Round and Round the Garden

Don't worry, I won't be tickling anyone's under there at any point in this post, but I have been going round and round the garden a lot lately playing match-maker with my Daylilies ... In fact, I think I'm down to the last few days of this love connection before one of my flower beds turns into a full blown maternity ward. For my fellow flower pervs out there, I've been spending my time cross pollinating the deepest bordeaux red petal, and chartreuse throated Pardon Me, with Nashville Star (I believe?) which fluctuates between a gorgeous oxblood red to sparkling rusty orange with a vibrant golden throat. The latter I acquired from my dad several years ago ... I was down for a visit on a weekend he was loading up to head South for the Winter (it must've been the same weekend I got the chicken wire and bird bath stand that I turned into a mannequin, boy that really was a while ago!). Anyway, he was offloading a bunch of stuff and on his final mosey as he passed the corner of his shop he picked up this sad little plastic pot that housed what looked to be Cousin It's little sister ... "Think you can do anything with this?"

Mommy, Daddy, and Baby Makes Three!

Meanwhile in the back yard, the playpen is hopping!  My dahlias are finally, finally, finally blooming, and with the explosion of color, some new babies are arriving as a result of last year's matchmaking program.  It's been a long slog to this point, and so often it just felt like it was never going to happen this year, so in celebration I thought I'd share a little of what's going on back there.

Bloom Where You Are

First year Dahlia seedlings 2021

 "Don't let yourself get in the way of the things that people love about you."

-Machine Gun Kelly
(No, the other one)

 

Cheer up, things could get worse ...

... So I cheered up, and sure enough, things got worse!  

This was a line my mother and her group of friends used to toss back and forth at each other in the 1960s, and I've tried to pin it down for attribution, but so far I've come up with three possibilities: James Hagerty, Robert Lynn Asprin, or Jerome Lester Horwitz, also known as, Curly Howard.  It seems like such a Curly thing to say, so I'm going with that one, except in my head when I hear him saying it, "worse" is always spelled, "woiyse," because, of course it is.

E - I - E - I - Whoa

Dahlias: First year seedlings, 2021

Last Spring, I talked very briefly about the Floret Flower Farm Workshop I joined; I wanted to share so much more throughout the year than I was able to.  Taking a crack at becoming a flower micro-farm started out okay enough ... The first 6 weeks of the year were dedicated to the class itself, garden-planning, and ordering.  The first two parts were great!  The ordering, however, was a little frustrating simply because stock started running out by the time the planning sections of the workshop wrapped up, so by the time I was ready to buy, and thought I knew what I was doing, almost everything I wanted was already sold out.