All the dahlias are in their big pots- hey, before August though.. lol

 It is such a breath of relief to have the last dahlia in it's large pot set on the fenceline where it goes. From now on, the pots get filled and setup in FALL so that I only have to add the tubers in spring. Spring is way, way too busy for moving large quantities of mulch and dirt- it just runs into summer that way and then you are still up potting dahlias on the 31st of July in zone 5 like a complete moron.

Now, I'm not too worried about it, I planted my first dahlias of the season on May 15th and my last dahlias were planted in starter pots on June 15th- most of the May 15th ones are blooming this week. SO - even though these look small, I feel optimistic that I could still see blooms on most of them before frost and if some are cutting it close I can cover them for a couple frosts. My first frost is usually October 10th.

I still need to go through and dump the empty pots from the failed tubers and clean those out for next year. Additionally, need to grab all those tags and update the inventory sheet I have. Realistically, considering how many cheap, wrinkled, 50 cent end of the year tubers I bought, my losses weren't horrible. This year I was trying to fill a whole fenceline- but going forward I'll be adding slower and being a bit more selective.

My littlest ones:



The dahlia's took so long because I had to tag back in on the veggie garden spouse was supposed to be maintaining- but, it got away from him so I went out and got the weeding and harvesting caught up. Pulled up the peas and weeded that clean again- I need to do some math and see if I have time for more peas. I hope so. Harvested the onions/shallots. That was interesting, so I thought I bought onions, shallots and garlic- but, it turns out the bins were mislabeled and I bought sets of onion, red onions and shallots. Oh well, good practice and another good lesson in why we buy from specialized places instead of say, a flea market, which is where these came from. First tomatoes are ripening- we're still eating them too fast to make anything with them, but I find that only lasts a few weeks and then we have more tomatoes than we can eat. Somehow, I don't have any patty pan squashes. Talk about disappointing! I planted seeds from the patty pan packet of seeds- but, what came up are not patty pans. It instead looks like maybe cantaloupe, good too, but, not patty pans. I have a bad feeling that my box of seeds got dumped over and I had help in the form of putting seeds back in packets. Thankfully, most of my seed packets are almost empty anyways except a handful of newer seeds which are still sealed. Definitely need to use the open ones all up next year and get a clean start again.

Now that the veggie garden is respectable again, it's time to tackle the front yard bed. We had tried a new kind of weed barrier out there last year and it's a nightmare, so I'm going to pull that out of there. I already installed a quality weed barrier at the grass edge, so the weed barrier in the middle really isn't necessary anymore. It was a grow thru barrier with the idea that you could plant annuals on top and they would grow through it. Obviously, weeds also grow through it just fine and then you pretty much need to cut the weed barrier to remove them. After work tomorrow I'll head out with my utility knife and cut and pull as much of that out of there as I can. I have something crazy like 60 hollyhocks I started from seed- so I'm going to use that other weed suppression method, 'pack it so full the weeds don't fit'. I have around twenty of the 1020 trays of quart pots full of various of my seed starts, hollyhock, agastache, salvia, milkweed, ageratum, sweet william, violas, pink dandelion and various sages. So I'll go pack those into that bed and hopefully that will drop my weed problem a bit.

I have a couple more roses that it's time to give up on, these still had trace amounts of green, but, if they haven't leafed by August, there's no reason to keep them here in zone 5. If they don't have leaves yet, they don't have a way to survive next winter. I got in some of those airlayering pods- so I need to go through and airlayer my surviving grafted roses because grafteds are a big waste of time in zone 5. I'm not as upset about the cheap grafteds I bought- but I bought some more expensive grafteds my first year and those are a bummer when they die.

Oh, to finish on a high note, been planting 3 kinds of milkweed for the past 3 years and finally had my first monarch.

Not a great image, but, he was tiny, like half an inch long.





Next year I will likely add less purchased plants and more from seed instead- I'm really don't have many caterpiller host plants so I'm going to try to correct that with seeds for next year.

Rain, rain go away, come again on my work week days...

 The lofty goals for the day went right out the window with a change in the weather and circumstances. Instead of brief rain in the morning, it ended up being all day off and on thundery rain. Less than a quarter inch of rain fell - but it was enough to make the day something of a wasted effort. Well, sort of.

The morning started well enough- got another 10 feet of weed barrier run with mulch on top and got the dahlias I potted the night before moved down onto it. Then it started thundering, so I unboxed the irises that came in this morning and got them spread out on my covered shelving, just a couple small orders from Facebook groups.

Went back indoors to get something else done while waiting on the weather to clear- went to vacuum my closet and found a couple mouse droppings and freaked out. As one does. Now all my closet things are in bins on my bedroom floor so I could sanitize all of that, set traps, seal the chew hole they made in the drywall. Found the spot they were digging into the crawlspace, covered that in mesh and steel wool, traps in the crawlspace. Went around looking for any other gaps in cabinets or so on where they could be accessing. Used spray foam around plumbing and all that fun stuff. Smell checked every single thing in the closet and had to throw out a couple ruined items. So annoying! This closet was spotless a week ago, cleaned for my mom's visit. I hate how fast you can get mice up north.

Then my sister called to say that a guy an hour away had some swan bird bath bases- would I like to go for a drive to check them out? Met her, then she had a flat tire, then filled the tire and followed her to a shop to get the tire changed, left her car at the shop and took mine instead. Tired yet? This is like 1 pm at this point.. lol It was already too much of a day.

We were driving and realized, hey wait, we pass that pretty cool nursery on the way there. So we stopped and filled the car, as one does when a great nursery is running their end of the season sales.


Of course, if you are a thinking person- you can see the mistake we just made right?

Anyhow, turns out the guy is actually 2 hours away. We finally get there, middle of nowhere, three turns on dirt roads, no street signs, just trusting Google and hoping for the best. BUT, totally worth it because these things are awesome, they were made 60+ years ago, then the place went out of business with these abandoned on the property. The owner of the property has been letting this guy buy them in lots for resale. Only drawback was that all the bowls were damaged because they were all just left out in winter for decades so they were all cracked and broken. We have a relative though with the same bowl, so we're just going to make a mold and try to pour our own.

But yeah, I ended up getting one also, because who could leave them behind?



Anyhow, so we pay the guy and he brings them to my car on a wheeled dolly. BUT, oh yeah, the car is full of plants. Like I had to put a plant back, full of plants. So, we unload the plants into his driveway, load the swans and lay them down, then pile the plants back in onto the swans as strategically as possible. The wagon of plants is just my plants- my sister bought at least as many. I drive a compact SUV.. lol Overall- went as fast as we could, but the guy had to think we were off our rockers.

Here is my supervisor, watching me grunt this 100lber into place.



This is Lucy- she was part of my feral colony back in Florida. When we moved to Michigan, we brought as many of the colony as I could trap or catch again. Many I could not trap again because I had previously trapped them for spay and neuter and they simply could not be recaptured. If you look close, you'll notice the ear tip. Unfortunately, Lucy hates other cats with an abiding passion- she occasionally asks to come inside to watch a movie with us- but she hates other cats so much that keeping her inside is impossible. As she is semi-feral, nobody else can touch her. She loves our barn and has decided that's her abode. She has a heated box in the barn for winter- it's a heated small henhouse I found online. When she wants out, she yowls and scratches the door. When she wants back in, she comes to the sliding patio door and glares at me until I come out and open the barn for her. I wish we could do a cat door, we tried briefly, but pretty much had a skunk in through it the first week. She's the most fantastic mouser that ever moused and I desperately wish she would consider moving inside.

Anyhow, finished lugging the bird bath pedestal to where I wanted it. Unloaded the car- photographed all the plant tags and added them to my excel sheet.

Then spouse let me know he had finished setting up new enclosures for two tarantulas who had outgrown their old enclosures- unfortunately both sort of easily spooked ones. I don't panic quite as fast as spouse does when a tarantula decides to teleport- so usually I rehouse the runny ones. They really don't like getting a new home- but, sadly that's the easiest way to clean an enclosure is just to do a whole new setup so you can deep clean. Our enclosures these days are a lot more bioactive- plants and cleanup crew, so rehousing is less necessary than it used to be- but, still about every other year you just have enough things the cleanup crew have skipped that it's just time to rehouse. Went pretty well- everybody behaved themselves- but it's always a bit tense because they are just so fast and you never know if they will cooperate or be a stinker about it.

There we are then, Saturday is over and all I managed to do was substantially increase my gardening and household tasks without accomplishing anything in particular. High of 90 tomorrow, but doesn't hit the 80's until 11 AM- so I should be able to really hustle until noon with anything out in sunshine and then I'll just up pot in the shade after that.

Some dahlias bloomed! Maybe they are worth the effort after all

This is my first year with dahlias. I won a set and that led me to fall down this rabbit hole. I really liked that the tubers were so easy to buy and have shipped- and so I bought a lot of them without really thinking about what it would be like to actually grow them. They seemed so convenient when I was sitting behind a monitor clicking and clacking away.

Unfortunately, my yard is too damp for dahlia tubers when you would plant dahlia tubers. Honestly, just as well, because I have a lot of clay and digging up tubers in fall when that clay is dried a bit would be absolutely brutal. Anyhow, have had a lot of pests and a lot of virus and gall stress- so far have had to toss a few I received with leafy gall and I've got some yellowing leaves I'm watching- but so far no concentric circles so I assume I'm still fine for the worst viruses.

Anyhow, some are finally blooming.

Babylon Lilac



Kelsey Annie Joy


Sandia Summertime


Polka


Day Dreamer - hopefully, that's what I bought it as


Pacific Ocean


Yes, there is some pest damage- but I'm trying to just use biologicals like lacewings and minute pirate bugs as well as just rinsing off and handpicking pests. I also haven't quite gotten fertilizer figured out optimally. The slow release I used early on seems to be depleted already. I have more on pickup order at Home Depot, spouse should grab my order on his way home today and hopefully that will take them to the end of the season.

I only have 50 left to up pot into final pots- but that even includes some late ones that are barely sprouted. I have 32 large pots left, so hoping to get the biggest remaining ones into their final pots by the weekend. After that, the smallest 18 can wait for bigger pots to free up. I have quite a few peonies and roses in large pots that should go into the ground this weekend and next weekend that will free up quite a few 3 and 5 gallon pots. OR I could order more, but, sort of waiting to see how these look around my fenceline first. I only want to fill the fenceline with two rows of dahlias, so I'll order more pots if the fenceline isn't quite full or I'll cull the ugliest dahlias if the fenceline is full. I know I could do the math and know right now- but I sort of like the suspense of it.. lol

Once again, really, really no more plant orders.. lol

 I ordered some Japanese iris and a few more bearded iris. What can I say, the deals are crazy. What are you going to do, just not buy irises?

I have one more iris shopping cart built, but, only allowed to buy it if I finish up potting all my remaining dahlias by Sunday evening. I did get a lot done on Sunday- used up all my 7 gallon and 5 gallon pots and was filling 3 gallons when I noticed that spouse had nicked the irrigation hose with the weed wacker and flooded my whole small potted area. Shut the hose off but had to temporarily move all my small pots to higher ground because they were sitting in an inch of water. I need a hose you can't cut with a weed wacker apparently- spouse keeps insisting you can't cut a hose with a weed wacker, but, here I am on my 5th hose of the season. I probably should just run PVC at this point- that is, if he can't cut it with the weedwacker. Eh, just looked it up, PVC also cuts with a weed wacker. At this point I've spent so much on replacement 100 foot hoses that I could have done irrigation twice- though, I would have had to do irrigation more than that as spouse isn't careful with the weedwacker at all.

On the bright side, everything bigger that needed a bigger pot is in one and all the pots are weeded again. I need to go through and remove the dead ones from my plant list, fortunately mostly just duplicate dahlia tubers and nothing to be that upset about. I'm still figuring out dahlias- maybe I will keep them on my covered porch longer next year. All I have left are little ones that would be fine in a 1 gallon a bit longer, but, don't really want it to get away from me and will probably move them all up to 3 gallons this week just to have it done. After that, I'll just move any that seem giant up into 7 gallon pots. Should have some of those freed up again shortly when I get the spring clearance peonies in the ground. Their spot is almost ready. It's so close to ready- but trying not to rush it. I feel like one more week with the tarp on the grass and I will have a much easier time pulling the dead grass/weeds.

Why I start most things in pots, a story in one photo

 This is why....

I should add- the yellow concentric rings look like Tobacco Rattle Virus. Generally, if you have concentric rings, you are usually safe assuming it's a virus and probably not a very good one. The whole pot went into the trash and I was once again glad I could just dispose of it that way instead of having to dig it out of the ground.

It has been 0 days since my last plant purchase

 I keep saying I need to stop buying plants for the year, but, keep running into absolute steals I can't pass up. Yeah. Bought 24 more irises today. I might need to just deactivate Facebook for a couple of weeks so I'm not tempted by my various buy groups.. lol

Earlier this year I got a few beds started solarizing. This morning I decided to just buy tarps to kill grass a bit faster since it's starting to cool a bit and it might work better now to just block the grass from light than to solarize. Anyhow, I just eyeballed my beds that I made earlier in the year and made them whatever size looked right. I measured this morning to see what size tarps I needed to make more beds the same size and my beds are somehow exactly 10' by 10'. I couldn't have made them that exact if I had tried to. My spouse didn't get how weird that was, but, I'm not that good at eyeballing measurements. It's absolutely bonkers that it is 10'x10' exactly. Just the sheer convenience of that! Anyhow, ordered in five 10'x10' tarps to more easily get more beds going, should be here for middle of the week.

My aunt was in town, so spent more time visiting family than gardening. I puttered around a bit in the yard until noon- weeded all of my dahlia pots and got 6 more moved from 1 gallon to 5 or 7 gallon depending on variety. Total dahlia losses for the tuber rot stage appear to be around 19 out of 170- not horrible for a first season AND most of the failures are all from the same seller. That one seller has a 50% rot rate for the tubers I bought from them. Will not be buying from them next year for sure.

Goals for tomorrow are to up pot my last 1.5 trays of seedlings and use up my remaining 5/7 gallons pots moving the dahlias up to bigger pots. I believe I have around 30 of those pots. Have around 100 3 gallon pots, since it is so late in the season anyways, I may just put the rest of the dahlias in 3 gallon pots- particularly smaller varieties and NOID and mystery ones that weren't that exciting to begin with. Undecided. On the other hand, might make more sense to just finish lining my fenceline with the right size pot instead of swapping them out next year. Sounds like a lot of extra work.

Ongoing weeding as well and need to relabel the whole rose garden as the tags are almost too faded for me to read them now. Maybe I'll get labels on two more wedges tomorrow- but that will be after potting dahlias or if I need a break. Hope my dirt pile holds out!

Almost to the end of my seed trays and really excited about it

 I took the day off from work yesterday to work in the garden- and then it rained.. lol

Oh well- on the bright side, it was just rain without lightning, so I cleaned up my pot hellscape on my porch. AND I up potted so many plants that were still in seed trays. This is my second round of seeds, I planted 12 trays of seedlings in March- mostly veggies and flowers. Then another 12 in late May after the first 12 trays moved to spots in the garden and so on. Out of the 12 trays, just 3 remain to up pot- hopefully half of that will get done after work today as it's another rainy day.

I used a couple different seed starting soils and the difference is pretty stark. Photo below is of hollyhocks started in different trays on the same day. Obviously, one seed starting soil was a lot better than the other. Unfortunately, I didn't label which was which. So it looks like I get to buy two types of seed starting soil again and have half my trays be wimpy and tiny and half good.. lol



Once these are potted up, I need to decide whether I'm starting one more set of perennials OR just cleaning them up and setting the trays up for native plant winter sowing. Undecided. If I did start them, they'd be ready for the ground in mid September. At that point, I could just put them all in a temporary in ground location to overwinter and have really nice larger plants for spring. I would probably just pot up into quart size and then bury the pot to make it easier to move in spring. I've got maybe a few more days to decide and after that it's likely too late to also get the trays empty and clean for overwinter sowing of native perennials.

Unless I just buy more trays... lol

It darn well better rain- that's all I'm going to say about that

 I'm lucky to work remote- so all I have to do in terms of commute at the end of my work day is walk downstairs. Even so- even spending most of every evening outdoors, I still have so much to get done. It has been almost a week since we got any sort of measurable rain- so I had to run around and water everything. I do have soaker hoses running in the veggie garden- but those are more like extra support with the expectation there will be some rain. They can keep everything adequately damp in addition to rain- but they can't seem to manage to keep the garden watered if we get no rain at all. Just not enough soaker hose for the area. Allegedly it will rain tomorrow night- but had no choice but to water tonight as everything was looking sad.

Up-potted a lot of rosemary and coreopsis from seed trays to quarts- a bit overdue, but, they will get going fast now that they are out in more sunshine. Shuffled some pansies I forgot about into some of my barrel planters that had some space. I start so much from seed that sometimes I lose track of a few. I thought I had a whole tray of agastache until I saw a pansy flower in it this morning. I had an old expired partial seed packet of pansy and I was really trying to use up my really old stuff this year- so I put a row of pansy in my agastache tray. It was labeled and everything, it just didn't stand out enough. Oh well, good timing, they were all getting ready to bloom in the seed tray, so now they can bloom a bit in my barrel planters and hopefully reseed themselves for next year.

I transplanted some agastache to my rose garden last week and am just so impressed with how quickly it has filled out. It's crazy how it goes from being a stick with leaves and a spindly flower to a real plant out in the ground in the sunshine. This time of year, I start my seeds on my porch so that they get morning sun and are pretty much hardened off for easy transplanting.

I can't believe how big my hollyhocks are this year! I started them from seed last year, they didn't flower and were pretty small when they died back for winter. This year they are just huge. Of course, now that they are flowering, I can see they were mislabeled.. lol What I bought was a single mix and what I got was a whole bunch of fully double reds. I'm assuming they are Chater's Double Red. Thankfully, my colors are so mixed out there it doesn't really matter. It could bloom any color and be fine out there.

I did not correctly mentally picture how big hollyhocks are and now I'm dubiously eyeing my 'i don't even know how many' pots of hollyhock and not certain I can plant it all out. I mean, I'm going to try, but, this is going to require some creativity.. lol I haven't counted recently and I did lose a couple in the last heat wave, but, I had over 100 of the little guys- most in quart size now and ready to go out into the yard. To be fair, last year my germination rate wasn't great on them, so I planted a ton this year and had great germination.

What's weird is, last year I had great germination on lupine and delphinium and this year both of those had terrible germination. I didn't get a single lupine to come up this year from seed. I ended up with 4 delphinium out of a whole tray. Last year, nearly every seed came up. Same seed packet for both of those- so maybe those just don't age well.

Though, maybe it was the seed starting soil. I used three different kinds- the Burpee organic made with coco coir, the Miracle Gro made with coco coir and the Master Garden organic seed starter they sell at Menards. They definitely did not perform the same. Unfortunately, I didn't think to label which was which when I did this. I will add a label for the soil used next time I start seeds though.

Anyhow, I took the day off from work tomorrow to make it to kid's dentist appointment- after that I will garden like crazy. I'll be planting the clearance hydrangeas tomorrow- looked them all up one at a time and they are all smaller ones with the exception of Torch. I spaced the ones I planted last year way too far apart thinking they were going to get a lot bigger. I was buying quickly because they were on clearance online and selling out as quickly as I could put them in my online cart. Anyhow, all the ones I planted are the little guys that get about 36" and I planted them like they were getting 6' across. I've got them arranged where they are going, diagonally between the ones I planted last year. Should look nice. Torch is going right by my porch- I have a spot that got too damp for a Mr. Lincoln rose- window AC drips there. I've had Torch under the drip in the pot for a couple days now and it looks really happy about that situation, so I'll dig out the dead Mr. Lincoln and get Torch in the ground. That poor rose, I rescued it from the trash cart at TSC last year, I offered to buy a few really bad roses for a dollar each and they sold them to me. But, they were literally piled into a cart to go to the trash. I didn't notice it because I wasn't super familiar with borer back then, but that rose had borer all the way to the graft line. It just limped along all summer. This year I sealed all my cut ends with wood glue and my roses look so much better. I've probably still missed a borer or two out there, but, it's not like how I missed them last year. Most of the ones with borer came from TSC- maybe a high concentration of them around there.

It's crazy how many things get borer and how different it looks from one plant to another. I'm in iris borer territory as well- thought I haven't spotted one of those yet. I keep checking- but I'm nervous I'm going to miss it. Last year I had a lot of damage to my raspberries from the raspberry cane borer- this year I knew what to look for and snapped those stinkers off early. The raspberry ones are actually kind of cool looking, they cut the cane in two lines about an inch apart and lay their eggs between. You can spot it because the end of that cane wilts just a bit and then you can easily see the two little lines. The little lines they make also make it easy to snap off- so I just snap that little bit off and put it in the fire pile to burn. If you don't snap it off, they burrow down and the whole cane dies. If you snap it off early, you just lose about 4" on the end- much better.

Oh well, enough about bugs and so on. lol

Some stuff done, but, not enough stuff done

 It was a busy weekend- a girl's shopping day with mom, sister, kid and I. The guys had their own outing- car show and biking. While mom and sister got a pedicure done around lunch time, I perused a couple plant clearances and of course, found some rescues.

Saturday was fully spent shopping, got home at 10 pm- all I did in the garden was water before I left to go shopping.
Sunday, today, was a bit better for getting garden stuff done. The guys outing included a Home Depot run and my lattice work got picked up to finish the arbor/pergola/whatever you call it that spouse and I started last year but ran out of time to finish. Now it actually has all the latticework up.



I'm still debating painting it or leaving it natural. Got the clematis up on the latticwork that was sprawling all over my roses and lupine- hopefully mostly intact. I did hear a bit of cracking even though I tried to be careful- so we'll so how much of it is wilted tomorrow. There was plenty to spare, so it should be fine even if I lose a little bit of it.

Weeded a 4' by 8' veggie garden bed. My spouse is supposed to take care of the veggie garden- were it up to me, I would just have a bunch of potted tomatoes. Unfortunately, he has never really gardened before so struggles a lot with what is a weed and what is the plant- so I'm trying to get the confusing ones caught up for him so he can tell what is what. The bed I weeded today was tomatillos, tomatoes, a couple Jelly Melons, Eggplant Nagaoka Kinchaku, and a couple Sugar Pie pumpkins. YES, it's overcrowded, but, the pumpkins can sprawl into the pathways and that worked fine last year. The tomatoes in this bed are all volunteers from last year, I just can't weed a tomato plant.. lol

Got every single plant in the rose garden watered and all the fruit trees. Went ahead and up potted a few 1 gallon roses to 3 gallon pots because they kept tipping over. Moved most of my potted roses so that they are sitting on top of the solarized beds- I have too many for the beds I solarized - so I guess I have to get out there and get more beds solarizing.


I have a lot more seedlings that need to be up potted as well- got my squash seedlings moved to gallon pots- they will go into the garden the moment we finish eating lettuce. The family knows it's a salad at every meal this week because the lettuce is all trying to bolt. Next year, I am doing more freezable greens. Not sure what to pick- kale isn't a winner here so far. Maybe I'll try spinach.

Picked 5 heads of lettuce and had them for breakfast lunch and dinner today- just need to do that everyday this week so I can start planting the fall stuff without wasting the lettuce.. lol



Cannot wait for tomatoes- there are so many green ones. Hope my family is ready to eat those with breakfast, lunch and dinner because I planted like 50 tomato plants and the garden grew another 30 or so as volunteers. Varieties I'm growing this year include:
Orange Accordion
Orange Hat
Brad's Atomic Grape
Sunrise Bumble Bee
Purple Bumble Bee
Sart Roloise
Phil's One
Korean Long

The volunteers in the garden look to be mostly mutts of the Indigo Blue Chocolate tomato I grew last year- they mostly came up in that bed and have a bit of a purplish cast to the foliage/stems like the parent plants did. Who knows what the tomatoes will be though.

The heat really slowed me down today. I really, really need a day off from work with a high of 70 or less so that I can do one last horrible push through the big tasks and just be able to water and weed the rest of the season.

I really don't like that every year I'm still planting in July- but, nothing to be done about it. I'm still waiting on some iris orders. The band roses don't get shipped until at least middle of May to my zone and then instructions say to keep them potted until they have a 1 gallon full of roots. A couple of the roses I planted just barely had roots enough in a 1 gallon- so not like I could do it sooner either. Next year I may just add a lot less. It's been two years of really heavy additions and I think I want to just mostly maintain next year. But, ya'll know how that is. Then it's winter and the wind is howling and the catalogs are showing up and gardening sounds amazing again as this theoretical thing to do in the warm sunshine. Again, forgetting that you won't be planting on a pleasant spring day but on a 90 degree day in July.