Little Things Are Coming Up!
It’s been hard to get back into writing a regular blog since overwintering. Our weather has been stranger than usual with temperatures doing a lot of fluctuating. I think consistently warm weather is finally here. It took a while but a lot of my flower seeds finally sprouted. A lot of them didn’t, but I should still have many.
My common milkweed has been growing literally like a weed. It’s already budding out and beginning to bloom. My hairy balls is a whole different story. It took a while for any of it to come up. I had planted hundreds of seeds, but there were only a few dozen sprouts. “Patience,” I tell myself. I started seeing a few more, but not many. Then we got a heavy rain and the entire bed sprouted…weeds. It was a while before I could go out and work on it and by then, with the water and warmth, the weeds had taken over. It took me around 12 hours or so of tediously pulling out individual weeds so I didn’t also get the tiny milkweed sprouts. By the time I was done, the garden looked practically empty. I had a few dozen hairy balls, but not nearly enough to feed many cats.
The ones I had seemed to have all sprouted in clusters and had to either be relocated for adequate root space or pulled out. I never pull out milkweed, so I’ve been transplanting them into a more organized pattern. Lo and behold, with all the weeds gone, I’m getting new sprouts every day. They just needed the sunlight. Now I must have at least 150 small hairy balls. Yes, I know how weird that sounds, LOL. It’s going to be a lot more work, to get them all where they belong, so I do it during periods of shade. As of this morning, it looks like I should have well over 200 plants. I’ll fertilize them in a few weeks so they should be big enough by the time the butters show up looking for a nursery. The point here is that you need to be patient and be sure that you keep your seeded area as weed free as possible.
