Another bi-annual plant sale put on by the Master Gardener’s program at the Cooperative Extension has come and gone; I managed to stop at 14 plants (2 were zinnias for the patio, so they don’t really count). The line started early, as usual:
The sale supposedly runs from 8:00AM–11:00AM, but virtually all the plants are gone in the first hour.
A few days before, in anticipation of having more plants to put in the ground, I dug bricks out of the patio to extend one of my beds:
Slowly but surely, every year I have a little more shade, which means more opportunities to put plants in the ground and have them survive the brutal summer; most plants need some shade in the morning or afternoon, few can handle full-on sun all day long. The green bush above is a Wonderful pomegranate, the tiny tree to the left a desert-adapted peach.
I picked up a variety of plants at the sale: lavender, a columbine that supposedly does well in this climate, some moss verbena….they all went in my newly extended bed. I try to plant stuff that’s good for birds, bees and butterflies:
This is some of the plant matter I yanked out of the ground:
I also planted 2 mission fig trees: you can see one here, hooked up to my crude soaker hose, the light green plant in the back is a wooly butterfly bush, they get quite large and have funny orange-globe-shaped flowers, kind of like globe amaranth.
