I've got some I rescued when I saw they were still alive after bringing them in from growing from seed their first year and literally dumping them in a pile of soil I thought I'd mix and use again. They were like that for months. To tell the truth, I felt sorry for them when I saw there was still a little green in them, dry as a bone, and they taught me how most living things want to live. So I put them in a middle size pot with fresh soil on my step ladder by an east window in the breakfast room I use as my potting shed lol. They fell off once and lost some soil. Should put them in a different pot with fresh soil again. It took about 4 years, but they flower, one set another one, I didn't pay much attention because I didn't expect much. They say they are invasive. Well my clump finally migrated to the center of a smallish pot and looks like 4 or 5 little onions on the bottom lol. They bounce back fast after getting a haircut. I snip them into all sorts of things, mostly to add interest. I can't taste them. They are especially nice when I cook my potpourri of baked fish or baked potatoes and sour cream when I don't have green onions. If I bite into a little piece, I can taste them, but I can't in whatever I've snipped them into, and I pile a lot on my potatoes. I guess I like the look of it if nothing else.

nhbabs, there's no way to tell what these are. I often collect seeds of unknown plants without knowing what the heck it is or what I'm possibly getting myself into. I guess that's living dangerously and I have paid the price a couple times but for the most part its worked out well. This particular garden is so distinctive that I did a jaw drop and nearly swerved off the road when I saw all those hard to find natives happily baking in the sun in that inferno. Those are plants you cannot buy and whoever planted it was probably a transplant from either Mexico or South Texas. Its the kind of garden most people would see as not colorful or even weedy and drive right by. Its all in the eye of the beholder.

Thank y ou all so much! It’s obvious that I know nothing about garlic! Other than we eat a lot, and my husband, who does the shopping, complains sometimes that the quality is poor. I thought, hey, I can grow it for effect and enjoy eating it too. Indeed, they were planted close together. I think I will take the cloves left that I can find and re-plant those in my flower garden for the decorative effect. Right now I can’t tell where most of the plants even were. I’ll leave those alone, maybe move them if the hidden cloves sprout in spring. Then, I will buy some eating garlic and plant that spaced as you have as suggested. I am in zone 5 Chicago. This bed is partly shaded. It was my former vegetable garden, til it got too shady for tomatoes. All I am growing there is a little asparagus and rhubarb, and some variegated money plant. This is where I place plants that I am not ready to plant in my regular garden. I don’t have a whole lot of space for it but I would like to try. What variety and source would you recommend?

When I look back at how hard it was to improve this clay, I cannot believe we didn't just give up and quit. I'm stubborn though, so quitting was not in my vocabulary at the time. Being older and (hopefully) wiser now, I do things somewhat differently as a concession to the encroaching years. I largely have gotten away from using a rototiller, and only very rarely now even use my Mantis cultivator to work something into the soil. It is so much better to improve the soil from the top down in terms of not disturbing the soil structure, so in the established garden, I'm either very low till or almost entirely no-till. However, I don't think we would have gotten the soil into the great condition it is now without rototilling tons of organic matter into it over the year, and here's why. When we dug up our tiny oak saplings out of the woodland to transplant them into the yard, I only wanted tiny trees no taller than 12-18" and I wanted to move them with a 12-18" root ball so that we were moving saplings that had below-ground root systems equal to the above-ground top growth. Because the soil in the woodland was dark brown, crumbly, rich and humusy, I assumed all the woodland soil was that way. It wasn't. After the shovel went 8 or 9" deep into the woodland soil, that soil changed to dense red clay. I was, in one sense, shocked. I had expected the woodland with its gigantic trees had naturally better soil that what we had in the grassland areas. It really didn't. It had the same soil, only that the top 8 or 9" was much improved from having decades of organic matter fall to the ground and decompose in place. It also amazed me that the trees grew so well despite that fact that a large portion of their deeper roots were in the red clay. Based on that experience, I changed my approach to soil building and started just layering on the mulch and compost in the garden on top of the soil surface and letting it break down naturally and build the soil similar to how soil is built in the woods. It took a huge leap of faith for me to stop all the heavy digging, rototilling and cultivating of the soil, and I think it has paid off remarkably well. So, when we begin the work to move the garden eastward to make up for the shade encroaching from the west, I just want to build raised beds, fill them with hugelkultur type materials, and let the soil build and develop from there. It likely will be much slower than rototilling and working in organic matter right away, but it won't be backbreaking work and it won't be the kind of work that really disturbs the soil. I do have a lot of trouble with rodents and snakes moving into hugelkultur beds when they are new, so that will be an issue to work around.....but it isn't like the standard garden beds are entirely snake-free or vole-free either. If money was no object and I could spend any amount I choose on gardening, I'd just buy big containers (20 gallons or larger), fill them with a quality, purchased soil-less mix and only grow in containers, eliminating the whole issue of dealing with red clay. But, we live and garden here in the real world and have a budget and it isn't one that allows for endless spending of huge amounts of money on many containers and the growing medium to fill them up. I have slowly accumulated a lot of containers over the years and I love growing plants in them, but in general I add them at a much slower rate now because the growing medium needs to be renewed in them annually, and that requires adding a lot of organic matter to a lot of containers. With rocky soil that drains well, blue pimpernel might work well for you. You'll never know until you try. I love garden experimentation. Since I am in an area that generally is very drought prone, most of my experimentation has been to find what grows here without a lot of supplemental irrigation. Dawn