Lantana Time

So while I was at The Home Despot the other day picking up some hardware for mounting my Mac Mini mount, I decided to take a quick walk through the produce garden department and see if they had any purple and yellow mounding lantana.

That would be an affirmative, looks like they're finally in season again.

I've had my eye on picking up a few of these to replace the coyote brush in the front garden. I'm at least 99% sure that it's a weed, but either way it's kind of ugly and way out of place at the front corner like it is.

Having something that tall right at the front corner of the garden really makes no sense whatsoever, so even if it weren't ugly I'd still be a little put off by it.

So, first step is to give it a little haircut.

Just a little off the top will do.

Next is pulling up the roots. Since my yard is mostly a hard-packed clay, the roots mostly just ran along the surface underneath the mulch, so pulling them up actually wasn't terribly difficult to do.

It's looking better already!

Despite the sun getting low late in the afternoon, it was still pretty hot out, so I called it there and decided to finish things up the following morning. When I awoke, I was disappointed to find that the lantana had not planted itself overnight.

I guess I'll just have to do it the hard way.

Step one: lay them out roughly where they're going to go, just to make sure they're going to fit nicely.

It's a good thing these get bigger over time.

Next step, scrape the mulch back and dig a hole.

Did I mention that the "soil" in my yard is hard-packed clay? Thankfully the right tool for the job makes all the difference in the world.

With the hole dug, we add some organic matter to try to give the roots of the lantana something a bit more inviting to grow into.

This sure is a lot of work for just sticking a plant in the ground. Makes you wonder how these things ever manage to survive in nature.

Repeat 4 times.

And we finally get to the part where we stick the plants into the dirt.

I tried to mound up the dirt around the new plants a little to keep them from getting root rot, which is what I think killed off the lithodora I planted here a while back. The hard-packed clay doesn't drain well, so sticking a plant in the ground here is kind of like just shoving it into a bowl. Hopefully the extra elevation will help get a little bit of a wet/dry cycle going so the root rot doesn't take hold again.

I suppose we'll see. Worst case, the plants were only about $5 each so I'm not out much if they die.

That said, so far the lithodora is the only thing I've planted here that I've managed to completely kill, so I think luck should be on my side.