NOT WEEDS

The nice thing about growing perennial flowers is there’s no need to buy seeds or starts every year.  If they are happy in their location they somehow know when to appear in the spring and pretty much take care of themselves through the growing season.

The bad thing is a gardener needs to know what the baby perennials look like so there won’t be a massacre during the first few weedings in the spring.

For two years I tried without success to grow coneflowers in my garden from seed.

Then I saw young coneflower plants in a garden nursery and had a head-slap dufus moment.

This is a coneflower seedling.

This is the seedling of plantain (not the banana).

It is either a noxious weed or a useful herb depending on who looks at it.  I realized I had been ripping out all my baby coneflowers, mistaking them for weeds.

I may have also thought the young coneflowers were bindweed, the bane of gardeners everywhere.

This is baby bindweed.

This is a handful of adult bindweeds I pulled from my garden last fall.  These malevolent plants steal into gardens, send roots all the way to bedrock and then proceed to choke the life out of anything that will hold still long enough for them to strangle.   

My infant coneflowers didn’t have a chance against these masters of mimicry.

 The next year I transplanted my coneflowers to my garden after they were big enough to be recognized for what they were.

This spring I weeded my flower bed and then realized I couldn’t see any seedlings for my baby’s breath a.k.a. gypsophila.

This is young baby’s breath.

This is a noxious and sneaky plant called prostrate knotweed.  Once again I’d annihilated my flowers in my zeal to kill the weeds.

So now I’ve planted more baby’s breath in a flower pot.  
Sometimes it just doesn’t pay to be so diligent in the early execution of weeds. 

Here is a fun post by Eliza Cross at Happy Simple Living with Seven Ways to Politely Discourage Bindweed in Your Garden.