Why I Oughta...

Back in May of this year, I shared my plans to plant some Dahlia tubers directly in the ground in one of our landscape beds along the south property line.  That post is here .   In that post, I described the two varieties - one being a semi-cactus and the other being a dinner plate. Specifically I planted three Big Brother Dinner plate Dahlias . And, I planted three Color Spectacle Semi-Cactus Dahlia s. Please go click those links.  And make sure my eyes aren't fooling me.  They're both orange, right?  Like, totally orange.  The packages of both show orange flowers.  And...I love orange flowers.  Well, I like orange most things.  But, have a special soft-spot for orange flowers.  Now, scroll back to the top of this post.  That's a couple of the Big Brother Dinner plate flowers about to burst open.  And now, check out the photo below.  That's one of the Color Spectacle flowers starting to open up. They're, ummm, not orange.  Right?  Those are tota

Yesterday, I shared a couple of photos of some Elephant Ear bulbs that I am planning on putting in containers on the patio this Season .  Today, I'm sharing two more sets of bulbs - or in this case..."Tubers" is what they're actually called - for this Season.   Dahlias can be grown in the garden or in containers.  I think the pros put them in the ground/garden and then in Zones like ours (5b), pull them out of the ground in the Fall to store them over Winter.  But...they *can* be grown in containers.  Why do I think that?  Because of this article on the official site of The American Dahlia Society .  It walks you through how to grow them in pots.  (Hint...start them low and gradually add soil on top of them as they shoot up.) I think I'm going to try a little bit of both - putting some of our Dahlias in containers while putting others directly in the landscape.   So far we've bought two varieties of tubers.  First, a Dinnerplate variety called &q

Back in June of this year, I posted about the two fingerling varieties of potatoes that I planted in containers .  I've kept them in one of the most full-sun spots in our backyard, right outside of our kitchen windows.  And they shot up.  I 'hill'd them up' as best as I could, but pretty soon, I ran out of container height.  (Lesson learned...plant them in super tall containers and plant them low, so they can get 'hill'd up' quite a bit. This week, I saw these flower blooms emerging and thought that they're quite striking.  In fact, that's the exact phrase I used in my Instagram post from earlier this week.  Striking. (on yeah... that's my gardening-focused Insta handle.   That, much like this blog, is intended as a diary of sorts.) Potato blossoms. We're growing fingerlings in containers this season. The blooms are quite striking. A post shared by Hornbeam Hill (@hornbeamhill) on Jul 2, 2018 at 7:16am PDT I posted