Lawn And Garden Plants Transplanting: A Personal Adventure In Plant Relocation

For as far back as I can remember, transplanting has been a normal part of life. My mom often buys flowers for her garden, and my dad buys vegetable plants, mostly tomatoes, for his garden.

When I was a child, I can remember my dad growing his own seedlings for his garden. I also recall the story of how one of the weeping willow trees in my grandparents' yard had been grown from a switches my granddad had taken from local ball field.

My dad did all of the landscaping at the house we moved into when I was twelve. Some plants he bought, others we native plants he moved into the positions he wanted.

One of the groups of plants I found, you can see in the picture. This group was growing near the driveway, and on the border of our neighbors' yard. What I didn't expect was that the neighbor mowed then with the grass in his yard. I didn't remember them from last year, but I suppose they could have been there in a smaller group and had been mowed with the rest of plants in the lawn.

There's at least a dozen plants here, and I decided to take them all. If they are weeds, no one will care. I'm not to worried about leaving another patch of brown, either. This area needs to be fertilized and reseeded anyway.

When moving plants, I want to avoid touching them. Since these are not dormant, there is a good chance that these plants could be traumatized from too much handling.

I tried very hard to dig deep enough to get as much of the surrounding soil as possible, and avoid damaging the roots. It wasn't easy since there were grasses and even some poison ivy mixed in, and I didn't want to take any of that with me.

When I brought the plants to the new location, I realized that I should have started here first. I should have had this cleared out before bringing the plants over.

I had some weeds, including a very big dandelion, to get rid of, so the plants waited in the wheel barrel while I prepared the ground.

I decided to place the plants in rows in front of the rock. I was careful to dig the hole the same depth as the hole that was left where the plants were. I also made sure to gently cover the roots before adding the next row of plants.

They weren't really in rows when I found them, but I decided to place them in rows here, they are also spread out a bit more, because I didn't want them to choke each other out.

I still have now idea what they are. As I was transplanting them, I noticed some stems just starting out, so hopefully if they are flowers, I'll be able to identify them.

These almost look like the same type of plants. They are growing in as a patch just like the others, but in the back yard. I had noticed them last year, but didn't think much of them. I do remember that there were less of them, but I just mowed them over with the rest of the lawn.

I used to mow this yard with a push mower when I was a teenager, and don't recall ever seeing anything like them.

My youngest sister took over the lawn mowing after I graduated high school, and she didn't remember ever seeing plants like them before, either.

My mom noticed them this year, because they were a nice dark green before any of the surrounding grass had started to become green. She wanted to know what they were, and since I didn't know, she suggested letting them grow.

I mentioned it to my dad, and he agreed, it couldn't hurt to let them grow to see what they were. He thought they were weeds, but wasn't sure. He grew up on this land, the backyard adjoins the property to the house he lived in when he was a boy. Pretty much the entire front part of the property, including what is now the front and back yard, was my grandfather's garden.

To protect them, I set up this little metal fence I found.

A few weeks after transplanting my mystery plants, my mom mentioned that she want more buttercups in her flower garden. She had transplanted some wild violets from the lawn before they were mowed over, now she had one buttercup growing wild in her garden, and saw more out on the front lawn.

I didn't know she wanted more buttercups until after I mowed the front lawn, so I looked around and found some on the edge of the yard that hadn't been cut by the mower or electric trimmer yet.

I removed some ground ivy from around the buttercup in the garden, then picked a few good looking buttercups to dig up. Again I tried to take as much of the soil surrounding the roots, but I'm not sure how well these will look because they appeared to be losing their petals before I started moving them.

Transplanting works better when it is done earlier in the season, and I should have moved these buttercups sooner than I did.

It's been about three weeks since my original transplanting adventure, and now that we are starting to see blooms, I think I've identified both the transplanted and fenced in plants as forms of Hawkweed.

Hawkweed is in the Asteraceae family, related to dandelions, and you can see that the flowers on both plants look a lot like dandelion flowers. One picture I saw of meadow hawkweed showed plants with clustered yellow flowers atop long stems like the plants I transplanted. Several pictures I saw of common hawkweed showed single flowers on short stemmed plants like the ones I fenced in.

Hawkweed is also related to sunflowers, and flowers of both the groups of plants I have tend to open in the morning when it is sunny, then close in the afternoon or if it gets cloudy.

Hawkweed was originally brought from Europe as an ornamental plant, but is now considered more of a pest. They get their name from folklore because it was thought that hawks could improve their eyesight by chewing on them.

Lawn And Garden Plants Transplanting:
A Personal Adventure In Plant Relocation
by CleanerLife
is licensed under a Creative Commons
Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0
United States License.