Rain = Indoor Garden Day

They are cleomes--I don't care what you "thought" they were...

There's a lot happening in the Indoor Garden Space during this busy Sprinter Season.  Many of the cuttings and seedlings are blooming.  (This always excites me no end as I do not have the very nice (read VERY expensive) halide light set-up my neighbor, Dr. Darrel Apps, has in his underground grow room.) I have plants blooming under regular old florescent lights. I do check that the lights are rated minimally at 3,000 lumens.  (If you want to grow plants under lights do not think using the energy efficient 1560 or some such will do it for you!)

Linaria posing with tomatoes.

The coleus are all looking superb.  The local retailers around here charge an outrageous amount for wimpy little things so I am always careful to hold over some nice cuttings in the fall which I pot up and keep by my loft windows on a table salvaged from the dump strictly for this purpose.  (I painted it black and serves as a nice plant stand, but with its slightly uneven surface would have made for a terrible table.)



This has me excited.  My first seedlings from iochroma.  Armchair gardening in Winter, I came across iochroma grandiflora.  Anything with grandiflora as part of its Latin nomenclature stops me for minimally five seconds.  Reading that it also is a member of the nightshade family, which for me equals "easy to start from seed", hooked me.  Actually finding seed, though was limited to one seller on eBay or Amazon (I forget which.), unless I wanted to hand over much more money for a plant.  Also, unknown to many, tomatoes, nightshade, peppers, potatoes are actually perennials given a cooperative growing zone, with none of that biennial-ness that can make gardeners in central Wisconsin "&%CRA@#ZY" (like Jack-Nicholson-in-'The Shining'-crazy).

Blue salvia seedlings

 Working on that lime green and deep blue motive for my summer garden I started these blue salvia using the baggy method.  They were taped to my fridge, and had definitively decided which way down was.  I am currently messing with their tiny plant brains with them lying on a shelf under my light rack waiting for me to get in gear and prick them off the coffee filter and pot them on.  (Caution: Evil genius at work.)

Asian Spring Onions waiting for Spring

Eggplant, basil, parsley, cilantro, and green amaranth caudatus

 This Summer, the Master Gardeners are featuring my garden on their garden walk.  I seriously want to mess with these tourist gardeners with separate signs on the same plant in different spots in my potager labeling some cilantro as cilantro and others as coriander.  They are actually the same plant, but when speaking of the seed it's coriander.  You'd think that the seed fennel and the edible bulb variety fennel would rather have separate names versus all being lumped to gether with the other fennels some of which are merely decorative and do not produce the edible "bulb" part (which grows above ground like celery).  I don't even think there are any selected cultivars of cilantro!

Cinnie, the rain-depressed dog

Boxers, with all their facial wrinkles got the lock on SADD.  Rain, she does not like.  The gardener who first  said, "Take a picture, it lasts longer," must have been talking about central Wisconsin and sunny skies.

Checking the weather we have thunderstorm with a side helping of hail scheduled (no need to worry about foliage on trees and garden plants. Yay!).  Also, snow scheduled four of the next seven days and rain and overcast weather all but Saturday, on which day the Gardening Twins are celebrating their birthday (indoors).  Yay!

And, oh, the southeast part of the county is flooded out.