Lily Type #1 - ID: Corso

The first lily has bloomed!

Date: 6/18/2013
Size: 8.5-9 inches wide
Name: Believed to be Corso; inner petals have raised, dark pink/red spots and are smooth edged; outer petals are ruffled. Light pink petals with yellow centers and a green throat.

That Purple Thing, II

So, I wrote about the Purple Thing a while back, here. I speculated that what I had on my hands was an Aster. However... I think I need to reevaluate my diagnosis.

After stumbling across a link, here, the phrase, "It's an osteo that doesn't close; its double blooms stay open all day and night.." really stuck out to me. I was never totally satisfied with labeling the purple thing as an Aster, as the bloom times were all off and the link didn't mention anything about the flowers closing like they do. 

So. There we go. I think I have an African Trailing Daisy, which is surprising because it's out of its hardiness zone. It only blooms in winter for me, but what a show! 

Rose Cutting - 5th Week.

A moment of silence, please.

No pictures this time, just a news update. The rose cutting is officially dead. Since all the branches had browned and dried, I pulled it out of its pot to see if it had even thought about making roots, and it had not. Instead I found tiny maggot-like worms. Ew.

The dirt was tossed into the yard (waste not) into a non-garden spot, and the pot will be rinsed out before I stick anything else in it.

Some important lessons were learned.

Diagnosis of what probably went wrong (in no particular order of significance):

1. The cutting was from old wood rather than green wood, and it was very short.
2. No rooting hormone, which might have helped my chances a little.
3. I might have left too many leaves on.
4. I uncovered the rose too soon; should have left the plastic baggie on much longer than I did.
5. Becoming overly ambitious at the sight of new leaf growth, I moved the cutting into a spot with partial sun instead of mostly shade and bright light. Oopse.

I found a great link, here which does an excellent job at teaching you how to do rose cuttings. For me, the most important information this article had to offer that was not readily available in all my previous Googling:

1. Wounding the stem is good; taking all the bark off is bad. I should have wounded the stem in strips, one or two strips, down the cutting rather than stripping the bark all the way off. As the growth hormones are essentially in this top layer, I crippled my cutting without knowing it.
2. The cutting needs to remain covered for the whole time it's rooting, at least until the second set of leaves.
3. It's the second set of leaves you want to watch out for; any initial leaf growth, according to this article, will be as a result of energy already stored in the cutting. Secondary leaf growth, however, will be as a result of successful root production.

It was a very fun project to try, and now that my own roses are growing by leaps and bounds, I will probably begin experimentation to perfect my methods.

Strawberries and Roses and Other Things Too

So, an update! I've had several days off work, and I'll have a few more, and mom and I have taken the time to get our ornamentals planted this year.

We can't plant the garden for another two weeks according to the Almanac and the weather patterns we're experiencing, but we were determined to plant something. So we picked up some vincas, impatiens, pansies, and a very fragrant dianthus from the garden center to bring home some color to the flower bench.

I also grabbed a pack of 12 assorted oriental lily bulbs from the store. I love the oriental lilies, and I was going to pick some up from The Lily Garden, but I just couldn't bite the bullet on those prices. Perhaps in the future if there are one or two varieties I'm missing or I particularly like, I'll grab some from there. Nevertheless, that's a great site to browse for identification purposes.

As for other garden updates:

The tomatoes are up and growing strong! At the lower right, the pepper plant has made an appearance at 2 wks 3 days.

The strawberries are blooming! I'm honeslty surprised to see them do so, as I was certain transplanting messed them up for this year.

We've added a hummingbird feeder to the garden! It's standing next to my beloved Don Juan rose. We've had one brief visitor to it in the 24 hrs it's been up.

And finally, the roses are making roses! Pictured here is the biggest rosebush in my yard, a Sarah Van Fleet.

Link Spotlight and That Purple Thing

Wanted to share two things which are actually one thing just two ways.

I subscribe to a fun newsletter called "Now I Know," and this morning's article was on an intriguing plant called the Burning Bush. This perennial herb can be set afire! Well. Sorta. Check out the link, here.

I've spent way too much time on this website; The Helpful Gardener really is just that. It's got to be one of the most concise and streamlined source of gardening how-to's, when-to's, and why-to's.

While I was browsing the site, I found a list of plants known to attract butterflies. So I start clicking through, and I stumble across the Aster. Check out the pic below!

See that? For a few long moments I thought someone had walked up into my yard and taken a picture of The Purple Thing growing in a flower box on my front porch!

Let me tell you the story. Two years ago, in 2011, mom and I picked out some daisies at the store to plant in our flower box.

2011

See the green clump at the far right? We thought those were just another sort of daisy. They were inch and a half wide bright purple flowers. Cute, right? So we planted them. The colorful daisies never made new flowers and eventually died, and that clump in front never bloomed beyond the few flowers it came with. We thought 2011's flower box was a bust. Bah!

We were lazy and didnt clean it out. And when spring of 2012 rolled around, the Purple Thing was still alive. And in late January... February... March... it was blooming! When everything else was dead, that Purple Thing was covered in flowers.

2012

This picture above is from May, 2012. And you don't see any flowers on it. That's cause it stops blooming when it gets hot! And That Purple Thing doesn't like us to take care of it either. If we water it, it tries to die. If we fertilize it, it sulks. Know how we found that out? We planted those little annuals behind it; the more we tended them, the more the Purple Thing hated us. So we stopped bothering with it, the little annuals died, and the purple thing hunched there all summer long.

So now it's spring, 2013. Look. Just look:

2013

2013

You see all that? This is March; that Purple Thing has been blooming for well over a month. And it's covered in more buds just waiting to open. The greenery is almost touching the ground in the left picture. The bees and butterflies love this thing! We don't water it, we don't feed it. Mom has decided she wants to cut it back this year since there's a lot of dead material in the center of it, so in the summer when it stops blooming, we'll do that.

So today's lucky find is that I may be growing (not growing? letting grow?) an Aster in my flower box. We're not going to plant anything with it this year, since it likes to be left alone. The main trunk of this plant is easily three inches wide. The only curious thing is that the growing instructions on the Aster's page don't match what we've been doing, hahaha. But why teach an old flower new tricks? It brightens dim, cloudy winter days with incredibly vivid purple flowers that tend to close up around 4pm and open again for the morning.

If anybody has any other thoughts on what this could be, I'd love to hear!