Fritillaria

I have a small fritillaria purchased locally. Normally the complete botanical name is on the tag so I didn't check when I bought it. I was going to plant it today but all the tag says about it is that its flower will be checkered maroon and white with green rays. That is nice to know but it doesn't tell me where to plant it. Some frits like semi-shade others like full sun. Some prefer more watering, others less. If I knew the botanical name of this plant I could look it up and find out all the information I need to know before planting it -- to make sure it has a happy home and all the good things it needs. Do you have any suggestions about what its name is? I have looked through all the photos of frits I could find using Google searches. There are plenty of checkered maroon and yellow frits but I didn't find one maroon and white with green rays. I hope one of you has this plant and can tell me its name. Thanks for any help you can offer!

fritillaria meleagris. sheltered spot light shade somewhat cool moist soil
www.vanengelen.com

Hi Len123. Sorry for the long delay in responding to your post. I am not very good at wending my way throught the message board yet, usually end up on a board not meant for me and give up in frustration. Thank you for taking the time to look this bulb up for me, I do appreciate it. On the bulb blurbs I found on Google, this bulb, Fritillaria melegris, was listed as maroon and yellow and even in the picture on the link you supplied it does look like maroon and yellow checkered squares. Now, in Septmber, when it is planted permanently, this bulb will have a happy home as I have all the requirements listed for it.

Hi Phils Flowers, you have a very dainty plant, they like cool dampish soil to grow, but not sitting in waterlogged soil, over hear in UK, we call them checkered Fritillaries or Snakes Head fritilleries, if they are happy in the place you plant them, they will multiply, but not for a few years, they are really cute, try plant some Snowdrops beside them as this shows up the colouring on your Fritilleries, they like some leaf mould but not over thick on top of them. Good Luck, WeeNel.

Thank you for this information, WeeNel. I do love bulbs when they naturalize. You could buy that number of bulbs and arrange and rearrange them for hours and never reach the beauty that bulbs produce by doing it by themselves. Every time I try to duplicate Mother Nature, by trying to get a jump on this natural multiplication, it looks posed and artificial, rather like trying to pass off glass pearls for the real thing. It never works. I am so very lucky. Our soil here drains so freely that bulbs and all the other plants that need this quick drainage are very happy. I do have to add compost and, for some plants, peat moss to retain this moisture for a while or I would have to water every day in summer.

Gardening always throws up new problems and when you get smug and think you are a good gardener and know a great deal, there are always new things to be learned. I am in the process of building an alpine garden and for the first time in my life I have come up against plants that need a slightly alkaline soil. We here in the Pacific Northwest have acidic soil which those plants I grow really like, so I have never come up against this problem before. I think that to reduce the acidity in the soil I have to add lime but I do not know how much is too much. Is there anyone else who lives in a region with acidic soil who has amended it to become slightly alkaline? How did you do it?

Good for you, trying out new things in the garden, you seem to go along with my thoughts, nothing ventured, then nothing gained, just keep an eye on the new area, soon as you see the plants in bother, move them, they are not as delicate as people think. As for altering your soil from acidic, you are right, adding some garden lime should help, but dont go mad with it, just sprinkle like frosting a cake, then if you need more later, then add it, best time to add lime is when it starts autumn or when the hot weather has cooled a bit, too much will burn the roots, it is best to sprinkle, then rake it into the soil and wait a week or so before you add the plants, other things you could try depending on the water retention the plants need, is compost with added manure, or fish bloud and bone meal, buy this already mixed, the fish/blood mix if a fast feed for the plants but it stays in the soil long enough to sweeten it, also seeweed extracts, again buy as a soil conditioner/feed, you can also add some animal manure, but make sure it is well rotted, as new, it will be too strong and burn the roots,
Alpines like a good drainage soil and dont like to have the foliage laying on wet soil, so I normally add grit to the soil to help drain any extra water away faster, then when I put the little plants into the hole, I have them just proud of the infilled soil, then I add a mulch of gravel under the foliage to keep it off the soil, and it helps in the summer also to heat up the soil a bit, they seem to like that.For a more natural way to grow your bulbs, bend down low with a handful of bulbs and just drop them onto the earth, wherever they fall plant them, this prevents little circles or rows and it looks better for a more natural look, not as nature does it, but more like it. good luck, you sound as if you are going to be a busy gardener, enjoy and have fun. WeeNel.

Hi WeeNel, Sorry for the long delay in getting back to you but tend to spend the summer in my garden rather than on the computer. I am sure you do the same so you will understand.

The succulent bed is almost finished. I still have a few more plants that need to be transplanted and it is done. Have almost finished the alpine tarn too. That was not in the original plan but I was moaning so much about how slow everything was going that husband offered to help so set him to digging down to bedrock in the space that had been set aside for the succulent bed while I went shopping. He did that -- and very nicely too -- but, beside it, there was this deep hole. I asked him why he had dug the hole and his reply was I said to do it. Of course I didn't but didn't say a word, just told him how wonderfully he had managed digging the trench for the drain rocks for the succulent bed, vowing I couldn't have done it half as well. Men do have to be flattered, don't they?

I do have a problem. All the plants for the succulent bed and for the alpine garden have been sitting in pots on the back patio where I thought they would be safe -- except from the baby raccoons who liked to bat them from one end of the patio to the other -- at least until I caught them at it and walled the plants in so the babies couldn't get at them. We now put out the cat's balls so the baby raccoons play with them rather than try to get into the plants. However, that is not the real problem. The succulent plants were grown in a moisture retaining soil so it all had to come off as succulents don't like water to stay too long around their roots or they will rot. Removing the inappropriate soil I discovered there were small bugs in the soil around the Lewisia plants. They looked a bit like sowbugs but it was almost dark when I planted them so didn't get a really good look. I took the hose and washed off as much of the soil as I could, hoping it would flush the bugs too and that would be the end of them. It wasn't, several other plants are exhibiting a problem as well because the bottom leaves are yellowing. I will have to dig them up again, hoping all the bugs are still on those particular plants and water spray every bit of the old soil and the bugs off them, clean out the holes they were planted in and replant them. I don't know any other way to deal with these bugs. I don't even know if that will end the problem.

The succulent soil mix was easy as it was posted on the web. It is 50% sand, 25% pea gravel and landscape drain gravel, 25% loam/compost mix. I used mushroom manure as the compost as the lady who helps (actually does most of it) with the garden likes it best. I used an organic top soil from the garden nursery for the 'loam'. I will post a picture of this succulent bed in my diary when I finally take one and get around to posting in my diary again.

I added the lime right into the soil for those few succulents that like it. So far mixing the soil and planting right into it did not do the plants any harm thank goodness, perhaps there wasn't enough to bother them. I will add a bit to the top of the soil around the alkaline-loving plants as soon as the weather turns autumnish and rake it in. Thank you so much for this advice. I will do it the right way when I have the alpine bed properly contoured, have drain rock and soil in place and begin to plant it.

The whole succulent bed is covered in a layer of pea gravel so that none of these plants rest on the soil. If that happens the stems of the plants rot and the plant is a gonner. I hate losing plants. They are like my children. I don't want to lose any of them.

Dropping bulbs and planting them where they lay! That is the way my Dad did it too. I had completely forgotten that until you reminded me. Thanks!!! It was from him I got my love of gardening but have forgotten so much of how he did things. He loved everything that bloomed and had such a wide variety of plants that there was always something to see that was lovely no matter at what time of year you went to look. That is one of the advantages of living on the southern end of the west coast of Canada, we have a mild climate all year long. Every time I went home to see my parents he would take me out to the garden, proudly showing me his 'other' children, just as he had once shown me off to his friends. It would make me smile because I understood exactly how he felt about his plants.

I hope that you are having a lovely summer in your garden too,

Happy gardening all,

Phil

Hi Phil, not to sure about the bugs in your soil by name, we have the same type of bug here in Scotland UK, they feed off the roots, they look like little white grubs with a dark head, always in a horse show shape, these are the grubs from the vine weevil, mother lays eggs on or into the soil and the grubs go to the roots to feed before maturing into adults, we get a wash mix from the garden center and it comes in a powder, you then mix with the amount of water as by direction, and water it into the soil, it kills off the bugs, the problem with washing these of the soil is, if you dont stand/kill them as they are washed off and before the birds feed on them, then they just wiggle into another plant and that becomes infested also, try take a bug in a jar to the garden store for them to give you what is required to kill them off or you will find a lot of your plants get infested over the season.
I had the same kind of dad as you, only at the time when I was little, I never realised that he was teaching me anything, yet I have found as an adult, things spring to mind and before I know it, I have this wonderful picture of my childhood memories flooding back and I am back on track with my gardening problems, my dad would never use chemicals on our garden as he was a lover of wild life, he always said, a garden will give you all that you put into it, that included bad hobbits/bad crops, these old guy's new a thing or two about growing plants/food and their needs without a lot of expense eh, God love them for their patience, there care and their attitude to the good things in life, we have inherited all of these things and are happier for it. good luck, do send in some pictures once the garden settles, I'd love to see your new garden. Good Luck. WeeNel.

Hi Nell, I took one of the bugs in a jar to the nursery, I HATE touching bugs! Told him I thought it was a sowbug and wanted something to kill it. He dumped the bug out on the counter, touched it on its rear end (ugh!!!), it rolled itself up into a ball and he said it wasn't a sow bug it was a pill bug. They do look alike and, apparently, sow bugs can't roll up, they just arch. These are oval-shaped, dull black bugs with grooves on their back, possibly segmented but you aren't going to get me to check it out. They do have legs but they must be extremely short as the bug is almost on the ground. The nursery man said not to water the plants until they had been completely dry for a few weeks. It would stress the plants but not kill tthem and the bugs would move away from these plants. I didn't want the bugs to move, I wanted to kill them. They are NOT a beneficial bug. This nursery does not like to kill any bugs. I wanted something to kill them.

Unfortunately, a friend saw me talking to the nurseryman and she dragged me off to help select something to plant in front of her Euphorbia "Tasmanian Tiger" before he could offer any suggestions. Told her she would be better off planting it in front of her Chocolate eupatorium, she didn't need to buy anything. Famous last words, we both grabbed shopping carts and as neither of us has any will power when it comes to plants, we went through every section of the nursery and both had full shopping carts, both top and bottom. I did not see the nursery man again and completely forget to ask the counter person to suggest something to kill the pill bugs.

You sound like a garden center guy's dream, you and your friend, well I do the exact same thing, go to buy some tomato feed or something like that, and end up with a truck load of plants, have you ever noticed that your shopping trolley always looks full, you pay a fortune at the checkout, then when you unload the plants at home, you dont seem to have a lot of plants for your cash and once you plant them you dont cover the area you had thought you would, I have a real large garden and when I put the plants into the ground, next day I have trouble finding them, they look so few and far between, oh well, bet every gardener has this trouble eh. Don't recognise your bug by name, maybe go to your library and find a good book about pests and diseases to give you some insight to what all the troublesome bugs are, then you can spot the problems before they get a real hold, one thing for sure, if the bugs like your growing conditions, they will multiply fast.
Another thing I always do now after learning the hard way, whenever I bring plants home from the garden store, I always knock them out from the pots and check them over, you will be surprised at how many imported bugs come from the growers or garden centers as they sit in their pots, then we plant them in the garden and before you know it, you can end up with problems you never had before
it is worth the 2 min time believe me, I got Red spider mite introduced to my greenhouse a few years ago and it took me a good few years to realise what it was and get rid, when you remove the plant from the pot for planting, just tease out a bit of the roots gently and as you do, just look see there are no unwanted guests in the soil, this also helps the plants spread out the root ball as they have been growing around the pots instead if spreading out due to pot shape and space. good luck, hope your new garden beds give you many years of pleasure, you will need to send us all a picture once it is done. WeeNel.

Heh heh heh, PhilFlowers, you've got rolley polleys! (or, pill bugs, if you
will). I don't want to torment you, but those rolley polleys are hard to get rid
of, I'm sorry to say. The garden helper was some right in advising you to
let your plants dry out, as these bugs love to clean out dead plant debris, and they can multiply like mad. They prefer dark moist areas to do thier thing, and
can congregate en mass to cover the ground like a sea of moving carpet if
left under say- a tarp on the ground, or a scrap of cardboard rotting, or under
a decaying log. There are commercial baits available, though I've not used it
myself. I understand you don't like the chemicals, but an occasional knock-
down might be adviseable to prevent them from encroaching into healthy
vegetation when thier fav stuff is eaten up. Don't let these get out of hand!
Best of luck- the only benefit I have seen is thier ability to break down the
horse manure pile w/ wood bedding mixed in, though what they leave behind
may look like dirt, it is dry, floats, and won't hold water. Don't know what I can
use it for...