I got up early to get the iris moved to the front. and Jane wanted to get weedcloth and rock under the stickery junipers by the stop sign and the fire hydrant. But it’s brutally hot even if the thermometer says 80-ish. We try to work bent over pounding things in or planting and we get dizzy. So Jane came to help on my job—or I think I’d have thrown in the towel. The iris have really grown into huge clumps where they are difficult to extract, and the roots are monstrous: I collect a wheelbarrow full and come around to try to plant them in ground full of hemlock roots, and I’m getting dizzy from the heat—we’re just not used to this.
Then we decided to go to the fish store, on what they said would be its last day for the season—and they’re closed. Won’t see them again until spring. We’d hoped they had one of Yoruichi’s sisters still in the tank. But no go.
We decided to take a small diet break for the next several days: and went out for a hamburger and fries, and are having banana cream pie for supper. In about 3 days, we re-start the diet. Sometimes your system needs something different. On the other hand, we got the houseplants in from the garden and got them set up with a new light fixture.
Here’s the deal: these new CFL bulbs (the ones that look like Dairy Queen ice cream) function very well as grow-lights, and you can put a hundred watt CFL in a 60-watt socket, because it only draws 28 watts. So we got an inexpensive ceiling fixture, got a swag kit, (ignoring the ceiling plate that it is s’posed to hang from as a light fixture,) hung it where the window light is inadequate during the winter, and it’s quite nice. Now we will have a nice timed light that will keep our plants healthy during the dimmer days of winter (we can be overcast and grey for days or weeks in that season)…and it all worked quite nicely. Jane did most of it: I just managed to screw in the retaining rings for the light-shades backwards for her, so it all had to be re-done. We’ll have that on a timer—even plants like regularity about their light-dose. And hopefully we’ll be done with plants for a while.
The iris still aren’t moved. We aren’t sure we like them where we were going to put them, so we want to look at the ones that are planted for a while and be sure.
I think the ‘brutally hot’ part of it comes from humidity; if you’re fighting 90% humidity when you’re trying to garden, no wonder you feel like a used paper towel within 15 or so minutes. Out here, generally the humidity stays around a manageable 55%, with variations. When it spikes, it usually does so quickly, because a squall is blowing in from windward or up from Kona. It also sounds like mechanized assistance might be nice, rather like a tiny backhoe, for the iris extraction and replanting.
I think I’m going to wait until our dirt/grass pile finishes composting, then move them all into soft pliable ground: hacking into root-crossed gravel just is nasty.
I remember removing daffodil bulbs from the root system of a yucca. The yucca’s roots were a lot smaller when the bulbs went in. Getting them out was close to being archaeology.
I’d like to have a timed plant light that mimics the changing day length, even if it’s only week-by-week, rather than day-by-day. I think my sort-of-indoor plants would be a lot happier.
There are timers that do something like that: you find them as controllers in the marine tank hobby. There’s one that also does moon phases with LEDs to encourage coral spawning.