Such a Marvelous Scent!

Too bad blogs don't come with Smell-o-Vision. All it took was a couple of warm days and a good soak of the roots, and my Brug is flowering, and filling the greenhouse with scent.

I Won't Get Fooled Again...

Caution: no pretty pictures ahead, just lots of ugly ones

Last year in August I posted about a problem I was having with a thistle-like weed that kept coming back, no matter how many times I dug it out. You can read that post here. I had found some advice online that said if you let it start to flower, and then dig it out, you'll weaken it enough to kill it, so I decided to try that.

Bad move.

It never reached flowering stage, never produced anything that looked like a bud. It got taller, and when we got a frost in November, it died back. But then, over the course of the winter, it started to spread via runners.

Originally it was only on the left hand side of this path. But soon, it had traveled under the flagstones, popping up between them and on the right-hand side of the path.

Here it is coming up among the Pacific Coast iris growing on the far right-hand side.

I have lots of plans for changes I want to make to the garden this summer. I posted about the gravel garden here, and I have plenty of other work in the offing. But I knew I had to deal with this dang weed pronto, before it took over the entire bed, and then my entire garden. I had to put my other plans on a back burner.

So I started digging, and pulling up the flagstone pavers. I found a huge network of white spaghetti-like roots growing all over and under the pavers. There were even plants trying to come up underneath the flagstones.

After lots of digging

Weeds be gone, but lots of little white spaghetti-like roots remain to be sifted out of the soil

I had to dig up all the perennials growing in the area as well, check their roots for signs of the thistles, and store them temporarily in a plastic bin.

I stored many plants I dug up in this storage container

There was a thistle coming up at the edge of this Hosta. I had to wash the roots to separate them.

I set up a gardener's sieve and my wheelbarrow, and began sifting all the soil by hand, one shovelful at a time. The work gave me a new appreciation for the difficult life of a gold prospector.

My trusty tools -- wheelbarrow, gardener's sieve and spade

At the end of the first day's work, I had two wheelbarrow-loads of fluffy soil, a lot of rocks, and two five-gallon buckets of roots, debris, and tiny pebbles. Not to mention, hundreds of rescued earthworms.

Lovely pile of sifted soil

Some big ugly critter has been digging in the garden -- oh wait, that was me.

Two five-gallon buckets full of dirty pea gravel and other debris --  including several clumps of those nasty white spaghetti-like roots from the thistle, sifted out of the soil

At the end of Day Two:

The pile of sifted dirt gets bigger

There's nothing to do now but keep going, I sure hope it's worth it. The area is wet because I put the gardener's sieve between those rocks and washed the pea gravel and debris there.

Pot o' rocks -- a perennial crop around here

Pots o' little rocks

Debris and roots

At the end of four back-breaking days of sifting:

Ginormous pile of soil

I've never really been happy with the fact that this path only had five flagstones. One evening after work, Nigel and I stopped at Lowe's and bought a bunch more to make the path more substantial. I pushed and pulled the stones around to see if I could come up with a good layout. Even though the new flagstones are a different color, I made it work by alternating them.

This should work!

A nice clean space for the new layout

At first I wasn't sure what I was going to do with all those little pebbles and pea gravel-size stones that I had sifted out of the soil. Then I realized I could use them under the new flagstones. I had to take another day to sift through the gravel, thoroughly removing any more little pieces of root or anything that looked like it might one day want to grow up to become a weed.

Over the weekend I drafted Nigel to move the flagstones into their final spots.

Ta Da!

Re-newed path

The fluffy soil will need some moisture to pack down again. We've already used the new path to move a couple of wheelbarrow-loads of compost, and it works great. 

That stupid thistle better not show its face here again. If it does, I doubt I'll be able to kill it with a dirty look. I may have to get out the big guns, like Roundup, which I've never used.

And now...to replant! But first I have a date with a big bottle of ibuprofen.

A Few Random Images

The gardening season is gearing up here, and I've been visiting nurseries and going places and doing things, and of course, I always bring my camera along. But I don't always get enough good images to put together an entire post about it. So I thought I'd do a post to include some random shots that turned out adequately.

From the recent Yard, Garden and Patio Show in Portland:

Loved these sort of egg-shaped orange pots

Yucca 'Bright Star' in an orange container, just in case I'm wondering what color container mine will look good in, once I dig them up

Kokedama (moss ball)

From a visit to Cistus Nursery:

Garrya elliptica and Eucalyptus

From Thicket, another Portland nursery:

Hellebore (unfortunately, I didn't take note of the name)

Clematis armandii 'Apple Blossom'

Pussy willow

From Garden Fever, a neighborhood nursery also in Portland:

Clematis armandii 'Snowdrift'

Chez Alison:

In my own house, the two Begonias, that I moved out of the greenhouse a month or so ago to make room for seed-starting, are flowering.

And out in the greenhouse, the Old Lady Cactus (Mammalaria hahniana) is flowering. The flowers are tiny and delicate, and ever so much better than glued-on fake ones.

Out in the Greenhouse on a Frosty Morning

We've had a couple of cold nights, with temps down in the high 20s (F).  In the greenhouse, things are doing well. Mornings, when I return from the train station after dropping Nigel off, I go out there and sometimes just breathe. It smells like green, growing things, and the plants in there are responding to longer periods of daylight.

Echium 'Star of Madeira' is flowering

The whole plant overall is thriving

Variegated Opuntia, a recent purchase st the Portland Yard, Garden and Patio Show

When the ladies at the checkout were packing it into a carry-bag, they knocked off one of the pads. So it's sitting in a dish, getting hardened off so I can try rooting it. Then I'll have two!

The Brugs are producing flowers

This one produced a seedpod in the autumn, which has been hanging on and ripening all winter. I don't know if I should try sowing the seeds or not. Brugs are much easier to propagate via cuttings.

Echevaria flowers

I love the pink and orange!

I've been looking for a Pachypodium for a while with no success, so when I saw this one at the Rare Plant Research table at the YGP show, it basically hopped off the table into my hot little hand.

The leaves and spikes are such a strange combo of cute and lethal

These two bright red Bromeliads in burlap bags came from Garden Fever in Portland.

And this enormous Bromeliad, Aechmea blanchetiana, came from Rare Plant Research. I had to shift some plants around to fit it under the wire table, but eventually I managed to shoehorn it in.