Transplanting Seedlings, Fixing a Plant and Weeding

 One of our wax begonias was almost uprooted and hanging sideways out of the planter.

So I straightened it out and added extra dirt around it. There were holes here and there and I suspect a squirrel had been digging or hiding its treasures in the planter box so I filled those holes too.

A few weeks ago I clipped off a flower stalk full of seedlings (I hadn't gotten around to trimming the bush back yet) from our dark bluish purple butterfly bush plant and planted a bunch of the seeds in a 4 inch pot. Those seedlings had at least two sets of true leaves so it was time to get them in the ground. There were 6 seedlings but they were all squished together and their little roots weren't very strong (it's not the best idea to start seedlings in the heat of June so this isn't shocking). I'll be happy if even two end up surviving. Really only 5 have a chance because two had their roots intertwined and I planted them together. In a couple of days I'll thin the one that looks least healthy and hope the other lives. The seedling above is planted at the front left corner of our house (if facing the house) next to some of our rose of Sharon bushes.

This is what I've been calling my hot mess garden. About two years ago one of our giant hedges fell victim to a super heavy snow and ice storm. The tree guys left us a huge pile of woodchips and my husband and I couldn't agree as to whether to plant another hedge plant, make it a butterfly garden or do something else with it. So the mulch pile just sat there until this April. Why April? We had some major plumbing work that involved excavating most of our front yard and everything that we had time to save that had been in our front yard beds got tossed into whatever pots, buckets and receptacles we had handy. When it was time to replant the survivors my husband said he didn't want so many irises in front. We agreed that I could plant the extra in our hot mess garden. You can see the irises towards the bottom left of the planting bed in the photo above. Ok, it's not really a planting bed but what's left of the mulch pile. There's also a lot of weeds. That's a project for another day though.

So, I've been tossing extra seedlings and plants that don't need any attention in the hot mess garden. It turns out that I actually have a xeric garden going on there (one that doesn't need much water). I plan to check out The Xeric Gardener blog soon for more tips on making this a low maintenance garden. I'd also like it to attract butterflies. Mostly I want it to look less bad though. It's kind of an eyesore right now.

So, I planted the rest of the butterfly bush seedlings in the xeric garden (previously known as my hot mess garden). Just in case I forgot what the seedlings look like I surrounded them by extra large pieces of much or pine cones (so I don't pull them out when it's time to weed or lay landscape fabric over them if I get around to that soon).

 This is a cosmos seedling my husband kindly transplanted to our xeric garden this weekend.

This is a blooming cosmos plant that I transplanted to the xeric garden a few weeks ago. Both of the cosmos plants' seeds were sown at the same time (in March) but they are different varieties of cosmos and the one not blooming yet should have pink or white flowers

This is a piece of a lemon balm plant that I thought might be beyond salvation but it seems to be recovering just fine. One of the gardening tasks on my to do list is to make sure the plants in our herb garden (on the sunny side of our house) are at least six inches away from the house. When I get around to that I'll be adding some herbs to the (so far) no cost xeric garden. I love that, even though it's ugly right now, in a few years we should have a nice xeric garden that attracts butterflies and may not end up costing us any extra money. The biggest challenge with the location of the xeric garden is that people walking their dogs seem to let them do their business on my plants. We've already lost two cosmos seedlings because of that. Hopefully by having the larger plants by the street this will be less of an issue.

Thank you for joining me on my garden journey!

What's going on in your garden? Have you ever seen a xeric garden or a no cost garden?