All the Dirt on Gardening

Blossom's Garden Center is having their end-of-the season sale Thursday - tomorrow. Go grab some bargains to complete your garden. As the beds in the back yard have grown and the shrubs have expanded, it was becoming a challenge to get in between things. Three weeks ago my garden column was on covering a patch of weeds with newspaper and then topping it with mulch. The photo on the left is the end result. One less slice of the back yard has to be mowed. Bluestone Perennials website has an easy to use online catalog where you can browse their half-off everything sale. The front of the bed in the photo is lined with Nepeta Walker's Low from Bluestone . This year I ordered several dozen plants from Bluestone - for my garden and for a few friends. One type of plant arrived looking less than desirable and they replaced it. Everything from them has taken root and thrived so far. So, I'm impressed. Here's the progress report on the tiny Spicebush Butterfly Caterpillar fou...

Dame's Rocket, a type of mustard is the pretty purple flower in the photo. Many garden writers say to pull it out and burn it if you find it in your flower beds because it is so invasive. So, I wonder, do you pull up pretty natives and put them in plastic bags in the trash so not one seed escapes? It seems extreme to me but I may be eating those words next year if Dame invades aggressively. Quite honestly, as difficult as it is to get anything to grow, what harm could a few purple beauties do? These are edamame seedlings that have been decimated by something. The empty spots in the seed starting tray had little plants in them until a bed was made for them in the garden. After one row was planted, I put the flat nearby until more spring plants could be harvested. When I went out to pull three large heads of greens, all the edamame had lost its head - something that chews and prefers tender green vegetables has moved in. Barrel cactus is native to southwestern Oklahoma where this o...

Nasturtium bud and fading flower in today's garden. A reader asked, "When is the best time to to prune a Japonica?" I did a quick internet search and found at least a dozen plants with Japonica in their name, including: Japonica Lonicera - Japanese Honeysuckle, Flowering Quince Japonica, Cryptotaenia Japonica, Euonymous Japonica and Caradina Japonica. Fatsia Japonica is commonly known as aralia. The common names for Spirea Japonica is Japanese Spirea. So, the answer is, "It depends on which plant you have." Here is the shorthand answer - Many spring blooming shrubs and vines are pruned just after flowering so they can make the flower buds for next year on the wood they grow this summer. Other spring flowering plants are pruned in the late winter. If your Japonica is a Honeysuckle, prune it late winter because they bloom on new growth. If it is the Spirea Japonica, prune it next February according to The Missouri Botanical Garden's home gardening site. Prunin...

The daylily pictured came with us when we moved from the west coast to Oklahoma and has bloomed reliably every year no matter what weather Mother Nature provides. This little guy or gal spicebush swallowtail butterfly caterpillar was on a spice bush I just bought in order to attract spicebush butterflies. You have to be amazed by their finding the plant within a few weeks after its arrival. And, by the way, what a strange looking little thing with the eye markings. Double click to see more detail. We had almost an inch of rain, thankfully. All those seedlings for the garden tour sale are getting the right stuff for June 9th. The lavender flower is a pole bean I bought from an Italian seed company. I'm not impressed by their germination rate - about 50% in our garden. We shall see how they produce. In the meantime the flowers are very pretty moving up the trellis. The poppies are already making their seed heads for next year, the blackberries continue to make hundreds of flowers a ...

In Today's Garden Cucumbers every day, green tomatoes on half the plants, snow peas in salads from the garden, flowers on the pole beans, summer squash forming on volunteer plants and flowers blooming. These are some of the reasons we love to be in the garden. On the Web The Illinois State Museum website is a treasure trove for nature lovers. Their link for Botany is described, "The ISM botanical collections include more than 111,000 botanical specimens that are housed in the herbarium , which has one of the largest collections of Illinois flora in the state. The internationally significant Cutler-Blake ethnobotanical collection preserves remains of prehistoric cultivated plants that represent much of the primary evidence for early American Indian plant domestication in North America." The link at their site that I found even more fascinating, though, is the online photography show of Frank Sadorus . Sadorus lived on a family farm in Illinois and was an amateur photog...

Left: Blue and white Larkspur with rose campion . Right: Shrimp plant is a zone 9 beauty that will become 3 by 3 by the end of the summer These are seedlings and recently planted seeds for the upcoming Muskogee Garden Club plant sale at the Centennial Garden Tour June 9 and June 10. Plant seedlings include rose campion , snow on the mountain, love-lies-bleeding amaranth , purple millet, cleome , blackberries, mint and a few others. Seeds that we hope will be up and garden ready for the 9 th include teddy bear sunflowers, Mexican sunflowers, sunshine sunflowers, Indian blanket, Berry Basket and Decor zinnias from Renee Seeds and others. Anise Hyssop is the lavender spire in front and rose campion is the deep red flower in back. They were both started from seed two years ago. Great gardening weather and welcome rain is coming. It is easy to be an optimist this spring!

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 ta...