Laughing Ravens

unknown variety of dahlia   What changed? How does one go from not caring one iota about dahlias to suddenly having huge plantings of them throughout the garden? For that matter, how does one afford such largesse?  The simple answer is that dahlias are seductive. They lure you in with their rich color and forms... and then you're hooked. Luckily, they are also (generally) prolific growers. One tuber begets many tubers. This is a good thing because buying new tubers can be expensive.     What I discovered in year two was that dahlias grown from seed are a crap shoot.  I don't mean that it isn't worth doing, but rather you have no clue what you might get. Dahlias are promiscuous as can be. I can't count the number of photographs I have of dahlias that have bees in them. I would guess over 2/3 of the images have bees in them. None of my other flowers in the garden have that level of attraction. One caveat I will mention is that bees are drawn to the open cente...

dahlia, unknown ID, 2024 That last blog post was so dark. Must be the lack of sunlight affecting my holiday mood. Back to talking about garden-ish stuff. We now return to our regularly scheduled programming. In the Spring of 2021, Leto and were driving down Main Street, heading out of town, when we spotted a box on the side of the road that read: Free Dahlias. Red. Pink.  I don't know about you, but I brake for dahlias. Actually, I had never grown dahlias. I had always heard they were fussy. Too work intensive. And besides, they were just flowers. How good could they be? We stopped along the side of the road, spun the car around and stopped to retrieve the box of pink and red dahlias. Laughter filled the car as we realized that our combined knowledge of what to do with a box of dahlias could be summed up as: plant 'em and see what happens.    What we discovered in the summer of 2021 was that these tubers really wanted to grow! Planted just after Mother's Day, they were bl...

Early November evening and the winds thrash the window with pellets of ice and sheets of rain. The old ash tree outside my room is scratching to get in. Each billowy gust presses branches naked of leaves, against my window. Wave after wave, everything says the storm has a long ways to go before letting up. With that, I sit alone in my hospital bed, wondering if I will ever be able to leave this room. Being trapped on the rehabilitation floor is incrementally better than being trapped in the Intensive Care Unit, but only marginally. My food is delivered on a cart instead of via a tube through my nose. The pain is greater now that they have started weaning me off the cocktail of narcotics.  At the end of each day, when my room empties out and the nurses collect at the end of the hall, there is a time before sleep comes. In that vacant time, hopelessness darts around my room looking for a place to take up residence. Television usually plays police dramas or soap operas. The commercial...

 Winter is finally here, which really means that there isn't nearly as much fun to be had outside in the garden. There are still a few things I am working on, here and there... but even basic things like making new paths out of woodchips have halted because everything is suddenly frozen solid. Recently we started experimenting with polymer clay. I wish folks would just call it malleable plastic... because there's not much clay-like about it. But rather than say disparaging things, let's just say: I'm having a good time playing with the material.    Over the past few years, we have started using rebar as support structures for plants that might otherwise snap wooden stakes. A few years ago, I saw a dahlia grower advocating their use. As long as the rebar isn't hammered into the soil, it is a fantastic support mechanism. Woe betide anyone who hammers these steel rods into clay soil though. You may as well just sell the property, because that is never coming out. Ask m...

Sino-siberian iris, 'Dotted Line' (Lorena Reid, R. 1991).    Image from Cascadia Iris Gardens I went outside this morning and it wasn't quite 20 ° F. There's no snow on the ground. The weather has been vacillating wildly between above freezing temperatures (usually with dreary skies and rain) and serious cold. So far this winter, it has been fairly mild. While there have been major snowstorms that have occurred near us, we've landed in a weird bubble once again. Once the cold sets in (like today), it doesn't take much for me to wish for the warmer, sloppier weather to return.  I know that the plants I love make use of this cold and snow cover for their dormancy. I try to reassure myself that the newly planted irises wont be damaged by the cold. The blanket of mulch I put down in October should help moderate the wild swings in air temperature. But I wont know until springtime. What makes it difficult? Where did that title come from? Why ask the question in the mi...

Winter sowing in trays, stacked in layers This year, I wanted to try a couple new ideas with our winter sowing. For those who haven't tried winter sowing, at its simplest, it is just planting your seeds during the winter to give them a jump on spring. Perennial seeds do well, some hardy annual seeds do okay, and tender stuff doesn't survive.  One of the issues we have this winter is carryover from the spring/summer/fall. There are lots of pots of seeds that didn't germinate in the spring. A lot of the things I am reading about some of the more difficult seeds to start, indicate that it can take 2-3 years for seeds to germinate. And that also includes scarification/stratification of some form. Winter sowing usually makes that a simple solution, with the repeated freezing and thawing cycles.  We picked up these flat blue trays on Facebook Marketplace. I have seen similar things in use for bread delivery. They are lightweight, rigid and affordable. Best of all, they are perfor...