Twenty years ago, Dear Husband created a raised herb bed for me during the summer. I was eager to have some color and display, so that first year, I planted a wildflower mix in the center box. I thought that I’d be able to cut flowers for the house, and the following year the box would be ready for herbs.
What I didn’t understand, not having had a place to grow wildflowers, was that the chipmunks would harvest the seeds of the annuals and store them, and the following year I would find flowers growing in all sorts of unexpected places! The hardiest of all those flowers were ox-eye daisies. They are the traditional simple white daisy that everyone recognizes. They start with a low mound of leaves and then shoot up multiple stems with blooms. I still have the relatives of those first plants growing twenty years later!
We have had two days of rain and these low mounds of leaves have exploded into two foot tall plants ready to bloom! They were shading the rose, the iris, and several plants that I have been babying, so some of them had to go! I went out for two “weeding” sessions today, and by the time I was done there was a pile of unwanted plants roughly four feet by three feet by two feet sitting at the edge of the drive.
The sidewalk bed is looking much better, and now I have a place where I can put in a few annuals to give the bed color during the hot months. I planted two lilies, a dahlia and two lavender plants, and potted a geranium. My iris already have buds (it seems just a little early), and we’ll have masses of daisies to accent the iris color later this month.
My next foray into the garden will be to plant spinach and wildflowers. I’m looking forward to my trip to the nursery. I need to pick up tomatoes and basil and some alyssum, but I’m going to do one bed from seeds. Spring has arrived so early that I may be able to get things started by the end of the week.