Welcome August

Aug7

After a rough start to the year the garden is about where it’s usually at. I’m glad for that since in June it looked like a year of brown lawn and wilted flowers was ahead, but now things are mostly ok. I’d say totally ok, but when things dry out so much it takes a couple days straight of rain to really get into the soil, and in spite of frequent storms there are plenty of sloped and harder-soiled areas where things are back to wilting. Regardless, things look good enough and I’m happy with that.

The front border along the street is reveling in a full-summer show of perovskia and coneflowers, but sunflowers haven’t seeded in like they normally do. I blame the dry spring.

I’m also happy I put off planting annuals this spring. First of all there’s barely any room in the front border where I normally plant them, and second of all even with the rain here and there I’d still be watering them. One less job fits into my schedule perfectly!

I do like a woolly thistle (Cirsium eriophorum) here and there in the garden. Most visitors would accuse me of letting a weed grow, but I’m sure they’d understand when told it was planted here on purpose.

Maybe someone at some point said a dry summer would be the perfect time to ‘thin the flock’, create some space for mulch, spread some iris around, create a generally less cluttered and wild planting… but I think you know where that idea has landed.

Klasea bulgarica suffering along in a less-fertile and less-watered spot in the border than it would like, but it’s still a cool thing, even at five feet rather than seven.

It would be fun to complain endlessly about jobs not done and tasked shelved for the future, but let me first share a somewhat finished photo of the former construction road alongside the house. Something did get done this summer, and even with its lack of mulch (still hoping to get to that this fall), the emerging grass makes for a more inviting path than an uneven landscape of dumped concrete and roadside weeds.

I’m not sure anymore what the arc of stones was supposed to convey but it’s done and will likely stay this way for years, but at least the new grass makes sense, and will lead visitors up past the new daylily border, and allow them to oooh and ahhhh on their way to the daylily farm fields.

Since I think I heard someone ask why I wasn’t posting enough daylily photos, here are a few still in bloom this weekend. Late bloomers and rebloomers is how it is since the bulk of them wrapped up the show a week or two ago.

One of the nicest ones is this gift from my friend Paula. In theory I should divide it for the farm, but ‘Websters Pink Wonder’ might be something I need to hold on to for “evaluation” until I have a huge, huge, huge clump of it!

Also a gift, from another friend, is ‘Apricot Peace’. As other parts of the garden look a little worn out from the summer, this flower is as refreshing and delicious as any sun-riped summer fruit.

Since daylilies aren’t everyone’s cup of tea, here’s a break to look at the tropical garden. This end of the yard suffered through a lot of neglect as the gardener raced past this construction-ravaged part of the estate to go stick his head in the sand elsewhere, but after some time, rain, and lots of weeding, trimming, and rock-picking it’s at least less than a complete disaster. Actually it was Verbena bonariensis which saved the day. Its pollinator-filled haze of lavender-purple flowers covers up many of the sins of this season even if it does obscure the daylily flowers more than I’d like.

The tropical border. You may notice that the huge mound of yellow pokeweed (Phytolacca americana ‘Sunny Side Up’) is way to big for its space and way too much yellow, but I just don’t have the heart to trim it. You may also notice a lack of tropicals…

If I had to summarize for a sure-fire way of saving the late summer (full sun)garden, I’d say Verbena bonariensis, Hydrangea paniculata, and cannas. The three of them just ask for a little water and maybe some fertilizer, and BAM you’re a gardening rock star. Sadly I didn’t take a photo of the hydrangea this week, but how about this color from the cannas?

‘Cannanova Rose’, one of the newer seed strains of cannas, is disease free and flowers all summer and into fall if you just keep snapping off the seed pods. A plus for growing it in the North is the lack of canna roller caterpillars destroying the foliage, since they (and the cannas as well) can’t handle our winter cold.

What? More daylilies? You’ve got it.

‘Chama’ is a later daylily with a long season and big flowers. I’d say seek it out but with all the hundreds of other yellows out there I’m sure you could find something similar which is just as nice.

This Brookside Beauty seedling is not quite as average as a yellow. I picked it up this summer at my new favorite local daylily farm, Garrett Hill Daylilies, and maybe it’s too much of a lot of things but I’m quite happy with it.

It’s not all rippled edges and intense color. Here’s the more simple flower of a species daylily, Hemerocallis altissima (probably). Fragrant, tall, elegant, opens in the evening and then closes for the heat of the day, this daylily has a lot to offer as well.

Ok, let’s keep moving. The potager is beans, tomatoes and… daylilies now… I was fairly good for three years with my vegetables only policy (plus a few tulips), but that ship has left the pier. The beds are now filling with things like witch hazels and marigolds, cannas and phlox, and quite a few daylilies as well. It was a valiant fight but vegetables really are a lot of work, and the farm stand does it much, much better, so…. maybe we don’t need to grow our own cucumbers just in case we feel like eating a cucumber or twenty.

One of the few sunflowers to seed out this year… and a little short and small… but I’ll take it, as will the goldfinches I’m sure.

Right over the boxwood hedge of the potager is the stone wall which I went on and on about last year. It’s still there and it’s still the summer home for a few succulents, except for as hard as I tried there seem to be even more this summer. Someone will point out that I bought a few more .99 cent treasures on a summer plant trip, as well as a tiny box of cuttings and living stones last winter, but these aren’t even out there (they’re just too cool to put so far away), and all of these are just repots and divisions and cuttings. Someone needs to stop this ‘let me just take a few cuttings’ thing, just like the rabbits stopped the living stones thing. Had I known that the rabbits would consider the pots of living stones to be tasty little green jellybeans perfect for nibbling, I would have put them somewhere out of reach, but I didn’t and now they’re gone. Hmmmm, come to think of it my last living stone was the victim of a chipmunk attack. I guess they’re tasty little things and I should have known better.

Some of the old standbys which are apparently less tasty than living stones (Lithops).

So I guess I killed off the living stones through my own mistake. Actually the bunnies pulled a “propeller plant” off the wall and destroyed that, as well as a “lobster claw” which was also apparently too tasy to resist, so they’re not as cute and innocent as I like to think. Maybe I’ll just accept that and reconsider my succulent vetting process to include ‘easy to overwinter’, ‘thrives on neglect’, and ‘is not yummy for bunnies’ and move on. Trust me that any roadblock to the succulent collection growing is probably a good thing, especially when fall turns to winter and all those clay pots need lugging in.

Further down the wall. It doesn’t look too bad until you do a pot count, and it’s pretty much every last terracotta pot I own so another roadblock I set up is ‘no more terracotta pots’… unless it’s a really good sale… or they’re free… or it’s a really amazing pot…

Maybe you noticed the tiger lilies back past the succulent wall? They’re the double kind (Lilium lancifolium ‘Flore Pleno”) and I suppose I do like them in spite of their messiness, but what I don’t like is the arrival of those bright red lily beetles which eat more lily foliage than they should and produce entirely disgusting young who hide underneath a slimy, wet, bubble of poop as they also overeat their share of lily foliage. Because of the lily beetles I’m phasing out some of the clumps and trying to figure out which ones I can’t live without, and so far it’s the Asiatics, Martagon, and a few of the Regal lilies… only because they don’t handle late freezes well and have died back two of the last five years.

Lilium lancifolium ‘Flore Pleno’ spreading quite well in spite of the beetles and a good amount of shade.

Speaking of supporting more wildlife than I’d like, our ‘Liberty’ apple tree has set a decent crop of fruit this year and just about everyone seems to want a taste. When people ask questions like what to plant for wildlife I always think of things like apple trees, which seem to be under attack from every insect, disease, bird, mammal… it’s amazing they can survive from one year to the next. I wanted to try one though, and in an effort towards compromise chose a variety which was supposed to give the gardener “Freedom” from endless fussing and spraying. I guess nothing but bad taste will keep the animals away, but I think my photo does a good job at representing the cost of freedom.

Not spraying or putting in much effort at all does not produce the best foliage or fruit on an apple tree. How do they say it? Freedom does not come free? Definitely true in the case of this tree, but I think I’m fine with a handful of wormy apples to cut up and eaten outside versus bushels of fruit to deal with.

With an image of a diseased, nearly leafless apple tree I guess it’s not a stretch to go back behind the potager into the waste area. The grass which was seeded for new paths is coming up but only the weeds in the grass need mowing since for some reason the microgreens of the lawn are just one more thing which the rabbits cannot resist. They mow down the grass and leave the weeds. This isn’t how it was supposed to work but whatever, most of the weeds are Verbena seedlings and recent studies have shown there’s a 99.9% chance the gardener would rather have impassable paths of flowering verbena than neat grass.

Entering the waste space. Yeah that sunflower also came up where the path is supposed to be…

Change in plan is more the rule than the exception here, so besides grass paths turning into verbena fields you may recall there was a $3 box of canary seed thrown around back here in order to start a millet patch. Apparently what looked like millet wasn’t actually all millet and when some cabbagey stuff started growing I did some investigating and found out canola is also a seed birds will eat… and if anyone actually read the label they’d see canola right there after millet. So now there’s a millet and cannola patch in the waste space. Two fun facts I discovered about canola when I did my after-the-fact investigating were that 1. ‘Canola’ is short for ‘Canada oil, low acid’, a relatively recent Canadian plant creation of low acid rapeseed which became suitable for edible oil uses rather than industrial, and 2. Canola greens are much sought after by deer… which does not help at all as far as making my yard less-deer friendly.

The waste space has filled in quite quickly with weeds, canola, and millet, plus a bunch of barrow fulls of yard waste which were easier to dump here than on the compost pile. I guess it’s all about bringing life to the sterile fill, and sometimes life is messy.

So here I am talking about growing weeds intentionally again when I really should focus on my garden-rebuilding. Someday I’ll get it. Maybe. At least the waste area takes care of itself, which allows me to return to stone moving and construction repairs. Finally the pond area has been cleaned out, the path behind it returned to passable, and all those stones picked out of the earth-moving process are being put to use… for better or worse…

Shoddily stacked garbage stones line the arc of the curve which will take a grass path around the side of the new addition. I think it looks good enough and hopefully the freeze and thaws of winter don’t rip it apart before it has a chance to settle. More larger stones would have made it more weather-stable I think but you get what you get.

My fingertips are aching from all the stone grabbing and wedging and twisting and I’m glad to say the wall is as done as it’s going to get and only about ten stones remained as extras. These walls soak up a lot of rock so hopefully I have enough left for a few more questionably interesting constructions around the yard 😉

The back deck refuge from it all. I try to give the pots a little liquid feed once a week (and I never manage to keep to that schedule) but other than feeding, the drip lines and a timer take care of all the watering and leave me with nothing more to do than a little puttering when everything else seems like so much work.

I feel like I should be further along with everything but now that we’re into August I’m declaring a pause on projects and a rescheduling of fun. A few gardens have been visited, children have enjoyed day-trips, some lazy pool days are scheduled, and tomorrow myself and my plant squad (or more officially the Plant Posse… a possibly eye-rolling name given by a member’s daughter) are off for a day at Longwood. Severe weather alerts blanket our travel zone for the day but thoughts and prayers will guide us, and hopefully between the four of us the more reasonable will herd us out of the way of tornados, find shelter from strong winds, and a safe spot against hail, lightning , and thunder! Any day with the Posse is usually an adventure 😉

Hope you have a great week with an aggressive scheduling of fun!

Of Waste Places

Jul9

I remember seeing an exciting new bird the second summer after moving here. It was an Indigo Bunting, and the all-blue plumage on a blackbird sized bird in the back of the yard was quite the sight in my young garden. Surely this was a sign that all kinds of wonderful new things would be showing up as the garden grew and developed, and not just people but also wildlife would appreciate my masterpiece. I rushed inside and grabbed my bird book (this would be 15 years ago when books and paper and such were still a thing), and when I found the entry for my new friend it was the phrase “of waste places” which really stood out. Waste places! It’s a good thing that wasn’t the day I named the gardens or this blog, because I’d probably reconsider or regret it some days, but it was a good reality check on my gardening ambitions.

The rains have returned and the lawn is again in need of mowing, but the borders are still sparse owing to the dry May and the resulting lack of self-sown treasures or motivated planting.

In the between years the garden has filled in more but I have yet to see a second bunting, and that’s a relief as far as creating a ‘waste place’, but somewhat sad since Indigo Buntings are quite cool. In hindsight when it happened they had just recently bulldozed down the woodland and shalebanks behind us for the industrial park, and I suspect the acres of weedy and seedy re-growth had more to do with luring in new birds, but to this day I sometimes look around and think ‘what a waste place’.

Maybe a waste place, but at least a boldly colored one with the bright red of crocosmia ‘Lucifer’.

Actually it’s not that bad since the rains came back. Things are growing again and since someone mentioned daylilies let me start with those 😉

Daylily ‘Brookside Sparkle’, a souvenir from one of last summer’s daylily farm visits, and so much better than a t-shirt.

The daylily farm is doing well but ten out of ten people have suggested that I make it bigger, even if the suggestion was more of a nod when I said I was planning to make it bigger… and it was more like one person and not ten, but statistically that’s 100% of the people surveyed and why bother doing customer research if you’re going to ignore it? To that end I have budgeted $60 to buy more daylilies this summer, and also as any wise investor will do I’ve taken inflation into consideration and will be willing to raise that limit to $75 if things go that way. Now I just have to pickaxe a few new planting beds.

I’m committing to no more heavy equipment in the yard and will finally level and plant this access area by the street. It needs to be lowered a few inches and dug up for compaction and rocks… and about 25 square feet of concrete I uncovered for which I’ll need to drag out the jackhammer again…

So dirt moving and daylilies. That seems to be the theme for 2023 and I hope you can see a little progress in the next few photos.

Along the side of the house the grade was brought down a few inches, leveled, rocks were dug and finally, now that it looks like rain might be a thing again, a grass path has been seeded between a new bed and the old cholchicum bed which runs alongside the house foundation. The daylily farm is visible on the right… isn’t it beautiful?

Nearly all the tons of soil alongside the new addition have been wheel-barrowed to the low spots behind the potager in the back of the yard. Many rocks have been uncovered, some barely movable but mostly small, and these will go into lining the path of grass which will be seeded and extend down to the back of the house. As you can see the house foundation is still waiting for the masonary fund to mature, and might have to wait a year or two especially if the daylily fund keeps taking precedence.

Excavation piles are finally gone, and you can again see through to the pond and potager. One last section of soil to move, and then it’s on to wall building, final grading, and then grass-path seeding. The area in front is the already-seeded path which runs alongside the house.

Seeing the garden slowly uncover has been a relief, and each new section replanted has been one less weedy mess to ignore on the daily garden tours, but the real excitement has been seeing the level areas beyond the potager grow wider and wider each week. There is grass coming up on the new paths and whenever I get a minute in my mind I’m planting and replanting the open sections of the new flatlands. One day it’s filled with pumpkins, the next it’s daylilies, then tulips, then daffodils, then a new greenhouse, then a snowdrop farm… I think you get the idea, but right now it’s sterile, rocky, dries-like-concrete fill and even in my most optimistic minute I know I don’t have the time or energy to do anything with it this year, so I’ve decided it’s going to be my new waste place.

To shade and hold a bit of moisture in the “soil” I’ve started throwing weeds down and any other trimmings and organic material that usually gets thrown in the compost. I’m letting weeds come up. I’ll probably let them go to seed and then regret it when I have even more weeds, but whatever. I’m hoping the birds and other wildlife will like it, and to help that along I picked up a $3 box of finch and canary seed from the petstore to throw around. It’s basically pure millet and I think the sparrows and doves will enjoy it if they mature into a seedy mess, and hopefully I don’t regret a millet field in the back of my yard…. and now with that in print I’m thinking I should have at least looked up what millet looks like or done any kind of research, but…

My better half asked what the plan is for this back area. I thought it better to say ‘I’m not sure’ rather than explain how it was to become a ‘waste place’.

So we will see where this ends up. The birds and rabbits seem quite pleased by the general weediness of the yard, and I’ve never seen quite the procession of baby rabbits coming out of the flower beds as I have this year, but there has been one uninvited guest who I do not appreciate.

Deer tracks in some of the freshly leveled soil of the back 40

There is a single deer who has begun to make a habit of visiting the garden. One deer who has walked through perhaps four times and I’m already nearly apoplectic over the damage and I can’t imaging people suffering through local deer herds in their neighborhood. I thought our visitor was a large doe with a fawn hidden nearby, but Friday afternoon showed it to be a he as the nubs of developing antlers were visible when chasing him out of the yard. Maybe I can convince one of my friends that begonias and geranium adds a special flavor to the sausage, and one of them will be willing to stake out my yard come November… assuming I can make it that long… but in the meantime a minefield of fencing seems to be entertaining him, even if not really slowing him down.

Something random. My first flower on this cobra lily (Aarisaema fargesii) and it has a cool way to it, but I still think it’s the tropical foliage that impressed me more.

Typical. He plants for wildlife and then gets upset when wildlife shows up. Maybe all the digging is going to my head, as well as the heat and humidity, so today’s day of rest is probably a good thing.

Hope you have a great week.

A Week of Flowers-Day 5

Dec4

I’m taking it easy on day five of Cathy’s Week of Flowers celebration. I guess I don’t party like I used to. Today with a single photo I’m celebrating the heat of late July and the entire month of August, and the hot red flowers of Lobelia cardinalis. This moisture loving North American native plant finally settled in just off the back porch in a somewhat shaded and often damp corner of the house. While the cardinal flowers are in bloom, hummingbirds run a near constant turf war with guards and hit and runs and and the constant chatter of chases and aerial combat. A gardener who sits nearby to enjoy the shelter and shade is guaranteed a face-to-face barrage of insults from some tiny hovering pint-sized fighter pilot. Hummingbirds seem so tiny and cute, but in reality they’re little flying honey badgers.

Cardinal flower filling the end of the shade garden.

Hope you are enjoying your weekend, it’s a beautifully sunny morning here and although it’s also on the cold side, the rest of the week looks tolerable… and by tolerable I mean good shipping weather for a little box of succulents…

Merry Christmas to me!

Planned Surprises

Aug23

Saturday I suddenly found myself on the road to Ithaca NY. It’s about a two hour drive from here and of course I have better things to do locally but wanted to see a few friends, and you know… there was a plant sale. Just a small thing done among members of the Adirondack chapter of the North American Rock Garden Society, but they have some pretty cool plants and for just two or three dollars a piece all the plants (donated out of member gardens) find a new home that morning. Of course I was more than happy to help out, and a couple alliums, ferns and a violet are now here in Pa with me and even better, all the extra daffodils I dug this summer are GONE… or at least most of them. Stupid me thinks I should replant some of the smallest ones to give them a chance to grow out so they won’t be too small to give away? Don’t ask. My accounting brilliance is matched only by my business sense.

Cornell Botanic Gardens. It was nice to stop into a garden which I’m guessing has a couple feet of topsoil, annual mulches of compost, and just the right amount of watering to grow sickeningly well. Here’s Hydrangea cumulonimbus mocking the approaching storm clouds.

The plant sale was followed by a luncheon and I just want to say that in between garden talk there was an invite to a garden which I really wanted to see, but I actually opted out of going. Weird, right? I think it was a combo of poor sleep, impending bad weather, and an overall end-of-summer-I’m-sick-of-drought-my-garden-is-a-disaster malaise. In hindsight I wish I’d gone, but at that moment I just wasn’t up to being social any longer so passed. That was an actual unplanned surprise, since on the way up I had a conscious thought of the possibility of being invited somewhere, and how excellent that would be. I hope I’m not actually getting old(er)!

I found this sedge to be far cooler than you would imagine a sedge could be. Carex muskingumensis ‘Little Midge’ I believe, even though the label said ‘Little Midget’ which would also be fitting. Quite the geometry on this little guy.

Apparently I was still young enough to add one side trip to the trip by pulling into the parking lot of the Cornell Botanical Gardens. I did want to see how their tropical plantings were coming along, but then surprised myself by liking the shade plantings even more.

Mukdenia rossii ‘Crimson Fans’. Seeing this was a first for me, and I always thought the red color was an autumnal, perfect storm, enhanced for catalogs, color effect, but here it is in late August doing its bright crimson thing as if it’s no big deal. Very nice!

And then it was back home. I pulled in at a suitably responsible and mature arrival time of 6pm, just in time to enjoy the evening light on the Lycoris. If you want to talk about surprises the fact any of these are blooming would be the premier surprise since they did not look all that happy this spring, and baked-clay dry summers are not supposed to encourage good bloom with these temperamental divas.

The most common surprise lily, or Nekkid lady (Lycoris x squamigera), is blooming more than it’s ever bloomed before. I heard they like derelict, neglected properties so perhaps the random construction debris and bits of trash I’ve thrown here are the secret to a good show.

There’s actually a second magic lily surprising me this year. I thought I was successfully killing off most of my plantings, but suddenly there’s an almost clump of Lycoris x incarnata flower stalks poking up between the squash leaves. If only I knew what went right with this spot I’d repeat it with the other bulbs growing just inches away but worlds apart in flowering-power… as in they’re not flowering at all… Perhaps they’ll also surprise me but I doubt it. Someone might have already poked around and found several have lost their roots to some kind of rot, and even though they’re sometimes called magic lilies, I think a miracle is closer to what we need.

Lycoris x incarnata, aka the peppermint spider lily, is a hybrid of two other Lycoris species. There are other forms, but this striped version is one of the more common garden forms. I think it’s quite awesome this year.

These two Lycoris and a few others are the cold-hardy members of a bigger family of bulbs which do well in the warmer Southern states and aren’t all that uncommon down there. Sadly they’re not hardy enough for this garden, but of course since I’m doing so well with the other ones, I also thought I’d try a few of the more tender types such as L. radiata, the red hurricane lily. With a bar already set so low by their cousins, it’s not hard to imagine that just the fact they’re still alive counts as a fabulous success.

Other not-cold-hardy things filling space on the sand terrace. With a timed drip irrigation system this at least is one part of the garden not miserable for rain.

I’ll take whatever fabulous successes I can get. Today it rained, and although the 0.06″ is not the 0.50″ forecast, it should green up the crabgrass a bit and at least give me a day off from watering… assuming I still even water. This weekend I almost moved from ‘trying to get a few things through’ to ‘maybe save a few perennials and shrubs so they come back next year’. That’s basically giving up for the year, and with school ramping up again, and construction crawling along, and with money evaporating faster than the rain, it’s never sounded better… until you consider the alternatives. Being stuck in front of the tv from now until snowdrop season or taking up a trowel and helping tile, or sitting through an entire football game? I think even a bad day of looking at weeds and wilted plants has its bright spots and I think I can do it for a few more days. Lycoris season is always full of surprises, and even if the surprise is in how disappointing they can be, the colchicums will be here soon and I can always count on them.

Have a great week, and may your garden get all the rain it needs 😉

Still Going…

Aug17

That last rain really tricked me. It tricked the lawn as well, a green shimmer appeared and of course I thought it would be extremely generous to run the mower over to pick up some of the dead leaves and trash and then spray some liquid feed. Silly me. The rains stopped and things are back to wilting, and I’m back to watering, but at least it’s been cool the last few days as a respite to our usual baking.

Slowly the Japanese morning glories are coming into bloom. Ipomoea nils ‘Fuji no Murasaki’ is amazing and hasn’t been as invasive a seeder as other morning glories tend to be… unless you’re someone I gave seeds to and recently cursed me for giving you such a weed… so your results may vary.

Despite the return to dry, it’s still not as bad as it was, and still not as brutal as it could be. I think I just like complaining, plus on top of that it’s just boring. Super boring since just about everything is just sitting there waiting for water. There are three things though, which could count as somewhat interesting. First are the container plantings, which thanks to the drip irrigation are doing fairly well… in spite of a haphazard fertilization schedule, and the second is the patch of cardinal flower (Lobelia cardinalis) which looks great, but causes nonstop hummingbird conflict as one sneaks in for a sip just as another one or two come down in a screeching dive bomb to fight them off. People love hummingbirds but all I see are little featherpuffs of rage, and when one comes up and gives me the hovering stare-down of death for sitting too close to their lunch, I stare right back… but don’t dare say a word lest it triggers a torrent of anger from the little monster.

The Lobelia cardinalis does really well here in the shade of the house, far enough away from the life-sucking red maple roots. I did water a bit but not as much as you’d think.

So that’s two things, and for the third I’ll nominate the paniculata hydrangeas. They get a drink of water once things get bad enough to wilt, but other than that they just look awesome and make me seem like a gardening genius. Never mind the zinnias which are struggling and the surprise lilies which only surprise me by not dying, these hydrangeas are full of fat, fresh, flower-packed trusses of bloom.

The worst of the dried up rudbeckia triloba has been cropped out, leaving only the joy of budding hydrangea blooms. ‘Limelight’ is in the background, this is just a seedling which somehow managed to evade my super vigilant weeding long enough to look like something.

I’m considering adding a variety which fades to pink. ‘Vanilla Strawberry’ was in here but had to be moved for the construction, and for some reason I didn’t like the way it looked around ‘Limelight’ anyway. The pure white of V. Strawberry seemed just too white for all the yellows and chartreuse and then it was in a bad spot anyway, where the heat and dry would brown the blooms, rather than let them go pink. It’s been replanted next door and to be honest I want it back even if it doesn’t fit in. Maybe I’ll take some cuttings today, my mother in law loves it so there’s no way I’m getting the original plant back.

Limelight in the back yard around the potager. Obviously the phlox which was supposed to be moved years ago is still there and still doesn’t look nice alongside the hydrangea, but at least the boxwood is on its way to recovery after last winter’s run in with the bulldozer.

So three things are ignoring the dry and marching right through August in beautiful shape. There are more bits and pieces looking good but as I said they’re mostly waiting for rain and I also just like to complain. Now for example I shall complain that the dentist’s office still hasn’t called back to schedule my root canal and the gray skies have not produced anything more than a sneeze of useless mist. Oh well.

Have a great week regardless. These will be the sweet memories that come up in February when the only thing growing are the icicles off the gutter.

Well that Sure Escalated…

Aug2

Sometimes I’m stubborn and set in my ways, determined to make something work and prove I’m right. Other times I can turn on dot, easily distracted and influenced, and just one idea can derail an entire plan. About three weeks ago I went to a daylily farm, and even talked to a daylily breeder. I bought one. I went to another farm. suddenly I found myself going back to the first farm and getting a few more and now suddenly I like daylilies. Hmmmm… did not see that coming…

Some Brookside daylilies which have been added to the garden. It’s nice to have something green in the yard.

My mother might point out that at one point, maybe thirty years ago, someone planted dozens of daylilies alongside the garage and some of those clumps still remain today, but that was a long time ago. I thought we were past that.

The front border still looking a bit fried. Recent rains have greened up some of the lawn weeds, but only the rose of Sharon (Hibiscus syriacus) looks completely unbothered by the dry weather.

I guess not. Plenty of good people like daylilies, so what’s the harm in adding a few? With the garden still a depressing shade of sun-faded khaki anything which can shrug off the dry heat can only be a good thing.

Purple gomphrena and angelonia don’t mind the heat, but do need regular watering to keep this fresh and bright. I think it’s worth it.

No one even noticed a few new daylilies, but they did notice the water bill jumping up last month. I admitted that maybe it was the garden causing this, but also pointed out the garden-fresh vegetables were surely worth it. Fifty dollars for a couple zucchini and some lettuce, thankfully there was no cost to benefits analysis done to double check my logic.

Regular watering helped stave off the worst of the baking in this end of the front border, but even without watering I suspect ‘Blue Yonder’ agapanthus would still look unbothered. I’m so glad the bulldozer missed this one, although my seedlings and several other things in this bed were lost.

Triage by watering hose was saving a few things but fortunately I went and scheduled a camping trip for last week, and this brought in a nice storm which actually soaked in a little.

Cestrum is remarkably easy from seed and only grew faster in the heat. At first I was underwhelmed by the small lemony flowers of the first seedling (in my hand), but a couple weeks later, other seedlings began to open up larger orange flowers, similar to their ‘Orange Peel’ mother, and it was all good.

A nice soak, cooler temperatures, and then another surprise shower this past weekend have made all the difference in the garden. No more wilted plants making me feel guilty at every turn and the lawn even has a green haze to it, although it will still be a while before I need to fire up the lawnmower again. I think this just-in-time rain will also help the little tree frog tadpoles immensely. They’re just starting to sprout legs and leave the pond, and I don’t think venturing out into a desert would have been the best thing for my little babies.

There’s a big range to the tadpoles with some already out and about, others well into leg-growing, and a couple still just fat little polliwogs.

I’ve been coming across baby tree frogs in a few spots around the garden. Unlike the gray adults, the babies are a bright green with a dark mask around their eyes.

Baby gray tree frogs (Hyla versicolor) have a leafy green color while the adults take on more of a bark/lichen gray color.

My fingers are crossed that a good number of them make it.

Even the frogs like the new daylilies.

New daylilies, baby frogs, and a decent rain. It’s not perfect but it’s a good position to be in for the first week of August, and as long as no one asks how the construction is going I think it’s still better than a cold day in January.

Have a great week!

Garbage Day

Jul18

So it’s been hot and hasn’t rained more than half an inch here in the last three weeks. My “garden” has always been a little more interesting than it is beautiful, and now with things wilting and dying left and right, on top of the construction debris and damage, my yard has officially entered the trash stage. Visiting several beautiful gardens last weekend, filled with lush goodies, all artfully combined and arranged was a nice exercise, but did not help my opinion at all so earlier last week I decided to rip half of it out, mulch most of it, and try to save a few bits through the daily triage of going plant to plant with a water hose.

Lawn is not drought tolerant but rudbeckia and a few other things are. At least not everything is brown.

Maybe we’ll get lucky tonight and the storms rolling through will drop some moisture, but it’s going to take a couple days straight to get anything into the hard-baked soil and that’s not going to happen. Also the next week’s forecast is full of 90’s (32+C) so any rain tonight is more a teaser than relief.

With half the plants now ripped out, and a couple days of standing around with a water hose under my belt, the front border no longer shouts ‘save me!’ and instead just looks hot.

So plenty of people have it worse, and some people always have it worse, so please don’t feel the need to be nice and sympathetic when this kind of summer really isn’t that out of the ordinary for us. There’s still plenty of recyclables in this trash pile, and always a few treasures to pick out, such as the orien-pet lily ‘Conca d’Or which dominates the front border this week. I love everything about it this year, it’s huge, fragrant, creamy lemony, and as solid as a tree.

‘Conca d’Or’, perovskia, and some ‘Karl Foerster’ feather reed grass doing just fine under the triage of ‘just in time’ watering.

Now faced with a garden of mostly trash, more garden visits sounds like a good idea, right? I think so, but little did I know how dangerous they can be. Some friends and I traveled up into the far reaches of Northeastern Pennsylvania this weekend to visit a daylily farm and it was a bad thing…

A perfect, Idyllic, country view of the daylily sales-field at Lambertson’s Daylilies. Mark it with a flag, pay, they’ll dig it and it’s yours… what a deadly temptation!

I’m not above taking one for the team, so when a visit to Lambertson’s Daylilys came up in conversation, I of course politely agreed. “You hate daylilies” was mentioned, and that’s kind of extreme, but I can be nice and keep my thoughts to myself when opinions vary… and try not to relentlessly steamroll people with my beliefs and opinions just like all adults should… but I’m digressing… we met for breakfast and all of us headed out for a day at the farm.

Some of the display beds coming into bloom around the house. No trash here!

I bought one. It’s planted and gets checked way too much each morning. Today I cross-pollinated a few flowers and I’m already thinking about going back to see about picking another one… or possibly two… dammit…

The mother in law’s garden bed and it also looks very non-trash. I guess I’ll have to swipe a bit of this one and add it to my new daylily adventure.

When I returned home (filled with delicious ice cream because of course we had enough sense to stop at a dairy while in farm country) I put a critical eye towards the depressingly stunted tropical garden. A daylily would look good in there.

Even with watering there’s little hope for this year’s tropical garden. I’m far too lazy and cheap to water properly and the cannas are knee-high rather than chest height.

Seriously. It’s the perfect spot for a daylily patch… bed… border… growing field 😉 The peak bloom will match pool season, and that’s when this sidewalk gets nearly all its traffic.

My selection out of the farm’s seedling patch. At Lambertson’s the seedlings grow for a number of years, the under performers are culled out and most of the good ones are just sold as un-named seedlings.

Tree lilies, daylilies… I’m sensing a theme for easing the pain of a better-for-the-pool-than-the-garden summer. Waterlilies fit right into that.

The pond is thick with debris and whatever else washes in off the construction site, but the pink water lily has never grown as lush before. The tadpoles are also doing well, and I guess a dirty pond is still better than no pond.

So it’s not all bad, unless you judge me for finally falling into the daylily trap. I was doing so good… in 20 years I think I never went over a total of five daylily plants, and no one needs to know about the other 30 years of my life and the rows of daylilies that still grow at my parent’s house. I had put that behind me.

Not daylilies, just a couple hundred bricks which I chipped the mortar off and neatly stacked so that they can sit here for decades until I finally get around to doing something with them. In the meantime I’ve camouflaged them with potted plants which I couldn’t be bothered to bring up onto the deck.

It’s just one daylily. Maybe it’s just the dry weather and heat that are getting to me. Luckily plants other than lilies are still chugging along and even enjoying the weather. All those geranium (pelargonium) cuttings from the winter garden are loving the dry, sunny days, and were a nice, cheap way to fill a bunch of planters.

Maybe a few too many geraniums on the deck.

Another potted plant which has surprised me are the rhodohypoxis bulbs. They’ve been blooming for over a month and I didn’t expect that at all. In fact they’ve grown so well I might need to divide them soon, and don’t know if now or next spring would be the better time.

Some of the rhodohypoxis pots still doing well. The large-flowered, pale pink ‘Pintado’ is by far my favorite.

Maybe I mentioned one other bulb which wasn’t doing as well as the rhodohypoxis (actually both are classified as corms, and not really bulbs). Last winter I lost about half of the caladiums I was so excited about last year summer, but that doesn’t mean the ones which made it are pitiful. A couple are awesome again, and since many are of the same sort I’ll be referring to them as some of the idiot-proof cultivars and think twice about trying new ones this year. -which is something I decided last night after closing an online order which was soooo tempting until I thought about the daylilies again-

A few caladiums coming back to life now that temperatures have warmed. I think a cold, wet spell last fall did a few of the others in, as well as not hot enough weather in June.

So that’s what’s been going on here for the last couple weeks. It’s not bad at all but the garden really is trash, and only close editing and avoiding the majority of the yard has saved this post from becoming a complete downer. There’s a new daylily though, and the pool is always refreshing, but don’t bother asking how the construction is going, and just for reference it’s midnight and the possibility for a good rain is dwindling with each hour.

All the best for those in really hot and dry weather patterns, and I hope you still all have a great week. There’s always ice cream.

Independence Day

Jul4

It’s the Fourth of July here in the US, Independence Day, and long story short we have taxation WITH representation now rather than without. That appears to matter to 50-60% of eligible voters in a presidential election year but drops to only about 40% in midterm elections, so maybe it was more of a cool slogan than a real sentiment, but whatever… Happy Fourth!

The front porch is suitably patriotic for the season with a bit of streptocarpella in the hanging baskets this year.

Barbecue and fireworks are the real tradition these days, and here in PA the grilling we do would probably mortally wound any barbecuing Southerner, but we try. There will be plenty of over-eating regardless and the fireworks will be covered as well, although with the dry weather our home will be sticking to floral fireworks instead.

The first of the red hot pokers(Kniphofia) are firing up and they’re a favorite of mine. The newer selected forms have a longer bloom season and rebloom as well so that’s a win-win over the flash in a pan older versions.

Were it not for the entire spring being spent picking rocks and hauling stone, there’s a good chance the gardener would have divided and spread more pokers around the garden… but… there’s always next year 😉

A slightly less-weedy garden border. To be honest much of the plantings are self sown so maybe it would be no loss to pull much of it out and spread more pokers around! I’m sure everything else would return anyway, and in less time than I’d like to admit.

So fireworks and food. This year for the first time ever I’m neck and neck with the robins in the race to get blueberries. I think because it’s been dry the robins have moved to wetter gardens, and the lazy young robins which enjoy sitting in a blueberry bush all day, napping, eating, napping, have moved out with them.

There’s about a pint of blueberries sitting on the counter waiting to transform into a nice pancake or muffin, and it looks like we have enough for a couple more pickings.

Fireworks, food, and fragrance. The last few weeks the back garden has been filled with the fragrance of the little leaf linden (Tilia) and the buzz of the thousands of bees and beetles and bugs which swarm to the tree, but this week it’s all the regal lilies (Lilium regale). A warm, muggy evening spent watering the potager vegetables and enjoying the scent of the lilies is not a bad way to spend a holiday weekend.

Regal lilies are easy from seed. They’re easy in general, just keep an eye on them for the bright red lily beetles which have finally made their way here and become a problem in my garden.

…and don’t forget the ‘Don’t tread on me’ part of Independence day. This spring I noticed that as the garden fills and matures I’m less likely to allow the same weeds which I used to ignore. I realized this while pulling a couple bull thistle(Cirsium vulgare) seedlings which aren’t really a problem here but aren’t really that nice to bump into while “weeding” other things. Maybe my garden is becoming more civilized, and these armed plants which used to be just fine in the wild-West of my garden’s early days just aren’t safe to have as plantings pack in and mature. Today I permit a few fancy thistles armed with open spines in the main beds, and regulate some stinging nettles with their concealed weapons in the back end of the yard, and altogether it’s a much safer world. What a concept.

The woolly thistle (Cirsium eriophorum) even has purple tips on the spines and a fuzzy fluff! You really need a little training and have to know what you’re doing before you play around with this plant, but it’s still worth keeping around.

So there you have it. Food, fireworks, fragrance, and some independence. I hope you have an excellent summer week and if you’re off for the Monday, please enjoy 🙂

A Morning Stroll

Aug11

We had a decent morning last weekend and I was sore enough from digging a new bed and moving sand (don’t ask, I know I have plenty of beds) that I didn’t feel like doing anything more strenuous than taking a few pictures. Actually I did attempt to figure out a few camera settings, but it was a complete disaster so back to ‘automatic’ it went, and gosh what a relief to again embrace the idiot settings.

Agastache ‘Tutti Frutti’ is probably what this lilac-purple agastache is, but I never expect them to live long enough to really be concerned about the name. I love that it has a nice height to it.

So other than an ego-crushing moment with the camera and a secret garden project that I’m still a little embarrassed to talk about, there’s really not much for me to ramble on about. Better to just ramble through the garden on a beautiful morning and share only the nicer parts 😉

Because of someone’s yellow foliage addiction, there’s way too much limey-yellow in the front border. Rather than stress over the addiction I’m just going to wait until rock-bottom hits and then see where the shovel is.

Of course a year without showing agapanthus ‘Blue Yonder’ is a lot to ask, so here it is. Next year I will have to learn about transplanting agapanthus since the encroaching spruce is much less mobile. Maybe I’ll even learn about dividing an agapanthus…

For some reason I had little interest in planting up the tropical garden this spring, so grass, yellow pokeweed, and self-sown sunflowers have been allowed to erupt into an eight foot mountain of lushness. I’m fine with that. I think the whole bed will be going to perennials over the next few years, but you never know.

A perennial sunflower? Yes, I think it’s Helianthus decapetalus ‘Capenoch Star’ which has been moping along here for the past ten years. Why it decided to look great this year is unknown, but it’s really taken its time!

Biscuit the yorkie accompanies me on all morning walks. The rabbits don’t seem 100% panicked, but they do run off at a somewhat concerned pace when this little beast comes barreling across the yard.

Biscuit has absolutely no interest in our pond frog but the frog seems even less concerned than the rabbits.

From the lawn you can see the deck plantings have filled in. I notice quite some yellow foliage again, but the pink mandevilla vine is what really stands out.

Towards the back of the yard the potager is looking neat, and from a distance the chaos inside isn’t as obvious.

One major disappointment in the potager this year are the ‘Bishop’s Children’ dahlias which were started from seed this March. I would demand a paternity test, because unless there’s a dumpy housemaid involved, these dahlias should be taller, single, darker foliaged and hotter colors than they are. I’ve been wanting to grow these for years… I finally ordered the seed…

Some of the potager is respectably planted with vegetables. There are beans weakly climbing their poles, borer infested squash, bolting parsley, and undernourished tomatoes, all providing a good cover for a gardener trying to appear serious about tending the earth for the nourishment of his family.

One success has been the cabbage harvest. The harvested stumps of last year’s plants re-sprouted this spring and out of curiosity I let them grow. The sprouts were thinned to a single plant and to my surprise all of them are making perfect cabbages. Here the center cabbage has already been harvested and the new plan is to thin the latest sprouts and hope for a third harvest.

Castor beans are quite toxic and not good potager plants, but here’s ‘Carmencita’ flowering and looking awesome anyway.

Behind the potager is quite possibly my favorite spot in the yard, the meadow garden. This year Queen Anne’s Lace (Daucus carota) is defying my no QAL policy and making a nice forest of white lace above the golden rudbeckia and birds foot trefoil. I think I will pull them soon. That’s a lot of seed.

I don’t know why I’m bothering you with a view of the berm other than it’s weed whacked… except for some weedy asters which I like… and now sports an odd ledge which I felt the need to carve into the berm. fyi it’s just the right width for a boy and his dog as they walk the perimeter of the estate.

The first magic lilies (Lycoris squamigera) are opening. They are a funny group of plants and I’m really getting a good chuckle over how I thought they would grow well here and now they’re not. Hahaha, good one. I could fill another whole blog post with all the pictures of the other ones which aren’t flowering this year, including the new ones which I had faint hopes for flowers, but nah…

Maybe the Lycoris were talking to the cardinal flowers (Lobelia cardinalis) and realized they’d have quite some trouble competing with this show. They’re awesome this year 🙂 **hint** just put in a new path and they’ll sprout throughout the joints, rather than bother growing in the amended soil where they’re planted…

And that brings us around to the far side of the house, leading to the front again. For those remotely interested, this side of the house is where the new bed is located, and the new bed has something to do with not having enough room for caladiums, even though that side of the house is really too sunny for caladiums. Don’t bother trying to make sense out of it, it just doesn’t, but I’m quite happy and don’t even care if I’ve gone too far again.

Hope you’re having a great week and staying safe from whatever plagues your neighborhood this week. Covid variants… smoke… wildfire… heat… upcoming hurricane seasons… it’s all so 2020 and I for one have just about had enough of it!

Back in Business

Aug5

It’s been almost two weeks since we came back from vacation and you’re about to hear something you don’t often hear on this blog. I was busy. Seriously. For about five days straight I put in a good four or five hours of work in, either here or in my Mother in Law’s yard. Back in the good old days work could have gone on from dawn to dusk, but today it’s a different story and that’s about as long as I want to work. Still it makes a huge difference.

The front border has loved all the rain. It would have been the ideal year to pull all the fennel and plant a mass of zinnias and cannas (as the plan was) but… there’s always something else.

Before you’re too impressed by this flurry of motivation I think it’s important to come clean on one of my fairly well-guarded secrets. Not really a secret I guess, but there’s a reason I can spend a bunch of hours in the garden, day after day, and still manage to get up and get going the next morning. I’m a high school science teacher, and with a summer vacation from the middle of June until late August I can still be fairly lazy even with a couple hours of breaking a sweat in the garden 😉

From the other end of the front border… at just the right angle… things look amazing. The main flush of summer color is beginning!

So now I hope the confession of my profession has not darkened your opinion of this blog or this gardener. It’s always a mix of reactions ranging from ‘you’ve got the life’ to ‘God bless you’ so I never know where people’s opinions lie until the truth is out. All I’m really sure of is that most of my powering away in the garden is probably a response to the hours I spend each morning working on a horrible class which I need to finish this summer. It’s really not that bad but in addition to being naturally lazy, I am also a terrible student with a passionate hatred towards online learning, and after nearly a year and a half of online learning I think my cup runneth over.

Gratuitous photo of a cardoon (Cynara cardunculus) flower. I love them, they’re stiff and spiny and of course stupid me needs to touch them nearly every day to get a painful reminder.

Enough whining, here’s an update on a slightly more in control potager, although slightly more in control is completely false. It’s weeded. There are a few vegetables, but most of the left side is a thicket of eight to nine foot tall persicaria and sunflowers. I have to duck and crawl to get through the paths but secretly I think it’s kind of awesome. The only down side is that the majority of the sunflowers are pollen free and as a result there has not been a good seed set. As I sit hidden in my potager thicket I can hear the goldfinches chattering their complaints as they pick and pick looking for some seed that has actually plumped up and been pollinated. Fortunately in the past few days I’ve noticed a few plants with pollen have opened their first blooms and that should be enough for the bees to spread around and get things going.

As usual the potager has become overrun with flowers, and the vegetables have become scarce. If anyone asks I just tell them the endless rain rotted things and if I’m lucky they accept that and pick up a few beans from the farmstand 🙂

A big part of the potager purge was removing old bloomed-out larkspur and poppy stalks, and all the other volunteers which were nice enough until they weren’t. Fortunately there’s always something else, and although the new phlox bed has become a complete failure, the old phlox bed is filled with the usual stars.

Phlox paniculata, Hydrangea ‘Limelight’ and some silly chrysanthemums who think August is an ok month to flower. Here the plan was remove phlox, plant hydrangeas… but as you can see I never got around to moving the phlox. Oh well.

I’m never sure just how much of my babbling is memorable, but just in case you missed me repeating myself the first twenty times, tall garden phlox (Phlox paniculata) are a favorite of mine.

A nice bright phlox seedling which I’ve already set aside because I like the color. Honestly, I don’t think I could rule out the possibility that some time in the future a whole section of the yard gets dug up just to plant phlox.

Although I do love phlox they don’t always feel the same way towards me. Last week I mentioned that the entire bed which I cleared out and devoted to a few favorites is today just a swirling vat of mildew and spider mites and whatever else likes to kill phlox. Some of the plants are literally about to die and it’s kind of embarrassing that a native Northeastern American wildflower can’t be bothered to grow here. Figures, since just yesterday I saw a beautiful clump of pale pink phlox growing inches away from a busy road and in the yard of a house which could have passed as abandoned but probably wasn’t. Maybe my phlox patch needs some road salt and the occasional roadkill thrown on… that’s an idea I guess.

Another phlox seedling similar to ‘Laura’ but another foot or two taller, and that’s ‘Blushing Shortwood’ behind and to the left. Blushing Shortwood is an excellent phlox btw 🙂

This week’s cooler temperatures has really brought out the color on the phlox, if you only consider the ones which haven’t decided to die yet. There’s a nice pink flush on some of the whites, the white center stars are bright and not faded away, and the stronger colors aren’t washed out by the heat. There’s also a good spicy fragrance to many of them.

One of my favorite phlox seedlings. I need a big patch of this one.

Now I’m really thinking about turning more lawn under to make room for a big phlox patch. I think I’d like that. A lot. Hmmmm. Unless they all decide they should die on me, but in that case I’d just plant daffodils between them. Rumor has it I already ordered more daffodils than I should have, so I’ll need the room anyway since my daffodil purchases were based on an assumption I would dig up and give away some of the too-many I already have. My bad.

Caladium update. I finished potting them up. I’m still obsessed.

I need to check myself. There are two new raspberry plants sitting out on the driveway, fresh off the clearance rack and waiting to start a raspberry patch goodness know where, but apparently in my garden even though I have no idea. All I know is I love raspberries just like I love phlox and caladiums and daffodils and hydrangeas and all the other stuff which always comes before there’s a plan. Maybe plans are overrated, and that’s just what I’m telling myself… mostly as an excuse since I also have a vague suspicion there are new snowdrops waiting to be planted. It’s been months since snowdrops have been mentioned here but sadly that obsession is still burning bright and you only have another two or three months before someone starts bringing that up again on a weekly basis.

All in good time. Hope your week is going well 🙂

sorta like suburbia

more than you ever wanted to know about my garden

Category Archives: summer