I was out in the garden this morning (as I do), looked at happy bright yellow blooms and was compelled to go cut some to make that marigold smudge stick I've been on about.

(Golden goodness!)

This was a lot harder to wrap than the other one since it's so chunky so I started wrapping them one bundle at a time, adding more flowers making bundles under the first bundle until I had the length I wanted.

Next step was to pick a colour and wrap the outside.

I kept wrapping until I was happy I had wrapped over each flower.

And that's it. Now it gets to hang out with the other one.

In other news.....

I was thinking the other day how I feel like learning how to identify plants is like learning how to identify crystals. Although with crystals I had the added benefit of being able to feel their energy and use that as a guide.

Plants however are totally different.

Most of the plants we have came with tags but the bee and butterfly seed mix I got is a lucky dip. There's about 50 different seeds in that packet and who knows what I planted.

When this plant bloomed its first flower I googled chamomile because of the white flower and noticed the leaves were similar and thought yep, chamomile. Then another plant like it bloomed pink flowers so I googled 'pink chamomile' and even then it resembled a pink chamomile.

At this point I was prettt damn sure I had the right plant.

Then I looked at my plant spreadsheet where I listed all the seeds from the lucky dip mix and didn't see chamomile so back to the drawing board I went and during my seed search last night I found "Cosmos" compared the photos on the internet with my photos and it was an exact match to my plant right down to the centre of the flower to the leaves and height.

After all that brain power work I headed on over to my Facebook garden group to find people talking about apps that help identify plants.

Why didn't I think of looking for an app?!
I feel so old school lol

Someone recommended Picture This and said it worked a treat so I downloaded that and two others, Pl@ntNet and GardenTags that were in the Similar Apps section.

(A screenshot of the PictureThis app)

PictureThis was super easy to use. I simply selected a photo of the plant from my gallery and came up with a list of possible matches. If all you want is to match up plants then this is perfect, although it didn't recognise the sage plant, I think that was more due to the picture.

The other two are a bit more involved and are pretty much gardening community apps. Both are very cool though, one reminds me of instagram and the other a community board where you can look at plants people share from their region.

(A screenshot of Pl@ntNet.)

I think between these apps I should be able to identify the plants that come up from the bee and butterfly mix and no more mix ups!

That's it from me on this rainy Thursday.

Be well and stay safe everyone.

🌻 Arly

🍀 All pictures taken on my Samsung Note 8 🍀