June Begins With Abundance

Summer suddenly arrived on June 1st. The temperatures are rising, the rain chances are low to non-existent, and the mosquitoes are huge. Seriously, the mosquitoes are swarming everywhere. I tried deadheading plants last evening and had to give up due to all the bugs. The ever present wind has helped a bit in keeping the blood suckers at bay but not by much. Hopefully the city will FINALLY start spraying now that the rain has abated. Meanwhile, the strolling garden is going gangbusters with color and flowers.

The roses, larkspur, nepeta, dayliles and coreopsis, salvias, and scabiosa plants are blooming their little hearts out. The fertilizer I put out at the beginning of May coupled with more than 9 inches of above average rain made the plants the healthiest and fulliest in years.

The catnip is running rampant throughout the garden. I'm partly to blame since I've been transplanting it. Yes, I know it's a type of mint and mint can be a menace when planted in the ground due to its spreading tendancies. However, I never expected it to keep spreading and reseeding the way it has. I've transplanted some of it to give away to friends with felines of their own. Penny the Pill, my chubby ginger and white cat, barely gives it a sniff, and my elderly part Siamese part Tabby cat Symon likes it but can't consume that much. Getting old sucks, my furry little friend. He doesn't even get silly and cross eyed much anymore either.

 A windy view through one of the rose arbors. Annoyingly, the late snow storm and freeze in early March killed off any chances of apples, pears and plums on my young fruit trees. The peach tree, pictured in the upper right of this photo, does have several furry little football-shaped peaches still growing. I might be able to taste a rip one this year assuming we don't get anymore nasty wind storms before then.

The larkspur is gorgeous and rampant and at this very moment I'm sure its plotting reseeding everyone ridiculous spot it can think of. Good thing its so easy to pull out from the ground when not wanted.

The lilies are back! I haven't seen these beauties in a few years due to the drought. I lost the 5 foot deep maroon Asiatics I'd transplanted from my last home and it appears over half of the 50 or so bulbs I've planted over the years are gone too. But some of the remaining stalks are looking healthy and small little buds are popping up now so I have more of these lovelies to look forward to this summer.

The abundant rain has also revived this one Climbing America rosebush. Its been so scraggly looking for the past two years, unlike the pair planted behind it. The three bushes form a triangle arbor space under which I have a chair I like to relax in in the early morning before the yard gets too hot. You can clearly see the new growth compared to the thin growth above. I highly recommend this climbing rose. It's strong canes can withstand the whipping winds of West Texas, its leaves are a deep glossy green, and the lovely pink blossoms have such a lovely strong scent. I have a fourth one planted on the other side of the yard next to one of the arbors.

Budding Out

The end of March is almost here and the garden is seeing its first signs of color. The three varieties of daffodils have started blooming in the beds.

It's always a nice treat when bulbs, forgotten from the previous seasons, reappear to show off their glory. 

The trees have also all flowered. I'd forgotten how pungent the fruit-less Cleveland Pear tree's blossoms could get. But then they only linger around for about 2 weeks, thank goodness. Pretty flowers, stinky smell.

The pink blossoms of the dwarf peach tree are small but lovely and make a nice contrast with the shiny green leaves.

The clematis already has several buds on it. The gladiola bulbs have broken ground as have the lilies. Yesterday was a productive day in the garden. Planted a small Gala apple tree near last year's Yellow Delicious apple true. They might be planted a little too closely but we'll see. My tiny backyard is getting rather full and there won't be much planting space for large bushes and trees soon. Despite that, I'll probably try to cram another dwarf tree in a bare spot by the back gate. I was also able to divide several Pincushion plants, Salvias, and Tickseeds and replant them. Next month I'll need to divide up some of the Iris and daylilies to donate to the Garden and Arts Center's annual plant sale.

My plans for taking additional photos today was derailed by strong winds so I'll defer that to another day.

Looking Back Part I

I ran across some photos of the garden from two years ago and thought it would be fun to do a "Then and Now" post.  This is my fourth year in my new home and the lot is the usual small city size.  Part of the reason I decided to do a strolling garden is that I thought by breaking up the space and making it so that one would have to walk through the bed that yard would feel larger than it actually is. Granted, the poor folks who mow the yard probably look at it, shake their heads and mutter four letter words under their breath every time they visit... usually because I've dug up a new path or bed since the last time the visited. I don't know what I'm going to do when the yard is finally all dug up and planted. I'll probably have to buy a new home then. Course, I'd then have to figure out how I'm going to drag hundreds of bulbs and plants to the new home... hmmm, maybe it would be worth it to stay in the current home for a big longer. But I digress.

The above view is looking south through the west arbor. The garden is two years old (2009) and the beds are small. The Bermuda grass [which I hate incidentally] is looking really nice and green here. Obviously there was a good amount of rain in 2009. One thing I tried to stick with since the start was to have as many perennials and bulbs as possible so that the garden would become more lush over time. I have been able to divide many of the plants over the years and move the freebies around the gardens, front and back.

This is what the back beds looked like in 2009.  The bed is a sideways U shape. The west arbor is in front of this bed and you have to walk around to the back bed. I realized this year that I should have made the path from the arbor straight through to the back bed with one long bed on the side. But I didn't want to dig up all the iris bulbs, salvias, snapdragons and other bulbs to continue the path. I should have planned this better from the start. Oh well, c'est la vie. 

This is the west arbor today. The beds have been expanded, and will be expanded even more along the fence in the years to come. It's slow going as the Bermuda and clay soil is really tough to cut through. The bird bath had to be moved over a bit so that a lawn mower can get through to the cut the  lawn on the pathway. Hence the unsightly dirt square. Ignore the red basket on the left, those are new plants waiting to be planted. If only planting were as fun as buying and reading about plants!

The birdbath is also kind of sad looking. It was a solar one that I bought from QVC two years ago. It worked great for a year, then hail smashed the solar panel. The replacement panel I purchased ran for about two weeks than completely quit. So the birds have had to settle for a plain ole water bowl with a rock to land on. They frequent it heavily, especially since there is little water in the area available. Still, I miss the sound of the bubbling water. I've always been a little worried about having an electric fountain running and there being a fire or short when bad weather occurs and the solar birdbath solved that problem. Maybe someday I can get another moving fountain. Meanwhile, need to find something to cut down the algae or whatever it is growing in the fountain. Yuck!

A look at the curved walkway under the west arbor. Love the little pavers I found at Lowes. They were only $0.39 each and light enough to easily move around. Unfortunately Lowes has been out of these the last two times I've visited. I hope that doesn't mean they stopped carrying the pavers. I still have a lot of pathway to edge. The Climbing America is two years old and doing well. The larkspur came back from last year - yay! - and is just this weekend starting to bloom. I love this plant and have started putting out seed in other places. The white Rose of Sharon behind the rose bush is not doing well this year, though. Boo!

The white salvias sure do put on a show and help light up the space at dusk. I've made a point of adding more white and light colored plants this year to prolong the time I can enjoy the garden. If the wind doesn't get you here in West Texas the extreme heat of the day will. Late evening and early morning are really the best and sometimes only times you can enjoy the garden. I had planted a purple plum tree the second week I was in the house for shade but the neighbor's dog dug under the fence and killed it... and several other plants along with that. Later that summer I bought a corkscrew willow from my school's greenhouse sale with the hopes that it would add some shade. Yeah, the tree [see below] is still not that big. It's really cool and adds nice movement in the wind, but doesn't seem to be growing all that tall. It's a willow, the sucker should have doubled by now, darn it.

Here you can kind of see the back bed, the curved pathway in front of it and the long bed that edges the curved pathway. The daylilies, asiatic and oriental lilies and minature roses are in full swing. The yellow achillea was a little seedling I found growing in the grass near the mother plant and transplanted to this bed. I took a year but it's now blooming and doing well. I love free plants!

This view is from the curved pathway looking north, towards the house. You can see in from this vantage point that the yard really isn't all the deep. The large yellow achillea in the upper left corner is the mother of the seedling plant. All the daylilies are filling out and should start blooming in a month or so. Several of these are pass-along plants from my friend Lyn. Her plants are so vigorous and healthy, better than any I buy from the store it seems. Every gardener should have a friend like that  :}

And in celebration of Easter, here's the bunny that watches over my garden. He's a little rotund and has a good sense of humor. The sunglasses were courtesy of one of the lawn crew, or at least that's who I think put them there. They just appeared one day.

A not so sunny day

Wouldn't you know it? I take today off to be able to play in the garden [and get an extra day to recover from daylight savings - a pointless hour of torture for a non-morning person in a southern state] and it was rather chilly most of the day. In fact, didn't finally push my yellow wagon out of the garage and into the back yard until 3 pm.  And it was still a little nippy.  The low 60s wouldn't have been a problem if it weren't for the cool breeze. 

I couldn't really work on continuing the bed expansion since I was hurting pretty bad from the night before [darn that shoulder surgery! Almost 6 months later and it's still not completely unfrozen and back to normal]. So, today's task was to start planting the small plants, seeds and bulbs I've collected so far.

From the seed pile, about a quarter were planted today. Now, I KNOW we will have another cold blast between now and mid-April. The weather here always gets warm, fools everything into expecting several warm days and then bam! A cold front comes in and damages/kills things. So it's stupid to plant seeds. But I did it anyway, the every hopeful garden nut that I am.

The day before I managed to wrestle out the yellow Lady Banks rose bush which was suppose to be thornless and was definately not. It scratched up everybody walk by the north arbor. And to add insult to injury it grew twice as fast as the white, thornless Lady Banks on the southern arbor. In the bare spot I now planted Moonflowers and Black-Eyed Susan Vine to climb up the arbor. A beautiful miniature yellow rose was planted at the base on the other side of the arbor, with Larkspur seeds spread around the rose. This should be a pretty combination if all goes well.

All around this arbor I gleefully noted that lilies and daylilies are coming up, as well as Larkspur seedlings planted last weekend. Two annual cut flower mixture seed packets were also scattered around the bed. I should confess that I have mostly a black thumb when it comes to growing plants from seeds. I can probably count on both hands the number of plants I can grow from seed. So we'll see if I can break that record. I probably wouldn't have tried it but Lowe's had a buy one get one free deal so I thought what the heck.

I also managed to get several of the lilies planted before it started getting really cold and dark.  I've always wanted Tiger Lilies but have not run across them here in the nurseries for a reasonable costs, so I was excited to find a packet of 5 orange ones at Walmart. I've actually had good luck with their flower bulbs and they're so inexpensive that if they don't take you don't feel too guilty about replacing them. In fact my oldest  Asiatic Lily from Wally World is a gorgeous deep magenta color that reached over five feet tall last spring. I loved it so much that I took the bulbs with me when I moved into my new house four years ago and it bloomed despite being replanted two months earlier. So next time you run across those tempting bags of bulbs at Walmart consider giving it a try. It might turn out to be a great performer in your garden.

Back to the Tiger Lilies, I was glad that I read a small blurb about them in The Gardner's World magazine on Friday which warned that they should not be planted next to other types of lilies. As there are lilies planted in the bulk of the beds that basically narrowed down where the Tigers could go.

Next up were the pinks.  I had also picked up a gorgeous deep pink miniature rose this past weekend along with that yellow one. Both were really hard to photograph today as the colors in the photos didn't come close to the real thing. The yellow was impossible for some reason. Anyway, planted the fragrant pink one before the Irises. I plan to pick up two more of these to repeat the color.

And here I must make another confession. I have a cottage garden because I am not disciplined enough to follow a color or plant plan. I see it, I want it, I buy it... only to then to come home and say "where the heck am I going to cram this thing?!"  So I'm trying to be a little better about repeating either colors or plants in the beds this year to add more cohesion to the garden. Along with the rose, I planted three Romantic Rose daylilies and 5 Pink Heaven Trumpet Lilies. Both packets are also from Wally World. So here's to things coming up "rosy" in the garden.