To-do List, Revisited

This was the scene from our deck a week ago, just after I finished the epic weeding project that was to usher in a "big dig" of plants going to Lily Auction winners.

Alas, only four plants made it into the mail on Monday and then we were beset by rain, hard rain, driving rain, all sorts of rain, vertical, horizontal, leaky, indoorbucketinducing rain, and the entire property became a scene of squish.

This is a view of my front lawn, known as "Swamplandia!" now.  All it lacks is a heard of water buffalo.

It is marshland all the way to the dark green "fescue garden" we put in last fall.  There's no way to deal with this lowland except love it for what it is and get on with what needs to be done.

Every day's mail brings more new daylilies, and they are parked in buckets of water until I complete the digging and shipping for each week.  This weekend I must do last weekend's work.  All gardeners and farmers know this story of the ever-growing to-do list.

Just to the right of this scene as I walk out of the garage is the last untended section of car-park garden.

Kathy planted a beautiful collection of sedums there, and last year's stalks need to be cleaned out.

A blue spruce bush and a golden variety of juniper (I think) both suffered greatly last summer.  I plan to trim the dead wood away and shape what emerges alive.  In the case of the spruce, I know I'll debate whether to toss it and try another, or something else.

I love these lime-colored barberry bushes that emphasize vertical growth.

We made this berm two years ago to block the flow of water from higher parts of the neighborhood and channel it toward the drainage swale rather than across our lineout beds.  We are both enamored of creeping phlox. Its peak bloom follows the weeping cherry tree.

The Kousa dogwoods on this berm are supposed to do well in full sun.  I'm worried, though, about their exposure to "full wind."  I was heartened to see we'd saved them by using a soaker hose last summer.  Their leaves are just starting to emerge.

Water control is an issue on the other side of the front lawn, too.  The small drainage ditches on the other side of the road are not up to the job of catching all the runoff when we have a hard rain, so a shallow wave crosses the street and flows over the two beds of breeding daylilies.

This is the evidence of flowing water across a path in the bed.  On the lower right of the picture, the daylily JOHN GALT has had its roots exposed.

There are four or five plants with exposed roots at various locations in this bed.  I have bags of topsoil on hand from Home Depot and will use it to build up the soil level in the washed-out areas.  But then I have to work out a method to direct the flow of storm water, which probably will entail putting in metal garden edging so that the path becomes the water channel during rain.

This is a new bed for selected seedlings, which are currently growing in a rectangular bed slightly downhill from the new location.  I had thought that by this time I would have moved several dozen plants into this bed to make room for new seedlings.

These are the seedlings we want to plant.  They haven't matured enough to plant, which is good, because the ground is too soggy to till.  Preparing the ground is another to-do item.

There is no use in fretting and stewing when the temperature or watery conditions force you to remain indoors.  The thing to do is rest up, because you know you're going all-out when the window of opportunity opens wide.

The Race to Get Them Planted

Yesterday was a perfect day for several hours of digging.  The morning temperature was in the sixties and the drizzle I drove through on the way to University City wasn't falling when I got there.  I dug sixty-one plants, many of them pretty good clumps, and packed every available space in the car with them, save for the space I allowed Lola the Poodle in the back seat.

After lunch I planted about forty-five that were left over from the previous day's dig.

It's clear to me now that I have more interesting plants than I have space in my two hybridizing beds to display them, so I'm going to have to plant the whole collection without much planning, use the ample space in the back yard, and figure out a proper planting scheme for next year.

Today was the beginning of a substantial warming trend, with a high of near ninety predicted.  Kathy and I both got outside right after breakfast.  Here she is several hours later, planting the line-out bed, where we are growing various things in blocks.

I took the earth auger out to the shorter of the two big display beds near the street and planted all the ones I dug yesterday plus a dozen or so more that were either sitting in a pan of water or growing in pots.

Getting them planted before they bloom is exciting, but even more exciting is the sight of new seedlings breaking the surface.  I spotted them from the bedroom window yesterday morning and confirmed what I saw when I took the picture of the robin eggs.  Here's a picture of a mass planting of several dozen seeds sown densely about an inch deep.

That cross marker, "BCVL x Boundless" means my seedling from BUTTER CREAM X VICTORIAN LACE by BOUNDLESS BEAUTY.  The marker at the bottom of the photo, "Papa Luz x Boundless" is shorthand within shorthand.  "Papa Luzio" is a nickname for a seedling from (BETTY WARREN WOODS X PERSIMMON PUNCH) X BUTTER CREAM.  My friend, Ken Luzio, had admired a bright yellow seedling from BETTY WARREN WOODS X PERSIMMON PUNCH, so I nicknamed it "Ken's Yellow."  Then I nicknamed its offspring "Papa Luzio."  That seedling was vigorous and it had a nice scape with bright medium yellow flowers that just didn't thrill me.  So, before abandoning it, I made a final cross with the exemplary BOUNDLESS BEAUTY.

Here's another one that stirs up my hopes:

"Tulip" is a nickname for a seedling of exceptional blue pewter color from BEST KEPT SECRET X TARTA.  As the name indicates, there is often an opening problem, resulting in a flower that resembles a tulip.  "Ummies" is the exceptional pink, rose, and pewter lavender flower, UMBRELLAS OF CHERBOURG by the late Steve Moldovan.  My goal is to retain the distinctive color of "Tulip" on a flower that opens correctly.

We were finished for the day a little before one and had our lunch staring out the big sliding glass door at the water of Hidden Lake.  I wish I had the power of Hercules and the endurance to go out there and plant another seventy, but I don't think I ever had that kind of energy.

I'm starting to think ahead now to the circles and broken circles I've designed in the gardens in the back yard.  I'm going to encircle the shrub, Spirea "Gold Mound" with plants of the daylily, ELIJAH, and that will be my "Ring of Fire" bed.  I need a plant of the daylily, JOHNNY CASH somewhere nearby.  On the far corner of the lawn, I have four beds around a circular bed.  I've "painted" the picture to show one of two ideas I had for planting on the curve of each bed.  The picture below shows, with too bright a pink, the effect I have in mind with a mass planting of the daylily JACQUELINE KENNEDY ONASSIS.

The next photo changes the color to cream with just a hint of pink, which is not visible in my painted picture.  In this case, the mass planting would employ the daylily GREEK EFFECT.

I have two sets of four beds like this in the back yard and might just use both ideas, as I have enough plants to realize this vision this season.

First Plants in the Ground

Hallelujah!

Yesterday, Friday the 13th, Kathy and I re-planted the 381 seedlings that germinated in a University City garden in 2010 and were dug with the help of Seajay and Richard Mock on Thursday. Since there were so few seedlings to put into the new garden space I allowed for a regular crop of about 2000 plants, we gave them generous spacing in rows a foot apart.

Three hundred eighty one seedlings out of about two thousand seeds is horrible germination.  With hybridizing there are "disaster years."  One man I buy from lost a big section of "futures" to a sink hole in Florida.  Another man I've known for over a decade lost almost a whole crop recently because he planted the seeds too deep.  I've lost a crop in a cold frame from fungus gnats in the potting soil.  They awoke and feasted on the tender roots of the seedlings.  Friends supplied me with surplus seeds.  There are so many ways to be shocked and disappointed with seed storage and planting, and yet when I weigh my disappointment with the monumental disappointment of a farmer who can't get a crop in or out, I have to relax about my own problems.

Each plant came over in a plastic grocery bag or bookstore bag or drugstore bag.  I get them at the recycle bin at the grocery store.  Then I save them for more trips.  There are hundreds more plants to move here.

In the background you see the lawn has been regraded somewhat and half the deck has been removed to allow room for the regrading.  On Thursday, Steve and Tim thought they would only have half a day of work before rain moved in, but the rain didn't come, so they were able to install a new rain drainage system to collect the outputs of all the rain gutters and empty them onto the middle of the back yard.  The last thing we need in the swampy front is water!

The existing drainage system hadn't been carried out well.  It was causing erosion and swampiness around the basement.  There is more grading ahead, to make a gradual slope to the planting beds in the middle of the back yard.

Here's the finished work.  I'll plant this year's seeds densely on the end of the near bed.  Then in August, I'll transplant those that germinated to another two beds that I'll have two months to prepare.

The promised rain arrived this morning, a gentle all-day soaker that will prevent any more garden work here for many days.  Rather than work today, we went to Daniel's Farm and Nursery and bought two more dogwoods, two more redbuds, and a fragrant viburnum.  They will be delivered and planted in berms we'll make with Steve's help in the coming week or two.

When the ground it too wet to work, we have the all-summer project of tossing hunks of concrete rubble out of the swale that drains neighborhood storm water.  Since the swale lies on our property, the city isn't able to help with the cost of fixing it when sections collapse.  That's our worry entirely, but we don't actually worry about it.  Even with the clear-out only a quarter done, the water is remaining in the channel rather than running over the left side of the gardens.  We'll make more progress on it every day it doesn't rain for the next week or two, until we can work the ground again.