Dividing Hostas

I took terrible photos, but I want to be sure to document that this was the first time I ever divided perennials.  We've got lovely rows of hostas along our front sidewalk, but there's one very large one that doesn't match the rest, and takes up a lot of the sidewalk by mid-summer. 

 

Since the area under the tree in the front yard is in pretty poor shape--weedy, with very sparse ferns and lilly of the valley--I thought it might be good to move the big hosta to that area.

 

 

I found out that it is really tough to dig up a hosta!  So I only took a few chunks, and I'll have to move the rest of it next year.  I'm not sure if it was the hosta roots or the tree roots that made the job so challenging, but it was a bear.

 

Here are the locations of the six babies I moved further back under the tree.  I'm not doing the best job of keeping them watered, but hopefully they'll survive the winter and we'll have a renewed landscape next year!

 

Perennial Sale!

My favorite greenhouse, Wagner's, is having a sale. All perennials are 40% off. I spent a long time there on Sunday, browsing the selection. What a great way to spend an hour.


My intention was to look for some shade-loving plants for the front yard. There's a big (maple?) tree in the south half of the front yard that shades pretty much that whole side. There's a nice border of hostas along the sidewalk, and the rest of the space filled with a sprinkling of ferns, lilly of the valley, and lots of weeds. I wanted to find (a) a shade loving vine to climb the arbor on the shady south side, and (b) a shade loving plant that would aggressively fill in the space under the tree that the ferns have failed to fill.

"Silver Moon" Clematis

I found one variety of a flowering vine that likes partial shade: the "Silver Moon" clematis. I can't wait to see if it will flower in the spring. I wonder what "pruning type 2" means. And I wonder if I need to add wires or string or something to help it climb.

"Cherry Blossom" Lenten Rose

For the space under the tree, I am giving this "Cherry Blossom" Lenten Rose a try. It was the most expensive of my picks, but I have high hopes for it. The actual plant looks thick and sturdy. The tag says it's "exceptionally vigorous" and is an excellent groundcover for shady areas. Exactly what I need.

So I'd found what I was looking for. But then I kept finding more plants that wanted to go home with me. My front rock garden is still a weedy mess, because even though I've planted lots of low, thick groundcover, there are still areas of bare dirt. So I splurged on three new plants for the rock garden.

"Black Scallop" Ajuga

I love the "Chocolate Chip" Ajuga that I planted the last couple of summers. It's pretty all summer, and it is spreading nicely. This "Black Scallop" version has a bigger leaf, but otherwise looks very similar. I hope it spreads as well. This one supposedly likes partial shade, so I put it on the side of the front rock garden that gets a lot of shade from the maple. It will get dappled light during the day, and some sun in the late afternoons.

Mexican Evening Primrose

Now that I've decided to focus my energies on vegetable gardening, I didn't plant a single annual this year, and I missed the color. When I saw this Mexican Evening Primrose, I was wooed by its pretty flowers combined with its groundcover properties. The tag promises "profuse day-blooming flowers over a long season." This should be a treat!

"Heart Attack" Sweet William

Presumably named for its blood red blooms, I fell in love with the healthy-looking thick foliage and the potential for bright color in the spring. The tag says "Heart Attack" Sweet William is perfect for amassing in beds and borders.

From Humble Beginnings...

The summer has flown by, and from humble beginnings has spring a very lively garden. We've had loads of cucumbers, tomatoes, zucchini, lettuce, basil and dill. We're on the verge of a robust butternut squash harvest, and if the vigor of the as-yet fruitless vines of the pumpkin plants are any indication, we should have a great pumpkin harvest, too. We've got a couple of tiny acorn squashes and watermelons. And still have hopes that we'll get carrots, beets, and onions.

A few highlights in pictures:

2010 Garden

On Memorial Day, our 2010 garden was born. Last year's garden was so much fun, I decided to expand. A lot. We took the entire top tier of the backyard landscaping over. I took my parents advice and used roundup to kill the grass a couple of weeks ahead of time.


We basically planted a community garden. It was a "barn raising" of the garden variety. The father of last year's tomato seedlings, Simon's Sarah's Dad Ron, offered to come help and give master gardening advice, so we eagerly accepted the offer. Simon and Sarah helped too, and even brought dinner for the grill later.



Tilling by hand is a tough job. We used a couple of "garden claw" type tools, but a plain old pitchfork was the best tool for the job. Unfortunately, it broke under the stress.

When it was all turned up, we raked away the dead grass.

Finally, planting!

Then watering... (notice we attracted a neighborhood kid who always likes to be helpful!)

We planted carrots (the only thing we planted from seed), rhubarb, red onions, white onions, leeks, garlic, beets, lettuce, asparagus, strawberries, pumpkins, butternut squash, acorn squash, cucumbers, peppers, tomatoes, basil, dill, celery, and cilantro.

The rhubarb:

The strawberries:

The garlic...

The pumpkins....

The lettuce...

The end. Expect weekly updates. Or monthly. I'm not so great at the blogging these days.

Composting

This summer I decided to try composting. I was intimidated at first because of all the rules about what you can put in, what you can't, what constitutes "green" compost vs. "brown" compost, the delicate balance between the two, the moisture content, the temperature, the turning....


Then my friend Cindy told me you can compost without following all those rules. She calls it "throw it all in a pile" composting. So I dove in. The house came with a big black plastic composte bin. It was a little beat up, with cracks and holes, but I decided it was good enough.

After careful consideration, I placed the compost bin near the deck, beside the house. I knew it would be 10 times more likely to get used if I didn't have to put shoes on to dump stuff in it. Plus, there isn't really a good place for it out by the alley.




It's been kind of fun to dump stuff in there all summer--it makes me feel less wasteful when I empty out the fridge of all the vegetables that went bad before I used them. One thing I learned, though, is that I should NOT put apples and pears in there. My backyard is carpeted with apples and pears that have fallen from the fruit trees, all in various stages of rot. So each weekend I dutifully pick them all up, and this year I decided I didn't have to bag them and put them by the garbage pickup, since I have a compost bin now. So I dumped the first weekend's load in there. Bad idea. A couple days later when I went out to toss some moldy lettuce in, I lifted the lid to a swarm of fruit flies, moths, and bees. A literal cloud of them flew up in my face. Yuck. So no more apples in there.


This morning I emptied the kitchen of veggies gone bad and wandered on out to the compost bin, wondering how the moth situation would be now that I haven't put any new apples in there for a few weeks. When I lifted the lid, I saw something dart really quickly from one side to the other. A MOUSE! *Shudder* I nearly fell down backing away as quickly as I did. There's just something about animals that move quickly. They freak me out. I can't stand those spiders that run really fast across the wall, either.


I wonder if I could have avoided this if I had done a better job of turning the compost often and keeping a layer of grass clippings on the top. I seriously might have to stop composting. I can't have mice hanging out chomping away that close to my house. It's only a matter of time before they find a way in, and I will be VERY UNHAPPY if I find mice in my house. I'm trying to live peacefully with all the little beetles I have this summer, but mice are a very different, yucky story.

Gardening

I haven't crafted much this summer, because I've been spending my spare time and DIY energy on my first vegetable garden. I got lots of free plants from friends with extra seedlings, so I dug up some grass, mixed in some composted manure from Menards, and planted away. Simon's Sarah gave me a whole bunch of heirloom tomato plants from her dad's garden, as well as some eggplant. Zoe and Ryan gave me two basil plants, cilantro, green peppers, and cucumbers. Kate gave me a pumpkin plant.

I've harvested two green peppers and five cucumbers. The cilantro didn't last long, but I was able to snip a bunch and mix it in with some salsa before it all started turning brown. It was delicious while it lasted. But so far the star of the garden has been the basil. I've made lots of margherita flatbread pizzas on the grill, and have done up a couple of batches of pesto, and have enjoyed caprese salads, although all of these will be so much better when the heirloom tomatoes start ripening!

I've been too busy watering and weeding to take too many pictures, but here are a few.

Got a bumper crop of blueberries this year. They only last for a couple weeks, but I was able to make a tasty blueberry buckle and blueberry pancakes. And of course I ate most of them straight off the bush.

My pepper plants aren't big producers, but what I have been able to eat was lovely.

Signs of Life

Today was beautiful. Spring is finally here. So I decided to walk to crafternoon at Mollie's. While I was waiting on the front step for Sarah to show up so we could walk together, I scanned the yard for signs of new spring growth. Instead, I found a sign of death. Yikes! It feels a little bit like a bad omen.

DIY shrub pruning

You may have noticed that the shrubs on the north side of my house have been threatening to swallow it all year. Someone in This Old House magazine told me that the best way to prune overgrown shrubs is to trim a third of the branches now, a third next year, and a third the following year. That way, you'll get some green growing on the inside of the bush, and don't end up with a skeleton of bare branches. It took me two weekends to get the job done. I really went to town. I climbed on up inside those bushes like a tomboy. I was pretty proud. You can walk into the garage without ducking now.

I found lots of treasures in the bushes, too. An arrow (like for a bow and arrow), a chunk of gutter, nails and junk, a half eaten sandwich, and--you're lucky I spared you the picture--a dead animal. I'm pretty sure it had been dead for quite some time, because it looked like an empty fur coat. I'm also pretty sure it was a pet, because it it was blonde. Maybe like a cat or a dog. ick. The worst part? I couldn't bear to touch it, and it was tucked way under lots of tangly branches, so I couldn't really even reach it. So I covered it up with pine needles and left it there.

Homework: Landscaping Weekend

There's so much stuff going on in summer to distract me from blogging! But not to distract me from getting stuff done.


The blueberries and raspberries have come and gone, but not before I got to share some with Brynn.

A few weeks ago, Mom and Dad came to help with some landscaping projects. Kate had previously helped with cutting down the tree nearest the camera in this first picture, so to make room for the fire pit, we decided to dismantle some of this landscaping.

I removed all the wood chips and plastic, then we pried up all the wood forming the edges. I worked on redistributing some of the extra dirt while Dad used his chainsaw to create a new edge for the now smaller landscaping box.

Dad also helped with some deck repair and used the chainsaw to take down a volunteer tree that had grown for several years. I'd already trimmed as much as I could with my lopper.

Then it was time to start the fire pit. We checked both Menards and Home Depot for the landscaping bricks, and ended up finding much more variety at Home Depot. The bricks available here weren't the same dimensions as the ones Mom and Dad bought back in Iowa, so we had to do some recalculating of our geometry. In the end, I think we bought about 34 bricks--totalling much less than the $100-500 I would have spent on a portable fire ring.

I mostly watched while Mom and Dad did the work. First a trench had to be dug to lay the base ring at ground level. They're smart--the took ease of lawnmowing into account when creating the design. We used the grass dug up from the trench as turf on some of the bare dirt leftover after the landscaping was removed. Making sure the trench and the bricks were level was the hardest part. Below Mom and Dad are using a level balanced on a stake in the middle of the circle to each brick.



The end result looks quite nice.



While we were at Menards, I found a grill at a great price, so I crossed that off the list, too. Who knew a gas grill could take hours to assemble? Mom and Dad worked on it until after dark.




We also got the rosebush trimmed,


gutter extenders installed,


and a light installed in the garage.

With the new fire pit and grill, plus my penchant for running the central air, my house is the new party central among my pals.