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Archive for 'Grow lights'

Planning the window boxes

After a year away, I get to do all of my window boxes again this year. Yay! I’m so excited. Wow. Even before the landscaping was done on the yard, I was already doing the window boxes around the deck. Pretty cool tradition to have. I like it because it gives me fiddling gardening

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wang wong

Playing in the dirt

I’ve been planting yet more seeds — I started some marigolds for my window boxes, some cilantro for my kitchen, and I’m trying my hand at melampodium, notoriously hard to grow from seeds, but I can never find it in the nurseries around here and I love it. I also transplanted out my pansies, moving

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wang wong

Pansy germination

It’s taking a lot longer than I think it should for my pansies to germinate. It might be perhaps that I’m impatient, but I don’t think so. I planted these guys on the first, and here it is the sixteenth and they are just barely starting to come up. I’m leaving the lights on all the time again this year. Last year it was an experiment, but I think it was a successful one, so I’m going to repeat it again. The theory behind turning the lights off at night is to give the plants some rest, some sleep, but I read some research that said that the amount of light from artificial light is such a minuscule fraction of the light from the sun that they don’t need to rest to process it.

wang wong

Mid-winter update

Even in midwinter there’s some gardening activity worth preserving. First the mushrooms. The enokitake had to get moved out of the fridge to the basement to make room for holiday food. Unfortunately stuff in the basement gets neglected, and we’ve had only one half-hearted flush. We’ve gotten two pretty good flushes from the pioppino

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wang wong

A break in the rain

We had heavy, heavy rain most of the day today. I remain quite surprised at how well all the flowers are holding up, because the rain has been so hard that I expect to look out and see all the flower stalks lying on the ground, but so far, so good. The hollyhocks are blooming

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wang wong

Drastic Deadheading

It’s hard to believe that this is my first real deadheading run on the window boxes, but I don’t think the boxes themselves really took off until the cold and rainy June weather stopped. So once hot and sunny July started, we got a couple of weeks of gorgeous growth on the whole set, but

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wang wong

Seeking Shade

We goofed off all day yesterday, spending our holiday and thus day off in a canoe on the Connecticut River rather than working in the garden. We sure had fun, though, and the garden seems to have survived without us. I noticed yesterday morning that I have the first blooms from my Galliardia. This is

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wang wong

Summer Arrives

Usually, by the fourth of July, I’ve got all of my hot summer colors going strong in the garden. Despite the heat (which has been horrible), the summer colors are just now coming into their own. I used to be able to count on a burst of my ditch lilies reliably blooming right on the

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wang wong

Starting Herbs in Boxes

I had every intention of starting some herbs from seed in boxes for the upper balcony deck this year. I even bought the seed. I bought some sand to mix with the potting soil. I researched what temps they want to germinate. I kept a shelf clear in the basement for them. Somehow I never

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wang wong

Finishing the Front

I started outside this morning wanting to finish the bed directly in front of the front door. Though I’d done the majority of that bed, for some reason I stopped short of the most visible part, which was dumb, but I started there today, and what a huge difference it made! First off, I tackled

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wang wong