It has been a busy spring: work, life, and a sick kitty conspired to stretch us thin. Things are finally settling down, in time for us to enjoy the lead-up to summer.

The swallowtails have arrived, just in time for the Dame’s Rocket. This is a lovely plant, but invasive in some areas — check before you grow!

A bunch of other things are starting to bloom or just hitting their stride.

The Harsh Paintbrush has been going for a couple weeks now. I grew these from seed two years ago, and am very pleased that they are solidly perennial.

The slugs tend to munch on them when they’re starting to res-route; the copper around the pots eliminates that problem. I’ll be trying to plant some out this year — we’ll see whether I can keep them safe in the spring in the ground!

I also started some baby paintbrushes from some of the plants that bloomed last year. It’s gratifying to have their propagation down — maybe not to nursery standards, but quite solidly enough for home use.

I scarify the seeds in a ziplock back with some damp coconut coir for 6 weeks, then I sprinkle them in a 4″ pot filled with a coir/perlite/vermiculite mixture with a little vermiculite over. They sprouted in just a few days under grow lights in the basement.

About a month on, I use a fork to pull out chunks and stick them in 2″ pots. Then I sprinkle some native yarrow seeds over: these will act as the host plant, since paintbrushes are semi-parasitic. Yarrow sprout fast enough that they catch up nicely, and then they can grow up together.

Unfortunately not everything was so successful.

The native penstemon were getting off to an amazing start after the same scarification and planting regiment as the paintbrushes… but they had a mold attack very early on, and it pretty much destroyed them. I might get one.

Lesson here: plant them more thinly, and maybe don’t use vermiculite over them; I feel like the vermiculite made it worse.

The planting notes for this species do mention that they are susceptible to damping off… so I will be much more careful next time!

One other note on damping off:

I was a good girl and bleached all my pots this year, and it made a big difference (penstemon aside). The only things I had any problems with were my first batch of chocolate cosmos (note to self, they do *not* like being wet — keep them on the dry side until they hit their stride), and the penstemon.

So, lots of success and a few failures this spring.

More notes later! I will resist putting everything in this one catch-up post 😉