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I have beautiful vincas coming up in all sorts of surprise locations this year! They are so heat and drought resistant and the foilage stays pretty and a rich looking green through our yucky summer months. I'm not sure if I had thrown some in the compost pile and they didn't decompose or what, but I'll take it! One other thing, my vincas from last year were purple. Some of these are coming up white. Is this common? What surprises have you found?
My surprises include twin fawns nesting hidden between the flowers (waiting for their mom to return for them) that scare the bejeebers out of me when I go out to weed. I did get a 7 foot sunflower last year that I didn't plant - it produced hundreds of seeds for the birds.
Frogs, lots of them! They are in the most random places....the dog's water bowl, nestled deep in potted plants that are high up on plant stands. I'm pretty sure they have also made these dirt mounds in our flower beds. First we had caterpillars, lots of them, then grasshoppers and now frogs. Sometimes I think I am experiencing the 10 Biblical Plagues of Egypt.
One year one of my fairy roses started producing, every now and then, a white rose with red streaks.
A few years ago chipmunks were burrowing in a section of my garden and destroyed the roots of
my campanula. That spring and summer there was no sign of it, but the next year 4 stalks popped up in a cluster about a yard away from where I had originally planted it. It looked as if part of the root section migrated, and after a rest, revived.
Twelve years ago I scattered filipendula seeds in a bare weedy, woodsy area between my house and my neighbor's. None of them ever came up, but this year I found a filipendula blooming about 12 feet from where I had scattered those seeds.
Quite a few years ago we had a very bad winter, a lot of plants died, including every single one of my coreopsis grandiflora. I loved those plants, they were neat, tidy, and bloomed like crazy. I must have had at least a dozen. Last year one popped up out of the blue.
Poison ivy! yikes!
You can't cut it down and toss it, you can't burn it. You can get poison ivy from the smoke.
I was repeatedly getting severe cases of poison ivy rash on my torso, couldn't figure it out. The doctor finally guessed that someone in my family had been in close and repeated proximity to the stuff and that maybe I was getting a rash from doing the laundry.
Sure enough, such was the case.
I discovered the wooded part of my backyard was awash with poison ivy. I hadn't realized how much of it there was, because I rarely went down there.
One day I bought the large economy size of Roundup, put on a pair of old tights, old pants that could be thrown away, 2 layered long sleeve shirts, and a pair of my husband's old socks over my shoes (I was taking no chances) and commenced to spraying anything that looked like poison ivy. My neighbor said I was welcome to spray in her woods too, so I did.
Next summer the woods looked just lovely, with no poison ivy. Other plants quickly moved in and took their place.
Last edited by James1202; 07-24-2012 at 07:55 PM..
Reason: fix link
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