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

-
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.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Moldy Tulip Bulbs

-
Image
Moldy tulip bulbs are a big disappointment when you are hoping to fill a bed or some pots. It is not that unusual for their skins to have a bit of penicillin mold but these are beyond that tad bit stage. Mold penetrating tulip bulb  Mold on emerging tulip bulb growth  So, what to do? The plant references say to throw them out and buy new ones but I already spent $22 for 50 of these white tulip beauties. First, they got a soak in 1% bleach solution in the kitchen sink in the hope that the bleach would stop the mold from continuing to grow without killing the life force in the bulb itself. After a good slosh around, I wiped them off to see how much damage was beneath the blue and black.  This tulip bulb is soft to the touch and there is little chance it will thrive in the soil. This basal root on these have been ruined by mold. The final step I took to try to salvage part of them  was to spray them thoroughly with fungicid...
Read more

Propagate Begonia Stem Cuttings in water - Cane-like Angel Wing Begonia

-
Image
Propagating by stem cuttings is just about the easiest way to make more begonias for next summer's garden. During the fall, I regularly trim off 3-node long cuttings and put them into the growing pots where they take root. Now that cold weather has arrived, I root the stem cuttings in a vase of water. It's a great way to produce more pots of Begonias for next summer's garden. Water the plant well the day before. Take a cutting about 4-inches long, with 3 nodes, from a healthy stem. Use a perfectly clean container. Rinse the container with a drop of bleach if you are uncertain about its spotlessness. Remove all but the top leaf or two. There should be no leaves in the water. The cutting should  have a healthy leaf node at the bottom. Don't leave a stub below the node. Place the cutting into the water, and place the container out of the sun. In a couple of weeks, you will see new roots beginning to form. Check the water periodicall...
Read more

Create Nesting Areas for Birds and Wildlife

-
Image
From the website, Choose Natives , this lovely and instructive article helped remind me to continue to increase the amount of habitat and nesting that we provide in our garden. Many, though not all, are native or considered to be native in Oklahoma. So, I did a little research on each recommended plant and provided a link to more information. You'll see the plant name in italics - those are my links for your edification. Here's the post Derek Stoner, Project Coordinator for the Delaware Nature Society, helped restore the 860-acre Middle Run Natural Area by “intensive habitat management”, including planting 12,000 trees and shrubs.  His lecture, ‘ Native Plants for Nesting Birds: Connecting Flora and Fauna’,  given to a group of enthusiasts at the Millersville Native Plant Conference   in Pennsylvania, focused on his observations. Here are Derek’s landscaping recommendations for attracting birds: Plant shrubs in clusters (“habitat circles”) that will c...
Read more