I mowed again yesterday. I also emptied out my old flower pots from last year that had been sitting on my front porch. I moved a few more plants out to the cold frame. The weather here hasn't been overly warm, I'm not sure we've even hit 75 degrees yet, but it's been quite moderate with nights in the mid-upper 40's and days in the 50's-60's.
I started the last of the annual seeds over the weekend. These were the marigolds and a phlox called Pomegranate. I got the phlox seeds as a $1 pack from a Park seeds sale earlier this year. I've never grown phlox before (or I don't remember it if I did) so this is something new. I don't remember seeing them for sale in local garden centers and I'm pretty sure I never grew them from seed before. I think the reports of powdery mildew and them fading a bit in hot weather has scared me off in the past. But hey, for a dollar for 30 seeds, it's worth a shot.
I'll probably be repotting some of my early impatiens seedlings today and moving them out to the cold frame also. They're starting to come into bud now. The lowest forecast temp over the next ten days is 42 degrees overnight and my cold frame will stay ten to twenty degrees warmer than that.
I've taken eight cuttings so far from a beautiful red mini-rose I've had for decades. I may very well take a few more cuttings from it also. The rose is actively growing right now and the cuttings I've taken all look great and seem to be rooting easily, so making a small hedge out of the rose might be interesting. It's not a grafted rose so the cuttings should stay true to the parent plant. The dahlias that I've potted up are growing now and about an inch tall. I'll be harvesting some cuttings from them as the shoots get a bit bigger.
We're entering that hectic time of the spring where the annual weeds are growing so fast you have a hard time keeping up with them, and the seedlings all need repotting and everything needs to get prepped for the planting season.
I'm tweaking my porch planter boxes this year with DIY capillary matting. The boxes are self-watering and despite endless shimming and adjusting, there are still a few areas where water pools in them. So a bit of research into capillary mats showed they're essentially felt, so I've bought some felt to use as a DIY capillary matting to redistribute that pooled water evenly across the base of the boxes. It seems to work well in the testing phase. The pools of water disappeared and the mats seemed uniformly damp. It's a synthetic felt so it shouldn't decay over the growing season.
I also had a problem with the pipe connecting the two planting boxes clogging with potting soil that washed out of the pots last season, so I'm covering the drains with some quilt batting this year to use that as a filter medium to try and keep the soil from clogging the drains. I use it as a filter medium in my aquariums, so this should work. It's cheap and pretty efficient. I used my shop vac to suck out the old soil and debris that had clogged things last year, so the pipe is open and flowing again now.
For the next six to eight weeks there's a ton of stuff to do in the yard and garden but then things should settle down into a routine. If I ever get out in the real world again, I'm planning to buy some corn seeds to grow some corn in my old strawberry bed. I've given up on the strawberries for now. The catbirds have proven too witty a foe. Their tendency to peck a hole in every berry to check for ripeness tends to destroy 90% of the crop and the bird netting doesn't deter them. They manage to find a way around it no matter what I do.
Fly!!! Eagles!!! Fly!!!
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