madgardener wrote:
about the conversions of Fahrenheit versus Centigrade...sorry.....g
but you're absolutely right.
.. Although we converted to metric standards in Australia decades ago,
I'm of the generation that can't think in anything but feet and inches.
Celsius temps' though I've gotten used to . Maybe because the daily
weather forcasts are in that language and it sinks in.
Plants don't often read the reference books and behave entirely different in assorted zones
Speaking of behaving differently, I have a Corsican hellebore that
produces large clusters of flowers in early autumn that are still
intact here in late spring. These are tough customers for the species
and are happy in shade or open sun. They have large serated dark green
foliage that's more divided than the standard hellobore.
well, like I said, Hellebore LOVE and ADORE rich humus, and horse manure
is just to their tastes. I also don't pop the seedlings with much care.
I'm surprised Monkeyboy wants to move a mature plant. I'd be waiting
for seedlings to pop up underneath in spring and moving those. Maybe
they don't seed proprely in his/her garden?
but this is my first year that I have more than three or four seedlings per plant.
Now that's interesting, I couldn't count the seedlings under my
hellebores, they're in the hundreds every year. Here they behave like
weeds.
Last year was a wonderful year for fertilizations.
I pressume you're talking about the plants here? ;~)
The soil is a fertile basaltic loam that's well supplied with trace elements. Opium poppies
also thrive in this region being its major commercial crop.
ahhhh, I adore somniferum papaver! I adore them as FLOWERS. I can't get
seed of them, but my grand mammy used to grow the peony flowered double
pink opium poppies for decades. I used to have a couple of black opium
poppies, a double red, a single red, but the ground wasn't bare enough
for the seeds to germinate and establish. you have any seed to share
for simply flowers?
I can send seed of the ornamental varieties but not of the opium sub
species. Although it's a legaly cultivated commercial crop down here,
the security on plant material is very high. So much so that when the
farmers are sowing a crop the seed arrives under gaurd and is sown by
the end processor on the farmers land. They end processor comes back
for the harvesting as well. The other aspect that's worth knowing about
is that within the opium poppy species cultivated here are two
sub-species. One is grown for its morphine content, the other for its
phentamine. Phentamine is a base ingredient for general anaesthetics.
Innocent junkies ( is there such a species?) come here and unknowingly
steal plants of the phentamine sub species and die from the consumption
of the home made by-product. There's no way the two species can be
identified from visual clues.
One aspect of living in an area like this that's a huge advantage for
gardeners/farmers is the availability of 'poppy trash'. This is the
left over material from morphine/phentamine production. High in trace
elements and very alkaline due to the usage of lime in the processing
it's the perfect follow on from lots of horse manure that's made the
soil acidic. We get it for a good price too. AU$15 for a truck load. It
smells awful though as there are also high amounts of ethanol in the
stuff so I never put in direct contact with plants.
I might have seed to something you would like to
sow to establish that isn't too hard to rip out and control. I have
Swamp sunflower which looks like oversized coreopsis and averages about
5-7 foot in height depending on the moisture and soil type.
Thanks for the wonderful offer but plant quarantine down here in
Tasmania is draconian, even for seeds. It's bad enough on Mainland
Australia but Tasmania is strickter than you can imagine .
The madgardener still up on the ridge, back in Fairy Holler, overlooking
English Mountain in Eastern Tennessee, zone 7, Sunset zone 36 where it
got down to 30o F last night and there was frost on the punkin'

Frost is my number one enemy here. Last month we had it every single
night for weeks on end, It's killed my young persimmon tree and savaged
magnolias, roses and ....on and on.......
PS. There are some fabulous new hellebore cultivars coming onto the
market. Go to the Royal Horticultural Society web site and type in
Hellebore in the search engine.
http://www.rhs.org.uk/plants/pom.asp