3 Things To Do In the September Garden

Hey, I'm Sue from Garden Moxie. Welcome to my garden. I have no idea where this garden season went but we are already here in what appears to be very close to the autumn garden. So we are in my back garden right now and I can see that the pine needles are already starting to change and so are the colors of the leaves. Pretty soon it's going to start getting cooler here in southeast Michigan. I garden in zone 6a and right now my garden focus is going to be collecting seeds, planting bulbs, and doing projects. So my plan for today's video is to show you the bulbs that I've bought so that I can plant them and have blooming flowers in the springtime. I'm also going to be collecting some of the seeds that I want to grow over the winter time for next year and collect those from the garden. And I'm also going to do a project that I've been dying to do. I want to make a wreath out of the dried marigolds that I've collected from the pollinator garden. Okay, so what I want to do today is I definitely want to collect some zinnia seeds. And so, oh, little Bumble is sleeping. I don't want to bother him. So all I'm going to do is I'm going to find, I've been letting these kind of go to seed with the idea that I was going to be collecting some seeds here and I don't really need all that many seeds. So just going to collect some of these dried flowers here and I'll put these in my little bowl and I'll show you how we collect the zinnia seeds. All right, so in terms of grabbing seeds, I've just been letting these flowers, you know, kind of dry back and I'm just going to cut the flower off here and you can see it there. And I'm just going to use this to collect a few of the zinnia seeds. Now another plant that I really want to collect seeds from is my keys orange marigolds. And we didn't have a great season this season because the groundhog loves to eat these, but I am letting them go to seed so that I can collect the seeds for next season. And it's so easy to collect marigold seeds. You just kind of let the flowers get spent and you'll see, I'll just have enough seeds in here for next season, just from one flower just to collect that. I'll grab a couple more here though. I also want to collect these for drying. So there's still a couple of nice blooms here. Go ahead and collect those. You can use those for projects. I did plant all of these gonfrina from seed and I'm definitely going to be picking these now that they're ready here so that I can use them for some dried arrangements. But I also want to let some of them go to seed so that I can collect them for next year. And next season I really want to grow this color here. I love this deep purple. It's a great color. All right, so I've moved inside to my kitchen so that we can collect these seeds and also so we can make our wreath later. So I've just got these. I've got the zinnia flower that I collected from the garden a little bit ago and then also the two marigold flowers. I'll show you how to remove the seeds from these flowers and save them so that we have seeds that we can use and plant for next garden season. All right, so I'm going to start here with this zinnia seed. So this is from the variety Queenie Lemon Peach which is actually proving to be one of my favorite zinnias. The other zinnia that I grew this season that I absolutely loved was called Envy and I am definitely going to be planting Envy and Queenie Lemon Peach again next season. All right, so before we get going what I'd like to do is just do a little bit of a close-up here of this dried flower head so you can kind of see what we're going to be using. So you take the dried flower and you're just going to separate, kind of pull these dried petals off and then we have all of these seeds that you can see at the end of these petals. So here's a good example of one right here and so this is the seed and that's what we want to collect. So I mean this is pretty straightforward. I'm just going to separate these and then once I've got that done I will be putting the seeds into a little envelope here so that I can keep them until next season. So I just really just pull these off and then kind of pull them at one time. All right and then once I've got all the seeds I want to put them in here and I just want to make sure that I write the date down. So September 2024 and write down what seed it is. So this is a and it's Queenie Lemon Peach and then I just keep this. This is a little wax paper envelope and I can seal that up and then save that for next season. You collect the seeds the same way from the Marigolds. So if I pull this apart here, kind of pull the petals off. If I open this up, what you see in here are all of these Marigold seeds. Yeah so you can see there is a ton of seeds inside each one of these flowers and I'm just going to kind of pull them out here and I mean look at how many seeds are just one spent flower and there's probably more than enough seeds for the entire next season here and I'm going to separate you know I got some pieces of petal and what have you. So I'm going to take those out and then I'm going to go ahead and do the same thing where I'm collecting these seeds and putting them keeping them in my little envelope. Yes I am always impressed with again I'm just going to pull I'm just going to pull the petals off and if you open up this flower you're going to be able to grab all of these Marigold seeds. I mean I still have more of them there but look at all of those seeds. So easy to collect them and this way you've got them for next season and you don't have to buy new ones. So I'll go ahead and make sure that I grab these so that I have more than enough here to share with my friends and that's always the fun part of gardening to be able to share parts of your garden with your friends. So again I'll just go ahead and save those seeds in the envelope and then we are good to go. So today I wanted to show you how I make a wreath out of dried Marigolds. So I've got some Marigolds that I've been drying here in silica sand. This was one of my favorite projects last season. I absolutely loved it. One of the questions I know that comes up is how long will this wreath last and that's how come I am going to show you the wreath that I made last year. So this is over a year old. I made it in September of last year so September of 2023 and it started to lose the color in the Marigolds I'd say about the end of July. So it lasts almost a year looking just as good as you know it will look today. So it keeps this dark orange color until it starts to fade and it's almost a year. So it's like the perfect autumn decoration for the mantle and I was hoping to make a bigger one this year but like I mentioned earlier in the video the groundhog loved the Marigolds and ate most of the plants that I had growing in the garden. So we're going to go ahead and I'm going to show you it's super easy to make this wreath and fast and you can reuse the straw form and the pins. So let's go ahead and turn the camera around and we can get started. Okay so I left some of these Marigolds in the silica sand. I don't touch the sand with my hands. I wear a glove and anytime I'm moving this sand around I'm going to be wearing a mask. So I've got that on right now and these are just Marigolds that have been sitting in the sand for over a week and when you touch them you can feel that they're very dry and crunchy. Not crunchy like they're not going to fall apart. They're pretty pliable but you can tell that they're dry. They feel like dried flowers. So you just go in here and remove them and shake them to get the sand off and you can reuse this silica sand. This is probably this sand is probably like four or five years old. Now you can see that when they're dried they hold their color and so that was what I was showing earlier that they will hold this color for almost a year. So they make a great they're going to make a great wreath. So these are the flowers that we cut earlier in the garden and to dry them all you do is you place them on a small layer of the sand. At least this is how I do it and it's worked very well. I place them upside down and then I literally just cover them up with the sand and I let them stay like that for at least a week and then when you know that they're ready you know they'll be kind of you know like a dried flower would be. All right so all you need to do this project is you need your marigolds, you need a straw form, straw wreath form and then I use just regular pins, straight pins like you would use for sewing and then you start on the inside and grab a flower. So you basically start by pinning the flowers on the inside so you can see here all I've done is I've taken this straight pin and attached the marigold to the wreath form using the straight pins. Just push that in there like that to hold it in place. So then what we're going to do is we're just going to work around the edges and fill this all up to make a wreath and I'm going to just make my way around the entire wreath this way and so now I'm going to go on to the second level and to do that I'm just going to put the flowers like that and then I'm just going to layer them and some of these bigger flowers work out pretty well because they can kind of cover up quite a bit of space here and then I will just use I will just fill in the empty spots so that it looks you know as you keep going it'll eventually look like a nice wreath here. All right and we're just going to keep systematically doing our thing here along the edges of the the wreath form and you can see this doesn't really take a lot of time it's super easy to do and I just think it looks so pretty. Now what I found is the easiest way to attach these marigolds is to put the pin in this section of the like that that's how they you know really do stay on quite nicely and make sure that we've got everything hidden. It looks like I could use another flower over here and looks like this one is not attached very well so I'm gonna resecure that one and I've got a couple more flowers here that we can use to fill out the rest of this wreath. Yeah so there is the the wreath and again you can see you'll be able to reuse the straw form and all I did was use the straw form and some dried marigolds and the straight pins and I've got an absolutely beautiful autumn wreath. All right well the last thing I wanted to share are some of the bulbs that I am planning on planting this season. My mom and I went to one of the big box stores and picked out our tulips for this season and I thought it would be fun to share them. I would love to know if you're going to plan on doing any bulbs in your garden this season and what you guys are planning on growing. Okay so this first tulip is called Grand Perfection and it looks it looks so beautiful. It's white and kind of like a burgundy color. I think that is going to be a stunner. I've got some Queen of the Night tulips. I love this deep dark purple tulip and this is going to look great in this flower bed here with the ballerina tulips I planted last season and then I also purchased a tulip called Attila Graffiti which is kind of like a bright pink and a purple. That should be a very pretty tulip. I'm looking forward to that and then I'm trying three new daffodils for the season. I've got this double daffodil called Dick Wilden. That looks like it's going to be very pretty. This gets to be 14 to 20 inches tall and then my mom picked out this two-tone with a more of a peachy center and I don't know exactly how to pronounce it. Salamay I think is what it's called. I'll show you that up close. You know how I am with pronunciations. Not the greatest. Then we've got this tiny little daffodil called Juanita and this one again is like a two-tone with the yellow with the orange cup. I'd love to hear what daffodil bulbs or tulip bulbs you're planning on growing in the spring. That's it for this video friends and I'll see you in the next one.