Tag: milkweed

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11/18/2023 green section

The heavy duty plastic garden cart with three full planters in it. Long afternoon shadows on driveway.
We used our trusty garden cart to bring the green section plants from the backyard as well as the verbenas.
The lovegrass had long roots where they hit the side of the pot and went down. The exposed roots aren’t buried again yet.
The sand lovegrass had a beautiful root system!
Two young milkweeds with a lot of soil gone from the rest of pot being planted. My gloved hand is adjacent to the roots to highlight the swollen taproot part.
The green milkweeds had very long root systems. These just sprouted this spring. I think I got 3-6 from this pot into the ground. Not all put up leaves again with the fall rain so it’s hard to be sure.
Big pale rocks frame the newly planted corner in green section of rainbow garden.
Everyone tucked in snugly. I moved the spikemoss from here to the rock garden as the spotted euphorbia keeps almost covering it here.
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06/06/2023 milkweed revives!

Something completely chopped off one of the two baby Asclepias viridiflora in the rainbow garden. I was pleased to find it is growing back! As of today (06/11/2023) it has grown another pair of leaves too.
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06/11/2023 roots

Unless you’re taking a herbarium specimen or moving stuff in the garden, we often don’t see how deep some native plant roots are. Today I helped two friends rescue plants from a remnant prairie that is about to be dozed and built on. (We dug with permission.)

A Winecup had the taproot I’ve read about but it was concentrated near the surface. This seems likely to live.
I figured this big milkweed has a very deep root so we didn’t try it.
Briar sat in the shade of encroaching cedar trees and helped check the reference book.
A cute hopper insect!
The Pediomelium/Psoralea type legume had a long thin root. The end broke so we shall see if it lives.
Scarlet pea had a very long root. Again we’ll see how it grows!

Spiderworts, native perennial dayflower, an all yellow Gaillardia, fleabane, western horse nettle, and Heterotheca (I think?) all came up easily with a sharpshooter shovel. Little bluestem has very deep roots but I think they are supposed to be okay to divide. Fern acacia (I think??) had a longer root (over a foot for a 6” tall plant) that may have broken.

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05/29/2023 quarter inch rain

One of our four new prairie larkspurs has bloomed!!
I took several angles as I was excited. Three of four plants tried to bloom but their flower stalks got knocked over or snipped off by something toothy.
The showy milkweed in the side yard (north of the rainbow garden) is coming up!
Our three kinds of milkweed are growing!! The lower left one is a green milkweed. The two biggest plants are whorled milkweed (A. verticillata) from Abby. The one remaining viridiflora is not in the picture.
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05/27/2023 front yard

The rainbow garden is almost there.
The winecups have gotten MASSIVE. I have never seen such mammoth winecup leaves in the wild.
A typical winecup with regular sized leaves. We saw this one today on our afternoon walk, at Saxon Park.
A view panning over to see the Salvia greggii and coreopsis too. All the white flowers in the raised beds are cilantro. If you’ve been looking at our iNaturalist feed, the cilantro flowers are hopping with insect activity.