I had my roof cleaned after several years. From the ground the mess looked like a bunch of sticks, neglected, yes, but not out of the ordinary. What the men doing the work raked down, was almost soil. Piles of oak catkins had been raining on my roof, and oak catkins decompose into humus very readily. So I grabbed these containers of wonderful soil/mulch mix, only about half of the total. I‘m using them to fill in my hügel-borders.

 

At this time of year, when you water your hanging baskets and they droop the next day, it’s worth pulling out the contents and seeing if you’ve got something like this. Once roots have absolutely filled the basket, you can never water it enough. You can do four things:

1. Give up, and compost the lot.
2. Slice the roots into parts, trim down the top growth, add fresh compost to the basket, replant, water well, then rehang.
3. Get rid of the old plants and buy new ones. Baskets can be filled with mums—even though mums don’t cascade, the look is pretty good going into autumn.
4. Break up the roots, and plant the contents into a garden bed. With good watering, you can get annual color in your garden until whichever frost is enough to kill the plants. In a warm microclimate, annuals can survive a frosty night, or a few.

Above is a basket combo that got too root-bound, that I put into the border. I don’t know what this mint family plant is. I think it’s a plectranthus, since it has a trailing habit, and the leaves have barely any scent when I crush them. (The other one is a delosperma.) Ever since the pandemic gardening boom, I’ve had episodes of getting something I didn’t order instead of what I did. I selected a combo of green, purple, and green-and-purple glads, and got green, green-and-purple, and bright tomato red. I got peony-flowered daffodils. I’m not a big double daffodil fan, but these won me over (some things look better in life than in catalogs!) I got (apparently) a cuphea hyssopifolia instead of a white turtlehead. And I got this plectranthus (if it is) that I grew from seed. As far as I know, I’ve never seen seed like this offered.

Finally, a true cat-faced tomato from my garden. And some of my pepper haul.