Seeing that I'm posting about the garden I'll share about my echinacea (coneflower) experiment.We have a nice butterfly/hummingbird garden which started out with one big purple coneflower. It dropped seeds and then we had three. And then my beloved husband bought a white coneflower and a yellow coneflower bringing our echinacea count to five plants.
Unfortunately for us neither the white nor yellow coneflower plants appeared to make it through the winter but fortunately for us we had a few more seedlings reappear this year. Now, odds are strong that they will all be purple coneflowers but we might get extra blessed and have one or two turn up white or yellow. We won't likely know until mid to late summer because I moved five of them over to the main front yard garden area (which got expanded after the backhoe excavation ordeal) and transplanting tends to delay blooming (at least in my experience). Here's what the little transplants look like now.
Here's a close up of one of the seedlings and here's a lesson learned. I'd never transplanted echinacea before. It turns out that they have a big center tap root in addition to the normal little roots and that tap root is tenacious. I was doing the transplanting after some heavy rain and the plants just didn't want to come out of the ground. Had I known about the tap roots I'd have dug twice as deep as I thought I needed to. That would have made the job a lot easier.
Hope you enjoyed my iris photos and echinacea story. What's going on in your garden?
If you have any tips on growing echinacea or replanting roses (they're next on my put-back-after-the-excavation list) I'd love to hear them! May God bless you!
