Congestion!

Today just a quick task, as time is quite limited. Each day as I walk out of the garage, this is the first bed I pass. It's the triangular raised bed ("box") that was my first cleanup task this year. It is jam-packed with Agastache foeniculum. I love this plant, but there are too many here.

I notice them getting bigger every day, and say to myself "I need to do something about these soon".

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I say that every day. Well, "soon" is here, because I'm going to dig some of them up.

I'm not going to just pull them out though -- I'm going to carefully dig them up and pot them. Then I'll have extra plants to put somewhere else or give away. Did you notice the carpet of seedlings that are growing? Here's a closer look:

This plant reseeds quite readily, but not in an uncontrollable way. Transplanting is straightforward: carefully dig around the plant...

Then even more carefully crumble some of the soil from the rootball and pot up.

How much soil do you remove? Enough to make it fit in the pot you want to use. I'm using "quart" sized pots mainly, although I used one larger size (I don't know what it's called -- it's not gallon).

The hardest part about this task is choosing which plants to remove and which to leave. I want them spaced out with more room than they had before, but in some cases a couple of plants are too close together, or too large so I'm not comfortable removing them -- I'd rather have two live plants jammed together than have one or both die because I hacked too many roots off.

So after repeating the process a few more times, and pulling out some of the smaller plants (I've learned that you don't have to save every single plant that grows in your garden), here's what I have:

That's after filling in the holes with bagged topsoil. Luckily I had a few bags in the garage. I also had a bag of pine bark mulch, so I'm going to mulch this bed for the first time ever:

Usually this is my "I'll stick it here until I find a better spot" bed, but this looks so nice I think I'll find somewhere else for that this year.

Best thing about this...

More free plants! I'll keep these out of direct sunlight for a day or two, but since they're still pretty small I don't think there will be too much problem with keeping them hydrated. Waiting much longer would have resulted in some droopy plants after I dug them up.

Which reminds me that I still have those Rudbeckia in the veggie garden that I have to move somewhere... but not today.



This task took me 45 minutes, including cleanup.