5/23/11

5/23/11

I wish it would stop raining... I know it's needed to make the garden grow, but inly if followed by sun. At this point the week and a half of rain is just rotting my seeds. T-storms and upper 60's today but partly sunny 70-80's for the next two days. Hooray!

Later...
The sun came out something glorious today. A welcomed break after enduring 10 days of thunderstorms & torrential rains. A perfect car washing day... though I didn't get around to washing the El Camino. I could feel my seedlings sigh with relief for the sun and get to growing. I spent the day planting containers and window boxes with annual flowers. Though they are the short lived candy fluff of the plant world, they get the 'exploding color' job done.
Monday I'd gone shopping with Nena, Uma's mom, and had a blast! Though most employees here have a healthy fear of her, as I mentioned before, I see eye to eye with her and she likes my work. I've heard that past gardeners have not been trusted by Nena to do a good job, but I'm guessing she trusts my eye and my skills after seeing the work I've done in the garden so far. She let me know that she thought the garden was beautiful and thanked me; tow compliments rarely spoken by Nena. That's a big high 5 to me!
At the nursery we went aisle to aisle - annuals to veges to perennials to trees and shrubs - putting flat after flat on our carts of anything and everything that caught our eyes. I LOVE to plant shop! It really doesn't get any better. We ended up buying three, 3-tiered carts full of stuff plus a couple water lilies for the pond and some larger perennials.
I'm a pretty thrift gardener, knowing that harvesting from the wild (ferns, wildflowers, etc.) and dividing plants can save $ and fill a landscape for free. So when I have no budget like this day, I go crazy. We got spilling color with 5 types of petunias & calibrachoa, stature from snapdragons and 3 kinds of marigolds (I love orange flowers), and shade color with impatiens. (Yuck! Not my choice. I think they are the cheap hoes of the flower world.) We got trailers and fillers with lotus vine and black ipomoea batatas.
I dug ostrich ferns (ones who's fiddle heads are so tasty) from in front of one of the wooded cottages where I also spotted the elusive cobra lily (arisaema)... so cool! I planted the 3' tall ferns in stately planters framing the main entrance.
We also got an assortment of perennials to fill in gaps in the main flower beds in front of the same building. A couple of varieties of coreopsis, 'autumn joy' sedum, cranesbill, and a bad ass echinacea called 'hot papaya'. I filled in smaller areas in the back of the bed against the wall with cosmos and snapdragons nearer the foreground. Looks pimpin'!
Today I will finish planting the annual containers with the help of my assistant.* I think he'll be stoked to plant because he's been pulling weeds for days. I hope it doesn't rain.
I also harvested the comfrey, a plant ingredient in the compost tea I'm going to make. The recipe for tea calls for a combination of:

comfrey (Ca, K, P)
borage (vitamin C, K, Ca)
nettles (silica, Ca, also a compost accelerator)
alfalfa (N, P, K, S, Fe, Zn, & B... complete food)
Other plants such as yarrow and chamomile add nutrients too.
Good stuff! I put the comfrey in 5 gallon buckets, filled them with water, and weighted them down with a rock. It will quickly break down into a stinky slurry and I'll strain it and add some of this concentrate to my 55 gallon rain barrel. The other plants I'll dry and grind up then put in a muslin sack, like a giant T-bag, so that they steep but are easily removable. I'll put an aquarium bubbler in the bottom to aerate and add unsulfured molasses to feed the beneficial 'micro herd'. These are tiny organisms which help plants to fight diseases and pathogens and improve bad soil by supplying power to soil health. I'm excited to make my own plant food. It's inexpensive and harvested from the garden and surrounding woods. It's like mixing my own soil, it gives assurance to things working out well because I know exactly what's gone in. Not just the ingredients, but also the care and love to give them the best.

*Since I type my entries from my journal i am always a few days behind. Turns out having my assistant help with containers wasn't such a good idea. He can stick to pulling weeds.