... is what I am thinking results from digging up those aggravating little smilax tubers. I spent some time this afternoon, puttering in the back yard with my shovel. It started, as things tend to do, with a project totally unrelated to digging up smilax. When I put a bucket of good home-made dirt and a few little plants in the wheelbarrow.
Once again I find myself buying things to plant then bringing them home and playing a guessing game: roaming around looking for the most likely spot to dig. I accidently bought these plants at wally world a couple of weeks ago and needed to plant or they will never survive. It probably occurred when I thought I could just scoot in the garden shop and run in, really quick like, to get more cash on the card I use for gas at the Murphy in the parking lot. And the siren call of something to plant lured me into buying more stuff I don't need and had no place to put.
Roaming around the yard, pushing the wheelbarrow with dirt, shovel and plants, trying to figure out where a bright sunny spot might be, I got distracted by the thorny vines of the smilax. Some of the tubers were young, no bigger than a pin head. Only a leaf or two on a little short vine, just barely showing above the collected leaves. Some were as big as an English pea. Some were as big as a quarter, with a long twining, grabby, climbing vine to match. But all were growing just behind the back of the house, in the sprouted up through the leaves. I probably dug up a hundred of them, so a very satisfying afternoon. Mostly growing in a place that is really shady, pretty much never gets any sun, with really thick leaf mulch under some oak trees. They obviously will tolerate anything from full sun to none at all. Pretty dang hardy.
I finally got the little bare-rooted things from wally world in the ground. It's a sea holly, that does not actually look like a flower at all, but something prickly, almost cactus like, that turns blue as it matures. I've seen them as cut flowers and think they are really neat, so hope they will grow and do well in that sunny spot they are settled into.
Along with a lot of reclaimed, rescued bulbs. Several pots full of those daffodil looking things. Bright yellow, but tiny little blooms the size of a nickel. Big fat bulbs, packed together in pots that probably came from a greenhouse where the grower has to keep lights and heat going full time in Canada to force them to bloom. And some bloomed out hyacinths that went into the bed on the north side of the house that has dozens more. In every color that they bloom: white, pale pink, dusty rose, lavender, dark purple With a good dose of time-release fertilizer in the hole, I hope they will be glorious next spring.
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