This year, I’m still learning, and am definitely still making mistakes.
I thought I was very clever last year in marking the names and locations of all my plants. And because I’m a bit anal retentive, I also entered every single plant in the garden in a gardening app called Landscaper.
Guess what happened? Over the winter, almost every single marker in the garden disappeared. A bunch of them broke, leaving me with bits of black and white plastic all over the garden, but many of them simply evaporated into thin air. The result is that come spring, I once again seem to have lost a lot of my plants. D’oh.
So because I can’t solve a problem without spending money, I bought METAL plant stakes this time and marked all of them and placed them into the garden where I thought, or knew, the plants were. As I write this, I can only hope that these markers will work, and I’ll stop losing my perennials. As it is, by early May 2020, I can’t find about a dozen plants, and don’t know if they will return. Seriously, how do gardeners find their plants?
One issue that I think I solved this year is the problem of Jerry and Nixie tearing up the plants along the fence line fighting with Kita, the neighbor dog. After all of our previous solutions failed, we ordered stronger fencing, and this time I think it worked!
We also put down new wood chips into the path, which makes the garden look very shiny and new.
Here’s what the garden looked like in early May.
You can see the bare wildflower garden, the eco-lawn, and Jerry’s butt
A shady look at the shady garden
April. The ferns are unfurling, the columbines are back, and the forget-me-nots are creeping out.
A couple of white salvias, a couple of varieties of Veronica, and, if they come back, some Shasta daisies and mountain sandwort
This little section lost almost every plant I planted in both 2018 and 2019. The only plants that survived here were a tiny delphinium and a red campion.
One of our mistakes was to not do more (well, anything) to keep the grass out of the flower beds, so the fescue is moving in on the alliums, sedges, and coneflowers
The lambs ears look perky and the candytuft, lithodora and bugloss are blooming!
The guaras are among my favorite plants in the garden, so I was so sad this year when I couldn’t find them. I guess I thought I would see new growth coming out of the old dead matter (top picture), and when I didn’t, I thought they died. But I just started seeing tiny guara sprouts (bottom) so my guaras are not only back, they’ve had babies!
The vegetables and herbs! Already this year, the cucumber died and the basil looks like crap (for the third year in a row). But most everything else looks ok so far. It’s the first year I have tried carrots, so the bunnies can have homemade food this year.
A look at the shade garden from the new deck
See how mad Jerry is, knowing that he can’t get to the fence to fight with Kita anymore?
The Cecile Brunner rose in all its glory. This rose is only two years old!
Pooka gazes out over her territory
Our super comfy egg chair
Another look at the path. Jerry loves to kick the bark all over the garden.
I think this year I’m going to stop calling this part of the garden the Hellscape. The Cecile Brunner is so big now that it is starting to get intimate with the climbing rose on the end
You can see that the creeping thyme and laurentia which I planted after the seeds didn’t take have filled in between the pavers nicely, and the Irish moss on the left of the picture is starting to spread
You can see the Irish moss under the Ugly but Colorful Oil Tank
I love that the lawn looks like a green ocean
That bushy green plant in the right of the picture is a volunteer mint. There are now a few of these in the yard, so I’m thinking that we need to learn how to cook with mint
Jerry and my egg chair
We loved our first Cecile Brunner rose so much that we bought a bare root this year and planted it in front of that black trellis on the fence
The clematises are already so big!
The roses are really killing it this year
At the top is a delphinium I planted in 2019 that came back beautifully while at the bottom, there is another delphinium from 2019 which has so far produced…one tiny stem and one tiny leaf
Not sure why the basil already looks like an angry monster chewed on it
These anemones are so pretty
Japanese painted fern
I wonder how much of this will be flowers and how much weeds? I also planted corn here this year!
If anyone asked me what showy milkweed looks like when it is growing, I don’t think I would guess this
I think this is probably a weed but to be on the safe side, I’m keeping it. For now. But I have my eye on it
These are the plants that we have planted in our garden.
Margo DeMello 