Gertrude's Flower Garden Weekly Diary

1/9/04 - During this week, the weather shifted from spring to winter. Starting with days almost twenty degrees warmer than normal we moved into arctic-like weather with the temperture well below normal. While it was still warm and the ground still soft, I dug two holes in the front of the house for my little Alberta Spruce Christmas trees. When the past weekend was over, I took down all of my Christmas decorations, including those hanging on the Christmas trees. I then put the little trees on the front steps since it was raining and they needed a good watering. Just this afternoon, before the hard freeze was due, I planted them next to the ones from other years--soon I should have quite a "stand" of Alberta Spruce in front of the house, marking the years since we stopped putting up large cut trees. Also during this week, I gathered a few small fallen tree limbs and some leaves blown into the corners of the garden; that was all of the outside garden work for the week.
Going through my 2004 seed catalogue, I picked out eleven new varieties of flowers that I would like to try. Then I narrowed the list down to five, since I already have a great many varieties of seeds gathered from last year's garden that I want to plant, and just so much time and space to work with. Over the weeks ahead, I will tell you about these new varieties--here is the first one described in the seed catalogue's words. "Scarlet Starlet, a fresh new face in marigolds--delicate, expressive, colorful. NEW Marigold. This bicolor marigold delights with crisp colors. Bronze-red petals, delicately edged in gold, dance around the crowns of disk flowers. The bushy, dwarf plants with dark green foliage bloom abundantly. Ht. 10". Annual." I have always had good results with French Marigolds (I notice the seed catalogue has omitted the "French"--are we dropping this like the "French" in "French Fried Potatoes"?), and look forward to seeing these bloom with the ones that I had last year whose seeds I have saved.
Here is the picture that I promised would show the two plantings of Wings Begonias. The tiny plants in the larger box are from the seeds that I planted in the soil mixture left over from last year, and the ones in the smaller container were planted about a week later in a fresh mixture. You can easily see how the first planting was decimated by the fungus. There are, however, still a goodly number of tiny plants surviving so that I expect to be able to transplant some of these to individual containers. The more recent planting, done in fresh planting material, is coming along fine. You can see how thickly these come up, and how difficult it will be to separate them for transplanting. I try not to plant them so thickly, but there does not seem to be any way to do it, because the seeds are so very fine. I tried mixing seeds with sand last year, but this didn't seem to help very much. The garden suppliers who sell very fine seeds such as those of Begonias seem to handle this problem by "pelletizing" the seeds, that is too say, coating them to make them larger and more easily handled. Since I don't have facilities to do this, I must be more careful and painstaking in my transplanting of these seedlings.

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