If I Had a Million Dollars

Today, I received my first seed catalog of the year. (Not just seeds, bareroot and container plants too, but for ease of reference I am calling it a seed catalog!) Oh. My. God. The things I could spend money on if I had it. Most alluring to me are the things I can do in a shade garden. The spot by the fence on the North side just isn't going to be big enough to hold everything I want to do! I am considering branching out and adding a shade garden down behind the birches, next to the raspberries. On the side of the house I want to do a three level thing, I have decided. Short ferns by the lawn. Midsized flowers with nice foliage behind them. Maybe amsonia. Maybe bluebells. And then behind in a cluster a few stalks of bright yellow digitalis / foxglove. There are so many other things I want in shade too, like bulbs - tiny crocus and jonquils under the shrubs. I want a tiny grove of trillium under the fir tree and toad lillies under the deck. So many possibilities. And then there's the stuff I could grow into a stunning show of color on the south side. I am dying for a peony, or a whole set of peonies. They grow really well around here. I am considering taking out the russian sage by Amy's window (it's outgrown itself and fallen in towards the middle) and replacing it with a peony. 10" colorful spring blooms, and next to the white lilac too! I can hardly stand it. I want 8 foot stalks to hollyhock growing up beside the door to the garage, welcoming with their impressive color. I'm even considering poppies below my blueberries. There is just SO MUCH I can do!

If I don't watch it I am going to spend a LOT of money on this garden.

However it is all worth it to me - the sense of satisfaction is immense. Just this afternoon I was walking around checking on the roses with Iris and my super shy neighbor happened to be out for a walk with her two little girls. She came over and raved about the roses, which made me glow! So many of the neighbors have dropped by now to offer their compliments on the garden and how much it adds to the house. That feels REALLY good.

Harvest

The end of summer is here and that means harvest. Every week I go gather what I can use or store. I'm also starting to do the sanitation and preparation for winter!

Today I went out quickly after dinner and filled a couple old colanders with:

1 gigantic cucumber - not as long as the others at only 9" long. But it had GIRTH, it was 10" around!
1 dozen or so cherry tomatoes
34 carrots, about 1/4 of my crop, to make baby food for Iris
2 dozen heads of calendula - I am swimming in calendula this year and will have to sell some on, I couldn't use what I have in 10 years. I harvest this much every other day.
Some basil for drying
Plenty of raspberry leaves, enough to dry and make several pots of tea.

Not bad for one evening's take!
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I pruned the birches back to my head height a few days ago and they look SO much better. Not just them, but the lillies underneath them can finally get some sun now. It was a lot of work but so worth it. Once I kill off the grass that has crept into the beds around their trunks I'll mulch heavily for winter.

I deadheaded the roses tonight and they all look fantastic. Nice shape, growth, lots of budding, healthy looking plants. Except the Little Mischief. I don't know if I can save that one, and I don't know what's going wrong. It is still growing and blooming fine, but so many of the leaves have what looks like a fungal disease (even though the little mischief is well ventilated) and when the blooms drop new leaves don't replace them - I just have bare twigs. I am not sure it will come back after the winter, and I'm sad about that. If not, I suppose I'll figure out a replacement next summer, but I'd love to keep the one I have!

The lawn is the bane of my existance this year. Hot and dry, the weeds all grew and the grass all died. It needs a lot of recovery. I need to kill off as many weeds as I can, aerate, then mulch and reseed the entire thing. Some spots more than others. Lots of water. Reminder to myself for next year: At least 1" of water a week, don't let it go longer. Keep it about 3" long, and never mow more than 1/3 of the blade off. We'll see if that helps.

Garden on the back burner

Not much to post as we've been so busy I haven't had the time to work in my garden much.

I finally got the roses mulched, and the black spot taken care of of course. I can't remember if I mentioned that in the previous entry - if not, yes, it's all done now and everyone's had a systemic anti-fungal. It looks really nice!

I have some columbine in the front hosta garden and it has been so pretty there. This year it set off a few tiny plants and I am thinking about digging them up and potting them indoors over winter. It would be nice to have several of them in the garden!

The weeds have taken over the lawn. I don't know WHAT to do about the lawn. The best solution I can think of is to hire someone to come treat it professionally. We gave it a weeder feeder twice in spring thinking that would be good maintenance. Well we now have no grass but tons of carpeting weeds, go figure. Our neighbors all have gorgeous lawns. Ours is brown with patches of green weeds. It's lovely.

I went around last weekend with the roundup getting rid of any weeds I could find in the gardens and killing a few in the grass. I have NO idea if it will help - in another week or so we should know!

There's a Fungus Among Us

OK so I discovered my nearly wild rose already has 2 leaves affected by black spot, a dangerous fungal infection common in roses. Here I thought they were super disease resistant and everything! It may well have come that way from the nursery; I think I spaced them alright in the garden to allow for maximum air flow, but then again the NW rose is right in the middle of the other two. (Although, to be fair, its whole back is open to the air!) It seems to only be affecting 2 or 3 leaves so far. My plan is to remove the infected leaves and a bit of the cane tomorrow, and then treat all the roses with a systemic anti-fungal. In this case I think it would be easier to spray, but I haven't been able to find any fungicide spray for roses. Go figure. Anyway one more thing to accomplish tomorrow! My list keeps growing.

Speaking of, I forgot to mention on here, I have been doing some weed research. If you've been to our house you may have noticed we have a bunch of AWFUL thistles (Amy calls them "sticker bushes") in the yard. Very big and horribly painfully thorny. They grow like, well, like weeds. ANYWAY I figured out those are a variety called Canadian thistle, and the reason my pulling and digging them hasn't done any damn good is that they grow on an underground rhizome system. The whole front yard? Probably one single plant. Plus they seed too so every frond that sticks up puts of thousands of airborne seeds, and if just one seed takes it can create another plant that covers the entire yard.... the only way to kill them is with Roundup. Lots of Roundup. Kill the majority of the above ground weeds. And to keep the Roundup off the grass and daffodils and snowberries and everything else, I need to go around to each plant (and I'm not kidding, we have hundreds. Several hundreds) and paint each leaf with Roundup using a paintbrush.

This is going to be a very time consuming job. I see a babysitter in my children's future.

We have a garden!

The rose garden is complete!! Well, OK, I haven't mulched it yet; but otherwise it's all planted and edged and it looks wonderful. I'm so so proud of it. It doesn't hurt that all my neighbors have come over to congratulate me on it! The roses are absolutely stunning and I added in some mums and asters for color that just make it so complete. I found a perfect little birdbath and the stone turtles that Pete bought me months ago have found a home at last! I can't stop looking at it, I keep going outside to enjoy the sight. And the smell - the roses smell so wonderful! Anyway here you go:

BEFORE:


AFTER:


(See the pile of dirt in the background, where my blueberries will go next year? What am I going to do with it?)

This image got resized funny but if you ignore the pixelation, check out the blooms on my yellow submarine rose already! The pink little mischief is in the rear towards the left.


Gardening is SO rewarding. I know we spent a fair amount of money on this garden to get good quality plants, but it will pay us back a hundredfold in enjoyment over the years. Plus all going well we won't have to replant, if I can get them wintered well. I already have butterflies enjoying the plants - it's beautiful!

This is a lot of work!

OK, creating this bed is a lot more work than I originally thought it would be! It has turned into a 2 day job.

Today was Saturday, so we both could throw some effort into it. Unfortunately with two little ones it isn't like we can both work on the garden - one of us watches the kids while the other works, and we trade off. We did get a lot done, my back shows it, but it isn't finished. Frankly the roses aren't even planted yet!

We decided to make the bed bigger, taking out an entire section of the lawn that wasn't looking so hot. So we dug it pretty big - I'd guesstimate 4 to 5 feet in wide, about 6 feet out running South, a big curve around back towards the garage, and then running about 4 feet down the side of the garage and maybe 3 feet wide. Pretty good sized! We had to cut and pull off all the dead sod and weeds on the top about 3 or 4" down, which was a struggle. We found a surprise under the sod - about 5" underneath the surface we dug up decaying electricity flags letting us know the line was buried under this bed. We had to stop, do some research, make some calls to places that weren't open on a Saturday, and finally a couple of hours later figured out that hand digging (as opposed to excavating with power tools) was probably OK as long as we were being careful.

The dirt in that section has been neglected for a long time and is very heavy in clay. It was HARD and really cemented together. Adding to the joy there had obviously been something there at some point as we kept digging up bricks and pieces of slate, like paving stones. Every time we put the shovel in something blocked it, it seems. Combined with the heavy clay it was a back breaking effort. We dug, broke and turned the soil down to 12 inches. And then we took a break!

I amended it with 5cf of vacuum packed peat moss (which I wasn't sure would be enough, but expanded out really well) and almost 200lbs of well composted manure. Those bags were HEAVY. Once it was in the right spot we dug it all again, turning the amendments into the soil and continuing to break clods and aerate everything. We watered it and let it settle. By that time it was about 5pm, and we decided to pack up the kids and head to the county fair rather than fight with it any more today!

Tomorrow I have to:

Get the 5 roses into the ground: Dig 2' wide holes, plant, cut away the pots, add starter and root fungus stimulant stuff, backfill with amended soil, water.
Mulch everything with the 10cf of cedar mulch I have in the garage. More big bags to carry yay!
Go to the local nursery and pick up a stack of bricks and some annuals
Edge the bed. I want one brick flat with the grass so it can be mown over easily and one brick holding in the soil and mulch. A big hassle.
Plant the annuals and get them mulched
Continue to look for the missing pieces of the garden we still seek: A couple boulders, a statue, something.

Biggest headache of the project we forgot to anticipate: Where to put the dead sod, weeds and topsoil we removed. We have this HUGE mound of it just sitting next to the bed looking ugly. We don't even own a wheelbarrow to move it. Going to have to figure something out.

Seeing as tomorrow I not only have to finish the bed, I need to clean and prep the garage for window delivery Monday, clean the house and remove all the blinds etc for window installation Tuesday, cook a few dinners and take them to Shannon who had her baby this morning, and while Pete's home run into the home store to pick up paint and supplies to paint or repaint all of the trim on the house, which needs to be done (by me!) on Wednesday. Several of our windowsills were rotted, and they're being replaced with the windows which is great, but they will be plain wood. They need to be sealed and painted so I get to repaint the whole house extreior trim. Yay me!

It's going to be quite the week but I *will* have a rose garden to show for it when I'm done!

I got my roses!!!

Well today was a banner day - I spent the morning at the nursery taking notes, filled a few pages of my notebook with details on all the cultivars of species roses I have been looking at (and that is QUITE the feat with a 2 year old and infant in arms!) I came home, did some more research, and made my decisions - we went out this evening and invested a pretty good chunk of money into some gorgeous species roses, peat moss, composted manure, etc - I already have 10cf of cedar mulch so I just need some brick edging and some annuals to add color at the front. Maybe a nice boulder or statuary or something for interest. And I will have my wonderful rose garden where the ugly weeds used to be! I can't tell you how happy this makes me, I'm just delirious. I have perennial gardens and hostas and shrubs and berries and veggies and bulbs - but no roses until now. Plus experimenting with old garden / species roses is just so damn cool. The bed will look great!


Here's what I ended up picking. The pictures I could find online vary slightly in color (I guess the color fades or intensifies a little depending on climate and soil?) but the cultivars are all the same so here we go.



Right by the garage door / driveway will be this beautiful "Nearly Wild" floribunda rose - it looks very similar to wild roses, smells lovely and a bit like apples. It has a bit of an issue with mildew / blackspot but is otherwise extremely hardly and beautiful little plant with interesting single blooms that are continuous and numerous all through summer.

This beauty will go next, towards the front of the bed / house. It's called a Champlain rose, an Explorer series Kordesii. It's about 4 feet tall, blooms profusely, and thrives on neglect. The one we have has darker red blooms than the one pictured.


Then covering the corner of the house is the Little Mischief - one of the brand spanking new Easy Elegance series that are extremely hardy and disease resistant. The one we have has much paler pink blooms, a kind of seashell pink, and they absolutely carpet the bush. It's short, about 1 1/2' tall, and spreading in lovely branches.


First on the side is another Easy Elegance selection called Yellow Submarine. It is taller than the others, growing from 3 - 5' tall for contrast. The blooms start off lemon yellow and as they mature fade to white, so the flowering bush is covered in all shades of yellow at any one time.


Finally against the garage south side is the William Baffin. Known to be hardy and happy in this area, it grows vigorously and produces clusters of fuschia roses. It's another Kordesii and is a climber, getting to be about 10' at full growth if it is trellised properly. The blooms are semi doubles with bright yellow centers / stamens.

So there you have it! I will begin the day tomorrow clearing ground and amending soil so I can plant that evening or tomorrow. If I can get the bricks I can even finish the bed this weekend. You will be innundated with pictures!

Reaching the end of summer slowly

Finally! Some rain and a cool front! Although I don't know if any of the plants will be the same, it's been a hot and drought filled summer so far. But we've had a couple inches of water and nice cool day today, and it will continue. Cheers all around!

Not much to report; the tomatoes are ripe, the squash are getting bigger (I have three that survived,) the carrots are still stubby and might not grow any more from the weather we've had. The calendula blooms non stop, remember that is a good one to plant when you need long lasting easy color somewhere! I am going to prune the birches in September or October, the snowberry in February, and the lilac after it blooms next summer. I still need to get to the nursery and figure out what I want to plant on the SW corner as far as shrubs and OG roses go, but this week is crammed with doctor appointments so who knows. Everything else is thriving. Surprisingly the cheap dahlia I picked up in front is showing off like the cheap walmart petunia. I don't care as long as they bloom, fine with me! There are hardly any toads this year which is strange, I assume because of the weather. I'm so used to seeing the little guys flopping around when I water. We have a vole or gopher or something making holes in the front lawn by the pathway, the impatiens bed, and now the back lawn as well - must trap it. And that's about all that is going on right now!