name that plant!

So I just found a great forum at Garden Web called, Name That Plant! where you can uplaod a picture, a short description, and people will tell you what it could be.
So, i have a project in mind... let's get a positive ID on that "painted daisy" as well as the magenta flowered perennial. Or anything else that we want to know what it is.

Aaron, can you take some pictures for uploading?

lots of work

aaron and i built yet another Square Foot Bed. This one is for perrenial culinary herbs. We lost a number of herbs over the winter -- not sure of the cause. But the thyme, rosemary, and, oregano sage all died. Still I rescued a sage plant left over from the class project, and chives, and marjoram. Marjoram is easy to confuse with oregano, but marjoram has a lighter scent, is less woody, and creeps less and it more upright.

need to label those plants, and also put the dividers in. In this bed we used our own home made compost, in addition to left over manure and sphagnum peat. The bed is rectangular -- we made in a 9-square grid, but the grids measure something like 13.3 inches x 11.3 inches-- because we were using scrap lumber. Also, need to get more herbs for that bed. I'd like to make it all perrenial. Thyme, tarragon, rosemary -- i'm sure we'll come up with others.

i trimmed back the tree, and in the butterfly garden i trampled the weeds. hardly anything has come up this year from what we planted last year -- a couple of lupine, but a lot of coneflower and a lot of indian blanket / painted daisy. There's a magenta wild flower with delicate ferny leaves that keeps coming back. maybe we should save it. i'd like to identify it. it does attract butterflys too. I think we might have got 2 butterfly weed plants to come back also.

i think the secret to that butterfly garden is to find reliable perrenials. define the area that we will plant them in. mulch and weed barrier everything else like mad. then, grow our plants using peat pots and plant at the rate of four per square foot. since the plants are perrenials, if we plant seeds now, even though its early june, we should get healthy enough plants to use in the beds. then over seed with other plants.

if i'm still in cincinnati next year-- and i know i say this every year-- i'd like to take advantage of old science's greenhouse.

bed edge

it wasn't what i planned on doing. i was going to build a square foot bed for the herb patch. but i didn't have my tools. so i started weeding the herb patches and then i decided to re-edge the beds.

it looks so much better.

also, i watered the SF beds by hose.

a little gardening

Aaron and i almost finished the weed barrier-- i was short in my purchase by about 5 feet. no matter-- we will need it for the butterfly garden.
i weeded the zig zag bed, and aaron weeded the squares. i watered everything. i built little bowl shaped moats around some of the vining plants, so water stays around them better when we water. it seems to work, but who knows if that will result in better plants?
its amazing how easy and fast these little beds are to weed.
aaron told me we should have mulch soon too.

weed barrier

it's a great spring day today, one of the few we get in Northern Kentucky. Aaron and I put down about half the weed barrier today. I imagine we'll put down the rest later in the week.

I planted cilantro in two squares. We need to get some basil seed. I filled in the missing spots inside sqaures where we didn't get full germination and then watered the squares. I thinned some of the radish out to get 16 plants. I weeded the zig-zag as well.