Front Garden Grade Card

People tell you not to flip out when you plant perennials for the first time.  You need to have an eye for the long term picture.  They will eventually yield that full-out English garden grown-in-together-for-years look.  After a few years.  If one needs immediate validation as a gardener, annuals are a better choice.  They poof up, they die, and next year you start all over again. 

Well I can wait.  Delayed gratification is better.  And yet.
  

I have garden anxiety.  When the box arrived from Bluestone I peeked in excitedly (that's a lie, I tore that box open) and the stalks of my perennials seemed so small.  Are they going to be ok out there?  A strong gust of wind would blow them over, or so it seemed.  And now that they've been in the ground about a month now, I have to say that I'm a bit worried that I may not have any green on these thumbs at all.

In the beginning, the geraniums looked... bad.

Geranium Rozanne

Planted

Progress

They haven't gotten much bigger after a month.  Not much in new green growth, but there are finally flowers.  

I think maybe they need more water than I've been giving them.  I can say that now that I am a newly minted gardener, I am keenly aware of the weather.  I'm always checking for the next rain.  

If anyone has any geranium advice, I'm all ears!

Salvia "Eveline"

Out of 4 plants, this was the only healthy one of the bunch, I'm sorry to say.

Little buds peeping out, and the first signs of slug attacks

This was one of the first ones I pulled from the box.  This one actually flowered.

With the exception of this one pictured here, the salvia eveline looked terrible.  They were moldy and snail-ridden when I pulled them from the shipping box.

note the snail eggs

 Three of the salvia eveline came out like a train wreck.  Their leaves were either wilty and mushy or their were holes in the leaves.  They came out of the shipping box covered in slugs and slug eggs.  Strangely enough, none of the other plants had pests on them, not even the other species of salvia.

A few days after planting one of them died altogether, and the other two lost most of their leaves.  I sent a note and some photos to Bluestone, letting them know how disappointed I was in their slug-riddled flowers.   They were really stand-up about the whole thing.  I got an apology and replacement flowers within a week.  That's a good company, right there.  I approve.  They stood by the quality of their product, and I respect that.  Slugs can happen.

There were new holes in the salvia eveline leaves pretty much every time I checked them.  Finally I spoke to a colleague who told me that it was slugs.  Slugs again!  It seems that when you get rid of one garden nemesis (groundhogs) you find yourself another.  Sure enough there were slugs underneath the plant or on the underside of the leaves pretty much each time I checked it.  I tried slug poison pellets because Bobby is never unsupervised in the front yard.  Sure enough the snail presence diminished, and I don't often see the snot-like slug trails in the mulch anymore.   I did try the beer trap in the front flower bed as well, and again I never had a single slug in it.  The only effect it had was to make the front of our house smell like a college dorm.  

Salvia "Plumosa"

Unlike the salvia eveline, the plumosa hasn't been sluggy.  Right after planting they became infested with red spider mites and white flies.  I used a spray called Sevin for that, and it seems to have worked.  The plumosa leaves, which had yellowed from the stress of infestation regained their green color.  I respray whenever I catch a glimpse of white flies.  


You see how they flop over?  I'm not sure how to handle this.  The stems look pretty weak to me.  I wonder if this is simply because the flowers are too heavy, or if there's a structural weakness stemming from (no pun intended) something else...

I feel like I just can't catch a break with salvia.    

Nepeta Dropmore Hybrid (Catmint)

Blooms!  

It had blooms right away, but then stopped flowering.  It has filled out with more greenery though, which is good enough for now.  At least its not dying.  

Patience, patience.

Nepeta Walker's Low (Catmint)

I have two of these, and they look like completely different plants. 

Look:  

Plant one stands upright, growing tall. 

Plant two is growing along the ground.  

incidentally, this one isn't flowering at all...

Poppies

Not looking real good.  May be sturdy enough to survive, but I'm losing confidence.  There is less greenery than there was when they were first planted.  Seeking out poppy advice is problematic because inevitably a google search bring up illicit poppy production webpages, which is not helpful.  

Iris "Big Blue"

not blooming, not real healthy.

Daylily "Barbara Mitchell"

ditto.

There you have it.  the catmint and the geranium and the salvia are doing ok.  The poppies, irises, and lilies are regressing.  

50% is not a good gardening grade.  

Frown.

Belated Back Yard Update

Haven't posted for awhile.  Things have been busy for D and I both personally and professionally.  Oh, and we've also both been stricken with pretty gruesome cases of poison ivy.  

But full schedules and itchy rashes notwithstanding, we've made time for work around the yard.  With how crappy the yard used to look, I think we've made real progress.  

Remember this?  This was in the beginning.  The vine orgy.

note the overgrown mess of honeysuckle strangling the mulberry in the back

Fantastic tangle of dead crap left in mounds for us to clean up 

We cleaned up the dead vine remnants.  Then D removed the vintage, rusty laundry pole.

 This is what it looked like this spring  

We planted grass seed, and some weeds popped up.

 Transplanted hostas from the front.  

And they are being eaten by slugs.  Swiss cheese here.

I've tried beer traps, but using homebrew must be a mistake, because the beer traps are always empty.

It's not perfect, but its green and the lumber has been moved.  

The grass grew in very well at the base of the tree, and quickly too.  

I think the giant elephant-ear sized leaves look like rhubarb, but I haven't actually identified them.  If they are, they can stay.  If they are not rhubarb, they are outta here.

I planted another hosta and a second astilbe.  I need to mulch this area, but just haven't got around to it.  The lily has already bloomed.  It looks like it too made a successful transplant.  

And on the other side of the yard, the tree branches from the honeysuckle felled by my husband the were left to dry out along with whatever vine was strangling that tree here.  D chopped that down with an ax.

This side of the yard was pretty hideous for a few weeks.

:: wince ::

 The day finally came when the branches were dried enough to be (relatively) easily stripped down to be put into the yard waste bins for collection. 

 It was around this time that I got poison ivy

After hours outside stripping branches, I'd barely made a dent.

even with bobby's help

 D made a more orderly and controlled lumber pile.  Using 2 concrete sidewalk squares left intact from the concrete removal on the side of the house to raise the pile up off the ground to keep them dry, and four rebar poles.  We'll be covering the lumber pile with a tarp to keep the burn pile dry.  

And D spent a third afternoon breaking down more branches,
and this is what it looks like now.  Eh?

One more time.

Before:  

After:  

Front Garden Bed: In Progress

Of course, the plants I ordered arrived in the middle of a days-long spell of rain.  The weather broke for two days, and then the rain was supposed to come back for more.  (*it never showed up, figures)

So, believing that we had no time to spare, out to the front yard we went.  

 We'd already planted the existing (freshly-jackhammered) front bed.  It was a bit easier and less time consuming in that we didn't have to tear up any sod.  But it had been complicated in that the hostas and whatnot that were there had to be moved to the back.  

A week or so after planting.  Before the slugs set in :(

I'd envisioned a line of plants skirting the foundation, and so we had to tear up the existing sod and move it to lay the flower bed.  See the bald spots?  Those are where once the tree roots were, before D dug them up and removed them.  

 

Here are bits that we removed by shovel, before I inevitably hurt my back and D had to take over.  

(the yellow line is a tape measure)

In the process, we unearthed a bit of tree or something.  Here it is, rising up out of the earth like the creature in the movie Tremors.  

"we should call em 'Graboids.' "

 D had to take the axe to it.  Once that was out, we mixed the existing soil with peat and potting soil (they were out of planting soil, oddly enough), aerating it.  

We placed the bits of sod in the back were we have some mysteriously bald earth to cover.  

Maybe it'll thrive here, maybe not.  But no harm done.  

 While we're in the backyard, here are the hostas we moved from the front bed.  They are, incidentally, much healthier than anything we've planted.  I frown at this statement, but its true.

On the top left corner is an astilbe I bought at a church sale last year.  

On the left are two spikey things we also transplanted from the front.  They're healthy too.  Some semper vivum or something?  

Name that plant!

 And now, back to the front.  You can see in the pot on the corner of the concrete porch there.  In there are lilies and an iris that we were given for free at a library book sale in Circleville three years ago.  

 The ladies that ran the sale were desperate to find homes for a bunch of orphaned plants.  If we didn't take them, they said, they'd have to throw them away.  So, because I'm a sucker for a leafy sob story, I took them.  They survived un-planted on an apartment balcony that got about two hours of sun per day.  True, the iris has never bloomed.  But the lilies did, in the plastic planter pack.  And now look at them.  They are the healthiest things out there. 

Well, everyone likes the underdog, don't they?

 And while we're distracted from the work that was going on, I heard a curious rustling in the maple tree behind me. I looked over and saw some of the branches were shaking and quivering.  I watched as a baby robin slowly plopped out of the tree and onto the ground.  Right next to the space where Bobby was chained.

It flopped like a landed fish and I pointed my finger with urgency and got D's attention first with wordless panicked noises, and then I managed, "Baby bird!  Baby bird by Bobby!"  Somehow, our brilliant boy missed the whole thing, from the thud to the flopping, even though it was quite literally right next to him.  D got the dog's attention, and while we held the dog back baby bird proceeded to hop and bounce awkwardly right into the street.  Mama bird screamed avian obscenities at us.  Eventually baby bird hopped under my car in the driveway and the dog was taken inside, and we got back to work.

We don't know if it figured out the whole flight thing, because we never saw it again.  

There were leftover border stones in the garage, that the previous owners didn't use.  Not enough to stretch the length of the front of the house, but close enough that we only have to buy two or three more bricks.  Then, finally, we were able to plant.  To be continued.