Verbena hastata...

Today my Verbena hastata collection arrived. They are lovely tough plants that the bees and butterflies should like a lot. They will add a little height to the beds where needed, and will be looking good (hopefully) from June to September next summer.
At the moment the modules they were grown in are 5cm across, and have been cut right back to be overwintered. I had to decide whether to put them out now, or pot them up, and have decided that potting them will be best, as I can better decide where to put them as the biggest spaces show up. Lots of these herbaceous plants disappear altogether during the cold months.

 

I like these plants very much and am thrilled to see them return each year. My bees do seem to like them very much.

 

I potted these Verbena plants, but first soaked them in a water tray for a few hours as they were dry, and the roots were very tightly bound. The soak made the roots loosen up as if they were asking for compost or soil.


They join a few more plants I'm overwintering for spring planting next spring...

 

Those plants look good. The root ball gives me the idea that they have every chance of surviving and strongly grow next year.

You have a great set-up there. Is it your boot room that you have converted for this purpose?

 

No, it's the potting shed in the back garden. It's one of my favourite corners, especially if the weather is unkind. There's a pond full of goldfish and plants just outside the door, and the pump pushes the water over the waterfall and makes a lovely splashing sound - the fish like that. There are too many of those now which leave us with a quandary - do we dig out another pond (hard work) or try to give them away??

 

Lovely potting shed. What a luxury. It looks spacious and tidy. A great place to work. Wouldn’t I just love having one of those.
Too bad that you shall have to cull your school. If your pond was over here, your problem with overpopulation would be sorted— the blue herons would take them if you did not use protective netting.

 

I think it would be really good to be able to dig out another quite deep pond in the front of the house where the new beds are, especially for wildlife, which there is now an abundance of - especially as there are now so few campers using the place. If we could do that, the surplus fish could be transferred, and take their chances by going deep in the water and hiding in rushes and other plants, which would need to be planted in abundance first. I would like to form a pond with a ''beach'' area for birds and hedgehogs etc as well as a really deep area. The herons would be as welcome as any other creature - they all need to eat.
Herons in particular have been starving to death here as everyone nets their ponds, and the poor birds get nothing!
The problems are affording the cost of it as well as the huge effort. There are just so many other jobs outstanding at the moment, and we're getting on a bit (especially me )

 

That makes for interesting reading, Tetters.
When you mentioned that the herons there were starving it took me back to the 70’s when the herons were disappearing here. It went on quite a while before some clever cloggs discovered that it was down to the farmers and the use of pesticides. You see over here there are canals literally everywhere. Canals of all sizes, all of them connected.

Blue herons were then and are now again such a common site in the cities and in the countryside that we almost take no notice of them.

Well, what was killing the herons was that the frogs in the canals were being filled with pesticides from the fields and absorbing some from the canal water. It was draining from the fields, into the canals and the frogs were also eating these insects. The frogs were then being consumed by the herons which would eventually get an overdose of the pesticide and they would then die.

So, it was the sick insects and the high levels of the pesticide in the the water of the canals ( you might call them ‘ditches’) that was killing our herons. Steps were taken in our Parliament and the chemicals were prohibited. Within a few years the populations were back up and the cycles of life continued.

But you are right, building a pond of any size is a massive physical effort, and the larger the undertaking, the larger the graft and cost. I am going out from the standpoint that one would be doing the job correctly.

 

The subject we seem to have crossed over to on ''organic gardening'' would be worthy of a whole new thread