#14: Ambition and Mistakes

I wrote in a post last year about my native Hostas. When I was trying to figure out what plants were already in my landscaping that were native, I looked up every single plant, and through that research I found out that one version of the many Hostas in my garden were native. So I kept those, moved them to a new area of the landscape, and surrounded them with Golden Groundsel (Packera Aurea) to try to keep the deer from eating them down to nubs.

As it turns out, my Hostas aren't native. No Hostas are native to the U.S. I have no idea how I determined that they were, but whatever source I used was just plain wrong.

When I started this blog, I named it Sow and See as a play on "try and see" to represent the fact that I am taking a learn-as-I-go approach to all of this. The inevitable outcome of that approach is that you will make mistakes along the way. And mistakes I'm making aplenty.

Back in early February, I ordered 83 plants from Prairie Nursery. There's something about human nature that makes us forget how time-consuming things are when we're planning for the future. In my mind, getting 83 plants into the ground was going to be quick and easy: just dig a small hole, plop the plant in, and cover it with dirt. At two minutes per plant, I figured I'd be finished in a weekend.

The first weekend went by, and all I was able to do was get seven shrubs planted.

The second weekend went by, and all I was able to do was get 12 plants in the ground. I ran into a million rocks that I had to excavate, and I had to be really careful because there are electric wires running underground in the area I was planting in, so I needed to avoid electrocuting myself.

Then the first day of the third weekend went by, and all I was able to accomplish was getting six Purple Poppy Mallow (Callirhoe Involucrata) into the other half of the section of yard pictured above.

(Another lesson I learned from the things I planted in the fall of last year is that mulch will kill your plants if it shifts and falls on top of them, which is why I'm temporarily surrounding my plants with these plastic rings until they get tall enough to survive shifting mulch. I sadly lost several Cardinal Flowers [Lobelia Cardinalis] and two Black-Eyed Susans [Rudbeckia Hirta] to mulch; they didn't come back up this spring.)

I still had 58 plants to get into the ground, and in the meantime, the plants still in containers were starting to look a bit unhappy. The unseasonably warm spring was encouraging their roots to grow rapidly, and they were getting so root-bound that they were barely holding onto water anymore. If I didn't get them in the ground quickly, I was going to lose them, and I'd spent way too much money on these plants to let that happen.

"Okay," I thought. "I'll just plunk them into the ground as quickly as possible and then move them later as needed." I started to dig my first hole in the back yard and ran into a large oak tree root. Then, deciding to start elsewhere, I dug into the ground and ran into yet another large oak tree root.

In the end, I decided to put all of the plants into my front yard landscaping. It was the only solution I could find that ensured I wouldn't kill my plants (though two of them were in pretty bad shape and may or may not recover), and I wouldn't have to work myself into the ground to get them planted.

But even that didn't accommodate 100% of the plants. I still had five Obedient Plants (Physostegia virginiana) that I needed to put somewhere, but since they're also fairly aggressive, my front garden bed didn't feel like the right place. So I cleaned out a standing bed that I'd planned to take down eventually and plopped them in there as an interim get-them-in-the-ground solution.

In the end, I made very little progress toward my goal of turning my backyard into a wildflower garden, but I have to say I was kind of excited to fill in the bed out front a bit more. I'd thought that my front landscaping was going to have to wait until I made a lot more progress on the back yard, but through my own incredible over-ambition when it came to the back yard project, I managed to get it almost completely filled.

The good news for my backyard is that my outdoor winter sowing was extremely prolific. The bad news is that it was another ambitious project that turned out to be a bit of a mistake.

In between trying to get plants in the ground, I've also been trying to separate the seeds I germinated into their own containers. I honestly thought I'd be lucky to get any plants at all from them or, if I got some, I'd get maybe 10-20. I'm still not finished separating them, though I've put hours upon hours of work into it. I'm fairly certain I'm going to end up with more than 200 plants.

Next time, I'll share pictures of what I ended up with, as well as the mistakes I definitely won't be making when winter sowing in this way the next time around. Make sure to subscribe so you don't miss it!