Garden: What's Growing in Your Garden?

[entwife]

This all had me wondering: what are you growing in your garden, be it outside, inside, in containers, in the ground, in the air, or in water?

My one complaint about this home is how difficult it is to garden successfully. We live on the West side of a wooded hillside. I do have thriving hedge roses, rosa rugosa, in red and white. Hostas. One tenacious chokecherry and one stubborn blueberry bush. The rest of my green friends are all potted. Aloe, sunflowers, bachelor buttons, daisies, and some other unidentified wildflowers. I learned this year that bachelor buttons come in shades other than blue! Never saw any other colors until now. Lovely pink, purple, lavender, and white! The real upside though are the native plants on this wooded property: wild rhododendron, mayapple, cleavers, plantain, honeysuckle, hawthorns, holly, blackberries, a council of pines and other trees, and hen of the forest mushrooms! I love our little bit of earth
 

[Larix]

My one complaint about this home is how difficult it is to garden successfully. We live on the West side of a wooded hillside. I do have thriving hedge roses, rosa rugosa, in red and white. Hostas. One tenacious chokecherry and one stubborn blueberry bush. The rest of my green friends are all potted. Aloe, sunflowers, bachelor buttons, daisies, and some other unidentified wildflowers. I learned this year that bachelor buttons come in shades other than blue! Never saw any other colors until now. Lovely pink, purple, lavender, and white! The real upside though are the native plants on this wooded property: wild rhododendron, mayapple, cleavers, plantain, honeysuckle, hawthorns, holly, blackberries, a council of pines and other trees, and hen of the forest mushrooms! I love our little bit of earth
 

Winter is now coming soon.

[TheGreenWizard]

My one complaint about this home is how difficult it is to garden successfully. We live on the West side of a wooded hillside. I do have thriving hedge roses, rosa rugosa, in red and white. Hostas. One tenacious chokecherry and one stubborn blueberry bush. The rest of my green friends are all potted. Aloe, sunflowers, bachelor buttons, daisies, and some other unidentified wildflowers. I learned this year that bachelor buttons come in shades other than blue! Never saw any other colors until now. Lovely pink, purple, lavender, and white! The real upside though are the native plants on this wooded property: wild rhododendron, mayapple, cleavers, plantain, honeysuckle, hawthorns, holly, blackberries, a council of pines and other trees, and hen of the forest mushrooms! I love our little bit of earth
 

This sounds absolutely lovely.

We just moved into our new apartment, and I had to let go of some plants, but currently, we have the following:

• Hardy Fig tree
• Begonia (still going strong, but had a close call)
• Mint
• Cherry Tomatoes in Aerogarden
• Lucky Bamboo
• Pothos

My students are gonna start some seeds this upcoming month for our plant sale in May... that is if Covid doesn't make too much of an impact but I doubt that.

[Nerys53]

Recently, I repotted majority of my
[/list]I also had a friend send me some seed packets (!!!) a while back, and had sowed the basil seeds. They're growing now quite nicely, but I can't harvest them yet.

This all had me wondering: what are you growing in your garden, be it outside, inside, in containers, in the ground, in the air, or in water?

Lemon balm, mugwort, vinca minor, dandelions, marjoram. plantain, fern, sweet woodruff, raspberry, lunaria/honesty, thyme, hypericum, pieris, rose, nettles, honeysuckle, buttercups, horsetails, ivy, wysteria , snowdrops, narcissus, bluebells, hyacinth, yarrow, moss, grasses, euonymus, sheppards purse.

Some died in heatwaves last summer so need replacements of lavender, rosemary some others too.

Indoors chili hot pepper grown from a kitchen seed. Poinsettias still surviving after Xmas.
Need to buy some new houseplants.

Trees birch, rowan, alder, hazel, holly, pine tree, fir tree, willow, plum, cherry, chinese juniper, conipher.

[Altair]

Lemon balm, mugwort, vinca minor, dandelions, marjoram. plantain, fern, sweet woodruff, raspberry, lunaria/honesty, thyme, hypericum, pieris, rose, nettles, honeysuckle, buttercups, horsetails, ivy, wysteria , snowdrops, narcissus, bluebells, hyacinth, yarrow, moss, grasses, euonymus, sheppards purse.

Some died in heatwaves last summer so need replacements of lavender, rosemary some others too.

Indoors chili hot pepper grown from a kitchen seed. Poinsettias still surviving after Xmas.
Need to buy some new houseplants.

Trees birch, rowan, alder, hazel, holly, pine tree, fir tree, willow, plum, cherry, chinese juniper, conipher.

The winter, combined with the roof garden being disassembled, moved, and reassembled (so that the roof underneath could be resurfaced), didn't do as much damage as I feared. One trunk of my multi-trunked Gray Birch (Betula populifolia) seems to have died off, but that trunk has been doing a little worse each year for a while, and I was just too soft to act; once spring is done I'll remove the dead trunk so that the remaining trunks can thrive.

I lost one of my two inkberry holly shrubs (Ilex glabra) entirely; unbeknownst to me, the pot toppled over so that the plant didn't get any rain all winter...and the one thing you can't let an inkberry bush do is dry out. I'm working on a replacement.

Pretty much everything else survived: Trees--Blackhaw Viburnum (Viburnum prunifolium), weeping-form Eastern Redbud (Cercis canadensis), Blackgum/Sourgum/Tupelo (Nyssa sylvatica); vines--Coral Honeysuckle (Lonicera sempervirens), Common Jasmine (Jasminum officinale), Virginia Creeper (Parthenocissus quinquefolia); various perennial wildflowers, like Wild Indigo (Baptisia tinctoria); a fern (Athyrium filix-femina); and Switchgrass (Panicum virgatum), a native tall grass.

The survival of my great experiment--growing a native dwarf oak in a container--is still an open question. Buds have begun to leaf out from the tiny sapling, but it did that last year, and then the leaves withered and died. We shall see...

[SunflowerP]

This all had me wondering: what are you growing in your garden, be it outside, inside, in containers, in the ground, in the air, or in water?

I've killed spider plants. I might even have killed a cactus, but OTOH it might have been dead before I got it, or could conceivably still be alive but dormant wherever it wound up.

So I've generally stayed clear of plants since. But a few months back, the ISP that began as the provincial public telephone company (the other major local ISP, which is the one I use, began as one of the local cable TV services) came in to set the whole building up to be internet-ready for its fibre-optic service, which required the resident of each suite to be available to let them do the in-suite part of the installation. This was a trivial inconvenience for me, but they shrewdly-but-charmingly acknowledged the inconvenience factor by coming around, a few weeks later, with thank-you gift bags.

Which contained a 'thank you; let us reiterate what this could do for you' promo thingy, a small bottle of hand sanitizer (good choice, In These Plague Times), and....

... a wee succulent, in a tiny starter pot.

Not wishing to commit planticide again if I could avoid it, I took to the internet to determine what sort of succulent it is, and what kind of care it might require. I tentatively identified it as some sort of hen-and-chicks, possibly echeveria secunda aka Mexican hen-and-chicks (though refreshing my memory just now, I'm considering whether it might be some variety of sempervivum or jovibarba, the old-world hen-and-chicks).

I've named it Paulina, because 'Mexican hen' is of course pollo, and my paternal grandmother's middle name was Paulina. It was clear from the beginning that repotting would be necessary at some point, since the pot was obviously only just big enough; my research reassured me that since succulents grow slowly and like cozy pots... but OTOH I was seeing considerable upper-plant growth, which indicated there wasn't much room for root growth. So I took my time making sure I had just what I wanted: 3.5" terracotta pot and proportionate saucer, terracotta pebbles to go in the bottom of the pot for better drainage and to keep soil from dribbling out all the time, succulent-and-cactus potting soil mix.

So far Paulina is thriving, to my delight, on lots of sunshine (I take it outside if it's not too chilly - desert plant, so I figure 'desert nights' temperatures are fine if it's sunny) and exactly one watering (when I repotted).

I took a pic, but I'm not being successful in attaching it, alas. Possibly it will do so anyway when I hit post, we'll see. (If it does: That really is only a 3.5" pot, it just looks huge because it's close to my lappy's camera. The original pot was about a quarter that size.)

Sunflower

[Altair]

I've killed spider plants. I might even have killed a cactus, but OTOH it might have been dead before I got it, or could conceivably still be alive but dormant wherever it wound up.

So I've generally stayed clear of plants since. But a few months back, the ISP that began as the provincial public telephone company (the other major local ISP, which is the one I use, began as one of the local cable TV services) came in to set the whole building up to be internet-ready for its fibre-optic service, which required the resident of each suite to be available to let them do the in-suite part of the installation.

This is one of those posts where the main point is completely overshadowed by an incidental bit that blows the mind:

This was a trivial inconvenience for me, but they shrewdly-but-charmingly acknowledged the inconvenience factor by coming around, a few weeks later, with thank-you gift bags.

Wait--WHAT??

Here in NYC if some ISP gave us thank-you gift bags--as opposed to "Just sit in you f*cking apartment and wait all day until we get there sometime between 9 AM and 5 PM and there's nothing you can do about it but lie back and take it"--I think we New Yorkers would die of stroke from the unexpected rush.

[SunflowerP]

This is one of those posts where the main point is completely overshadowed by an incidental bit that blows the mind:

Wait--WHAT??

Here in NYC if some ISP gave us thank-you gift bags--as opposed to "Just sit in you f*cking apartment and wait all day until we get there sometime between 9 AM and 5 PM and there's nothing you can do about it but lie back and take it"--I think we New Yorkers would die of stroke from the unexpected rush.

Calgary may well have the two best ISPs in North America (though this doesn't necessarily carry over to other cities those ISPs serve).

This comes, I believe, of both PhoneCo and CableCo having elected to get into ISP at about the same time, and quite early in the game - they were the first players in the Calgary market, in the mid-'90s. This meant they were competing on reliability and customer service, as much or more than on price, and it meant Calgarians developed strong expectations about reliability and customer service, which locked them into maintaining high standards in those areas.

Every so often, some other company tries to get into the local market, usually by offering lower prices. This hasn't worked yet; while Calgarians might like the idea of paying less for their internet, they aren't willing to give up service and reliability for it - and the companies trying to get in on the local act generally are used to operating elsewhere, under different conditions, and have no clue that Calgarians' expectations are different from, say, New Yorkers'.

Someday, some more-savvy company will do their local market research thoroughly, promote themselves based on providing comparable reliability and service at a lower price, and (if they live up to it, at least half-assedly) put a crack in that locked-in duopoly. But it hasn't happened yet.

That said, I was surprised by the gift bag, too; that's a step beyond just 'good customer service'. But not very surprised; the whole thing was clearly part of a significant push to increase market share, so the gift bag was an obvious attempt to get us to think, 'Huh, CableCo never did that for me; maybe PhoneCo has even better customer service!'

Sunflower

[Altair]

I lost one of my two inkberry holly shrubs (Ilex glabra) entirely; unbeknownst to me, the pot toppled over so that the plant didn't get any rain all winter...and the one thing you can't let an inkberry bush do is dry out. I'm working on a replacement....

The survival of my great experiment--growing a native dwarf oak in a container--is still an open question. Buds have begun to leaf out from the tiny sapling, but it did that last year, and then the leaves withered and died. We shall see...

My holly king:



...who I'm pretty sure is a female, based on the flower. (Holly plants are  either one sex or the other; for inkberries apparently the females produce flowers singly, males in clumps.) It's new, meant to replace the one I'd thought had died but that when I cut all the dead stuff back, it sprouted new leaves. Of course, my *other* inkberry, which I thought was hanging on, actually died...and that one was, purely by accident, a male. Male inkberries are virtually impossible to find, and necessary if you want berries from the females (to feed robins, mockingbirds, etc.) So now I'm stuck, until another accident brings me a male and true holly king.

My oak king:

 

...made it to full leafout without aborting its nascent buds this year! I acknowledge that I deliberately chose a small species of native oak, Dwarf Chinkapin Oak (Quercus prinoides), so that it might flourish in a container and limit itself to a manageable size...but I wish it would get past the Charlie Brown Xmas Special stage. Still, I knew going into this that oaks are slow growers (I'll probably be 90 by the time it becomes a "real boy"). I guess I should just be thankful that, so far, it's thriving.

In accordance with their roles, the holly "king(s)" sit in a north corner of the garden, and the oak king sits at the southern border.