifuga or actaea), grasses, trees, shrubs (other than the unspecified lilac I bought, and an equally unspecified hydrangea).
There was cow parsley (Queen Anne’s Lace, wild chervil), however, which I don’t think I’ve come across before. Maybe I should have bought it, but I can probably find a surplus one growing some place nearby.
Below: filipendula seedheads in Oct; garden with goatsbeard, snakeroot, astilbe, salvia and mint; penstemon ‘Jingle Bells’ in bloom; tricyrtis in bloom; and chelone in bloom.
I was happy with what I got, and even happier than it took almost no time to plant this bit of flora. The lilac was the only one that required a pick axe.
It was a good day.
And next weekend is another plant sale.