One plus with irrigating plants from well water with no fertilizer/pesticide additions; can soak that sweet sweet ice-cold water onto your arms/face on a hellishly hot day to gain limited heat immunity while working.

4 Spring flowering tree gijinka design concepts/ideas

Cause art is frustrating and CAUSE WORDS WILL DO

Magnolia– largest/tallest/oldest of the four. Good charmer with birds (especially berry-eating birds). Leather/thick fabric petal dress. Very kind Oujo-sama/royal kind of air, despite this occasionally you’ll get these hints of a wild (almost witch-like) side, like she’s seen/been before the time of her christening as a royal. She knows a far more ancient time.

Cercis (aka. Redbed)- Heart-motif dainty tomboy (odd combo I know). Speedy/sporty despite the misfortune of injuring herself a lot due to said speed. Bees REALLY like her, no I don’t just mean honeybees, BEES REALLY LIKE HER, she would probably love leafcutter bees. I imagine she’d wear suspenders.

Malus (aka. Apple)- Country hick. Phyiscally stouter/rounder than the other 3. Wild curly hair that gets so annoyingly tangled when it gets long that she has to cut it a lot. Pink/red/white Plaid, probably a dress or apron. Motherlyish. Probably thinks you should eat more. She finds bees cute and spiders chill but she is terrified of caterpillars. Oriole birds like her.

Asimina (aka. Pawpaw)- tall but not as tall/built as Magnolia, is probably quite lanky. Green with hints of maroon-red clothes that are quite simple/practical and also full of pockets. Shy/aloof compared to the other 3. Probably lives in a woodland cottage. Despite her dark skin she burns from the sun easily. She doesn’t insist/advertise on people eating her baking as Malus does, but her baking has a taste that Malus sometimes gets jealous of and wonders why tf Asmina doesn’t show off her food more.

105 Jacks in a batch

Today I got the Jack-in-the-pulpit (Arisaema triphyllum) plantlets from the 2015 sowing (the first pic is admittedly not of said Jacks, rather that is of the 2016 sowed Jacks) all into their own individual pots at last. Many of them are still only just waking up from their corms which is fine by me as it’d be a LOT harder to repot them from their super-crowded pot if they were all fully awake and emerged.

With them no longer having to compete with their siblings + with me feeding them some granular fertilizer (eventually. For now I’m not giving them even a lick of fert) they should reach floral maturity much quicker (hoping under 2 years but that might be overly optimistic).

In the next few days the 2016-sown Jacks will be next to repot. We’re definitely gonna be reaching the 200+ mark once we got the 2016 Jacks potted up I’m sure. Thank god the greenhouse got a clean out to make for greatly-needed space!

Photographed May 18th 2018

I feel such an anxiety spike whenever trying to figure out what I should be charging for the plants I’m selling. My brain can to a degree measure/gauge what an art commission should sell at to a degree, but potted perennials/trees feel up in the air! I can judge what’s a good plant buy (I’m a cheapsake for buying plants), not so much for what’s a good plant sell (as in a sell which consumers will come for while still leading to an actual profit for the seller). Google isn’t particularly helpful for helping me figure this out…

Any perennial/tree sellers out there have a system for how to mark a plant up for its selling price?

All the space that the flowerpots are taking in the greenhouse as I need space for the new seedlings;

flowerpot moving day

THEY LIIIIIIIIIIVE.

Most of the liveliest of the greenhouse residents right now. (not listed in order of the pics) Betula

alleghaniensis, Betula

populifolia, Thuja occidentalis, Catalpa sp., Picea glauca, Geum triflorum, Clemtatis tangutica, and Penstemon hirsutus.

These guys are also on the list of “gonna see if I can sell them this year” crops. Especially the Birches, cause they big and they are a pain in my butt lmao.

Photographed May 13th 2018

Spring Flowers/flowerbuds in the greenhouse

2nd year Alpine Strawberry (2 cultivars, though tempted to sell them together as a “mix” due to messed up labels), Prairie Smoke (Geum triflorum), Canadian Columbine (Aquilegia canadensis) and Foamflower (Tiarella cordifolia).

Talk about fast pace to maturity. These are definitely at selling size so this is the year I’ll be trying to sell them off. Whether its to another nursery or to interested gardeners. Of course I plan to keep 3 of each (except the strawberries) species so that I can propagate from my own stock in the future.

Photographed May 13th 2018

The Sugar Maple (Acer saccharum) that are under lights rn are survivors of the starving birds and mice (during that spring snow out we had a few weeks ago) that were scavenging the tray in the greenhouse. So, we see why these trees are so expensive; it’s not just that they grow slow as balls, it’s the fact that even at seed/seedling stage EVERY FUCKING THING WANTS TO EAT THEM. It’s not just us humans who find Sugar Maple deliciously enticing.

However due to the fact that autumn 2017 I had a lot of sugar maple seeds on hand thanks to our neighbour John, I had a lot of seedtrays of them, and consequently experimented stratifying them in different locations. One of said locations being the new experimental outdoor seedbed. It flooded and had severe freeze/thaw late winter / early spring so I thought pretty much every seed would’ve croaked. However as you can see here not only are they doing splendidly but the birds/mice couldn’t get their grubby mouths into them.

So to the Birds/mice that were total dicks to one of my most valuable future plant crops;

Photographed May 13th 2018

Alright since the previous seedling post didn’t get much reception HERE’S SOMETHING TO RECEPTION ABOUT!

Cornus kousa, Cercidiphyllum japonicum, Asmina triloba, Magnolia macrophylla, Cercis canadensis, and Liriodendron tulipifera seedlings oh my (also Acer saccharum in the group shot but shhh we’ll get to that).

I severely underestimated the seed viability of the majority of this year’s indoor stratified seeds. Due to this a lot of sprouting seeds of Cercis, Magnolia, and Cornus had to be discarded due to very limited growlight space. Pawpaw in the future definitely is going to be indoor stratified like this despite it being a space hog, as I have gotten far more seedlings from this over outdoor style. For some unusual reason several of the pawpaw seedlings sprouted out in a twisted form (which unfortunately kills them for sellability which sucks ass). Now from here I chew my nails as I wait for space to be made in the greenhouse to move some of these guys out of the lights cause jfc they’re getting too big too fast for such a cramped space.

Photographed May 13th 2018