The garden is getting to that point where most of the major work in some beds has been completed (even though there's much to do in other beds) and I can start looking at the details.
Stringy stonecrop, Sedum sarmentosum, is probably the fastest-growing sedum around -- at least in the cold-hardy species.
The other day I posted lots of photos of individual blooms -- up-close is my favorite way of looking at most flowers.
Certain plants disappear for me for most of the year -- there's just nothing remarkable about them, or perhaps they get overshadowed by other things.
Yesterday I showed you most of the plants I put on the north side of the new front walkway.
My recent walkway project ended for this year once I got all of the perennials planted. It's time to show you what plants I put here to give the area not only instant impact, but to ensure that it becomes a real thing of beauty and interest in future years.
Like all gardeners, every spring I have a long list of things to do: clean up, cultivate, weed, plant -- you know the list. It's not surprising to me that some of those tasks get delayed, and I don't get to them as soon as I'd like to. Starting seed? Sometimes a bit late. Getting veggie seedlings into the ground? Same there -- sometimes later than I'd like. This year though, I think I set a record.
Yesterday I posted part 1 of my visit to the Missouri Botanical Garden. Today I continue on where I left off. I'm nearing the southeast corner of The Garden now, where there are more houses (that were once private residences and now serve various purposes), and some formal gardens.
I'm terrible when growing spring greens. I've thought about it a little and I'm pretty sure there are a few mistakes I make, but the main one is I'm not good at thinning. Some of the pots of greens I planted on my deck (for convenience -- no need to make the long trek down to the veggie garden) exhibit this quite clearly:
Sometimes my posts have focus. A topic. Maybe they document a project. Maybe they have a central theme. Other times my posts do not. They're collections of non-connected mini-topics. Sort of a jumble of some small things I've noticed recently that don't lend themselves to a full post.
The other day I received a package of plants as part of a trade. I took a brief look at the plants then, but didn't want to unwrap them completely as I wasn't ready to plant.
Getting plants via mail order is fun and exciting. You place the order, wait a week or two, and a box shows up full of new plants. If you've never done it, you should give it a try.
I've got a lot of different planting beds in my suburban garden: veggie beds, perennial beds, plantings of bamboo, huge ornamental grasses. Many of them are pretty large beds, but I've got some small areas too, like the planting pockets around the stream. My smallest "garden" though has to be the cracks between stones of my flagstone patios. I've never really thought about them as a garden until recently -- they've just been the gaps between the stones before.
Besides getting some seeds started inside the last few days, I also did another planting project. A week and a half ago I placed an order for some new plants, and received the package this past weekend. Yes, it's February, and yes, I live in a part of the country that won't be seeing spring for a couple more months, so what was any respectable nursery doing shipping plants in the middle of winter?
We've got three flagstone areas in our yard: the patio under the deck, the landing on the main stairway down to the patio, and the patio. All of them originally had a form of crushed limestone filling all of the cracks between the stones, but I've been slowly replacing that gritty, messy material with green.
In my garden I use various groundcovers as filler plants. They don't really cover large portions of ground, but they fill in around stairs, next to the rocks of the "stream", and anywhere else I want a low-growing, easy spot of texture and color.
It's about 20ºF warmer today than it should be: 80ºF instead of 60ºF, and the same for tomorrow. This means two things: 1) I should be seeing more bamboo shoots, and 2) I need to do some more cleanup. Just a small area today:
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