I’m sort of frustrated with my front yard ditchweed garden. I feel like a planted SO MUCH SHIT and nothing I actually planted ON PURPOSE decided to grow as they have in previous years! I have a few theories on this. The first is that poppies are finicky little pricks. The second is that there’s too much grass in the garden now for certain things to grow, so they just didn’t get enough sun right from the beginning and grew retarded as taller things stunted them further. The third is that I need to give up on planting any type of cosmos that aren’t your standard pink and white ones because they just do not grow in my yard. I thought if I planted LOOOOOOTS of fancy ones in favour of regular ones, some would HAVE to grow, but nope. As with previous years, they did not and neither did the few regular ones I planted either due to problem #2.
Having said all of that, nature’s done a pretty okay job at giving me a base to work with for next year and next year I think I’ll be going back to American Meadows for my seeds because everything this year came from Vesey’s and they don’t have the quantities I need or the variety. American Meadows has better descriptions/information and has a lot of seeds that some people might call weeds, but bees, birds and butterflies call “food”. The bees like the Bachelor’s Buttons usually, but mine only grew to be about 4 inches high and maybe only about 30 flowers total out of a billion and a half seeds:
Nature, however, had another plan for the bees and somehow St. John’s Wort (as identified by awesome tumblr people) has made its way into the garden in little yellow patches. It’s done flowering now so I don’t have any current pics, but here’s one I took a few weeks ago. It was impossible to take a pic of it WITHOUT a bee!
Stunted cosmos.
These are normal ones, not fancy ones because only normal ones will (well, used to) grow.
So much Queen Anne’s Lace!
I need to find something NOT YELLOW that can co-exist with these because they grow tall, fast!
My best guess is that these are Black-Eyed/Brown-Eyed Susans but I honestly have no fucking clue.
These and the Queen Anne’s Lace were the end result of the wildflower mixes that were originally planted when we removed the sod.
Removing the sod that’s grown back (well, next spring) is out of the question because that’ll also remove what grew this year, as well as any flowers that may be the type to flower one year but not the next or whatever. Getting rid of a lawn is serious business, man. I don’t see how we could have done it any other way (with a sod cutter, 8 years ago) so now, like I said above, the name of the game is to find seeds that will co-exist with all this yellow, white and grass that can also be food for fauna. I’ve got a year to plan, so I don’t need to figure it out now, but after seeing what’s been the strongest to survive blind weedings and mowings, it should give me a good idea of what to look out for. Also I think I might ask my favourite seed-nerd, Ana, for a little help.
When I went into the garden this morning to take these pictures, the first thing I was greeted with, though, was SUCCESS. I purposely plant milkweed in my garden for the monarchs to lay their eggs on and sometimes at the end of the summer, if we’re lucky, we’ll find a couple of caterpillars ready to pupate and I have a special terrarium that I use to watch them turn into butterflies. It never gets old. It amazes me every single time. Well, this guy/girl was the very first thing I saw when I went outside today:
She’s big and probably ready to pupate but I like to wait for the caterpillars in the later summer/early fall because I know for sure when those ones are about to pupate because the milkweed starts dying. And when the milkweed starts dying, the caterpillars are like, “welp, buffet’s over, better get to work” and then they begin to pupate. With the caterpillar above, she’s big enough that I could put her in the terrarium with a few milkweed leaves and she’d pupate shortly after they got too wilted to eat because a lack of food can trigger the process if they’re close to it to begin with.
I am by no means a caterpillar expert, this is just what I’ve learned from experience (and I’ve never had a caterpillar or butterfly die before).
What I *didn’t* know, is what this guy is:
I think it’s a milkweed tussock moth.
I found two of them on the older milkweed stalks and that article says monarchs prefer younger plants, which is good to know because I’ve just let the old ones grow back. This fall I’ll rip out the old ones, which I have to do anyway because they’re in the way of my second heliopsis, which is this:
And that’s about all I have to say about my garden.
Honestly, that’s all I really have to say I guess. I had other stuff but Wes and I have started playing Warcraft together again and it’s about time for us to do some quests. Saw Guardians of the Galaxy and Maleficent on Sunday night at the drive-in. Both were awesome. I am now leveling a resto druid on a PvP server named “Iamgroot”. I’m hoping people will think I’m cute and not kill me…
