A Real Garden Post

A Fake Gardening Post

I got laundry done. I got dishes done. I did a quick edit on the ghost stories and got them all scheduled to churn out one at a time across the month of October.  It was weird, to think that, no matter what happens next month, they will appear on your screen.  I don’t know. It kind of creeped me out a little bit.

They’re not all great, but the intentionally false internet ghost story is a tricky genre anyway, since most folks writing in it don’t confess it up front, thereby making it hard to judge yourself by your peers.

I took some pictures of the shasta daisies, which have just come up.  My mom tells me there are a lot of perennials that prefer to be planted in the fall–shasta daisies, all types of coneflowers, black eyed susans, etc. Sadly for almost all of those things, I planted them in the spring. So, I’ll be curious to see if the daisies bloom next year with the rest of the perennials or if they’ll need another year beyond that.

If they bloom next year, mark my word, I’m going to become an advocate of buying your perennial seeds in the spring when they’re for sale, but saving them until fall to plant.

Also, I am now an advocate for, oh, writing down what you planted somewhere so that you can know, without question, what the stuff coming up in your garden is.

I’m pretty good at recognizing a coneflower leaf, and I’m pretty sure I know which ones are black-eyed susans, but there are still a couple of things in there that I am completely clueless about.

Later I’ll post some pictures of the red coneflower.  Holy cow, if you have money to spend and if Bates has any more of them, I cannot recommend it enough.  The petals don’t turn that tomato red right away.  When the flower first opens, the petal looks like it has a base of yellow rimmed with red. Then the red kind of slowly overtakes all the yellow places.  I can’t get over what a stunning flower it is at every step of the way.

I’m still perplexed about the hollyhocks. Even the ones in the sun didn’t get very big.  I think it just may have been too shady for them over there.  But they’re still growing and still green so I’m going to let them do their thing.

None of the spiky stuff (foxglove, etc.) that is supposed to like shade came up.  I’m not done with that, though.  Next year, I think I’m going to try to plant some where the hollyhocks are now and along the side of the shed, where I had the peas.  If I don’t get any in those places, I’m going to just assume they don’t grown in my yard.

Also, I have a lot of gardening questions so I guess what I’m saying is that, though this seemed like a post about gardening, I’m going to have a more official Sunday gardening post this afternoon.