1 post tagged “"starting seeds"”

Today I went to Annie's Annuals.  All the gardeners hereabouts know about Annie's.  The better nurseries carry her stock, which is how I first found out about her, but everyone said I should go to Richmond to see the mother ship. This weekend is their Spring Party, so I thought I'd finally go.  I didn't get there 'til late.  The good news is the rain had stopped by then and the sun had come out. The bad news is that I missed the raffle for the 15 min. shopping spree.

It's an impressive place, a lush jewel in the middle of some depressing squalor in Richmond. (Richmond was a shipbuilding town in WWII and sorta became the Rust Belt *before* the Rust Belt.)  She's got a real eye for garden design and throws together some gorgeous mixes of flowers. Furthermore, it's interesting to see the ways they found to save money as a nascent business. (One of their offices is a trailer with fold-out tent expansions...they're not replacing it anytime soon as they clearly built a chain-link fence enclosure that fits it perfectly.)

I had hardly got home from the errands I did afterward when I got a call from friends inviting me to dinner.  Though I have a lot of work to do, I accepted. So I only got to planting more seeds at 11pm tonight.  I planted some Berkeley Tie-Dye tomatoes, Charentais melons, Cerinthe purpurea. (At Annie's they had an interesting Cerinthe variation I was sorely tempted to buy.)  I took in the Cupani sweet pea seedlings because they look like they're finally ready to go up a size.  I didn't get to them but as I was getting ready to put them aside, I spotted plenty of fat aphids.  The ants had been loitering around the seedlings I put on the outside stairs and they'd already planted some aphids on the Rosa dumalis.  Didn't know they'd gotten to these as well. Bastards.  I've already expended a whole bottle of Safer Soap on the plants on which the ants have established their aphid plantations.  I sprayed some diluted soap on the Cupani but it didn't look like it was strong enough. So I was forced to kill the little bastards with my fingers. Greasy and gross.

One bit of good news for us amateurs - a number of things in Annie's catalog weren't at Annie's today.  The frost killed the cuttings they'd just propagated. So even the pros get fooled by Mother Nature.  Even the pros have garden deaths.