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Where Are They Now?

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  Unless you’re just starting your first garden, we’ve all done it. On purpose, or accidentally. We’ve eyed the spanky new plant in bloom in the garden center or nursery, pried open our nearly empty wallet. Splurged on the new plant. Brought it home, planted it where we want to see it grow and bloom. And that summer, it grows a little, maybe struggles. The next spring… the promise of a bloom like we see in the books and magazines! Right? Well… maybe not. I can’t count the number of times the new plant looked sad. Like I did something wrong. I violated some secret code that was on the plant tag that I didnt read. Year three… yep, gonna be a bang up year! Massive growth, maybe even time to divide in the fall. Very excited. Spring comes and the plant looks terrible. Spring frosts hit the bud tips hard. Things are looking lousy. No blooms at all this year. Time to give this plant the special shovel pruning. Up and out. Maybe it would be better off somewhere else? Then it ...
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Names vs Un-Named

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  Back in 2020, we were driving through our little town of Trumansburg, on our way out of town, heading up the shallow hill from ‘downtown’… when Leto spied two boxes on the side of the road labelled: “Free Dahlias”. Car tires screeched as we spun the Subaru around and went back for a closer look. I have trust issues. It could have been full of car parts. It could have been a box full of moldy clothes. Turned out to be two boxes of dahlia tubers. One labelled red, and the other labelled pink. Well… free dahlia tubers. Sure, well, yes, thank you, I think I will. And so we did. We hadn’t even driven 100 yards before we were suddenly giddy. At that point, we had never grown a single dahlia. We had heard that you had to dig them up in the fall, store them over-winter and then hope they grew again in the spring. Sounded like too much work… until that fateful day when they magically jumped into our car. We drove back home with two boxes of pink and red dahlia tubers, total...
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Moving to Substack

 I have been curious to see if this blog would take off. It hasn't. That's okay, I guess. Feels a little like talking to myself in the shower. I've been trying to write something at least every other week, but with no real regularity. Everything I have read about Blogger is that it is a dead community. No one reads blogs. Well, explain Substack? Folks monetizing their blogs... gosh, I guess someone wants to pay for the privilege to read what used to be free. Hmmm.   So, in hopes of finding greater community and hopefully more engagement, I am moving this blog over to Substack . https://alexsolla1.substack.com/      I may cross post between these two for a while, but who knows? 
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Growing irises from seed

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Growing irises from seed... sounds like a pretty simple proposition, right? The first question I hear a lot of gardeners ask is will it work? Then someone will often ask: Where do I get iris seeds? Inevitably, the next question is: How soon will they bloom? And oftentimes, the last question, asked with some temerity is: Is it worth it? I'll answer the last question first: Absolutely YES! Growing irises from seed can be as simple as starting many perennial seeds. They prefer a vernalization period, which is really not much more than a technical way of saying that iris seeds need to go through the wet and cold period of winter, before they start to grow in the springtime. You can do this indoors by soaking and rinsing your seeds for up to two weeks, and then refrigerating for up to three months. Or you can follow a simpler approach and plant them into pots before winter sets in. Seeds placed into flats or pots or even module trays before December, then left outdoors through the winte...
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Turning Point

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Ever since I started growing Siberian irises, I have been captivated by the range and intensity of colors possible within the group. There are so many wild, rich, saturated colors available right now. (Ironically, there are fewer and fewer places to buy or even see, Siberian irises, but that is a topic for another post).  Seedling from seed donated by Marty Schafer and Jan Sacks. But it wasn't always this way. In fact, this is a very recent occurrence.  So how did we get here? All the way up into the early 1090's, Siberian irises came in various shades of white, purple, lilac, blue-ish, and (after 'Butter and Sugar' was introduced in 1976) even yellows. Everything changed rapidly after the introduction of a few key irises.  It can't be overstated how one iris introduction (every few decades) can cause dramatic changes for the possibilities of color and form. In 1957 'White Swirl' was introduced by Cassebeer. Now, virtually every Siberian iris in commerce tod...
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Chasing Color

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  Color seems like a simple thing, right? A color is a color. Kids know what blue is.  Blue is always blue. There's something very concrete about color. Until it isn't.  As a little kid I learned that color is complex. First through paint, mixed with my fingers, where yellow and green made mucky brown. Then Playdoh taught me that yellow and blue didn't make green... but more of a vomit color. This was not looking good for my little color wheel. (I went looking for photos on the intertubes that would illustrate my childhood frustration, but apparently Playdoh has changed to remedy that frustration, so that now the colors do blend together according to the color wheel... but they sure didn't in the 1970's. Also of note in my search were the number of sites which offered homemade versions of Playdoh because apparently that's a thing.) At the same time, I was trying to understand how light changed color. My mom found these educational toys at a garage sale one weeke...
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Distractions vs the Real path

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I've often wondered if I have a collection of odd hobbies and interests or if I am simply distracting myself. Being ruthlessly curious has pros and cons. Knowing that my brain is wired differently is much the same. When I was a kid and would come home from school, it was: Grab a snack, deal with homework, then my time was my own. College messed with the format, but others around me still found time off on the weekends. I always found myself drawn into other projects that consumed my weekends and non-classtime. Eventually, I found clay and the next twenty years vanished in the blink of an eye.  Clay gave my curiosity a place to play and explore, but it also demanded a level of attention that one of my college girlfriends saw as invasive. She referred to clay as my mistress. From her perspective, I could see it. I would get up in the middle of the night, drive half an hour to the studio, just to monitor a kiln. I frequently showed up to our dinner dates with bits of clay stuck to my ...
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