The Rest of the Freebies

OK, techically, the plants I bought yesterday were not free. You can say one of them cost $1.06 and the rest were free, or they each cost 9.6 cents. Take your pick. But in fact, I got $88 worth of plants for $1.06.

This is the best of the lot in terms of desire for me, and it's also the healthiest. Yes, another hosta. As long as I can keep the deer from eating them, I don't have to worry about flowers. The shades of foliage provide the color. One of the risks of buying clearance plants is that you may not know what you are getting. This one had a tag. Supposedly, it's 'Forbidden Fruit." Hmmm. I doubt it, but we'll see. The center color is supposed to be more golden and the edge more blue. That would be nice. It may get bleached out later in the season. Is this considered late?

These don't look like much right now, but I'm super happy to have them. I used to have some astilbe, long ago, but they eventually died out. I know two of them are white 'Bridal Veil,' and one is pink 'Rheinland.' The fourth one is pot luck! They were all pot luck when I bought them because it turned out the tags had slipped down the sides of the pots. They don't like to be transplanted mid-summer, but I'll try to keep them watered. I put them right back where the astilbe used to be. That garden used to have more sun, and I think that made the previous ones a little unhappy. Ignore the unweeded area behind them. These won't bloom again until next year. (Yeah, there's a baby white pine in there I need to move.)

Finally, because I needed to pick one more plant, I chose this Coreopsis. I don't know what cultivar, and haven't tried to figure it out yet. I've sort of been working at weeding the sunny garden, but haven't made much progress, so for now, this is thrown in very near a bunch of grass that will have to come out. But it's blooming! Of course, everything was root-bound, so it will take a while for new roots to spread anyway.

Hopefully, I can keep them happy, but the price was right!

Also under the heading of freebies... there is a black raspberry bush growing under the outside steps. Not an ideal location, and I'll probably chop it out in another week or so. Meanwhile, it's been providing me with one or two berries a day if I can get them ahead of the birds. There aren't enough berries to really do much with except eat them, but it's a nice treat. I do love them! We called them blackcaps when I was a kid.

I spent the whole day finishing up writing an article about my hike for Outdoors.com. I am getting paid for it! Just sent it off. I'll let you all know when it's published.

The only gardening that happened today was to plant the plants shown above. I do have to move one plant I put in the rock garden. I'm not sure what I was thinking when I bought it. It doesn't want full sun, and it's very unhappy. Sigh. The starlings that are mobbing the mulberry tree pulled up a couple of things, but I don't think they really killed anything.

The big unhappy news is that my scanner, a quite good one, will not work with Windows 10. No drivers to download, just "sorry, tough crunchies." I can still use it with the old computer until that totally dies, but what a hassle. To replace it with comparable quality will be over $300. The list of reasons I did not want to upgrade the computer goes on and on.

I don't want to end on a low note, so let me tell you that one of the frost burned hosta I bought at half price a few weeks ago, and there were two in the pot, is going to bloom. Hosta flowers aren't usually very exciting, but hey. I'll take it's picture when it performs.

See Astilbe in Bloom