LOVE HURTS

I really need to get some alyssum (love that faint honey fragrance), calendula, nasturtium and Orange Chiffon swiss chard planted in my porch containers, while the weather is still cool! Actually, I should have done it back in early fall, but I just couldn't bear to pull out all of the succulents that were still going great guns at the time. In fact, they were looking more gorgeous than ever, because the cool weather had caused their colors to intensify, and my sticks-o-fire plant was truly ablaze! There wasn't room in my tiny house to overwinter such huge pots, and I just didn't have the heart to trash everything, so I let them be.

Of course, a few weeks later we had the first of several hard freezes, and then my pots were all filled with a lovely, squishy black mush. Right after that was the whirl of Christmas and January birthdays, a couple of weeks solid of cold wet days, and my conference preparations. I cleaned away the mush a while back, but I'm sick to death of looking at giant pots with nothing but little black stubs poking out, every time I enter the house. I'm dying to plant some of those cold-lovers I mentioned earlier, now that I finally have some free time, but I'm hesitant to spend the money. Here in Texas, you just never know when you are going to get your first rash of 90 degree days. Could be May. Could be March. If it turns out to be the latter, I'm gonna be mighty pissed that I sank a bunch of money into those pots in February!

Guess what I really need to do is learn to place cuttings into baby-sized pots, from all of my favorite heat-lovers, then let them spend the winter on a sunny windowsill. Perhaps knowing that I have a few free plants to start my containers off with the following spring, will take a bit of the bite out of having to yank them all in the fall. Heavy sigh.

P.S. That first photo is of my favorite container, taken in the worst heat of summer. So picture it even larger, and the colors twice as vivid, when it got turned to mush. The other photo is of a smaller pot that had contained a beautiful croton with stained-glass-like leaves, now mush.