Good morning, and this is just wrong. Welcome to Saturday Morning Garden Blogging.
In Denver, there's something called Stock Show Weather — that when the National Western Stock Show hits Denver each January, odds are that the weather is going to be really cold and crappy.
The Stock Show opened on Thursday — when the high was 67° downtown.
Uhm, yeah — "Stock Show Weather", like "it always snows on Halloween", is a case of selective memory. Typically during a 2 week period in January, Denver's going to have a cold front come through — and one is forecast to arrive today and tomorrow… and then blow right out again with highs going back into the 50s by mid-week.
Meanwhile, the lilac bush in the back yard is very confused and is sending out new growth already. I hope this isn't another year of snap-turning weather where a mild winter morphs into a cold-as-hell spring. Cross fingers.
But with the solstice past, I'm starting to look forward to the next gardening season. One of the things accomplished last week was potting up the mess of Inca Sun brugmansia and geranium clippings that had put out good strong roots.
The brugs really went nuts — every clipping had a good, dense system of healthy roots. I now have 9 plants potted and, if all goes well, I'll be able to pass them around in a couple of months. I do need to reserve two or three for my in-laws, but the rest will be up for grabs.
Some of the geranium clippings did much better than others. More particularly, the clippings that were in a deeper container with a lot of space underneath the end of the clippings developed really lovely, long, dense roots. The clippings that were in shorter containers, with the stems touching or almost touching the bottom, didn't root as well. However, there was another variable — the deeper container also received more sunlight, but was slightly cooler, being closer to the window. In any event, I'm now experimenting to see if any of those variables affect the rooting: I've put some clippings in the tall container, and others in a short container, and placed both in the sunnier, cooler spot. So we'll see what happens.
I've also managed — thanks to the shit from the Mister's fishies — to get an orchid to bloom. I have no idea what type this is — I call it a Chinese Grocery Store Generic. We have an Asian supermarket a mile or so down the road and they have really, really inexpensive orchids, of really, really limited varieties. But they do bloom.
But what I find extremely weird is that a flower that looks so very much like female genitalia is named for testicles. WTF?
This weekend… well, I'm going to have to go into work some. And I'm still recovering from last week's cold (many thanks to blue jersey mom for taking over at the last minute). And I'm schedule to post the Sunday WAYWO diary. But I do absolutely have to sit down, and go through the stack of seed catalogs and order goodies to grow this year.
That's what's happening here. What's going on in your garden?