Direct Seeding Sweet Peas in Fall, Saving Dahlia Seed, Cutting Back Peonies & Rotten Plants

Good morning friends. I hope you're having a great day out there in your gardens. Well, I have a couple things that I want to get accomplished today in the garden. I want to cut back some perennials that I told you were struggling with the amount of moisture that we have here in south central Pennsylvania. Specifically, this drops of Jupiter oregano just looks like a complete hot mess after all the rain we've had. I also want to remove all my peony foliage from the garden. They are prone to powdery mildew and botrytis in my wet rainy humid climate, so I want to clear that foliage out of the garden and dispose of it. I'm also going to deadhead all of my saving grace and sharing grace dahlias one final time. I want to get one more big beautiful flush of flowers off of those blooms before the first frost and I also want to allow enough time for them to set seed. In fact, I even see some seed that's ready for harvest and just looking at the plants right now I see that we even have some seed right there that's ready to be harvested, so I don't want to remove every single seed pod, but I'm going to be selective. Like ones that have just started to go to seed, I think I'll go ahead and remove these so that I continue to get some blooms, but seed heads that look like this I think I'll leave on the plant so that they'll continue to dry out and turn brown and then we do have a few seed pods that look like this that are ready for harvest. I also need to deadhead my ball dahlias and my decorative dahlias and then I want to finish off the day with fall sowing some sweet peas. We're just going to directly sow these in the ground and I want to compare a directly sown sweet pea to ones that I sow in very late winter and if you're interested I have a video all about how I like to grow sweet peas. I like to grow them hard and cold. I germinate them inside and then as soon as they pop out I move them outside onto our covered porch to grow on in very extreme and cold conditions, but if I can skip that step and just directly sow them in the fall with the same results, why not? So we're going to give it a try this year. I'm going to sow about half of my seed today and then half of the seed we'll do like we always do and start it in late winter. Well I think Grace is ready to get to work so let's try to tackle this ornamental oregano issue first. So here's what the ornamental oregano looks like. I do see a little bit of new growth in the center there so I think I'll just cut it back to where I see new growth. Now the ones on the very end look fine and the ones over here, well the front one looks okay, but then as we progress back towards the raised beds they start to look pretty bad so I'm at least going to cut these eight front ones back and then maybe we'll step back and see what we want to do about the others. That one also needs cut back all the way to the ground so let's just get to it. Grace, thank you. Yeah that looks really bad. So I'm trying to decide between two different ways to possibly fix this issue. I might just remove all the mulch and surround this area with gravel and see if that eliminates this problem or I might transplant these into a raised bed where they can spill over the side of the raised bed and then in their place I might just do a shrub, a low growing shrub that I know can handle a lot of moisture. We'll live and learn but in retrospect if I wanted this look but didn't want to have to deal with this issue I think I probably should have planted something like spirea instead. I know that shrub can handle our really wet and humid conditions and it won't react like this where the whole thing basically turns to mush. So are you the type of gardener that likes to plan things out on paper and then do exactly what you've written down or do you like to get out there start working and then the creativity flows from there? I think I am the latter. As I continue to cut this back I'm starting to think that it might be a good idea to put the limetta hydrangeas out here surrounding the outer deck to have the limettas on the outside, incrediball or haas halos spilling over the raised bed, and really just make this area 100% shrubs with the exception of that back two feet of raised bed which I'm going to save for all my different bulbs that I like to grow so much. But this definitely didn't work so live and learn. I got the front four oreganos cut back. I would not say this looks great by any stretch of the imagination but at least it shows us what we need to do in the future. I really am starting to lean towards those limetta hydrangeas on the exterior. Can you guys imagine that with a new book nook room? Let me know what you think. Let's go ahead and move on now and cut back some of our peonies. I can see a little bit of botrytis here which is that brown on the leaf and then also powdery mildew which is the whiteness on the leaf. So rather than compost this specifically because of the botrytis I want to go ahead and dispose of this foliage and I always do that with peonies. Also when I cut them back I like to leave about an inch behind and the reason why I do that is I want to have evidence that there is a peony here. If I cut it all the way back to the ground I probably will forget I have a peony here and might accidentally dig it up and plant some bulbs in this area. What I'm aiming to do here with this selective deadheading is tell the plant to keep on producing flowers for me but to also allow the seed heads that are very close to ripening to finish. It's kind of a hard decision whether or not to stop deadheading them at this point in the season because sometimes we have about a month left in our growing season sometimes we have a whole two months left and what I would really like to see this year is to have all of these Bonaire giant zinnias blooming and all of these pro cut plums blooming and to get one last glorious flush off of Saving Grace and at that point I'll just completely stop deadheading them and use them only for seed collection. But look so many bees still enjoying Martha Miller. It almost seems like every other flower head has a bee on it which reminds me that I need to show you the pressed dahlias because they are ready to be removed from the book. I was excited to see that they were fully dry in a week which is really great because then it lets us all know that we can do this and still have time to craft with them for the fall season. I see that we have some seed right here ready to be collected and I like to wait until the bloom has fully browned on the plant and I have a whole video about collecting dahlias seed. It's a really short straight to the point video. This is just kind of a fun hang out with me vlog today. So this is my whole sharing grace collection. This is the seed of Saving Grace, the dahlia that I think is going to be available next year through Jung Seed and when you grow dahlias from seed you never know what you're going to get. Dahlias grown from seed do not come true to the parent plant. They have eight different chromosomes and a lot of different variations can happen because of that. Now when it comes to timing out seed collection I want to let you know that I am really pushing it to the limit here. Generally I want at least six weeks of a buffer period between a dahlia in bloom and waiting for that seed to be ripe and when it comes to dahlia seeds maturing it really depends on variety and the type of dahlia. I have found that these open face dahlias come to maturity much quicker than something like a ball dahlia or a huge large decorative dahlia. Something like this I'm going to allow myself about five weeks from the time a bee has pollinated it to when I anticipate it being ready for harvest a seed. But if I'm working with a much larger variety I would give myself six to even eight weeks from bloom to seed collection. Not all dahlias are good seed producers but Sharon Grace and most open face dahlias are fabulous seed producers and the bees are doing all the work for me here. And I'm going to open one of these heads up for you so you can see the seed. I'm actually not going to save this one just because it's been so incredibly wet. And here's a look at that head that I just pulled off. I'll just pull this off and there's my dahlia seed right there and this will be a unique dahlia. Before we head back outside to direct sow some sweet peas I want to show you what these pressed dahlias look like after only I think it's been seven days it might only be five days. So let's take a look. So this was a combination of I believe Saving Grace, Martha Miller and then one that I believe one of you named Eyelashes. So it seems like the pinks all turned purple. I was debating between using wax paper and paper towels so I might try it again with wax paper. So I'm pretty happy with this result. I should have marked which one is which. I think this one's Martha Miller and this one's Saving Grace. Oh dear you know what I'm gonna have to do some more. This one you can see I messed up there a little bit. Messed up with the petal. It has a line in it. Let's see how the other ones worked out. Okay here's the other page. Oh these all look wonderful. Oh I should have been more careful placing them in but you know the one year we did ornaments where I did pressed paper whites and I enclosed those in glass. I think these would also look really beautiful enclosed in glass on the Christmas tree and that kind of makes me think I should cut and press some more so that we can do that on the tree that I want to put in the garden library. Yeah I definitely need to do that and what I'm going to do is allow these vines to stay on the trellis all winter season to give me some protection from the road. I just want a little more privacy during the winter season but I want to get my sweet peas in the ground right next to these vines and the experiment I want to do is I'm going to direct sow some in the fall and then right next to those I'm going to go every other one. One sown in the fall, one sown in a root trainer in very early winter just like I always do and then we can compare the vigor of the plants, the bloom size, the bloom quality, the vase life. Let's just do this experiment and see how it goes. Now in order to try to make this as fair as possible I'm going to use the exact same seed packet. I'm going to plant them in the exact same raised bed. I'm not going to soak any of the seed. That's not something that I do personally and we will just see how this goes and I decided I wanted to do this when I stopped over at my mom's house earlier this year and she had sweet peas in bloom very early on in the season and I said mom when did you plant those and she said that's actually the sweet pea plant you gave me the year prior and the root system had overwintered in her garden and the plant was looking so fabulous. So I've already sowed those two poles so I'm going to go every other pole. We're going to go the first pole, third pole, fifth pole, and seventh pole so if I need to I can reference this video next spring when they're blooming. I just make a hole about an inch down with my pen, stick one seed into each hole and there's some construction going on in the neighborhood right now so I'll just go ahead and do the other side once I turn the camera off but I will make sure and show you the results of this experiment and I'm really interested to see what happens. So the guys are here filling in those holes that they made when they ran the new electric but I wanted to go over some important temperatures when it comes to sweet peas. The ideal temperature for germination on sweet peas is 50 to 55 degrees Fahrenheit. The ideal temperature for bulking up is 35 to 50 degrees Fahrenheit and the ideal temperature for flowering is 45 degrees to 70 degrees and in that bulking up period it can go much lower. You can go all the way down to 20 degrees no problem at all. That happens here all the time when my sweet peas sit out and get hit with below freezing temperatures but this experiment is going to be really fun. I can't wait to see the results and I also can't wait until the two ginormous holes and the driveway garden are all filled up with soil. Well friends I think that brings me to the end of today's video but I did want you to know that now that the temperatures have cooled down I have lots and lots of gardening videos in store. I'm pretty much done setting up the flower stand for the season. I might do some just single dahlias at the stand all the same dahlias but other than that we are going to get back into gardening garden design and we are going to fix the hedge that is on the agenda coming up very soon. Well friends I want to wish you a wonderful day out there in your gardens and I'll see you sometime soon. Bye friends!