We love sedums ... have them all over the place. For a decade or more, they were beautiful in fall with their purple flowers - the butterflies loved them and mom used them in flower arrangements. Then the deer started eating them 2 or 3 years ago and have continued to eat them - they munch about the top 2/3 of the plant. It’s really sad.
Question for you! Mom bought those 4 echinachea plants from the garden center - large & already blooming in the pots, flowers are in the orange color family. The flowers are now going to seed. I’m cutting off the seed cones (now black) & saving in a paper bag to plant next year. If the plants were not close to the house, the goldfinches would have already picked the seeds clean! The seeds should be ‘good’, right? Even if the plant is a hybrid? I don’t care if it doesn’t come back the same color, as long as we get a plant/flowers.
If I can get my lazy self outside, I might plant some radishes & kale. My SIL did this earlier in August & now has a nice fall garden. The cukes are totally gone, need to clean out the dead vines & that will give me space to plant inside the fencing - deer love radishes. It’s sunny now, but clouds are all around & supposed to cover us most of the day, so it won’t be so hot in the garden.
Well, the ‘orange’ tells me they are hybrids, so you’ll most likely get the basic purple coneflower from those seeds.
I let mine go to seed, too. I’ve gotten a few seedlings from them, which I’ve been moving to The Big Garden as filler. One stayed red, one is back to purple. But either way is fine with me.
I have ‘Julia Butterflies’ ‘Lakota’ and another bi-color I can’t remember. (’Cheyenne’ something...) They start off colorful, but now they all just look basic purple to me.
I LOVE Sedum. The front of the house is south-facing and our foundation is fieldstone, so it gets hot, hot, hot there. The only landscaping plants I kept were the Sedum that Linda had planted years ago, though I added some purple in with the basic ‘Autumn Joy.’ I also have perennial grasses that do great in those conditions, too. When I get tired of fighting Japanese Beetles for my roses, I’m going to re-do all around the greenhouse with Sedum.
Right now the Sedum are starting to bloom and look very pretty and colorful. They are also one of the last food sources for bees and butterflies, so they’re always busy. :)
I told Beau what my ‘theme’ was, today. He said, ;Do they kick you off for being CORNY?’ I said, ‘No. That only happens to me on Facebook.’ *SNORT*