Hello friends!
So I don’t know if this is happens to anyone else, but right now I am pretty much obsessed with my garden. A lot of my spare moments are spent walking through my garden- trying to decide if I am going to move a plant here or there, what plants I still want to get, asking myself how could I develop my garden more, etc… Every where I go, my eyes are peeled looking for plant sales. A couple of weekends ago I found out about a special shade gardening society that was having a plant sale in Portland. Not only was there a plant sale, but a specialty Hosta nursery out of Oregon City was going to be there and they were discounting some of their plants because they were closing. How could I resist? Then I found out about the plant sale that was happening at the Firstenburg Community Center two weekends ago- how could I not go- it’s just 5 minutes up the street. I found 2 echinacea coneflowers “Sundown”
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was the variety, from the big sky series. Now this is a special variety of coneflower, sometimes hard to find. I totally scored a deal on it! I got 2 of them for $6.99 each. Normally they range from $9.99- $14.99 depending on where you get them.
I also recently went shopping for a bird bath with Dana’s grandmother, Odelia, more affectionately known as “Grams”. We went to The Concrete Shop over in Hazel Dell to check out their inventory of bird baths. Grams had been looking for a bird bath for the last 2 years and I had been wanting one myself, but a concrete bird bath that is well made can often cost $100-160.00 depending on the size and where you get it. I must say that the Concrete Shop had a nice selection and both Grams and I found birdbaths and got them for under $65.00. Yahoo!
So as you can see- my eyes are peeled for deals! I am having a lot of fun with my yard this year. Actually, I have also embarked on another more “extreme” endeavor. I have several daylilies in my yard- and I am seemingly finding more all the time. Daylilies are wonderful perennials. Hemerocallis (their latin name) literally means Hemero-”Day”, Callis-”Beauty” = “DayBeauty”. Most daylilies have a beautiful fountain-shaped grassy foliage and in the summertime send up several stems of blooms. Each bloom is magnificent and only lasts a day. Well, I have a creative side to me that really enjoys making things- I get that from both of my parents. It’s also got a mad scientist sort of tweak to it. Suffice it to say- the mad scientist part of me has emerged and I have been hybridizing my daylilies as they bloom. What is hybridization? Well, its basically where you take 2 different cultivars of the same genus (ok, in laymens terms, 2 different kinds of the same plant) and you cross pollinate them in hopes that they will produce seeds possessing characteristics of the parent plants. Any of you who have done some biology know that with different sets of DNA you can come up with all kinds of different combinations. So, I have successfully hybridized a few of my daylilies and I am anxiously awaiting the maturing of the seed pods so I can prepare them for planting. Eventually, I will plant the seeds and nurture the new daylilies and once they bloom I will get to see how they are different or similar to the parent plants. Its sort of my own little weird experiment. Because daylilies hybridize easily, many people experiment with it- some make a profession of it. Me, I’m just a tinkerer- a gardener with a wild hair. To me its exciting. I’ll keep you updated on my experiment. Talk to you soon!
