A not so sunny day

Wouldn't you know it? I take today off to be able to play in the garden [and get an extra day to recover from daylight savings - a pointless hour of torture for a non-morning person in a southern state] and it was rather chilly most of the day. In fact, didn't finally push my yellow wagon out of the garage and into the back yard until 3 pm.  And it was still a little nippy.  The low 60s wouldn't have been a problem if it weren't for the cool breeze. 

I couldn't really work on continuing the bed expansion since I was hurting pretty bad from the night before [darn that shoulder surgery! Almost 6 months later and it's still not completely unfrozen and back to normal]. So, today's task was to start planting the small plants, seeds and bulbs I've collected so far.

From the seed pile, about a quarter were planted today. Now, I KNOW we will have another cold blast between now and mid-April. The weather here always gets warm, fools everything into expecting several warm days and then bam! A cold front comes in and damages/kills things. So it's stupid to plant seeds. But I did it anyway, the every hopeful garden nut that I am.

The day before I managed to wrestle out the yellow Lady Banks rose bush which was suppose to be thornless and was definately not. It scratched up everybody walk by the north arbor. And to add insult to injury it grew twice as fast as the white, thornless Lady Banks on the southern arbor. In the bare spot I now planted Moonflowers and Black-Eyed Susan Vine to climb up the arbor. A beautiful miniature yellow rose was planted at the base on the other side of the arbor, with Larkspur seeds spread around the rose. This should be a pretty combination if all goes well.

All around this arbor I gleefully noted that lilies and daylilies are coming up, as well as Larkspur seedlings planted last weekend. Two annual cut flower mixture seed packets were also scattered around the bed. I should confess that I have mostly a black thumb when it comes to growing plants from seeds. I can probably count on both hands the number of plants I can grow from seed. So we'll see if I can break that record. I probably wouldn't have tried it but Lowe's had a buy one get one free deal so I thought what the heck.

I also managed to get several of the lilies planted before it started getting really cold and dark.  I've always wanted Tiger Lilies but have not run across them here in the nurseries for a reasonable costs, so I was excited to find a packet of 5 orange ones at Walmart. I've actually had good luck with their flower bulbs and they're so inexpensive that if they don't take you don't feel too guilty about replacing them. In fact my oldest  Asiatic Lily from Wally World is a gorgeous deep magenta color that reached over five feet tall last spring. I loved it so much that I took the bulbs with me when I moved into my new house four years ago and it bloomed despite being replanted two months earlier. So next time you run across those tempting bags of bulbs at Walmart consider giving it a try. It might turn out to be a great performer in your garden.

Back to the Tiger Lilies, I was glad that I read a small blurb about them in The Gardner's World magazine on Friday which warned that they should not be planted next to other types of lilies. As there are lilies planted in the bulk of the beds that basically narrowed down where the Tigers could go.

Next up were the pinks.  I had also picked up a gorgeous deep pink miniature rose this past weekend along with that yellow one. Both were really hard to photograph today as the colors in the photos didn't come close to the real thing. The yellow was impossible for some reason. Anyway, planted the fragrant pink one before the Irises. I plan to pick up two more of these to repeat the color.

And here I must make another confession. I have a cottage garden because I am not disciplined enough to follow a color or plant plan. I see it, I want it, I buy it... only to then to come home and say "where the heck am I going to cram this thing?!"  So I'm trying to be a little better about repeating either colors or plants in the beds this year to add more cohesion to the garden. Along with the rose, I planted three Romantic Rose daylilies and 5 Pink Heaven Trumpet Lilies. Both packets are also from Wally World. So here's to things coming up "rosy" in the garden.