{"id":108,"date":"2008-08-14T14:35:54","date_gmt":"2008-08-14T22:35:54","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/gardenersapprentice.com\/garden\/?p=108"},"modified":"2015-11-24T07:33:01","modified_gmt":"2015-11-24T15:33:01","slug":"filling-holes","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/gardenersapprentice.com\/gardeningtips\/filling-holes\/","title":{"rendered":"Filling Holes"},"content":{"rendered":"

FILLING HOLES
\n<\/font><\/font><\/strong>\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 <\/strong>Right now in my garden the roses are in the midst of their August sulk, waiting for the Japanese beetles and the sticky heat to clear out.\u00a0 The Shasta daisies are a beautiful memory and even many of the coneflowers are looking a little long in the tooth.\u00a0 The non-fragrant purple flowers of the ordinary hostas have come and gone and I have lopped their scraggly stalks.\u00a0 I also cut back the overgrown salvia and the attenuated California poppies because they looked terrible.\u00a0 <\/font><\/font><\/p>\n

The roses of Sharon and three of the four butterfly bushes are doing their bit to keep up appearances and will for another three weeks or so.\u00a0 The Hosta plantaginea or August lilies have buds, as do the asters and boltonia, but they aren’t ready to show their beautiful flowers yet.\u00a0 I love my garden, but right now I have to admit that I hate the bare spots.\u00a0 Once again this year I take myself out to the August garden and moan disconsolately, “I should have put in more annuals.”\u009d<\/font><\/p>\n

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 This year my excuse for not doing so was better than usual.\u00a0 A change in my husband’s job status made it necessary to conserve resources, so my plant purchases were minimal.\u00a0 For a person whose motto is “when the going gets tough, the tough go to the garden center,”\u009d this was especially difficult.\u00a0 Happily we are in a better situation now, but I still can’t spend like a drunken sailor on a spree.\u00a0 After all, I have to think about my daughter’s college tuition, not to mention essentials like fall bulbs.<\/font><\/font><\/p>\n

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 So earlier this week, my first thought was to plug holes with plants that are already on hand.\u00a0 I have lots and lots and lots of a small-flowered coreopsis called Zagreb and it is dying to be divided.\u00a0 Of course the divisions inevitably go through a bit of transplant shock, but they come out of it quickly and even while they are in the midst of the uglies, they cover the bare earth.\u00a0 I would rather make divisions of the much better looking Coreopsis Moonlight, but Zagreb is twice as vigorous. \u00a0Those are the breaks–at least in my yard.<\/font><\/font><\/p>\n

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 If I didn’t intervene, the garden would be nothing but large perilla mint plants. \u00a0In this situation though, I removed fewer of the weedy creatures than usual and moved some of the others around to fill in the bald spots.\u00a0 I even pinched the thugs back to make them bushier.\u00a0 Now they shine forth from the large pots that flank my porch stairs, which truly speaks of desperation.\u00a0 At least perilla is attractive in its ubiquitousness, with fashionable purple-bronze leaves and pretty pink flower stalks.\u00a0 I heard a bypasser tell her companion that they were definitely coleus.\u00a0 I was gratified.<\/font><\/font><\/p>\n

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 After making all the free, quick fixes that I could think of, I finally went to the garden center in search of bargains.\u00a0 I found them in the form of several pots of portulaca and one giant coleus.\u00a0 All my specimens were sad looking when they arrived home from the garden center, but they won’t be for long.<\/font><\/font><\/p>\n

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 The late Henry Mitchell, America’s greatest garden writer, reminisced in one of his books about housewives in his native Texas who defied the withering summer heat by growing colorful annual portulaca or moss rose in old tin washtubs.\u00a0 Portulaca grandiflora, a relative of the edible weed purslane, is a creeping succulent plant, with small, plump leaves and bright poppy-like flowers that last only one day.\u00a0 The blooms absolutely shine in the hot sun.<\/font><\/font><\/p>\n

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 At the garden center I found three six-inch pots of portulaca for a tiny price.\u00a0 These portulaca, undoubtedly remnants of plants sold in cell packs earlier in the season, looked a little tired.\u00a0 I knew that if I cut them back, they would have plenty of life left.\u00a0 After the big clip job, I’ll divide each potted portulaca tangle in half and install the plants in six holes in the fronts of various borders, where they will be happy and bloom through the end of the summer.\u00a0 The portulaca would have been reasonably cheap at twice the price and nobody else has to know just how cheap they really were.<\/font><\/font><\/p>\n

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 I also found one giant, overgrown coleus.\u00a0 The red, green and yellow carnival colors of the leaves drew my eye from twenty feet away.\u00a0 I took it home, snipped off the flower stalks and cut the plant way back.\u00a0 The coleus will interpret this as a gesture of affection and respond with a new flush of bushy leaves in its adopted home in one of the shady borders.\u00a0 The cuttings went into a glass of water, where they will root quickly.\u00a0 In a few weeks they will be in the garden, providing riotous color until frost.<\/font><\/font><\/p>\n

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Once the rehabilitated bargain plants are installed, I will freshen up the worst looking beds with some new mulch and edge the ones that I haven’t gotten around to edging yet.\u00a0 Nothing rejuvenates a garden like mowing the surrounding grass, edging and mulching.\u00a0 Those who don’t know me can imagine that I had my “people”\u009d do all those chores.\u00a0 The gardener in me will rejoice in my newly refreshed beds and borders.\u00a0 My inner social climber will rejoice because my garden will once again keep up with the Joneses.\u00a0 After all, I walked by the Joneses place the other day, and the ten thousand impatiens that their people installed in the middle of May are looking a little leggy. <\/font><\/font><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

FILLING HOLES \u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Right now in my garden the roses are in the midst of their August sulk, waiting for the Japanese beetles and the sticky heat to clear out.\u00a0 The Shasta daisies are a beautiful memory and even many of the coneflowers are looking a little long in the tooth.\u00a0 The non-fragrant purple flowers … Read more<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-108","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-summer"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/gardenersapprentice.com\/gardeningtips\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/108","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/gardenersapprentice.com\/gardeningtips\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/gardenersapprentice.com\/gardeningtips\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gardenersapprentice.com\/gardeningtips\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gardenersapprentice.com\/gardeningtips\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=108"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/gardenersapprentice.com\/gardeningtips\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/108\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1675,"href":"https:\/\/gardenersapprentice.com\/gardeningtips\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/108\/revisions\/1675"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/gardenersapprentice.com\/gardeningtips\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=108"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gardenersapprentice.com\/gardeningtips\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=108"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gardenersapprentice.com\/gardeningtips\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=108"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}