A Maryland Country Garden

A Small Rant

I just wanted to get this off my chest.  I hate the red mulch I'm seeing everywhere lately.  Hate it.  It looks ugly, fake and garish.  I assume the only reason people are using it instead of the more usual brown shredded hardwood mulch is because it's new and different.  Oh, lookie!  There's something different: RED mulch!  I must buy it and I must use it.  Just because. It's new.  And different.  And red.  And maybe more expensive.  (Although I don't know that.)

There, I feel better. 

Today, when I went to water some seedlings I have on the deck I saw what I thought were two rocks sitting in the cells.  Now how did they get there, I wondered.  So I started to pick one up and it was then I realized it wasn't a rock.  It felt cold and a little slimey.  Tree frogs!  A big one and a baby one were taking naps in my seedlings.  That's what I get for not wearing my glasses.

Who's been eating my iris?

I planted a big bag of iris reticulae last fall and was excited to see them starting to come up the end of March.  But all that came up the first week were the yellow ones.  So I thought, that's what I get for getting the cheapy bag o' bulbs at Lowe's hardware.  The picture on the bag shows blues and yellows but it's probably really only yellows with maybe 2 blues in it.  But I was proven wrong during the second week of blooming--all blues.  I was happy.  I took pictures.  It snowed, but I was sure they'd be fine.  Then, the morning of the snow I looked out my window and saw nothing but thin green straps of leaves where the flowers had been.  It wasn't the snow that got them because they had totally disappeared.  No, surely some creature had eaten them.  I've never had any other types of iris bothered by animals though. I wonder which of the many, many creatures around here was the culprit?  Bunnies, most likely.   Here's what they used to look like:

I spoke too soon

Winter has made a short return and for the next few days we will have freezing temps.  I've had to protect all my seedlings, which were outside on the deck.  I put some flats in the cold frame and put some fleece over others.  This morning there was an inch of snow on the ground, which, I must say, was very pretty and a lovely backdrop for the chionodoxa.