New Plants.

7-1-12 VERMONT: It has been hot, hot, hot, up in the mid-nineties, no more fires at night, for now. Many cites in the south and mid-west have set record temps.

I have been busy with weeding and pruning, of course, but also hit the nurseries and did some planting. In the bed by the new French doors, I dug out the old soil, some of it, put in a mix of top soil and sand and planted two strawberry foxglove, Digitalis x mertonensis, two silvermound wormwood, Artemisia schmidtiana ‘Silvermound’, and one Phlox paniculata ‘Red Riding Hood’. The foxglove is marginally hardy for here, but we’ll see. That bed had had lilies, real lilies, but something ate most of the bulbs this spring, probably a striped rat. The reason for the soil change was poor growth of whatever went in that bed.

Similarly, the bed in front of the old house has been death for plantings, and I did another soil change there and planted two false indigo bushes, Amorpha fruticosa. They are legumes, nitrogen fixers, and should do well. I planted another echinacea, Echinacea purperea ‘Tomato Soup’, and a larkspur, Delphinium grardiflorum ‘Blue Butterfly’, in the porch bed.

I put another Joe Pye weed, Eupatorium maculatum ‘Carin’, in the bed behind the pond and a blue flag iris, Iris versicolor, on the edge of the pond near the drain.

This afternoon we had an intense but short T-storm with a bit of hail and lightning strikes nearby. There was 0.4 inches of rain.

New blooms: mallow.

 
I was up early the other day and caught this orange sky about 5 AM.
A few minutes later.