Garden Report: The Replanting

On Mothers Day, Annie's Annuals has a big party/sale, and we've been wanting to replace our passionfruit vine that was killed by the contractors, so I went up to get a few plants.

The whole experience was a lot worse than usual. I am not a huge fan of crowds, but crowds of people who cannot seem to grasp social distancing even after more than year and more than half a million Americans dead are just about unbearable. But before the complete lack of respect for others got to me, I was able to pick out a few plants.

First up, I picked up one of my favourite little low-lying flowers, Nemophila menziesii 'Penny Black'. I planted a couple of these next to the replacement passionfruit (Passiflora edulis 'Frederick').

Then on the other side of the pergola, in blatant denial of how out of control large passionfruit vines get, I planted a second passionfruit, Passiflora actinia.

I had to weed out grass growing around the pergola to plant these, and since planting them I've been going out and doing a little more weeding every day to widen the empty patch. At some point we will have a landscaping contractor come in here and remove much of the grass and install hardscaping and maybe help with some parts of the planting, but for now I might as well pull out what I can, especially because I've worked pretty carefully over the last several months to not take on too much more work and only work the equivalent of one full time job instead of two.

A plant I got to try out in a container is Lotus jacobaeus, "Black-Flowered Lotus", which is lacy and pretty in baby plant form, and absolutely lovely as a very small container plant.

Over the last several days I've been repotting a bunch of plants and potting up some new plants, and to aid in the process I made this watering station by the side porch. I repot the plants then bring them here and water them thoroughly for a couple days to get them settled into the pots. This spot is a little shady so it's gentle on plants that have just had a root prune and gotten a lot of their soil replaced.

The hose is attached to a system that automatically doses the water with cal-mag, which is lacking in our tap water. Calcium and magnesium are critical micronutrients in the uptake of water and nutrients, so every time I water I make sure there's a little in the mix (I add about 90 parts per million, measured using a TDS meter, because I am a big nerd). If I use a watering can or spray canister (you can see one of the many I have in the center of the photo), I mix it up at the tap. But this dosing system does the job for me, and I only need to refill it about once a year, depending on how many plants I am watering. The catch is that the hose does't reach every plant I have, and also produces a lot of water which is not always practical for smaller plants.

In other garden news, I picked up a cheap fuchsia at Costco a couple weeks ago and have been moving it around, trying to find a good place for it. Ultimately I think I will put some plant hangers on the side porch for haning plants, but I'm not there yet, so it has ended up hanging in the mulberry tree. It looks pretty nice there, if a little weird. I will probably repot it into a large container later this summer, because even though it looks nice hanging it's kind of impractically large.

Also, the new blueberry bushes already have fruit:

This isn't much of a surprise, because they had blooms on them when they arrived, but it is kind of cool, given that our dogs repeatedly killed baby blueberry bushes before we got any fruit from them at all.

The harvest will be fairly small because these bushes have been heavily pruned, but they are already showing signs of wanting to bush out more, which is excellent.

And progress continues on the tub garden. I've got most of the colour coat on, but I'm running low on paint and need to make yet another trip to the hardware store to get more. The plastic there is taped on masking so the inside of the tub doesn't get painted while I spray the outside. Because this tub will not be used for bathing, I can also touch up the inside with white spray paint without much worry. It doesn't have to be perfect to be perfectly suitable as a bog garden.

Next up for the tub is getting new bolts to replace the ones we removed from the feet, because the old ones were completely rusted.

And in what's old is new again, I am also spending a lot of time picking nails and screws out of the garden:

posted by ayse on 05/12/21