Moving things in the garden

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lightbulbs

 

 

light bulbs

 

heavy bulbs

I moved some two year old peony seedlings today. Tiny little slips of a thing. They made it through winter but they needed to move. 

Why? Well... you've heard the expression: "right plant, right place" well, that would be a massive understatement. Two years ago I goofed up. Insert your own expletive. Yeah, that one.

I'm cheap/efficient/lazy (add your own descriptive invective).... which is the short way to say that I zigged when I should've zagged. Last spring, we had dozen upon dozens of winter-sown jugs covering the ground. Close to one hundred and fifty. Way too many. The soil mix inside the jugs was custom made, ultra-high drainage, modified potting mix. Loaded with grit. Monty says you gotta use grit. So we used grit. Stuff is expensive considering it's just granite grit fed to chickens... but I digress.

Two years ago, in December, we planted quite a few jugs with peony seeds. Paeonia rockii, Paeonia suffruticosa, and a few Paeonia tenuifolia. I had ordered the seeds from NARGS and was very excited. Spring came and went, followed by more disappointment in the summertime as germination was abysmal. Instead of peony seedlings, we had things like penstemon popping up. Or other ultra-fine seeded plants... stuff that had powdered off on my fingers. That survived. No peonies.

So rather than take up drinking, I used the super-specially mixed soil to help fill in a few new beds that I was planting my first batch of iris seedlings into. Yup, just stirred it all together and poured the wheelbarrow into the long raised bed. Didn't think anything more about it for the season.

Last year, as I started weeding the iris bed, I discovered a few tiny single peony leaves poking up through the woodchip mulch. Huh! Surprise! Of course, there were no labels. No clue which variety of seedlings they might be. I have a general guess based on leaf shape, but that's a pretty broad guess. Species level guess. Since I am a nice/lazy/cheap/efficient guy, I left the peony seedlings alone last year, while the irises around them grew to great heights. Maybe you're starting to see the problem.

This year, I started my weeding and found the little peony seedlings coming up. Bright dark red leaves, unfurling like a miniature truffula-tree from Dr. Seuss. Where? Right beside ever-growing iris versicolor, and iris domestica, and even an iris tectorum. Wrong place, right plant? Hmm. So they needed to move. 

The good news was that the super potting mix made with all that grit is quite possibly the easiest stuff to work with on earth. It drains impeccably. It crumbles if you look at it sideways. Our clay soil is hideous stuff. This potting mix is like creme brule in comparison. So, I slid my digging knife into this gritty-ness, levered the long root out of the ground gently. Bit by bit, one after another, these little peonies were freed from the iris bed. Not a ton, but also, nothing to sneeze at. 

Once they were lifted, I needed to get them into the ground asap. As always (at least around here), there wasn't a perfect place to plant them so they could grow on, undisturbed. In a perfect world, I would love to have a holding bed for just such a purpose. Aint gonna happen. If there's an empty bed for a day, it's because I have Covid. Open space in the garden rhymes with unwanted cookies. 

Over the last couple of years, we have been exploring ways to integrate our plantings. Our apple trees are the closest thing we have to structure in our garden. They form a line of six trees. The oldest of the three are probably 5-6 years old now. We bought them from a Mennonite nursery... and they were pot bound and grown on god-only-knows what rootstock. But they looked cute and that's what matters when you are investing in a fruit tree that might outlive you. So it goes.

To keep the apples company we planted a few dozen daffodils between them. Of course, since the daffodils had been rescued from the lawn, they came with free-range chionodoxa. Who can complain about such lovely blue flowers. Okay, maybe they're a menace. After one season, we decided that the daffs needed friends... because once they finish blooming, they leave you wondering: What next? We planted a few perennials that we had (remember those winter-sown jugs that there were so many of? yeah, those were full of perennials)... this included aquilegia, nepeta, and as summer rolled on, we even added a few dahlias. By the time autumn wrapped up, it was jam-packed. 

After clearing everything out over the winter, there was space again. This time of year is perfect for moving perennials. They are just barely awake. Kind of like how I feel after waking up from surgery when they ask me how I feel? Drugged to the hilt, but thirsty so thirsty my throat is RAW and no, they wont let me drink anything yet. Plants are lucky. I make sure they get a good drink after I move them. Plus in the spring, you can usually count on rain. Not always. But the ground is cool, the woodchips stay wet for days after it rains. Great time to move plants. 

So I tucked these tiny peonies under the apple trees, amongst the daffodils and columbine and the new heucheras (freshly moved from their winter bed). Leto planted some erythronium californica bulbs last fall. These little trout lilies have just recently popped up. Buds have formed but none have started flowering yet. I noticed one of the clematis we had convinced to climb the Northern Spy apple tree had started budding out. Nothing quite like seeing rich dark red clematis blooms long after the pale white blossoms of the apple have fallen off. One of these years, we won't have wicked late frosts in May that kill off our tiny baby apples... and maybe, just maybe, we'll see some of our apples grow to maturity. It's a menagerie, a chaotic rumble of plants among the apple trees. In a few more years, it will make sense. For now I embrace the chaos and giggle when one of the new transplants makes a joke about fitting in.