Pandemic Garden Club
Apr. 8th, 2022 06:50 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
scrubjayspeaksWelcome to the April edition of Pandemic Garden Club! Growing good things in strange times!
Anyone is welcome to comment with what they're growing right now, things they would like to try, problems they're encountering, and questions they have. Share resources, answer questions, shout encouragement.
As for myself...
Well, we had our first 100-degree day here. Blegh. Dreadful. It's supposed to cool off this next week, but, well, I think it's safer to just resign myself to the instantaneous summer of it all. The real question, friends, is what my bet will be for the summer high temperature at my house. Do I go with the safe option of 123, which only exceeds our previous high by two to three degrees? Or do I go for the bold choice and make it a nice, round, fatal 125?
I'm gonna need so much shade cloth this year...
Anyway! On to the more pleasant topic of what spring we DO get here:
My first grape hyacinths (muscari) have sprouted up. And they are...tiny??? This is not at all what I was led to expect from the bulb catalogue photos. And yet, they seem to be fine? Like, they're fully formed, they have all their little balloon flowers, they're holding up well. They're just wee little sprigs that put me more in mind of lavender than of actual hyacinths.
Less fully formed is the single windflower I have gotten so far. That's not just a bad angle on the photo--it really doesn't have any petals on that far side. Uh. Considering I planted fifty corms, I really hope this one is just leading the pack and not the entirety of what I'll see from them.
I finally got around to pruning the geraniums. They have gotten all leggy and disreputable, but I didn't want to torment them until it warmed up a bit. I have a hard enough time keeping them alive through winter as it is. I did not do an especially elegant job. But I'm just hoping to get the oldest plants to be bushes again and not long, draping tentacles of bare bark tipped by one sad tuft of frost-damaged leaves.
In other delightful news, I have borage. White borage. This would not be noteworthy, insofar as I planted white borage seeds, so I damn well ought to have some. It grows like a weed out in the orchard, where it was planted as a pest deterrent companion to the tomatoes. It grows significantly less weed-like in the castle garden, because somehow that area is an alien planet despite being only about fifty feet away. But here's the thing: I did not plant the white borage this year. I think I planted it last year, but honestly, time is an illusion, and it just as easily could have been two years ago. Did I see a S I N G L E white borage plant from that planting at the time? Like hell I did. Apparently, it just really needed to chill out for a while before growing.
Speaking of the orchard, we've got our first fruit set! Mostly plums at the moment. And they're tiny and green, of course, but it's still cheering to see them working so hard. Hopefully we can get the corn growing fast enough to keep up with the summer heat--the plan is to use rows of it, fully grown, as shade screens for the fruit trees to cut down on sun scarring.
Before we start worrying about summer too much, though, have a quick blast from autumns past. These are the basket gourds I grew last year. They are almost all fully cured at this point. There are just a couple of the bigger ones that are still hardening and don't yet sound hollow enough. But some of the smaller ones are definitely dried. I need to look up again the instructions for processing them, but I know it's basically a bleach wash and light scrubbing to take off the outermost skin.
My plan (*nervous laughter*) is to cut and drill several of the small, round ones and assemble them into a pendulum light. I'm not going to try to wire them into any of the existing light fixtures, I don't think--I'll wait to do that after I somehow get my day job to pay for me to get some training in electrician-ing. But I watched this video on making a planter/lamp combo that uses an LED lamp base and I got real obsessed. I don't mind running a cord down to outlet level if I get to have a bonkers pinhole lantern gourd chandelier. I mean, what's the point of life if you CAN'T have one of those?
Anyone is welcome to comment with what they're growing right now, things they would like to try, problems they're encountering, and questions they have. Share resources, answer questions, shout encouragement.
As for myself...
Well, we had our first 100-degree day here. Blegh. Dreadful. It's supposed to cool off this next week, but, well, I think it's safer to just resign myself to the instantaneous summer of it all. The real question, friends, is what my bet will be for the summer high temperature at my house. Do I go with the safe option of 123, which only exceeds our previous high by two to three degrees? Or do I go for the bold choice and make it a nice, round, fatal 125?
I'm gonna need so much shade cloth this year...
Anyway! On to the more pleasant topic of what spring we DO get here:
My first grape hyacinths (muscari) have sprouted up. And they are...tiny??? This is not at all what I was led to expect from the bulb catalogue photos. And yet, they seem to be fine? Like, they're fully formed, they have all their little balloon flowers, they're holding up well. They're just wee little sprigs that put me more in mind of lavender than of actual hyacinths.
Less fully formed is the single windflower I have gotten so far. That's not just a bad angle on the photo--it really doesn't have any petals on that far side. Uh. Considering I planted fifty corms, I really hope this one is just leading the pack and not the entirety of what I'll see from them.
I finally got around to pruning the geraniums. They have gotten all leggy and disreputable, but I didn't want to torment them until it warmed up a bit. I have a hard enough time keeping them alive through winter as it is. I did not do an especially elegant job. But I'm just hoping to get the oldest plants to be bushes again and not long, draping tentacles of bare bark tipped by one sad tuft of frost-damaged leaves.
In other delightful news, I have borage. White borage. This would not be noteworthy, insofar as I planted white borage seeds, so I damn well ought to have some. It grows like a weed out in the orchard, where it was planted as a pest deterrent companion to the tomatoes. It grows significantly less weed-like in the castle garden, because somehow that area is an alien planet despite being only about fifty feet away. But here's the thing: I did not plant the white borage this year. I think I planted it last year, but honestly, time is an illusion, and it just as easily could have been two years ago. Did I see a S I N G L E white borage plant from that planting at the time? Like hell I did. Apparently, it just really needed to chill out for a while before growing.
Speaking of the orchard, we've got our first fruit set! Mostly plums at the moment. And they're tiny and green, of course, but it's still cheering to see them working so hard. Hopefully we can get the corn growing fast enough to keep up with the summer heat--the plan is to use rows of it, fully grown, as shade screens for the fruit trees to cut down on sun scarring.
Before we start worrying about summer too much, though, have a quick blast from autumns past. These are the basket gourds I grew last year. They are almost all fully cured at this point. There are just a couple of the bigger ones that are still hardening and don't yet sound hollow enough. But some of the smaller ones are definitely dried. I need to look up again the instructions for processing them, but I know it's basically a bleach wash and light scrubbing to take off the outermost skin.
My plan (*nervous laughter*) is to cut and drill several of the small, round ones and assemble them into a pendulum light. I'm not going to try to wire them into any of the existing light fixtures, I don't think--I'll wait to do that after I somehow get my day job to pay for me to get some training in electrician-ing. But I watched this video on making a planter/lamp combo that uses an LED lamp base and I got real obsessed. I don't mind running a cord down to outlet level if I get to have a bonkers pinhole lantern gourd chandelier. I mean, what's the point of life if you CAN'T have one of those?
