Saturday, August 2, 2008

My Mutant Cosmos

I have a small area in my garden that is too close to the foundation (and its termite barrier) to grow food. So I grow flowers to cut. My favorite ones are snapdragons and cosmos because they grow well here. When I picked them out I chose ones that were about the same height and just mixed them up in the bed. I should have put the snapdragons in front.

The Sensations cosmos was supposed to only get three feet tall, but as you can see it towers over the garden. It has topped six feet. Some of the stems are an inch thick. The Sensation variety usually grows only 3' or maybe 4' for me if the flower stalks are tall, but never like this. The poor snapdragons are only about 2 1/2' tall and are totally dwarfed by the cosmos. They seem to be surviving well despite being lost in the foliage of the cosmos.

But the cosmos keeps growing. They are acting like my supposedly 2 1/2" tall peas that weren't supposed to climb but still are (now at 6' also). I'm wondering if it has been the weird weather this year. The beginning of June was extremely hot and we had constant rain, wind and thunderstorms and weirdly also lots of sun. Or did I over feed them (though I can't imagine how, since I did the same as always)? They did take a long time to bloom, though they are starting to bloom now. I would think the poor snapdragons would grow well too if I had, but they are acting like normal.

2 comments:

  1. It happens to all of us, but maybe your soil there is rich? I have one bed in the front that everything I plant there grows twice as tall then if I plant it somewhere else. ???

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  2. It may well be rich. I used to think of that area as my bad spot. Years ago there was a crab apple tree near there that we took down for my garden. Nothing liked to grow there for years and years as the tree kept trying to send up suckers and start again. Finally the tree gave up the ghost and the bed is now very productive.

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