Laughing Ravens

  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 ...

  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...

 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? 

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...