Ep 4: Early May 2020 - Zone 4 Minnesota Gardening

The gardener is building little cages for the red twig dogwood using a roll of chicken wire and some big metal staples to hold it in place. This is to protect the plants from deer that have been coming back to eat them.

Gardeners should water their newly planted seeds every single day until the seedlings start to come up. Keeping the soil wet allows the water to penetrate the seed coating to trigger germination. Once the seedlings have emerged, watering can be scaled back depending on the weather.

When potting up peppers, gardeners should start by adding some potting soil to the bottom of a new pot. Then, carefully remove the pepper plant from its existing pot, ensuring to preserve the roots, place it in the new pot, add more soil around the edges, gently firm the soil, and water the plant well.

To transplant the ornamental grass, the gardener dug around the plant in a circle to cut out a chunk of grass with as much of the roots as possible. Then, he moved the chunk of grass to a new location, planting it in a hole supplemented with compost to ensure better growth in the sandy soil.

The gardener encountered an issue with the tulips not growing well. He suspects the potting medium, a mixture of sand and compost, is the problem due to poor drainage or not enough air around the roots. He believes that using regular potting soil instead might have resulted in better growth.

The type of ornamental grass identified while digging up the cottage garden is perennial Miscanthus Red Flame, also known as Miscanthus sinensis variety perpurascens.

The gardener believes that while some gardening projects might fail due to factors like weather, disease, or poor decisions, it's important to keep gardening because many projects will succeed and some will even exceed expectations. He accepts that failures are a part of gardening and emphasizes the importance of continuing to garden to enjoy the successes.