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Sunday, August 19, 2012

Spring chores finished?

Like all gardeners, every spring I have a long list of things to do: clean up, cultivate, weed, plant -- you know the list. It's not surprising to me that some of those tasks get delayed, and I don't get to them as soon as I'd like to. Starting seed? Sometimes a bit late. Getting veggie seedlings into the ground? Same there -- sometimes later than I'd like. This year though, I think I set a record.


See this pot of heat-ravaged sedum? Last year this contained Colocasia, and it was going to this year again too. I put the sedum there last fall as a place they could overwinter. They did beautifully too -- until June came around with its record heat and fried many of them. So today at long last I move them.


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The pot is surrounded by grasses, and really needs something with some height in order to work here -- to contribute to the garden in a positive way:


Right now it's just a ring of happy sedum surrounding the skeletons of the dead plants in the middle.


The Sedum fosterianum 'Oracle' was especially hard hit:


I've read this plant can take the heat, but my experience has shown otherwise -- it's just not that happy when it gets too warm.

In any case, the sedum all came out, and I worked some fertilizer into the soil:


I've got plenty of "extra" plants in nursery pots, and was able to find a few that worked well together and should do nicely here:


Taking a closer look at each:

Pineapple Sage

Clary Sage

Winter Savory

The clary sage and winter savory are new to me this year, having picked them up at the swap table at the Schalfly Gardenworks summer event last month. (I know clary sage is an invasive in some parts of the country, but not in my climate.)

So that's the pot replanted:



The sedum got tucked into various corners of this part of the garden:



Some also got potted up. Of course they were potted sedum when they were placed here for overwintering last year, so I wonder if I'll just repeat the cycle again.. surely I'll learn from my mistakes, right?

So is that the last of the items from my spring garden chores list? 

I wish I knew, as I lost that list months ago.

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2 comments:

  1. Alan, I lost several of my established sedums this summer, even those in dappled shade, and I speculate that: "It wasn't the heat; it was the humidity" that did them in. It's been hotter for longer periods of time and they did okay. This year has been unusually humid, so that's my reasoning. But I could be wrong.

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  2. Sandy: we've actually had quite a dry summer -- less humid days than usual. It could be a lack of water during the really hot spells that did them in. I'm just not sure.

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