Gardeny Things

I love my garden. I love working in it, I love learning more about plants and soil, I love eating things that I grew, I love bring a plant from seed to maturity, I love seeing the bees at work on the flowers while the birds peck at the ants. It's a good garden now, and will be even better next year.

On our way back from Fernie (via Saskatchewan, where I was given a parsley plant) today we stopped at Josh's parents to pick up even more plants. It's a joy to have someone so willing and happy to share plants with me, and I've now been gifted hollyhocks along with many more bedding plants to fill out the gaps in the garden. The hollyhocks will have pink flowers, and I have seeds for hollyhocks with flowers that are almost black, and I'm hoping they will mix and seed around and I'll have blackish-purpleish-pinkish flowers towering above the other plants in a couple of years. It's a long game with hollyhocks; they're biennial - the first year they grow enough of a plant to survive dormancy in the winter, and the second year they flower and set seed - so I won't see the black flowers until 2020, unless I buy an already-flowering plant. Which honestly, I might do.

The bedding plants mostly went to the front, and the hollyhocks are going to join the delphinium, day lilies, and irises in the side bed. Before I can plant them out, however, I have to carry out Operation Extreme Makeover: Garden Edition, which involves digging out nearly all of the plants in the side bed, doing some major weeding, and replanting things in a way that makes sense. I arrived home to discover that the flowers are done on both the day lilies and the delphinium, so the timing is perfect. I need to get the hollyhocks in the ground within a couple of days, so Operation EM:GE is going to be carried out this week.

I've got other garden tasks to complete this week, including trimming and supporting the tomatoes, doing a huge amount of weeding in the veg bed (there was a heat wave the week we were gone and things have gone wild and are starting to set seed), pulling all the radishes, and eating some of the chard. We've moved from weather hovering in the high 30s to a much more friendly mid-20s, so it's a good time to get out there. We were gone for a bit over a week and I've been missing my plants.