Tempting Fate

Woke up to a sunny morning this long weekend Monday. No rain, no clouds, only +1C temperature at 8:30 AM, but it looked promising. The temperature rose steadily as the sun continued to shine so by 11 AM, I had made up my mind... I'm planting some of these bedding plants today, one way or another.  I hope I won't regret this decision tonight!

Parrot tulips

I spent the better part of the day planting regal geraniums, white euphorbia ( Diamond frost), blue petunias, white osteospermum daisies and vinca vines in 3 of the 4 large green tubs in the yard.  Also tackled the 2 flower boxes and filled them with pink geraniums, dark blue pansies and light green lysamachia (creeping jenny.)  Worked on two of the deck pots as well, Then I planted the pink Gaura out in the stack stone flower beds. All in all, quite a nice day's work.

Then 2 days later I planted out the 5 tomatoes plants that we had been babying along on the deck as well as the 3 spaghetti squash plants that I had grown from seed.
I put a couple of floating begonia pond plants out on the pond and checked the goldfish. Then I watered the flower beds and proceeded to dig out another basketful of dandelions.

Garden helpers- Phoenix and Spirit

After that I cleaned out the flower bed next to the house... dug out grass and weeds and dug back the edge of the lawn a little. Then I planted 2 red nonstop tuberous begonias in that bed in front of the clematises.
My clematises both came up, growing strong and long green shoots up from the roots. (One is a General Sikorska with dark blue flowers and one a Jackmanii which gets dark purple blossoms.) Time to trim off the old dead last year's growth now.  I haven't had a lot of experience with Clematises yet. Have only had clematises for 3 years now, but I really like them! They bloom the most gorgeous flowers for many weeks and even in the fall they have attractive curly seed pods on them.

I have found, though, that it is best to leave the old growth over winter because sometimes in the spring the new growth will start from the old growth part way up the old vines.... If you twist the old stems and they are dry and brittle and brek off, those are parts you can cut away. If the stem doesn't break then that part might still be living so I would leave it fora week or two longer to see.
This year the stems didn't do that though. They all seem to be dead. Maybe it depends on how hard of a winter they get.

I checked my peonies and the one close to the pond has numerous long shoots which seem to promise a good number of flowers this year! Three fat buds that are evident and possibly more. That's two more than it had last year! Not sure why it only had one flower. I read recently that peonies need to have that cold winter weather in order to do their best in the spring and not to mulch them. I did the opposite 2 winters ago and instead of helping the plant to thrive, it hardly bloomed at all. Then to make matters worse, the deer ate the one and only blossom on that whole entire peony!
Two of the other peonies in the wild bed at the far end of the yard have shoots, too. The other two don't show much sign of life yet... But I'm not feeling daunted. They both were very slow in sprouting in the past and just about the time I was ready to give up on them, the little shoots cut through the ground.

I still need to dig out some grass from the lower level of my rock garden and some of the huge clumps of shasta daisies which have self seeded there... I really hate to dig up a perfectly healthy thriving plant, but they are just taking over!  They have long 10 inch flower stems with fat buds on the ends...

I want to plant calendulas there this year along with the Swan River daisies, (also known as Ice Flowers).

Photos to follow! :)