Garden Makeover Part II

Here's the plan for my newly spacious front bed: I'm going to take a bunch of my planters and pots and sneak them into the bare spots I've made. Devious!

I plant three huge Rex begonias right into the bed, and move two large mixed planters of geraniums and Abutilon and fuchsia into the bare areas.  Instant color where there was only bare soil. They won't live through the winter, but that's OK. They'll color it up and act as placeholders until frost. It's cheating, sort of, but it's good cheating.

Hoo-wee does that ever look better.

It's OK with me if it looks kind of like a garden center tag sale. At least it's interesting and not full of deadheads and crap I don't want.

I put some tropicals I don't intend to bring into the greenhouse in the spaces where the lilies of the valley grew. It's kind of a crazy mix, but it sure beats a mess.

 With a bunch of the superfluous pots cleared away and planted out, the front entry looks neater and more inviting now.

Achimenes "Pink Nighty" is stealing the show, with shocking pink blossoms popping everywhere.

 

I've been propagating that plant like mad, so I can have some to give away this winter. 

Achimenes, which is a gesneriad (African violet/gloxinia/sinningia relative) has a charming habit of going dormant in fall, dying back, and leaving little green pinecone-like tubers in the soil. You keep those in a Ziploc bag at room temperature, and plant five of them to an 8" pot come spring.  

From practically nothing you get this amaaaazing compact but trailing, bushy plant that blooms and blooms and blooms.

And then when it dies back in fall, you store it over the winter in a Ziploc bag full of green pinecone thingies. Takes no space at all, but you have all the genetic material you need to start fresh in spring.

It's truly amazing. They let you know when they're ready to grow by putting out a little red shoot!

I'm kinda nuts about a new Rex begonia called Jurassic "Watermelon." I'd like to think T-rex had this color and pattern. 

Hibiscus "The Path" has just gone nuts this summer. She got a bigger pot and lots of plant food and manure. She liked that!

Heck, she's as tall as I am now. I'm already planning what not to bring into the greenhouse, on her behalf. Sorry, giant scraggly Rosemary. You've just been voted out of the Groanhouse.

You too, three oversized jasmines. Too much foliage and spread. We're cutting back to one jasmine.

In late summer, the sun's intensity has dropped enough that I can bring my bonsai Japanese maples out of the shade and display them on the front stoop. I love to watch them color up come fall.

When I was finally done with my garden/front porch makeover, I mowed the lawn. 

Right before I took this picture, Mr. Baker was lying, frogspraddled, right across the path of the mower. This is what he does when I mow. He glares balefully at me and moves at the very last second. Then lies down again where I will have to come through on the next pass. It's his way of bringing himself to my notice as I mow and sing and talk to myself.

So there you go.  A day well spent, and I enjoyed every minute of it. I like working hard, especially when the results are so easy to see. Maybe it's time for a late summer garden makeover at your house! 

Thanks to the tuberoses in the foreground, this view smells even better than it looks. I like to think of our meadow as the world's largest flowerbed.

Late Summer Garden Makeover: One Day, Big Difference

July 19. The place is looking pretty fly; the drought hasn't hit yet; the late summer crabgrass has yet to take over the entire lawn, and the daylilies are all blooming. 

By August 21, though, my front gardens were showing their age. That big front bed was buggin' me. 

Over the years since I planted it, certain things had taken over, asserted themselves, crowding out the plants I loved and actually wanted there.

It was ticking me off.

I was winding up for a garden makeover. And I wanted fast results.

I had to wait for a good soaking rain. We got 2 1/2", and three days later another 3/4" of blessed rain, which would soften the soil enough for me to do some serious digging.

August 21 dawned clear and cool, 53 degrees. I went for my run and came back loaded for bear.

I started digging.

First to go were the huge, gangly, spent evening primroses that had bloomed beautifully, then turned into seed factories. I like evening primroses, but these had spread so aggressively they killed a bunch of things I like better. I wasn't about to let these drop their seeds all over this bed again. I got them out before the capsules opened. Whew!

Next to go were the orange ditch lilies that, no matter how often I pull them out, keep spreading. 

That's because you can't pull daylilies out. They just break off at soil level, leaving all the tubers. You have to get serious, get a spade and dig them out.

It didn't take long to get a cartload of tops and roots. Whew. That already feels a lot better. I have some beautiful farmer's market daylilies in that bed that I adore. But these orange ditch lilies just had to go.

Now there was some breathing room around the daylilies I liked. There was room for the bleeding heart to come back up in the spring, room for four beautiful little bleeding hearts my dear friend Lucy in Minnesota gave me this summer, and room for all the daffodils that had had to struggle through the daylilies. 

It's absolutely amazing the biomass I took out of that bed. Out! Out! Out! You can see the last remaining ditch lilies on the left side of this photo. They're going.

When I was finished, there was even room for me to plant a few new things next spring!

Next to go were all the lilies of the valley. 

I know this plant well enough to know that I will never get rid of them all. But I tried.

Now, I know a lot of you love this plant. I do, too. The problem is, this plant is a thug. A big ugly garden thug.

I got the start for what became a monstrous stand of LOV from my grandma Ruigh's garden in Meservey, Iowa. 

I never dreamt it would take over half my front bed with a foot-deep, impenetrably dense mat of roots and runners. 

I am a sentimental person, but I abandon sentimentality when a plant ceases to be an asset. Unfortunately, you can't grow just a few lilies of the valley. You wind up growing nothing else. Can you say "INVASIVE?"

Grunting and cussing, I dug and dug and dug. I was amazed to see they had infiltrated the hosta roots. Nothing stops them! The roots were so thick and heavy I had to chop them into manageable two-foot square hunks to be able to lift them and shake the soil out of them. 

Horrid!

 Another cartload of pure ugh. About 75 pounds of lilies of the valley. And a Lenten rose, one of many, that just keep seeding and spreading. I want things like larkspur and delphinium, bleeding heart, bergenia, fuchsia and butterfly weed instead.

When I was done, there was a pleasing amount of bare space in between the plants. Yay! 

Now to tackle the doorstep clutter. I can't help it. I'm a compulsive horticulturist. I propagate and pot up babies and divide and recombine...I just love messing with plants.

And pretty soon it gets difficult to get in the front door.

But I have a plan.

Next: Cheating with Container Plants and Tropicals: Late Summer Garden Makeover II.

Reading Summer's Best Book: Animal Tracking on Dean's Fork

 It's good to have a place that fixes you, a guaranteed cure for whatever ails you. Dean's Fork is a medicine that I take regularly. When I have the time to do the whole road, it's a seven mile roundtrip of cure.

 It's downhill all the way. So it's uphill all the way home. Which is kind of cool--I just cruise along letting gravity and curiosity take me farther than I probably ought to go. It's easy to go all the way to the end. Then I pay the price coming back, but the uphill is so gradual and I stop so much that I don't even notice it.

 A midsummer morning is best, for the chicory's out then. After a rain is awesome. My "book" is freshly imprinted with good things to read.  Raccoon:

 A fresh kill, probably by a screech-owl, spattered across the road. The little owl probably reached into a roost hole in the wee hours and pulled his supper out, then fluttered down to the road with it to kill and pluck it. A downy woodpecker would be a pretty good talon-ful for a screech owl, and it would need room to work. Of course it could have been a Cooper's hawk who dun it, too. Haven't seen evidence of sharp-shins nesting in the area this year.

It's a downy woodpecker, most likely a juvenile. Juvenile downies are old enough now for all of their feathers to be out of sheath, so I'm not going by that. The hint is in the yellow staining on the tips of the tail feathers, upper left. That came from the sawdust and droppings in the nest cavity, where the bird sat for a long time. The other hint is the lack of wear on the feathers. By this time of year, adult downies have a lot of wear on their tired feathers. While we are looking at this, dig the tribal coolness of the pattern on those tail feathers!

I think this is an American toadlet, about to leave its puddle. It's maturing too early to be a gray tree frog. Deans Fork is a giant herp factory, with its deep, persistent puddles in the truck tire ruts all along its shaded length. This spring was a total bust for mountain chorus frogs, spring peepers and wood frogs. Even American toads had a terrible time, breeding as they do in May. Very few made it, because it started out nice and wet and then dried up completely. The rains started in June, too late for the early breeders. But the gray tree frogs, which rely on midsummer rains for ephemeral puddles, are having a banner year. Most puddles I see now are packed with gray tree frog taddies. This is why amphibians live a long, long time. Not every year allows them to reproduce.

The old gristmill that used to be a destination for me is now just a roof on a pile of chestnut, thanks to the Derecho of June 29, 2012. It is still beautiful, but I miss the mill. This is what she was in her golden years, before the storm.

And now, all fallen in. It feels a little odd to have been here long enough to be able to reminisce about its past glory, but not as odd, I expect, as it would feel to be here long enough to remember when it was a working gristmill. I suspect the old fellow who still runs cattle here can remember that. I have run into him a couple of times. He makes me laugh because he cusses so much, wrassling tractor implements all by himself on a road where nobody goes.

I look back up the Fork and am thankful for the black barn, still standing proud, her slate roof still intact. "When the roof goes, the barn goes." DOD, talking to me again.

Down near the end, my second set of bobcat tracks, these from a small female. The first were from a big male. You'll remember these from the last bobkit post. The way the green stone kept his inside toe from hitting the mud.

The same animal:

And in a wet spot nearby, a mink! (Or, correction: probably a fox squirrel, thanks to an anonymous commenter.) Bunching up his tracks in fours, his odd little crescent-shaped heels giving him away. Hind paws are the bigger ones, on either side of the two front paws. Picture him humping along rabbit-like, his hindfeet striking ahead of his forefeet. That would be a squirrely way to travel more than a minky way.

I smile big to find tracks from a tiny box turtle, dragging his tiny turtle tail in the fresh mud, headed to get a drink. His plastron is only an inch across. Box turtle tracks are rare, rare, rare, and these are my first set of juvenile box turtle tracks! Knowing there is a juvenile out there, knowing that somehow two box turtles bumped into each other a couple of springs ago and the female managed to lay eggs that June and miraculously get them past all the coons and possums and snakes for three months until they hatched, makes me SO happy. Taking the Dean's Fork cure, I am. Reading a really good book in this mud. 

My friend Michael, a daylily breeder, calls these "ditch lilies." A European import, now in bloom all along the roadsides. Now I call them that, too. I've got the damn things spreading all through my front flower bed. As soon as they're done blooming they're going, to make more room for things I really want. It will be about the third time I've been sure I've dug them all out. They always win, and come back stronger than ever. D'oh! Ditch lilies!

But they look mighty fine down here on Dean's Fork.

Bacon and I look back up the Fork.

Blue sky has been very rare this summer, and I'm loving its reflection on the water.

I can never get enough of this vista, looking back up toward the black barn. 

Sometimes you get a dog in your vista, sometimes you don't. 

We'll keep loping down Dean's Fork on Sunday.