Morning Glories - A high 'wow' factor!

(Note: this post is referring to *cultivated* morning glories, which are not a problem in any area AFAIK. I'm aware that there are wild morning glories that can be a problem weed in some areas, but they are not the subject of this post.)

Frugal gardening tip: Morning glories have a high 'wow! factor'. They give good value for the money and minimal effort required, IMHO.

Here's what I've done this year: I bought two packets of morning glory seeds, Star of Yelta, and Heavenly Blue.

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above is a good picture of the Star of Yelta, these are such an intense color they appear luminescent.

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are pictures of the Heavenly Blue, although pictures don't really do it justice. The Heavenly Blue is a clear, pure blue: I think it's the 'bluest' blue I've ever seen in the flower world. Blue flowers are notorious for being difficult to photograph (film cameras - I don't know if it applies to digital cameras).

On April 20, I roughed up the large, very hard seeds with sandpaper, and soaked them overnight in warm water. The next morning I planted them in little 6-cell packs filled with Pro-Mix - a mixture of peat moss, perlite, and top soil: good for seed starting. (I used to buy specific seed starting mix, but the Pro-Mix is much cheaper if you need any quantity of it. There are many similar mixes available at garden centers.)

When the seeds sprouted (a few days later) I put them under our fluorescent seed-starting lights, indoors. They were transplanted into 4" pots in a week or two, then outdoors into 12" pots on the front porch - they're in mushroom-soil, but any good potting soil or Pro-Mix would be fine - in that case, you'd need to feed them occasionally. The mushroom-soil is rich, so I won't need to give them plant food.

They went outdoors after danger of the last frost (May 31 in our area).

I bought large dark blue-green pots at the local Dollar Store - these match the dark blue-green flower boxes that are also on the front porch and filled with petunias. I use ugly big black pots (that we dumpster-dived) for veggies on the deck in back, but for the decorative stuff in the front, I wanted something a bit nicer. Our house is white, with blue-green shutters and trim, so the blue-green pots look very good on the front porch.

The morning glory pots are sitting by the pillars that hold up the front porch, so they can climb up the pillars.

We had a terribly wet, very cool spring: almost no sun at all in June. The poor morning glories just sort of sat there, stunned, until the last week of June.

Before putting them in their pots on the porch, I had wound twine around the pillars, to help them climb, duct-taping it on the top and bottom to hold it in place. It turns out that this wasn't necessary - they're pretty much ignoring the twine and just climbing up the pillars wherever they want to.

The morning glories really took off as soon as the weather got hot and sunny, and the Star of Yelta is now blooming.

The Star has been faster and sturdier than the Heavenly Blues at every point in their development, btw, but the Blues are also climbing up the pillar nicely now, and I expect them to be blooming soon.

When I lived in Delaware, I lived in a little apartment with big, south-facing windows in the bedroom and living room. I tied twine to bricks on the ground in front of the windows, and to nails in the (fairly wide) roof overhang, and had a living curtain of greenery with gorgeous blossoms all summer to shade my apartment. I also did this with yard-long beans.

Morning-glories are an easy plant to grow and - to me at least - they have a very high 'Wow! factor' because of the gorgeous colors in the blossoms - they seem to glow from within. And because they will climb up trellises, fences, pillars, mailboxes, etc. They can also be used for a ground cover, but the 'Wow! factor' is higher when they are climbing, IMHO.

Pat

Reply to
Pat Meadows
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Ooops! I meant to post this to misc.consumers.frugal.living

- it is, of course, off-topic for rec.gardens.edible - My apologies to all.

Pat

Reply to
Pat Meadows

Pictures! I want to see pictures!

('sOK to post here -- we know there are veg on that porch, too. :-)

Reply to
Frogleg

hey, wow man. You remembered... ;-)

Reply to
Steve Calvin

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