More Wildflowers!

As  alluded to, I did some big changes in my bed formerly known as the "Edibles Garden"...

I ripped it all out! 

I forgot to take a true before picture, but here's the first picture from May after over an hour of just moving the pots and starting to clear the front 3' of weeding 😳😳 It was a LOT! (It would have gone quicker if I hadn't been trying to save the violets to transplant to my new wildflower garden path.)

Eventually I got the entire thing weeded, then dumped a bunch of compost, churned it all together (these are very technical gardening terms) and sprinkled pretty much the entire 1/4lb (over 120,000!) bag of native wildflower seeds!

Time to wait...

Early July they were sprouting!

(Naturally also with many tomato and squash seedlings basking in their release from the compost bin. Also by then I had pulled out the pea plants that were finished and planted more seeds in that strip.)

3 weeks later they were knee / thigh high and obvious that only one species was dominating...

And that species was cosmos!

By mid-August we had a cosmos jungle!

Beautiful! And a good thing that they took over too since researching each of the species listed on the seed packet led me to discover that very few are actually native and some are quite aggressive. 😡 

I need to be vigilant next year about watching the seedlings, comparing them to the photos I stored, and ripping out any undesirables that are trying to gain ground.

Thankfully over half of the seed packet was annuals anyway, and since nearly everything was crowded out by the cosmos, I shouldn't have to worry about them having reseeded themselves.

Hoping! 

We went away for a week at the end of September and came back to find that despite the growing season being basically over, it had grown another 2 feet, showing no signs of stopping, and was now less jungle and more I'm-here-to-take-over-your-species:-all-humans-must-bow-before-my-greatness.

Look at it compared to the height of the grill! Or my second story deck for that matter!

Next year should be quite the adventure. 😳

Meanwhile, I did keep a few edibles there in pots...of course my herbs, a cherry tomato seedling from a friend, aaaaaand.....the cherry tomato reseeded volunteer I've come to rely on every year! 😁😁

Husband mocks this little volunteer since it usually takes SO long to get going that we don't get tomatoes until October. This year however, it did great! It outstripped the friend's seedling and started producing first! We've had a great little crop through the whole end of summer that's continuing now into October!

So that's the adventure of my massive vegetable garden put to bed....no pun intended. It seems it will be much more productive as a wildflower bed and now that I have a baseline established, I can continue propagating and collecting true natives from others and make it a spectacular extension of my other bed. 

And now we need to have a moment of silence for the end of an era....

RIP, cilantro.

Yes, unfortunately I neglected that bed far too long and I let the wonderfully native, beneficial, though "weedy" fleabane crowd pretty much everything else out. I had hoped that when I ripped it all out and turned over the soil, perhaps a rogue seed would make its way up and the cilantro would live on! But alas. If that's the case, the cosmos crowded out any chance of its coming to true life.
Such a bummer; that was a delightful, happiest of all my  accidents. And one I'm quite certain I could never duplicate, though maybe some time I'll buck up the courage to get a plant and see how it fares and if it seeds as vigorously and heartily as my beloved original. [sigh]

But lovely! (minus the trash cans 🙄)