Portulaca in bloom

The portulaca is in bloom and it looks very pretty. gave a friend a pot of them also since i had so many and i'm wondering if her's has bloomed yet as well. i put some bloom booster fertilizer on them a few days ago (high P) so maybe they're a bit earlier than hers will be. Neat thing i heard about this plant is that you can get multiple blooms from the same stem, meaning the same seed. i'll have to look at one of mine just to make sure it's true. pretty amazing tho if it's true.

Transplanted some of the recently planted seedlings into paper pots to give them more room since they are showing sets of true leaves. I found from last time that when i transplanted them and they got pretty established in there they just took off growing. don't know if that was just a correlation with with season or the pots or the soil in the pots yet. next time i'll have to try to experiment with it...

when these guys were in the seed starting troths i made we got a really heavy rain that took out a large section and washed away a lot of seed so i guess i'm happy that i had this many so far. i have the worst luck sometimes. i may not get any astilbe or balloon flower since they were at the end and were most likely to be washed away...

stork's bill - 5 pots
Verbascum - 7 pots
bergenia red - 1 pot   : (

i noticed for some time now that the plants growing in the sip containers haven't been faring very well. both the angel trumpet (right) and the datura metel (left) have had their leaves turn yellow and fall off. they're similar families, but still. plus the rose stem (center) from propagation has not grown at all since i put it in the planter. because of this i put them all old-school and put them in containers with miracle gro garden soil that i put slow release fertilizer in. hopefully this will help them out a bit b/c i dont know what else to do. when i took them out of the planters and broke up the soil, it had an unpleasant smell like of something that's been sitting in something too long. i'm thinking it's either the fact that they always had water available at the bottom reservoir or the algae growing at the bottom since i didn't paint my containers or a combo of both. the gardenia seeds i planted have taken well in one of the sip planters (5 or 6 healthy sprouts!) and i think that next time i'm going to prepare the sip planters properly by painting the outside of the container to prevent algae and put the gardenia in them.