Gardening is my default activity in the summer. After work or on the weekends, it's the first thing I start doing, and I'll always do it before home repair or sewing or practicing Spanish (but I do make time for laundry and Star Trek. I'm not a heathen.) As a result, my gardens are looking great. June's combo of rain and warm weather means that everything is growing like mad, but most plants aren't fruiting yet, so there's not actually much to eat yet.
Every year, you get a few "volunteer" plants, which are the name for plants that were unexpected results of last year's crops self-seeding. Since these seeds are often blown around, and I rotate crops, things come up in unexpected places. This year I not only have volunteers, I have mysteries. I've encountered several plants that don't seem to be weeds - you can usually recognize weeds because when you have one, you have a hundred. These mysteries are compounded by the fact that my mother did some of my planting, and it's possible that she put in things but didn't tell me.
I've got my eye on three mystery plants.
I have three of these plants. They are about two feet high, with huge, round leaves on a single stem. They are in a bed that housed watermelon, zinnias, and garlic last year, but they are definitely not one of those.
I have a single specimen of this plant, which is about 18" high, with thin, wispy leaves, and several stems towering above a base of smaller stems.
This plant is the most puzzling. It is in the exact location where I planted an echinacea root this spring.
Echinacea are small round plants, less than two feet high, with purpely-red blossoms. Instead, I have an enormous, meter-high plant with white-purple furled flowers. I highly suspect that the garden company sold me the wrong root. It's like planting a pumpkin seed and getting a tomato.
My informal garden advising committee is my last hope. If they can't identify the plants before they go to seed, then I may have to kill them, because because that's when a weed is not just an unwanted plant but a menace.
4 comments:
I'm not familiar with any of them, but I like your final photograph - a delicate coloured flower - if it does nothing else, it might keep the pollinators happy.
Do you have the equivalent of 'i spy' in the US? You can post your photographs and someone on the site usually has an answer.
Pull the ones in the second and third pictures. I am sure they are weeds. Will think about the other two.
I am pretty sure I can't help with any of these at all.
I was going to vote to take #2 off the island for sure.
I like the way you slyly blamed your poor mother for possible errors.
Also in most cultures, volunteers are venerated. But in gardening, they are treated as pariahs...interesting juxtaposition
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