Friday, April 24, 2009

muscari, blueberries, and seed starting

As noted yesterday, my muscari (grape hyacinth) are starting to mature nicely.  I love the fact that foliage emerges from these bulbs in the Fall, then the little flowers come out in the Spring.  They are great planted en masse.Sage and I bought and planted two new blueberry bushes, a Northland and a Patriot, which are hardy to zone 4.  I didn't have the best of luck with the less-hardy Earliblue and Berkeley varieties, so I'm trying again, this time with a little more sun.  We planted them with some peat/compost, then top-dressed them with a compost mulch.Oops.  I forgot that I was chilling seeds in my refrigerator (in a zip-lock bag in my crisper).  I doubt the extended chill will hurt them (it was only a week or so extra).  So today with my daughter's help I started anemone, columbine, campanula, snapdragons and hibiscus.  I was very proud of my daughter (soon to be four):  when I told her I was just pressing the little seeds into the top of the soil (rather than covering them), she asked:  "is that because they need light?"  Indeed, they need light to germinate.  

Labeling disaster:  somehow the label for my tomatoes fell out of their cells, and now I can't figure out which seedlings they are.  I'm sure I'll recognize them at some point, hopefully before I eat the wrong plant.

We'll see how this goes:  since the weather should be pretty temperate over the next week, I put my lobelia into my portable greenhouse/cold frame to harden them off.  They are in two window boxes, which I will affix to my picket fence somehow, so that the plants drape over the top of the fence.

1 comment:

  1. Today, David, Sage was in the garden with me. I asked her what the pretty blue flowers were, and she said, "grape hyacinth!" She knows her flowers.

    ReplyDelete