Fourth Annual Fall Park Circle Plant Swap

It was that time of year again - time for the fall plant swap.  We had a lot of stuff going on this weekend and the thought crossed my mind that I might not have time to go this year.  Can you believe that?  It was only a passing thought - I came to my senses pretty quickly.  We have had a lot going on, and I procrastinated until this morning as far as pulling plants together for the swap goes.  I got up at 5am and was outside at 5:30 trying to get plants together, realizing that I couldn't see a thing!  I promptly went back inside and read the paper, ate breakfast and watched tv until 7am, when I resumed my activities.

I came up with a large pile of plants - more than I expected on such short notice.  Earlier in the week, I had dug up all the pups from our century plant.  This morning I dug up some irises and some phlox and potted them up.  I thinned out the water irises growing in the waterfall of our pond - it needed it.  It needs a good cleaning out and repotting, but that will have to wait.  And hostas - I have to explain the hostas.

While at the previous plant swap in April, I was in the middle of planting a shade garden and was looking for enough hostas for a mass planting.  I didn't find many at the swap, but I met a woman there that offered me some from her yard.  A week or so later, I went to her house and we walked around and dug up parts of almost every clump she had in her yard.  When I got them home, I broke them into smaller plants and had them in a couple of buckets of water.  I planted as many as I could and put the leftover bucket of hostas, dirt and water in the driveway, intending to plant them in the next couple of days.  Days turned into weeks and weeks turned into months, and so I ended up bringing them to the next plant swap.  I wanted to tell her the story, but she wasn't there.  I did save a clump for myself - I still have plans to plant some in the near future, along with what I got at the swap.

I mention this every time now, but I don't find as many plants that I have to have as I used to, and it was trued this time.  Inevitably I end up doing more socializing in the beginning, rather than scoping out plants.  I see people who I don't see all the time and I end up talking to them.  I eventually find my first selection - there's usually one must-have plant - but I didn't see one today.  Just like last time, I found my groove - I changed my first selection from a Euphorbia trigona to a citrus I found after Darren mentioned that there were some mixed in with the rest of the plants.

Before I go any further, let me mention the plants I didn't get.  These were high-ranking choices, that got picked by other people while I was picking other plants:  Euphorbia trigona, night-blooming cactus, corpse-flower cactus, giant papyrus, canna and ginger lilies.  I think that's about it for the plants I didn't get.

I had a little trouble prioritizing this time.  Every other time Robin was there and, for the first few rounds, she would help me get the plants I wanted.  So I started out with the citrus and then I found some daylilies.  I saw someone with one of my friend Joan's Yuccas and I decided to get one of those.  I would have preferred Echinacea, but I got some of Joan's Black-eyed Susans instead.  I found some more daylilies - I wasn't sure what they were at first.  They were in a plastic bag and extremely leggy, like they didn't get a lot of sun, or they were over-fertilized with Nitrogen.  They reminded me of the Narcissus bulbs I brought previously - in their case, it was not enough light.  I got some Persian shield and a couple of beautyberrys to add some native plants to our landscape.  As always, I feel satisfied by what I brought home from the swap, and the fewer plants mean that they won't be neglected because I don't know what to do with them.  I've already planted the Yucca and I know what I'm doing with most of the others - nothing should be neglected this year.  I would say that I'm happy about this swap and look forward to more in the future.

Flowers

I haven't done a whole lot in the yard lately - mainly, I've been noticing flowers. Watching them go from buds to flowers to seed pods has left me wanting to know more. I know the basics of pollination, even if I don't remember what each part of the flower is called. (I started studying today) Last fall I did a little seed collecting and this spring I've been planting a lot of seeds, but I've really become interested in the last couple of weeks. I also tried to cross pollinate a couple of my daylilies last year, but I didn't get any seeds from it.

First it was the irises. I watched each one bloom and die, but I think only the water irises have seed pods - maybe the higher pollination rate is due to the water attracting more insects. Last year I was thinking the same thing - I'll collect the seeds and grow some more - but I always have too many of these things - so I don't know what I'll do with the seeds.

I brought home a few lilies from a now-wild area of the neighborhood and they have since formed seed pods. I've collected seeds from most of them, but I don't know when I should plant them. After some research, there are different techniques, depending upon which type and I don't know what these were. I'll spend some time this summer researching and I'll let you know what I find out.

My pitcher plants have been blooming for the last several weeks and I've been really curious about their structure. I could see into them until a few of the "petals" fell off. It appears that they have produced seeds, but most of them have fallen out of the flower. I'm not sure if I want to bother with germinating them - I've heard it takes months - and the plants you can buy at Lowes - I think those are two years old - too much of a commitment for me.

Before I had planted all of my squash, they started blooming - the same with my cucumbers. I didn't have anywhere to put them in the ground, so I just transplanted them into larger pots. As they continued to bloom, I thought I would try to take advantage of this and hand pollinate the flowers. As I started looking at the flowers, they turned out to be all male. This got me wondering about squash flowers, so I read about them in the master gardener's training manual - apparently most of the early flowers on squash are male. So I'll be biding my time until a female flower shows up.

I know you're supposed to be able to grow potatoes from seed as well as from a potato, so when my potatoes began flowering, I held out hope that maybe there might be seed pods when they were done, but no such luck. That's fine - they're very easy to grow from a potato eye. Same goes for water lilies. I've always wondered about getting seed pods out of them. A big problem is that there are so few blooming at the same time in most situations - except for the wild, white cowlilies that you see in ponds and ditches everywhere.

The last plant I want to mention is probably my favorite at the moment, at least as far as pollinating goes - it's the yucca. There's one on my route that I've been watching flower for the past few weeks, knowing any day the landscapers will chop it off, but it hasn't happened yet. I've been doing some research and I think I've figured out how to pollinate it. I'll let you know how it goes.

Garden Update

A number of things not significant enough for their own post have been happening in the garden and I thought I would lump then all together here.

It turns out the irises growing in the pond filter are two different types. The other type is the same as the one in the bog. In my walk around the yard today, I noticed that one of the irises from the Spontaneous Craigslist Roadtrip is actually blooming. I really need to do something with those.

My collection of canna that was in a plastic bag is growing again this year - the second in a row. I decided today I need to plant that somewhere too.

There's new growth on our cactuses large and small and one of our yuccas out front is about to bloom.

I found some carpet last week and brought it home to smother bamboo. I let it sit in the driveway for a couple of days until I heard it was going to rain. It was heavy enough for me dry - I definitely didn't want to deal with it wet. I got out there that evening and laid it out. I also took the carpet I was saving in the garage and did the same thing. Almost the whole area behind the garage, with a few exceptions, is bamboo free. Now we're one step closer to doing something with that area - like getting chickens. I just have to put up a fence, trim some trees and build a hen house.

Irises

Recently, as flowers began blooming, I was surprised how many different kinds of irises we had. Well, I only have five, but they are of a wide variety. I've been considering planting irises in the yard lately, although I've been told how finicky they can be. It all seem like a Catch-22 to hear about. If you don't divide irises every few years, they will stop blooming - or when you divide irises, they may not bloom the next spring. I think there is some truth to these statements. I have seen irises get overcrowded and they definitely don't bloom as much - I walked by the house tonight and there only one bloom out of probably close to a hundred irises. I have also had experience with irises not blooming until the second spring after they were divided - and I've also had ones that bloomed the next spring. I think it really depends on how soon after they finish blooming do you divide them. The soon the better, probably.

The first iris we had was here when we bought the house. The first spring there were only a few, so they didn't get much attention. A couple of years went by and I noticed them again - I really liked them for some reason. I looked them up and found out they are Yellow Flag Irises - Iris pseudacorus. I was pointing them out to my grandmother and she was very familiar with them. She said when she and my grandfather would go out in the boat, she would see them growing on the banks. I dug some up and put them in the bog as an experiment, but it was a bust. Not that they did badly - it was just the end of their blooming and they got droopy and I didn't have the patience for it. Last year I marked the handful (less than ten) we had so I could dig them up later and move them, but that didn't happen - I haven't decided where to put them. They came up this year and I had about fifty of them - talk about invasive! Yes, they are on a number of invasive species lists around the country, but I'm keeping them.

I've got two different bearded irises, but I don't know what kind. I tried looking up some of the irises and there were just too many that I gave up. These two are a good representations of how finicky irises can be. The first one I got because someone was throwing them out. It was October 2008 and someone was selling/buying a house on my route. The junk started to pile up on the street, including a rotting half whiskey barrel planter full of irises. I threw it in my truck and took it home. I spent the evening digging and dividing the irises, ending up with at least forty plants. I found a spot in the yard for them and planted them within a couple of days. Much to my surprise, they bloomed the following spring.

I'm not sure when I got more bearded irises - it seems like it wasn't too much later than I got the others. One of my coworkers brought them in and left them in the break room for someone to take. They sat there several days before I decided to take them. They may have sat at our house for a while longer before I found a place for them in the yard. Maybe it seems like I got them so much longer ago, because they didn't bloom the first spring. I finally started noticing buds on them before Easter just recently. When we got back from vacation, they were in full bloom - sort of a creamy white color.

The next two irises are both water irises - sometimes they are called Japanese Irises, or Louisiana Irises - I'm not really sure. There was a lot of non-specific information on irises that I found. The first water iris I bought from Dream Gardens in March 2008, right after I finished the bog. I bought it a little too late, because it had just finished flowering for the year - I had to wait until spring 2009 to see it flower, and when it did, it was so nice to see - sort of a deep purple flower - the woman at Dream Gardens said that you can tell the color of the flower by the color on the leaves. In this case she was right, but I don't know if that's true all of the time. It's putting out buds again this year and about to bloom. I'm planning to divide it afterward and find someone who wants some of it. (In the photo, the flower isn't open completely. To see a photo from last year, click here.)

The other water iris I don't know much about. I got some small plants that looked like irises at a koi club plant swap summer 2008. They never bloomed and I took a few to one of the Park Circle plant swaps, where an old lady questioned whether they were really irises at all. All I could say was, "don't they look like irises to you?" I planted them in a few small pots and put them in the top of my pond filter/waterfall where I've ignored them until recently. I was looking for something to do in the yard the other evening when I decided to clean the dead stuff out of the pond filter. I was pulling dead iris leaves and water hyacinth out when I noticed buds on the plants. Once again I was completely surprised that they were about to bloom. I had written them off, but it seems that over the last couple of years, they've matured into large irises that have almost taken over the filter. These need to be thinned out too - but not until they finish blooming. I've seen these flowers for the first time and they are a paler purple than the other ones.

I take it back - that I only have five different irises. It just occurred to me that I was leaving some out. I just remembered that this past summer that Robin and I took a "Spontaneous Craigslist Roadtrip". I may be the first person to use this term, but not the first to actually do this. Imagine reading a craigslist post titled "Curb Alert" - someone has thinned out their irises and put them on the curb. Robin comes home and I say, "how do you feel like driving to Summerville to get plants off the side of the road?" Robin replies, "when do you want to go?"

We put them in shopping bags so we didn't get too much dirt in the car, and when we got home I put the bag in the back yard, intending to do something with them in the near future. I haven't touched them since! They've obviously rooted in the ground now and they're putting out new growth, but they're in the same place I dropped the bag more than six months ago. I've got some yard work to do this weekend, like pulling weeds in the back yard - I'm planning to do something with those irises as well.

Plant Resilience

I've started writing a couple other posts, but I don't have the brains to finish them right now, so I thought I would pad the blog with a number of short entries. I was going to write about plant resilience - about plants thriving despite the gardener ignoring them.

I got a bag of irises from someone at work back in the Spring, I think. I planted most of them and left the dregs on the ground. Earlier in the year, I thought this was some bulb that was already planted where I decided to put my garden area, but I noticed recently that it was one of the irises that I ignored for most of the year was thriving.
Last winter/spring I dug up a number of canna rhizomes I had planted in a pot. I put them there originally because of their tendency to spread. I stored them in a plastic grocery bag with the intention of getting around to planting it, but it never happened. So, they sat forgotten in the plastic bag since April, until last week when I noticed them growing out of the bag! Roots must have found a hole in the bag to grow into the ground, because I can't move them. It did get sun and a little rain, so there you go.

I had a few more examples that I don't have photos of - like the irises that I got off the curb in Summerville. I put them down in the yard, still in the plastic bag, and they rooted right there. I'll have to do something with them eventually, but for now they're fine where they are.