PLANT SALE THIS WEEKEND

As the record heat of a couple of days ago becomes a distant memory and we see highs dropping into the 60s, it is time to  think about  ….

P L A N T   S A L E ! ! !

I’m still busy printing out new signs and a plant catalog for the sale.

About 100 different plants in this sale of 1450 plants, seeds, advice, and socializing.

Well, I should say that I should be busy doing these things but obviously I am not. I am creating another blog post. Furthermore, I spent the morning gardening. I planted an island bush poppy, cut back the Bountiful seaside daisy and made cuttings from the pruned stems, and hand watered some thirsty looking fescues. It was so much fun.

Island bush poppy. It gets big! 6 feet tall and even wider. It is a spectacular plant.

It is going to replace the Mexican marigold (Tagetes lemmonii) that has been in the corner for years. This plant really isn’t performing well. I will leave it in place until the bush poppy gets larger.

The roots of this poppy – and many other poppies – are very brittle. You can see from the clump of soil in my hand that the roots just break off with the least provocation so I am being careful not to disturb them.

All planted and now it is getting watered thoroughly.

Using a square tipped spade, I cut all of the tree roots around the plant at the grass line. I will do this a couple of times in the next year or two to give the poppy a chance to get established. After that it will hopefully compete successfully for water and nutrients with the deodar cedar roots.

Bountiful seaside daisy looking a bit messy.

I cut the long stems that had lots of dead leaves under them.

Here are the trimmings – quite a bit.

I should have thrown the whole pile out since I have so much to do, but I just couldn’t. I made cuttings instead. Hope I can convince Krista to adopt them.

A really old bottle of Rootone. Probably don’t need it at all, but why not.

Cuttings in potting soil with perlite. If I wasn’t in such a rush I would have removed more of the leaves. I did cut the stems shorter than shown in the upper picture and removed some of the lower leaves.

And finally, I picked some avocados. The tree in the far back, of unknown type, is behaving very strangely. For years  it only produced a small number of very delicious avocados, and they always came before the much larger Fuertes. More recently it has produced a decent crop as well. This year it has loads and loads of very small avocados. Their skins turn from shiny green to nearly black when they are ready to pick. Some are even falling off, but all are mini-sized. We are leaving in 22 days for a six month sojourn in India so I have to pick a bunch of avocados now and try to ripen them up in a paper bag containing an ethylene-producing apple.

Mini-avocados. Hope they taste okay. Hope they ripen before we leave. There are a whole lot of avocados in our trees. If you want to harvest some, email me and I will set something up.

Once this is posted I will really truly turn my attention to the plant sale. Got to get the catalog printed and copied. It contains a list of the plants we will be selling with a short, but hopefully accurate, description of each. If you want one, get to the sale early since we ran out last year. I will make more copies but they do seem to go.

It will be chilly on Saturday, but the plants will be happy and healthy while waiting to be adopted. No wilted, heat-stressed young’uns. And it looks like the next few weeks will be perfect for planting – cool with the possibility of some rain. See you at the sale.