Planning A Perennial Border Garden

12 March, 2013 2 Comments

A couple years ago I started a large perennial border garden across the front of our property. I only got a small portion of it tilled and planted and that is a hodgepodge of a bunch of plants I had that needed homes immediately, if not sooner.

Reclaiming Garden Space

A portion of last years garden.

A portion of last years garden.

This weekend I’m going to roll out the plastic and re-kill the grass that has retaken the rest of the garden. I’m going to get the perennial border garden I’ve been wanting for so many years, finally.

One thing I need to do is plan out the rest of the plants that I want for the garden. Right now I have plants that I either grew from seed, or bought on sale for a ridiculous price. The rest of the garden needs some thought, though, because I want to ensure that I have something blooming throughout the summer.

Taking Inventory

The first task on my list will be to look at the plants I have and see when they usually bloom. I know that some of the plants are continuous or repeat bloomers, so I’ll need to keep that in mind, as well. Just off the top of my head I know I have Shasta daisy, two or three veronicas, two miniature roses, four anise hyssops, several different lilies (all bought for $2 or less after they’d quit blooming), a half dozen or so snapdragons (waiting to see how many made it through the winter, a couple look not so good), three white strawberries (that need to be moved to the strawberry patch), a coreopsis, many carnations (started from seed and had 36 plants at first, some didn’t make it through the winter though), blue azure (I think that’s it’s name), purple cone flower, garden phlox (want more of these), blue salvia, and I think on pink pincushion button. That may seem like a lot of plants, but once I have the garden in place I’ll have about 60’ to plant, 40’ of which I’m going to get finished this year. We need to figure out the placement of the carport we want before we put in the last of the garden, as I’m going to have a picket fence surrounding it and I need to know where that’s going to end up, as it will be placed next to the carport on one side.

If I look at the list of plants I already have, I have a variety of bloom periods, but I need to make a chart or graph of which plants will bloom at what time and how many of them will overlap. Also, I need some interesting greenery, maybe an ornamental grass, to add some interesting textures. I’m not going to plant evergreens in this garden, but something that’s semi-evergreen might be a nice addition.

I’ll also have 60’ of garden to be planted in irises and day lilies. I won’t be able to fill that this year, more than likely, because that is costly, because I want to hand pick each one, not just get the big box store varieties. So, I should have plenty of room for a nice selection of annuals. I’ll keep that in mind when I’m planting flower seeds this afternoon (inside in flats).

Make A Drawing

I’ve got quite a bit of planning to do this spring. Hopefully I can get the foundation plantings, the perennial border and the front entry gardens all spruced up this year. I was shocked to realize I’ve lived here for seven years and my front yard still looks like a war zone. It’s time to finish up all the half baked projects and get all the plants into their permanent homes (or at least as permanent as any garden is).

 

Preparing For Spring Projects

5 February, 2013 Reply

It’s Planning Time

After moving a tree and large shrub that were blocking the front of the house. Now's the time to sit down and plan some landscaping.

After moving a tree and large shrub that were blocking the front of the house. Now’s the time to sit down and plan some landscaping.

It may seem early to a lot of you, as you look out your window at the mounds of snow, but here in the mid-Atlantic region I need to get my list of spring projects organized and ready to start working on them. Even now we’ll be having a few warmer days where I can get out and start on some preliminary projects, but March through May will be prime months for getting projects completed, while the temperatures are mild.

Review Of Last Year

In looking at my list from last year I only managed to get a few things done. Of course a bigger project, that I hadn’t really planned to do, but it suddenly came up – putting a roof on our back deck, took up a lot of time I could have been doing other things.

Also, I started some projects, but didn’t get many of them done. We got most of the soil in place for putting up the greenhouse, but then Sarvasri hurt his back and we couldn’t go any further. I managed to get one of the two japanese maple seedlings permanently planted.

Also, I ended up doing a lot of projects that are no longer on the list, or didn’t make it there in the first place. I put in a garden for melons and squash. We worked on the secret garden in the wooded part of our lot. We did buy and plant a bunch of fruit trees (that are all doing splendidly at this point). I permanently put in the herb garden where I wanted it.

New Commitment For 2013

I know the biggest thing on my list for this year is to get control of all the gardens, and to get permanent walls up for the raised beds. The other real biggie is to get the greenhouse up. I’m going to spend a bunch of time planning the front landscaping. Something I’d wanted to do last year, but when the deck project came up, my attention turned that direction.

This year, now that the giant autumn olive has been relocated, I want to get a complete design done for the front of the house, and start putting in the permanent foundation plantings. I found that some of the plants I originally planted I don’t like. They didn’t grow as described on the tag, so they’ll need to be moved and others need to take their place. I need to do some research and think about what I want the front to look like and exactly where the porch is going to go, so that I don’t plant anything there. It’s time to have a beautiful, attractive entrance to our house, instead of the tumble down wooden steps the builder supplied.

There are tons of other things that need to be completed. So, over the next few days I’m going to make a complete list of everything I see that needs to be done and then prioritize it. I’ll also set up some categories of quick jobs, moderate projects, long-term projects, etc. That way I can look and see what is a good match for the time I’m going to have. Working on a long-term project might not get very far if I only have an hour, but knowing what all the quick little jobs that need to be attended to would be perfect.

I’ve made lists before, but I’ve never prioritized them by these categories. I’m hoping this will help me have a better idea of what to spend my time on.

Procrastination Is A Four Letter Word

14 November, 2012 Reply

Procrastination Doesn’t Pay

Front entry with monster bush in front

It doesn’t look very foreboding in this picture from a couple years ago, but the bush in the center of the picture grew to enormous size and pricked everyone who tried to enter the house!

Well, at least it ought to be! Yesterday my procrastination caught up with me. Seven years ago we moved into our house, just a few days before Thanksgiving. At that time I transplanted a tiny little autumn olive from the property we moved from. It was probably about 12” tall. Yesterday, after seven years of being planted in a temporary home, that was only supposed to be there until the next spring, we moved the “tiny” autumn olive. It is now taller than me and the trunk is bigger around then my upper arm.

For the past several years I’ve been singing the song of not buying plants until you have a place for them, because of my tendency to fall in love with something before I even think about where I’m going to put it. I stopped that practice totally this year, because I had lost several beautiful plants, due to not having a plan. Oh, I have a generalized plan, but not specific. I know about where I want all the gardens, but not what’s going in them or when I want to do the work.

A place to grow tall and wide!

Now our “tiny” tree has a place to grow to it’s heart’s content, and we can smell it from the back deck each fall. We’ll keep our fingers crossed that it makes it through the move.

My dear, sweet husband, who is no muscle man, grunted and pushed and shoved from around 11:30 a.m. until 2:00 p.m. to get “tiny” out. Finally, after rigging a pulley system we managed to get the plant to let go so we could move her.

Hopefully I will never, ever make that mistake again. It was exhausting. Every muscle and joint in my body ached, I had scratches all over (they have honker thorns), and the poor plant had itself ripped from a nice cozy home, only to have to start all over.

We did pick a really nice spot for it. Out of the way of the underground power and septic, but enough at the corner of the house that, should it survive, it will bless us with it’s intoxicating fragrance when we sit outside on the back porch. That’s where it should have been all along, but I never had a complete plan.

Preparation Does

So, this winter I’m going to get a complete plan put together. Oh, I might not know exactly which perennials are going where, but I will certainly know where trees and shrubs are going to be placed. No more temporary homes. It’s just plain too hard on me, my unsuspecting husband, and my dear plants.

You can see the front door and windows now!

The house looks shockingly open, now that the monster bush has been relocated.

One thing Feng Shui talks about is the flow of energy. Well poor “tiny” was definitely not in the right place. She would grow so much every summer that her thorny branches would stick out right into the path up to the front door. Not very friendly, and not very auspicious for us. The front of the house looks startlingly open now. Hmmm, wonder if things will open up for us as well!

One other thing I realized is that I haven’t taken pictures of the property since Christmas 2010. So, next spring when everything is starting to green up. I’ll certainly be out there, and every spring thereafter. It’s really the only way to have a “journal” of the changes.

Have you ever made a planting error? If you did, how did you correct it? Were you able to save the plant? Share your landscape horrors with us.

Get Ready For Fall Planting

14 August, 2012 Reply
You can do a lot of planting in the fall

Don’t put your tools away until the frost is on the ground!

In many parts of the country, fall is just as good a time, maybe even better, to do serious planting. That is especially true of trees and shrubs, as it gives them time to grow a good root system over the winter months, without having to worry about keeping leaves going, too.

In any area of the country you can plant until the ground freezes hard. Now, I would recommend you know when the average first frost date is for your area, and plan to finish up around that time. If you know your area really well, have lived there for a number of years and have paid attention to the weather patterns, then you can probably stretch it some or even a lot. However, if you’re a relative newbie to the gardening realm, then plan on calling it a season around the average first frost date.

In some parts of the country, here for instance, fall is really the time to plant a lawn. This confuses a lot of people, as when they think “seeds,” they think spring. However, the grass will come up, have time to put down enough roots to keep it going, then when the cold hits it no longer needs to grow up, so it grows out, with nice long strong roots that will help it be strong and green, able to withstand weeds attacks, in the spring. Timing is important with this, as you need to make sure you get the grass far enough along that it can withstand the winter, and, unfortunately, every once in awhile you’ll have a really nasty winter and it just won’t take, but that’s rare.

Most perennials plant well in the fall, too. You can buy small plants, pint size, and put them in. Over the winter they’ll put out roots and the next spring you’ll have as big a plant as if you had bought the gallon one to begin with. Just remember to look at the mature size of the perennial so you don’t crowd them too close. It sometimes takes a lot of faith to believe that tiny little plant is going to cover the large area you’re leaving for it, but most grow really fast.

If you live in a milder climate you can do a winter vegetable garden. Most of the cole crops will make it well into the late fall or early winter, in some areas, with just a little bit of protection, they’ll go all the way until the warm weather hits in the spring. I’ve gone out on Christmas day to harvest chard and kale for our holiday meal. I think last year we even had some lettuce still going, but that’s rare. We had an extremely mild winter last year.

So, don’t dismay, if you’re landscape plans aren’t as far along as you’d like, you may have another three to four months of planting, if you’re in the right zone.

When was the latest or earliest you’ve planted something and had it survive? Mine was a clematis that I bought way too early. I planted it in February. I’ll have to share the whole story in my next blog…

A New Garden Experiment

26 July, 2012 Reply

My System Doesn’t Work

I’ve made a decision. After spending the last two mornings rescuing my tomato plants from over-zealous bean plants I realized that my gardening has not been very successful in the past few years. This year everything started out great, but now, as the weather gets really hot, the gardens are looking miserable and the production that was so abundant earlier has stopped. Disease is setting in on many plants, and others are not producing much of anything.

Learning How To Communicate With Nature

Many years ago I purchased a book called Perelandra Garden Workshop by Machaelle Small Wright. At the time I was all excited about it, but the techniques seemed cumbersome and after working with it for a short time I dropped it, because I just didn’t have that many hours in the day.

I’m giving the book a second look. I’m going to give the techniques a try, a real try this time. However, I will probably try to find shortcuts to getting the information, as having to ask 100 questions to get the answer to one problems is still too time consuming. I have a lot of knowledge under my belt now, though. A lot of understanding about energy and how to work with it, so it should be a faster process.

Her technique involves working with all the energy spirits or devas that oversee an area. They know what is going on in the area, what the soil needs, what the plants need, where placement of plants will be most beneficial for the plants success, etc. Now, whether you believe in devas or nature spirits really doesn’t matter, because, in essence what you are doing is tapping into the energy field that nature resides on. That you can’t deny exists. Science has proven that we’re 99% energy. That the physical form that we see is not really solid, etc. So, what I’m going to do is start to work with the energy of the property we live on and get it balanced so that the plants and my family can flourish.

Right now I feel more like I’m on a battlefield and all I do is go from one skirmish to the next. If I had taken the time to connect with the energy of the garden, the tomato plants, and the bean plants before I allowed them in the same garden together I would have gotten a huge no from the tomato plants.

No Foresight Causes Disaster

Here’s how it unfolded for me. I planned to put the tomato plants in a certain garden, because you need to move them from year to year, so as not to allow disease to settle into the soil. So, you try not to plant them in the same place for three years. This has been a challenge for me, because we don’t have all our garden space finished and finding a garden that hasn’t had a tomato plant in it for three years can be a challenge. Anyway, I chose the garden, but had to clear it out of some major weeds. That took some time and during that time a bunch of volunteer bean plants came up. These beans did extremely well in our heat and humidity last year so I just left them. I planted the tomatoes amongst the small bean sprouts and waited to see what happened.

At first it seemed like a good match. They were growing at about the same rate and the beans were actually holding the tomatoes up. Then things started to turn south. I found that some of the bean plants were smothering the three hot pepper plants I had put in the garden, so I moved the beans to the outside edge of that part of the garden.

My poor tomatoes are devastated.

Time to try a new method of knowing what my plants need. This tomato was beautiful and healthy just a couple weeks ago. Now, because of damp conditions and the beans stopping the air movement it is just a twig with a couple tomatoes hanging on the end of them.

This last week I realized that I wasn’t seeing very many tomatoes on my plants and on closer inspection I realized that the beans were trying to make the tomatoes their trellis and they were in-fact now smothering the tomato plants.

Because of circumstances I wasn’t able to get to them until this week and in that one week disease set in and my tomato plants, which were huge and beautiful, are now a mass of black leaves, early blight has struck again. I was so careful not to water them from above this spring, but the leaves of the beans held moisture in around the tomato plant, which was a prescription for disaster.

So, for the past two days I’ve been hacking back bean plants until they are just around the edges of the entire garden and trying to salvage at least some of the tomato plants. I don’t know if I have, we’ll have to see how they fare, now that they are no longer buried.

I’ll do some testing to see if there is anything I can do to curtail the early blight and get the plants healthy again, but I fear that there’s not much that can be done this year.

So, instead of guessing and putting out fires over and over, I’m going to ask the land and the plants what they want and need and give them that. Hopefully then I can start to see healthy productive plants in all gardens every year.

I’ll keep you apprised with the progress and any modifications I do to Machaelle’s program to make it simpler to use.

How Do You Communicate With Nature?

If anyone out there has used Machaelle’s method I’d love to hear from you. Or maybe you have some other method of communicating with nature that you could recommend.

 

We’re covered!

24 July, 2012 1 Comment

This past weekend we finally finished the roof on the back deck. It rocks! It took us a lot of time to get the deck reworked the way we wanted it, but it was worth it. We sat outside the other day and just enjoyed the evening slowly enveloping us. It was great.

We’re not necessarily fast workers, but we’re thorough. Here’s the progress of our humble respite.

Our Deck Before Remodel

Ugly, ugly, ugly. A huge eyesore! (Photo 1)

Not Move In Ready

When I first saw the deck I immediately decided I wanted the steps moved so that they were beside the deck instead of sticking out into usable ground. The other problem was that they put the steps on the corner away from the house, which meant there was an area that got no sun and wasn’t good for much of anything except catching all the bits and pieces of “treasures” my husband had for his various inventions! It was a catastrophe and was soon overgrown with weeds in amongst all his findings. Not only that the wood was very tired looking. It was only six years old when we moved in, but it had not been preserved or cleaned at all during that time. So the color of the wood was a dark grey and it looked very unappealing. Worst of all it was set so that it is in the blistering sun from around 8 in the morning until 5 or so in the evening. Meaning that it was unusable. We put an indoor/outdoor thermometer out there and the average summer temperature was over 110˚F!

Our deck was still an eyesore 5 years later!

Five years later it still looks pretty unappealing! (Photo 2)

Inside First

When we first moved in we didn’t really have time to spend outside as we were remodeling the inside of the house. We don’t have any outbuildings or a garage on our property, so we tried to put up a tarp over the deck so that we could cut the flooring and other outside and to keep down the sawdust. Photo 1 is of the deck after a big windstorm tore our tarp to shreds and left us with a 20th century looking sculpture in its place. As you can see we had a lot of stuff stored all around the deck, because at least under the deck provided a bit of protection. I also had all the plants I’d brought from the other property setting back there waiting for me to find them permanent homes.

At Long Last The Yard

Five long years later (Photo 2) you can see that not much has changed. We have picked up most of the mess and I’ve planted most of the plants, but it is still a very sad looking excuse for a deck and we still never use it. This is the first year we really did anything on the yard as we worked on the interior for the first three years, then spent two summers in India. Finally a summer to get some real gardens in.

Power washing made an amazing transformation.

Here’s the difference between before and after power washing. I want a power washer! (Photo 3)

Last summer we power washed the entire thing (Photo 3) and moved the stairs to their new location (Photo 4). It made a huge difference. The deck no longer looked so tired. Then I started to paint it. I only got that partially done, due to the fact that it kept raining and the wood would never dry out long enough for me to do much.

Commitment To Completion

This spring I begged my husband to work with me until the job was completed and I’m glad to say he did. I’ve always promised to be honest about our projects. This one took much longer than it really needed to. We only worked on it about a hour a day until we got ready to put up the rafters and put down the roofing. There’s so much to be done on the property that we felt that we couldn’t just give all our attention to the deck. So each day we would put up one board. Of course there were some days we couldn’t work on it at all, and some we spent a little more time, but it took us about 2 months to do what could have been done in one or two weekends if we’d really given it our all.

Moving the stairs made a huge difference.

Now the stairs are an asset and help to set off the herb garden that is at their base. (Photo 4)

We found some interesting things. First, they didn’t cut the railings the right length on one corner. That was the reason the railing on the other side was hanging by a thread. We cut the board properly and now it is much more secure. We had a lot of niggling to do to get everything together as the wood was old, had warped and often didn’t want us to screw something tight to it. We measured and remeasured and still made a 1/2” mistake on one corner, but you can’t tell. None of it was terribly hard, except getting my husband and I on the same book and page. We have very different styles of doing things and I finally had to just let go of my laid back, throw it together style, because he was going to draw perfectly scaled pictures before he cut one piece.

A Bit More To Go

The white really brightens up the deck.

Although the base of the deck still needs a lot of work, we now have a lovely place with lots of loving memories hung about it to spend our summer evenings. (Photo 5)

Of course it’s not completely done, as the first paint I bought was not very good (Valspar) and a good portion of it peeled off over the winter. So, we found another paint that has polyurethane in it (I didn’t win the battle for latex paint), and we’ll give that a try.

What you’re seeing in the after photos is about 75% complete, as the painting will take some time.

I’ve already dressed it up with all the gifts friends and family have given us over the years (Photo 5) and once the painting is done I’ll get the plants back on it. Hopefully within the next week, so we get a chance to enjoy it completely decked out (pun intended).

Share Your Handiwork

Have you ever reworked an eyesore on your property and been thrilled with the results? Share you story with all of us. I love to hear them.

When Things Finally Start To Come Together

31 May, 2012 Reply

Whew! I didn’t think it would ever look like our yard was going to come together. I’ve been working on it for two years and it looked like I’d done almost nothing, but this year, year three, things are finally starting to come together.

Plants are maturing, looking really stunning this year; our permanent crop plants are producing heavily; we got most of the fruit trees in for our little orchard. So the yard finally doesn’t look like an orphan.

My asiatic lily blooms for the first time.

An asiatic lily, purchased after it had bloomed last summer, rewards me with many blossoms this year.

There are some notable exceptions. One of the biggest is a large autumn olive almost in front of the door. We planned to move it this spring, but only got to the maple tree before it got too hot. So, it’s earmarked for a move immediately after the temperatures begin to cool this fall.

All my seedlings are looking terrific this year. Last year, almost from the get-go, my vegetable garden looked terrible. None of the plants produced much; my summer squash only produced male blossoms; the tomatoes got early blight, so even though they produced some tomatoes, they looked terrible.

My decision to not expand, until I have what’s already in the ground under control, was a good one. Oh, I’ll tell you I’ve been tempted sometimes to start the new perennial garden I want out front, or to start new rows for the blackberries and marionberries, but I’m holding off.

So far, with the help of my husband, we’ve managed to build a new, easily removed structure around the blueberries. This is keeping the birds at bay. Of course they holler at us every time we go outside. They are not happy that they can’t munch on all the berries before we get any.

We got 10 more fruit trees planted and just this weekend started to put down weed barrier around them and the berry bushes.

I managed to get several of the vegetable beds reworked with more amendments and the plants are doing terrific because of it.

Last we’ve started work on building a roof over the back deck, so we can sit outside and not get baked. It faces mostly south and is unbearably hot even in the early morning, so a roof will help cool it down so we can enjoy breakfast outside.

The herb garden is almost finished. Hopefully tomorrow we’ll bring over the loads of compost to fill it up and then this weekend we’ll work on the deck and I’ll move the herbs to their new home. Just in time to till up where they were and put in the last of the summer seeds.

Wish I’d taken before and after pictures, but I’ve been so busy just trying to keep ahead of everything I didn’t. From this point on we can at least show you what we’ve done, maybe even how to do it yourself.

So our little Avalon is finally starting to come together.

When A Major Spruce-Up Is In Order

22 July, 2011 Reply

We don’t know how it happens, but sometimes our garbage pile gets out of control. We end up with a stack of old appliances or remodel leftovers that just never quite make it to the landfill. Or maybe you’ve bought a fixer upper and there is a lot of garbage needing to be removed before the house will be livable. Or maybe you just don’t have a big enough vehicle to load the stuff in, or aren’t strong enough to do it. Whatever the cause a pile of junk around even the nicest house can make it look shabby and uncared for.

The other problem is, if you take care of all the stuff that needs to be hauled to various dumping sites, it can take a lot of time and gas. Appliances may need to go to one place, construction leftovers to another. Some items need special handling, such as computers and monitors, because they have hazardous materials in them. Some stuff you want removed may even be recyclable, such as fall leaves and yard trimmings.

Today there are companies that specialize in dealing with your unwanted items. It doesn’t matter what kind of mix you have they’ll come and haul it away for you. Whether it is Appliance Removal Chicago, defunct computer items, or just plain trash, having someone deal with it for you can help your yard look better and you’ll have the feeling that a dead weight has been removed from you, as well.