Occassionally, a wild hare goes hopping through the garden of my mind, and I just have to chase it. It's days like those that I go shopping on Craigslist.org while drinking my first cup of coffee, before my brain is fully engaged or I have figured out my hafta-do's for the day. I usually look at the free stuff first and of course the farm and garden stuff, in particular the free garden stuff, like mulch hay and free plants. If it's something within reasonable driving distance, I'll drop an email or call if there's a number. I also read the daily freecycle digest, to which I also contribute when we have something to move along down the line.
I have been slowly building my flower beds since I moved in with Sweetie. My clump of irises came from my old house, as did my three clumps of golden raspberries, which have now filled their space to overflowing and need to be moved to a larger area. Since then we've added two more iris circles (pink and sort of black, with coordinating flamingo yard ornaments 8-D ). Two years ago I purchased 200 daffodil bulbs and made a swath of daffodils in the corner of the yard. Then I found someone thinning their daffodil beds on freecycle last year and added more to the swath.
Last weekend, I found free purple irises on Craigslist not far from the house, as many as I wanted. I didnt' want to be greedy, as other people were also answering the ad, so I only took what I could carry in one trip with my recycle bin, which was all that was going to fit in my Geo anyway. It was also all that I could think of a place to put for the moment anyway. Some were budded and ready to bloom, but the clump was so tightly tangled that all the plants picked up as one without falling apart. I had my work cut out for me here, but what a great find! So nice of people to share rather than chuck them in the trash.
I put the plants in the shade with a little water poured over the roots to moisten the dirt ball clinging to them until I could get to them. Finally, I had time tonight and had figured out how I wanted to lay out the bed around the daffodil swath. I pictured a narrow bed that curved around the daffs, kind of ending in a point, with a space for a mulched walkway in between so I could take care of both beds. Mama dog supervised while I dug the sod up and moved it to a more useful spot in the yard. The dirt underneath was very nice and crumbly and dark. That was the easy part.
Getting all those plants separated into individual rhizomes and fans took about 2 and a half hours of teasing and wiggling and dusting the dirt away from the roots. The one large clump and one smaller clump disassembled into enough individual fans to neatly fill the curved bed I made, all of the fans facing the same way. There's room for them to multiply as irises do, but I don't think I'll have to thin the bed for a few years. It's supposed to rain for the next few days, which will work out just right for getting the plants started off well.
I have some tiger lillies all along the back of the garage, and while they look nice there, they don't really get seen much, and I'd love to move some of them to the other side of the daffodils. If the village doesn't do something with the drainage ditch they stripped the sod off of and recontoured, some tiger lilies just might start growing in it...they don't call them ditch lilies for nothing. Something has to keep the dirt from washing into the new storm sewer system and clogging it all up...
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