Spidra's The Grim Reaper garden

I justified paying for a landscape designer because I figured we’d save more money if we leaned on the expertise of a pro rather than relying on trial and error. Unfortunately, there were quite a few mistakes we paid for. One was siting pineapple sage in front of the raised beds. They grew to a height between 4 and 5 feet, shading a lot of the beds. The point was to grow something in front of the beds to soften the hard edges of the boards making up the beds. But you only need a plant between one and two feet tall to do that. Bad design.

I hate to give expensive plants away free, but being disabled makes it so. I can’t both sell it and ask someone to dig it up themselves unless the plant is super-valuable. So I Freecycled the plants. Someone came to dig one up today and the other one will be dug up tomorrow by another person.

After we’d finished, one of the hummingbirds buzzed the empty space disapprovingly, then moved on to the one bush that’s left. He’s going to be pissed when that one goes tomorrow. Of course, there’s plenty of hummer plants in the front yard but I don’t think as many of them are in bloom now. The Pineapple Sage is in full bloom.

The one I planted near the olallieberry is doing okay. The later transplants are nearly dead.

I think it was sold to me before it had truly established. I took good care of it but it died anyway. I’m going to ask Annie’s if they’ll do an exchange.

Doesn’t have quite the nice pink blush that ‘Taichung 11’ does. Could swear I took a picture of the first flower but I’m having trouble finding it.

Failure analysis: Put too thin a latex coat on the stump. Didn’t get a strong enough tape to wrap the bark back together. Things dehydrated. I kept checking to see if it was sprouting and there was no sign. I was resting my fingers against it to test its turgidity and it broke off. The cross section shows that the tapered part was black/brown although there was still a bit of green at the wide part of the wedge.

Yesterday or the day before, I was lifting the last healthy okra start up and the damned leggy thing bent against another plant’s leaf! Young plant against young plant was too much for it. I left it around for a day or so to see if it would recover but it’s never going to recover from that wound. So I threw it out tonight. I have a feeling my next attempt at okra is going to be sowing directly.