A WORRYING TIME FOR SOUTHERN GARDENERS

Like many gardeners in the south I am tempted to grow plants just outside my range. Cold snaps cause me to run for the blankets but there was no way I could have protected against the cold temperatures we had last week. We had already suffered a significant freeze event while I was away after Christmas but that was was not near as bad as the last few nights. We are typically much colder than Austin, from anywhere between 5-10º. partly because of the lack of housing and roads but in my garden there are no trees to moderate the temperature. I am fearful of the losses which may take a few weeks to really show.
I went out with my camera this morning. Typically a gardener likes to show the best of his/her garden but this morning that was impossible to find.
Our native mullein is a pretty tough plant, right? It made it through the first cold snap.

But not the second. It's hard to imagine that cold could bring it down. I shall miss the those soft velvety leaves and the beautiful flower stalk with yellow flowers.

But the plants I worry about most of all are my gorgeous structural agaves, Agave weberii.

They are already beginning to collapse. And I don't like what I see here.

Will the Philippine violet, that show stopper of the fall garden, survive? Only time will tell.

This week brings a thaw and should reveal what will live and what will die.
And I don't like this. Of course I know full well that spalling takes place when pots are full of wet soil and it freezes and thaws. There wasn't even anything growing in this pot but it was full of soil. It was very careless of me to leave out outside.

This was one of last year's garden purchases and I must say they were worth every penny.

They come in a set of 3 and I put them to good use this year. Despite the fact that calendula and alyssum are usually winter hardy I experimented by covering one grouping one. The plants came through with flying colors, whereas an uncovered grouping suffered horribly.

On a cold morning when there was no hope of getting outside I turned my attention to new life; seed cleaning and sowing. These are the dried seed heads of the American basket flower, Centaurea americana, given to me by a gardening friend last summer. This native annual has large thistle-like seed heads, but without the prickles. On the left what remains after seed removal.

The seeds are difficult to clean so some will be planted with a little extra. I use coir fibre to plant and they are on a heated seed mat. They should really have been planted in the fall so fingers crossed they will germinate quickly and soon catch up. If not I will remember to plant earlier next year.

Under the new grow light system I have arugula, chard, kale, pak choi, cilantro, tomato, brachyscome, and stocks. There is nothing more cheering on cold winter days than seed germination.

Swann River daisy, Brachyscome

10 week stocks

Pak choi

At least it makes me feel as though spring is on the way.

THERE WAS AN OLD WOMAN.......

 she didn't live in a shoe ..... but she had so many seedlings she didn't know what to do.

Just look at this lot. There are blackfoot daisies, dahlberg daisies, blanket flowers and purple skullcaps. In the sunken garden the recent rain brought forth a 'spectacle' of seedlings. That's my new collective noun for describing what would happen if I allowed all these to flower. One year I had bluebonnets packed in so tightly between the pavers that it became impossible to walk in there. I ended up pulling out so many I felt guilty. So I have to make a decision on who will stay and who will go and this is SO hard for me to do. I will say though that I have given the good guys a little breathing room and that is because there was also a 'sneak' of weeds among them which I had no qualms about removing.

IT'S TIME TO START THINKING HARDY ANNUALS

There are lots of opportunities for spring blooming here in Texas. I am talking about that group of plants called the hardy annuals. Those seeds that you can sow in the fall, winter over and bloom early in the year before the heat sets in. The list is long.

I have already done some of my seed shopping. I took advantage of a 25% discount on the new seed selections for 2012 at my local nursery. There are some plants I just don't want to live without. Many are the flowers of my childhood; larkspur, snapdragons, poppies, alyssum, cornflowers, rose campion.
Some seeds are already waiting in the garden for the first fall rains; bluebonnets, Ca poppies, Flander's poppies and Love-in-a-mist seeds are already in the ground from last year.

In the area where I was working on the new dry creek just look how many bluebonnet seeds have already germinated. They took advantage of the water sprayed during the clean up. I also have bag of bluebonnet seeds that I saved from the spring. Thee I will sow in selective places around the outside garden just as soon as I hear there is rain on the way.

EXCITEMENT IN THE GREENHOUSE

A little over a week ago I opened a packet of seeds and this was what I found.

The packet contained seeds of Delosperma floribunda 'stardust' I have always had great success with delosperma as a rock garden plant and decided to try growing them from seed. However, this was a first. I have seen pelleted seeds before but never so tiny. Not much hope for these, I thought. The directions said that the seeds need light to germinate and suggested sowing in shallow furrows. I decided to just make a shallow dent in the soil in the six pack and hope for the best.

Today I noticed tiny specks of green, the first seed leaves. I think I have 100% germination. I really had no expectations that they would germinate so I was over the moon. Now the test will be keeping them alive.

The greenhouse is starting to look a little crowded. I have such a weakness for saving plants as well as starting seeds. So all these little ones you see here are seedlings uprooted from the gravel. There is hardly room to move in there with all the other overwintering plants.