I know that you will see this before you get to the next entry, so this thought is a little out of order, but related.
I had the pleasure of working in the front garden yesterday. I decided to deadhead daffodils, and worked for an hour clipping them back. I need another hour. I think I might have gotten about half of them done. It was an incredibly prolific year for daffodils.
While I was there, I took the time to trim back the Russian sage, which has a nice start. I also pruned dead branches off the redbud, and cleared some weeds from the mulched bed. It’s VERY satisfying to know that so little effort can make such a difference in the appearance of the gardens.
Category Archives: In the Garden
Blogging in My Head
I’ve been blogging in my head for the last month, and almost every thought had to do with the spectacular Spring we have been experiencing. Starting at the end of March, we had a spate of warm weather that lead up to Easter. I was afraid that the daffodils, which had opened early in the warmth, would faint before my family could see their glory at Easter. Not only did they last, but more opened. This is the first time daffodil season and Easter Sunday have coincided, so that my extended family could see the display.
Thanks to a shift back to more seasonal weather, the daffodils hung on for weeks, joined about ten days ago by tulips. Each time I walk outside, I feel like the dog in the commercial who is tossed a doggie treat, and he floats into the air in happiness! I wiggle with pleasure at the beauty around me!
Dear Husband, wonderful man that he is, has slipped the rings over the peonies. They have responded to the warmth, and are easily 15 inches tall now. I plan to harvest some of the buds before they open and refrigerate them, so that I can enjoy peonies for weeks in flower arrangements.
I spent a couple of days working in the herb garden several weeks ago. I got in early to kill off thousands of feverfew starts that I didn’t want. That’s an incredibly prolific plant. If you don’t plan to make your own tinctures and teas, you might want to think twice about planting it. I cleared the walkway while I was at it, and put down Preen, but I should have watered the Preen in, and I can see that I have more volunteers to kill off.
When we visited with my youngest sis a week ago, we made our annual visit to her favorite nursery. I brought home a few plants that I hope to get in this week. I’ll have to wait on the basil, but the lavender can be planted now, and I think I might get away with the annual red fountain grass. It’s tender, but it will be planted next to a brick wall that should radiate heat during the night, and allow for the earlier planting.
I have spinach plants rising up through the dirt in the trial pot. I believe that I can start spinach fully eight weeks prior to our last frost date and have a viable crop. I have some in the bed now, and I’ll try to get another row in tomorrow. We’re having on-again off-again rain for several days, so I’ll have to run out between storms to get it planted.
I think this may be one of the best Springs that I can remember. The period from early April to late June is my favorite in the gardens. They have their best display, and I love the early bloomers. Iris are coming on strong, closely followed by lilies and day lilies. There’s something new blooming almost every week. I’ll try to be more vigilant with my camera so that you can see what’s sending me into raptures!
Happy Spring to you all!
Spring is ready to bloom
I can see daffodils just waiting for one slightly warmer day to burst into bloom! The daylilies are coming up nicely, as are the tulips. The crocus are still in bloom, but the cold, windy weather has been hard on them. Some of the larger ones have been blown over, or perhaps the raccoons have trampled them.
The chives have greened up and I can see starts of feverfew in the herb garden. The forsythia is taking on a golden hue. I hope to do a little trimming in the gardens next week. I need to cut down purple coneflower stems from last year, as well as chrysanthemums and verbena.
Wednesday afternoon I spent about 90 minutes raking gravel out of the lawn. Dear Husband had to plow the drive this winter and he managed to deposit a good portion of the drive on the lawn. We’ve both worked at this project off and on for a week or so. DH moves the heavier stuff, and then I come along with a leaf rake and get the finer pebbles. I’ve managed to thatch that portion of the lawn at the same time. We still have a bit to do, but I think we are two-thirds through the project. It will be time to sow some grass seed soon.
This weekend I plan to start my spinach test. I have conflicting information on how early to start spinach seed out of doors in my hardiness zone so I’m starting seed in large containers this week and next, and then in the raised veggie beds in three weeks. I should be able to get an idea what conditions will work for spinach seed starting, so that I can get an early crop started next year.
I’m going to see if I can buy some pansies to plant near the front door for Easter. We need a little color to welcome our guests, and they should be hardy enough to cope with the cool weather.
I hope you’re all getting the chance to get out and work in your gardens. I know it’s rushing the year a bit, but I have cabin fever, and really need to play in the dirt. Happy Spring to you all!
Crocus
Our chipmunk population has been redesigning our gardens. I have a wave of tiny purple crocus across the garden at the foot of the sidewalk. I was sure that I planted crocus closer to the front door! There’s still one gold crocus, and a white one, but these tiny purple ones are multiplying and making a pretty spring statement.
The iris seem happy with the weather. I see short leaves from all of them. I hope to do a major redesign of the sidewalk garden and I’ll be sorry to move all those iris. We haven’t recovered from the move of two years ago. I suppose that means that this would be the right time to make the adjustments.
I wish I could tell you that I had made good use of the 60 degree weather yesterday and today. Unfortunately, I’ve been chained to my desk this afternoon. I may go out for 30 minutes to rake the gravel off the front lawn. The chipmunks aren’t the only ones who have been redesigning here. Dear Husband relocated the lawn in four places when he plowed the driveway this winter, so we need to roll out the lawn and reseed. Too bad I can’t get the chipmunks to work with DH. 😉
Frost
Wednesday, I looked out the kitchen window and saw that my herb garden was covered with a hard frost. I thought, “That’s the end of the growing season!”
But, I was wrong. When the sun melted the frost away, many of the herbs perked up, and they are still growing. The parsley, in particular, seems to like to cold, but the oregano, thyme and sage are still growing.
I cut down the columnar basil last week. It’s pretty tender, and it doesn’t take much to end the basil’s growing season. I also cut down the lemon verbena, and let it dry inside. I pulled the leaves off to use as a room freshener. I grow lemon verbena as an annual here, but I understand that in the south the plant is perennial and gets quite large.
We have a few chores to do this weekend, and the grounds will be mostly ready for the winter. Dear Husband has covered the long driveway garden with leaves. I want to rake back the leaves on the peonies, cover them with compost and humus, and then recover them with leaves for the winter. I also need to spread straw over the ferns, and there’s a volunteer tree growing among the daylilies outside my office window that needs to be cut down.
This morning I will be going to services for the husband of a dear friend. Dorothy and Emil moved to Cincinnati when it became clear that Emil was developing Alzheimer’s. They wanted to be closer to their daughter, where they could ask for help, if needed. Emil has passed away, and Dorothy decided to have his service here, where they had made so many friends. This is a sad duty, one I feel I must do. I met Dorothy when she visited during the monthly Empty Nesters Sewing Circle Elegante Mother hosted. For EM, and for Dorothy, I’ll go and celebrate Emil’s life.
It’s Christmas!
I’m delighted to tell you that Christmas has arrived! I have a plant that we call a “Christmas Cactus.” My understanding is that it blooms these absolutely gorgeous blooms at Christmas.
Well, this plant is just a bit confused, and more so than usual. Normally it begins blooming late in November, sometimes in time for Thanksgiving. Then it blooms again, sometimes for Christmas, for Valentine’s Day, and for Easter. It’s covered with the palest fuchsia flowers. It looks a lot like this.
So, my plant is confused. Elegante Mother’s Christmas cactus is confused, too. Soon we’ll have a mass of hot orangey-red blooms open on her cactus. That MUST mean …. IT’S CHRISTMAS!!!!! Break out the mulled wine!
I Feel GREAAATTTT!!
Well, actually….I hurt like hell, but I’m delighted to have accomplished so very much today!
I started out early this morning trimming and pulling spent plants from the gardens leading to our front door. There’s a lot of work to do there to put the gardens to bed for the winter, and it was so nice today that I just kept working my way down the walk. Dear Husband came out about an hour later and started blowing the leaves into piles. I took a break and went back to it, and then we both stopped to have a sandwich.
After lunch, my stepson joined me in the gardens. We cut down the peonies and purple coneflower in the driveway gardens, and pulled the metal plant supports. He raked up the spent plants while I finished cutting down daylilies.
One of the big projects for today was to reorganize the garage for better storage, and cleaning the garage floor before we close up for winter. My stepson has recently purchased a motorcycle, and we’ve had to figure out how to squeeze everything in. I have eight pots of plants that I winter over in the unheated garage, set on a stack of styrofoam insullation. We reorganized garden equipment storage, and the recycling bins. Some things were thrown out, while others went down into the basement.
On paper it doesn’t sound like a lot, but it was six hours of constant work, and it clears the way for us to settle in for the winter. I’m just SO pleased that we got so much done. I still have a short list of things to do, but with Frankie’s help on the herb garden, and what we accomplished today, I can go into the holidays knowing that the grounds look tidy.
I need to have Dear Husband pick up a couple of bales of straw for me. I want to cover the ferns and daylilies. I need a couple of bags of compost. We covered peonies with dirt today. I’d like to top that off with compost to give them some organic food next spring.
So, this has been another of those “A day in the life of….” posts, but I can tell you that I FEEL GREAT!!! YEA! What a nice way to start November!
Ramblin
I have my annual Fall cold. I have been blaming my stepson for sharing his with me, but I discovered that my niece has the same cold, and she was with us for an afternoon. On top of that, I’ve been exposed to the swine flu, so I have spent the past two weeks pretty close to home. I chose not to go to exercise because I felt it would be wrong to share the swine flu with the senior citizens in the class. I hope to get back to exercise next week, before all my muscles turn to jello!
It’s supposed to be almost 70 degrees today. It’s sunny, and will be the last of the sunny days this week. We have rain forecast from this evening through Saturday. I should do a little work in the gardens, to move us through preparation for winter. My dear sis, Frankie, has done most of the work in the herb garden. I need to work at the front of the house, and in the long driveway gardens where the peonies grow.
Dear Husband was able to bring the boat home safely last weekend. Other than being swamped by a huge wave as he motored south to the yacht yard, it was a relatively uneventful trip. I suspect that he did better without my help than he does with it. He’s been offloading anything that would freeze, and winterizing the motor and bilges. Poor guy. Seven months and he’ll be back on the water!
Zucchini bread and pumpkin muffins are the only things I’ve baked so far. I’d like to make a carrot cake, and some pumpkin bread, and maybe some zucchini bread to freeze. I love the scent of fall seasonings. Cinnamon must be my all time favorite flavor!
I’ve managed to enter my Mother’s checkbook onto Quicken, but I realized yesterday that the program sees it as my property, rather than a separate account. I need to see if there is any way to sequester that data so that I can run reports, or I’ll have more work to do at tax time. Darn it all!
And that’s about all the news that’s fit to print. I hope you are all having a good Fall!
Fairy Godmother
My sister, Frankie, of Just My Opinion, is not happy to be just my sister. She has also applied to be my Fairy Godmother and I think she may beat out all the other contestants!
Last weekend, Frankie and her youngest daughter, our artist-in-training (AIT) came for a visit. It was MUCH too short, but they were able to arrive Friday night, and could stay until Sunday morning. Believe me, if you could see the Day-Timers for these two women, you would know how blessed I was to have even that much of their time.
I THOUGHT that the reason for this visit was to blitz the sewing of a new quilt top for Frankie. This summer she called me while she was standing in the midst of a fabric sale (be still my beating heart!) and asked me how much fabric she needed for a log cabin quilt. I was surprised to be able to give her any kind of sensible answer, but she seemed happy with my response, and brought the fabric to show, the next time she visited.
I’d cleared off the table in the quilt studio in preparation for cutting the strips. I thought we would start early Saturday morning and zip right through this to give her a completed top to take home. She had other ideas.
It was supposed to rain on Saturday. The clouds were out west, and I thought it would be rainy all Saturday. Frankie had mentioned that she wanted to help me clean up my gardens. It’s about a month too early to put them to bed for the winter, but they were looking pretty woolly, and needed attention. She decided that we needed to get out and put a couple of hours in before the rain came.
“But, the quilt…” “We’ll get to it.”
So, we put on our gardening clothes and gloves and trouped out. Frankie decided to start in the herb garden, which of all my gardens needed the most help. The herb garden sits to the north of the house, even with the kitchen. I can look out over it as I work at the sink. She asked me what could go, and what needed to be trimmed, and went off to collect her tools. She brought the entire compliment of loppers and rakes and hoes and shovels from home!
The area immediately to the east of the herb garden (on the north side of the garage) is rather like the poor relation in my yard. It really needs to be cleared, so that I can have a paved patio installed, but at the very least, I should put down landscaping paper and mulch or gravel. It was a mess of weeds and equipment, and it was driving me crazy.
While Frankie cleaned up my herb garden, I used the string trimmer to cut back all the weeds. Then, I moved three different sizes of Weber grills, the sieve I use when cleaning dirt from pots, the saw horses, and some potted plants onto the newly cleared area. (Frankie, I planted chrysanthemums in that little box at the front of the garage!)
The front of the house looks vastly improved, and so does that area north of the garage. But, the herb garden…….WOW! Frankie cleaned the walkways. ALL of the walkways! I tend to get one side or the other when I get to working on the garden, but she got the entire path! Even the little areas that lead to the lawn, where I traditionally heap up weeds waiting to be picked up! It looks astonishing! I know…a picture is worth a thousand words. I promise to take pictures and post them here.
Frankie cut back the rudbekia, and the oregano and the chives, and the lemon balm. She ripped out the spent basil plants, but had the sense to leave the lemon verbena and the columnar basil. We decided to leave the purple coneflower, which looks really untidy right now, but it feeds the finches, so it gets to stay another month. We both like the look of the lamb’s ears that has escaped the formal bed to grow in the walkway, so we agreed to leave those, too. It looks absolutely wonderful.
I should also sing the praises of AIT, who got out of bed to pick up loads of weeds and run them to the back in a wheelbarrow that had a tire going flat! She made things fly for us, and I can’t praise her enough for her part in all this.
We worked for close to four hours! I was really glad to “tweet” and call a halt. We were both at places where we were willing to quit, in other words, DONE! My herb garden is glorious! Thank you dear Sis and Niece for all you did!
Oh…I forgot to mention that they spent about half an hour pulling grapevines from our shrubs. I can’t wait to see the finished project that Frankie is working on. I believe she is creating a grapevine Christmas tree.
As for the quilt top, it was interrupted once more. We all showered and had lunch and the girls went to buy a pair (or more) of shoes for AIT. She is a college student and has discovered the necessity of having good shoes. She found a pair of shoes and a pair of winter boots. Frankie found a pair, too, so shopping was a success.
When they returned, tired, I cracked the whip, and insisted that we work on cutting the strips for the quilt! I ironed fabric and handed it to Frankie, and she cut the strips. We were two thirds of the way through the project when I had to fix dinner, so she kept cutting and got it all done. AIT and I worked on dinner, and we put out a bowl of mixed fruit, tuna melts on English muffins, and a huge bowl of salad with strips of chicken and practically every veggie in the house!
After dinner, Frankie thought she was going to be allowed to rest. There was some mention of aching muscles, and how long a day it was, but I was of a mind to SEW! I told her she could sit, but I wanted to make up at least one block to see what it looked like. Well, with the method she was going to use, I actually ended up with three finished blocks and part of eleven more, but who’s counting?
I know she was exhausted, but there was a satisfaction in being able to put up those blocks to see what her quilt was going to look like. She was surprised, as we frequently are until we can see them on the design wall, but not unhappy with how they looked. I wish she had left them to me. I’d have been happy to complete the blocks for her in return for all the gardening help she gave me. Perhaps, when the project is further along, Frankie will post pictures of the quilt.
We breakfasted together Sunday morning, before seeing our visitors off. AIT needed some time to work on her homework, and they have a long drive home. I always hate to see them go. Dear Husband and I will drive down to their home in Indiana in October, and their entire family will be with us for four days at Christmas, but I’ve been spoiled this summer, seeing my sis several times a month. We may need to live closer together when we are all retired!
It was a GREAT weekend, and it’s been a good week so far. Thank you, Frankie and AIT, for all you did. Don’t you all wish you had family like this!???
After and Before
I adore my herb garden. It’s twenty years old, and shows signs of wear and tear, but I feel incredibly fortunate to be able to work with plants that smell so wonderful, and to be able to incorporate them into a raised bed with native flowers.
The only difficulty with this garden is that we never completed the walkways. Originally, we intended to lay brick in the pathways, but we’ve just never gotten around to completing the chore. Each year, at least three times during the growing season, I’ve had to weed the walkways. The herbs, as well as weeds seem to like the ground up limestone (chat) as a growing medium. When the chat is dry, it’s impossible to weed. I can’t figure out how the plants can grow in it. When it’s rained, the chat is a breeze to weed.
I spent about two hours, two days in a row, and this was the result:
The “after” picture looks SO nice that you can see why I want to keep those walkways clean.
Below is the “Before” picture for the other half of the job. My garden helper left some plants in the walkway two weeks ago, so it looks worse than usual, but you can see what the rains have done for the weeds and volunteers.
If we don’t have rain in the next two days, I’ll be watering the path so that I can rip out all the volunteers and clean things up.