*a double-flowered version of meadowseet (Filipendula ulmaria), because I couldn’t find seeds and what the heck, why not get the one with the bigger flowers.:)

*Isla Gold tansy (Tanacetum vulgare), which I had at my old place and had to leave in the frozen ground–the leaves on this plant are an intense yellowish green, very striking

*cat thyme (Teucrium marum), not a thyme, which is poisonous to cats, but a plant cats like.

*bellflower vine (Codonopsis pilosula)–I started seeds of this plant, but the seedlings are so tiny and weak-looking that I don’t think they’ll make it, and this is one herb I want to learn about. Not to mention it has nodding, bell-shaped flowers, always a plus in my garden.

*variegated woody nightshade (Solanum dulcamara). I’ve not seen this for sale before, so I had to have it. I have plenty of regular woody nightshade growing wild here, so it should do well.

*native wisteria (Wisteria frutescens Amethyst Falls). I’ve loved wisteria since I was a kid. In the town where I grew up, it was not uncommon to see the Chinese wisteria turned into a yard tree–always struck me as very Victorian. I get a lot of requests for wisteria incense for a particular ritual, so it would be nice to have some real wisteria flowers. Plus bees love them. This species is not as good-smelling as the Chinese one (and some consider it stinky), but it won’t pull your house down either.

*bayberry (Myrica pennsylvanica). Love the smell of this stuff.

*chaste tree (Vitex agnus-castus). I started seeds of this plant, but they have not come up, so what the heck, I bought one.

Tasks for the weekend:

*start a kajillion more seeds! I’ve got a bunch that need warmth, like peppers and datura; some that need to be nicked, like a large number of morning glory varieties; and a few that just start at room temperature, like valerian.

*finish tilling. I was not going to till up my shade section, but I decided I might as well, since it looks like I might actually need the space. I have decided not to grow tomatoes or eggplants this year and to cut back greatly on the number of veggies I grow, because I feel like I am not doing what I really am good at, which is grow perennials.  And I will have a huge amount of work at the end of the season tincturing all this stuff.

I got almost all the tilling done–still have the borders in the front yard and the elbow on the south side of the house where the foxgloves are going to go. I got side-tracked by putting up a higher fence along about 20 feet of my yard to make a good extra space for growing tall peas and pole beans. My yard does not get much sun, so I have grab for all the sunbeams I can get. This entailed pulling down part of the decrepit fence that was there and digging up a wild grape (lots more where that came from), which had melded with the fence. What fun. Now, though, I have a lot more pea/bean room, and promptly took advantage of it by planting what I thought was the pole pea, Sugar Snap but was actually Sugar Sprint, which is a bush pea and does not require support. Doh! So now I get to go back and replant those parts, kind of like my Abramelin operation. It’s raining today and will probably rain tomorrow, so reseeding is not going to happen for a few days.

Meanwhile, I have got a ton of seeds to start and plants to pot up (a few to put in the ground as well). I also found that a few more things germinated, like the yellow gentian, which I had pretty much given up on. It’s basically impossible to get yellow gentian plants, and even to get seeds I had to send to the UK. This plant has a long history as a tonic. A number of other seeds haven’t germinated, though. The seeds mostly aren’t dead, just not awake. I was late starting the cold stratification, and our winter was milder than the seeds needed. I will probably put them in the fridge and re-do them next winter, so some things I will be doing without this year. But in fact, because I have taken off some (a LOT) of the pressure on myself to grow veggies this year, I have much more room and energy to devote to what I am growing.  It feels really good.

Friday I found an interesting site about soil. You can enter your address, then draw a rectangle over your lot, and it will tell you what kind of soil there is at that location. Mine turned out to be Howard gravelly silty loam with a bonus of 30% rock fragments; it’s considered not suitable for topsoil(!). This went a long, long way towards explaining for me exactly why I could grow those perennials so well but had the dickens of a time with “easy” stuff like squash. That knowledge was finally enough to convince me not to put too much effort anymore into growing veggies. I had determined to grow a number of peppers, tomatoes, and eggplants in pots this year, partly because I have decreasing areas of sun and partly to protect them from blight. But finding this out about my soil made me realize that I need to keep my in-ground growing focused on herbs and perennials, not tender perennials and annuals like veggies. I do have a bunch of herb seeds germinating, and I further went and bought some plants of herbs I couldn’t find seeds for or didn’t really want to bother with growing a bunch of, so I ready to go with the herbs. Re the veggies, I will be spending a lot more at the farmer’s markets this year, trying to take advantage of those floods of produce that happen throughout the season that offer opportunities to process and store up food for the winter. But even 30% rock fragments is not going to stop me from growing peas and beans in the ground, because I love me some fresh peas and beans.

Given the rocks and non-topsoil, I thought I better finally get down to a project I started last year and never finished–fertilizer. I put together a fertilizer based on the recipe in Gardening When It Counts: Growing Food in Hard Times. It’s composed of soybean meal, agricultural lime, dolomitic lime, garden gypsum, rock phosphate, and kelp.I felt a little uneasy about the rock phosphate. I lived in south Florida at one point, and if you have ever seen a phosphate mine, you know the meaning of raping the Earth. Ethics aside, I spread the fertilizer on some of my plots this morning and did a light tilling. A robin came by to help get rid of the bugs. I put in the pole snap peas in my patio plot (shown–looks pretty bare now and you can’t make out the perennials in the background, but it will look pretty good in a month or so) and by the fence with my elderly neighbor. He has been nice enough to allow me to use part of his plot for growing garlic. He’s been amending it with grass clippings for years. There are four rows of different kinds of garlic coming up now, more than enough to share with him and his kids and to last me a year. I really look forward to harvesting these babies.