Hard to Beet This Catch of the Day and Carl's Birthday

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The beets all have to come out before the weather beats them up. This morning I watched the sun come up while I was pulling these. What a great way to start a day.

Snow peas are just now forming - the spring has been a little late for them. It's unusual for the snow peas to be in flower when the blackberries are already forming on the vines. What a berry crop this year! Last year because of the drought there we so few that we had none to give away. This year will be very different - assuming the storm on the horizon does no damage.

The Muskogee Garden Club's Centennial Garden Tour is coming up June 9 and 10 so yesterday I planted a few hundred little pots of things for the plant sale. If they all come up and survive, there will be purple majesty millet, amaranth, rose campion, sunflowers, summer squash, loofah sponge vines, and a few other odds and ends.

So you want a big dramatic planting pot but don't want it to weigh a ton? Check this out.

The orange disk inside the tall flower pot is an Ups-a- Daisy planter insert. It's a circle of plastic that is designed to fill in the bottom of large planting containers.

The Ups a Daisy already has drainage holes in it. Just insert the disk and put a potted plant on top. The pot in the photo already had three small bump-outs in it for a pot to sit on. The Ups-a-Daisy is a definite improvement over filling the bottom of the big pots with Styrofoam peanuts which is the customary method of filling them up high enough to put a plant in them.


Ups-a-Daisy comes in 9 sizes from 12-inches to 18-inches. They are designed to fit half way or two-thirds of the way inside a tapered sided planter. The 10-inch is $4.99 and the 18-inch is $12.99 (cheaper than potting soil? maybe). The manufacturer Klanga, Inc. in Spring Grove Illinois makes them out of recycled plastic.
Westlake Ace Hardware and Southwood Nursery in Tulsa both sell them.

Today is the 300th birthday of Linnaeus whose name was actually Carol von Linne. This is the Swedish physician who invented our system of categorizing and naming plant families.

Before he completed his degree, the university encouraged him to travel to Lapland and record all the plants he found there. In order to sort out all the plants, he designed the system we now use. While in graduate school he also became the curator of a private botanical garden.
Linne became a professor at Uppsula University where he oversaw the restoration of the University gardens.
He continued his work as a physician at the same time and was the doctor to the Swedish royal family.
The Linnean Society of London holds many of his paper and their website has fascinating items in the Links section. The weblinks are there for nature sites, more Linnaeus sites, herbariums, etc.

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