Seedfork's blog: New compost pile

Another nice day, breezy with the high in the upper 80's. A good day to be in the garden. Last night got a bit rough, this morning limbs were laying all over the lawn and in the flower beds. The hostas look like a slug and snail attack took place, but actually it was just the punctures and tears from the barrage of oak limbs falling on them. Hate it when that happens. Any how, no real damage here but a house down the street a ways did lose its roof.
I picked up several wheelbarrow loads of twigs and branches, drug the big limbs across the street for the city to pick up. The garden came out pretty good with the exception of the hostas.
My wife had a wedding shower to attend at 1:30, so after eating Sunday lunch out as normal, she took off for the shower and I took off looking for some grass to pick up to make a new compost pile with. It took several stops, but finally I had a full truck load of grass clippings.I came home and was able to back right down next to the big leaf pile and unload the grass and mix in the old clippings and shredded leaves all at once. This is so much more convenient, than the old way of having to haul everything down with the wheelbarrow. Saves a ton of time and energy! By 3:30 I pulled the truck up into the garage. I had picked up the grass, unloaded the truck, mixed up and constructed the pile and was completely finished in two hours. Not a bad way to spend a lazy Sunday afternoon. I have included pictures trying to show the size of the pile, but in one photo the pile looks tiny, and in the other it looks the size of the egyptian pyramids, so somewhere between the two. Actually around 4 feet tall, and 9-10 feet long and wide. A good size for a pile for me to work and keep turned.


This is the pile of old shredded leaves and dried grass clippings I already had on hand, you can see how much I needed out of it to mix with a truck load of green clippings.

I had several daylilies blooming today, my wife was able to use roses I cut out of the garden for the wedding shower, the canna lilies are starting to bloom, and the most interesting thing to me is that the Calla Lily bloomed and the first bloom was white, today the second bloom was a different color, and the third bloom coming on looks to be even a different color. I was very pleased with that.




Canna starting to bloom:

Calla lily with new blooms coming on it.



The old blooms have faded away, but new blooms are now coming on the Red Hot Poker plant.


The first of the Caladiums are now starting to show, don't think there will be many this year, but I do hope to plant more next year.


With all the rain I have had a couple of hostas to have most of their leave go limp and look like they were dying. I feel sure it is just all the rain has saturated the ground and they are getting some type of root fungus. I have already lost a few hydrangeas to root root, and lost the first ones ever to root rot last year. Don't know why that has become a problem all of a sudden unless I have just added too much organic matter and it is holding in too much moisture.
I started to did the hostas up, but looking further at them decided to just pull the limp leaves off and leave the new growth on.
This was the first hosta I found with the limp leaves, the other was 'First Frost' but it did not look nearly so bad. This is just a seedling of mine I grew.

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