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Area 13: The Wildflower Bed
May 23: Still Waiting! The Ballon Flower is coming up, the Gaura is showing signs of life, and the Blue Flax is up and in bloom, nice little blue flowers at the top of wispy stems. We've added a Gaillardia with dark-red flowers behind the birdbath, which is also in currently in bloom. As far as anything else goes - it's still too early to tell. Right now I can't tell a wildflower from a weed, although I'm becoming suspicious of a few.Something else worth noting; there was a good sized patch of mushrooms in one area this year. It came up around the area where the scarlet sage was last year, so I'm thinking that there was a tight mass of fine roots below the surface which have broken down and released a burst of nitrogen into the soil. I'm probably mistaken about this, and I have no intention of disturbing this bed further until late in the fall so I won't be able to find out for sure.
As I am able to identify things, I'll get them on here for you. The old area is showing signs of life already, so it probably won't be too long now. For the time being here is a description of each mixed package that went into this bed:
Plant-a-Page� "Grow a Butterfly Garden" : This is a neat little idea for kids. It's a small booklet explaining the basics of making and caring for a garden. The seeds are embedded into one of the pages in the booklet. The idea is to tear the page into little pieces and plant the pieces in your garden. I did this with the kids (ages 2 and 3 at the time) last summer and they had a great time, the paper is large enough that they can do the planting without difficulty, and you can be sure that 250 seeds didn't get dumped in a 1 square inch area. Here's what it may have contained - Annuals:Dwarf Coneflower, California Poppy, Dwarf Godetia, Larkspur, Gaillardia, Sweet Alyssum, Scarlet Sage; Perrenials Siberian Wallflower, Purple Coneflower, Coreopsis, Lupine, Black-eyed Susan, Candytuft, Bue Flax, Gayfeather, and Lemon Mint. The small bed that I planted with it filed in nicely and when I expanded into the larger bed I tried not to disturb this area. I'll be keeping better track this year on what comes back as a perrenial or self-seeding annual.
American Meadows Inc. "Hummingbird & Butterfly Garden - Flower Mixture: This is your run-of-the-mill bunch of seeds mixed in an envelope. The important info from the envelope is as follows - "Net Wt: 1oz., 65% inert material as a sowing aid, and over 10,000 flower seeds. The following flowers are included at 5% or less of the mix: Nasturtium (red, orange), Dame's Rocket (lilac), Chinese Forget-Me-Not (blue), Cosmos (pink, white, red), Purple Coneflower (pink), Crimson Clover (red), Wild Lupine (blue), Red Poppy (red, pink, white), Rose Mallow (pink), Baby Snapdragon (multicolored), Baby's Breath (Gyp. elegans white), Lemon Mint (pink), Scarlet Sage (red), Black-eyed Susan (gold/brown), None-So-Pretty (pink). I really hope that some of these come up and I can ID them before weeding them out. The scarlet sage makes an excellent show and the birds/butterflies go crazy on it. I want to try collecting some seed this year, but I need plants first :-)
American Meadows Inc. Baby's Breath/Red Poppy Maybe you got these too, they just came in the mail one day as part of some special offer thing. They two small pouches were sprinkled in the wildflower bed somewhere. I'm pretty sure the poppies went in the corner above the balloon flower.
I guess thats it for now.
Thanks for stopping by,
Brett
Previous Entries:
April 21: This is what the bed looks like. I still need to dress it up with a little compost or topsoil, and seed it out. Won't be long now.