Betsy's Garden

Betsy lost a big oak tree in a storm last winter. It was in her front yard but near the far left side of her property. Once all the removal work was done and carted away she was left with a bare circle 20 feet in diameter. Rather than try to plant grass and make it match, she took advantage of the nearly full sun and planted a vegetable garden.

Around the near edge is a thick row of basil - enough for all the tomatoes in Hanover! Around the rest of the perimeter is a row of peppers. They are all different kinds and fun to see. She is my kind of plant shopper. She hit a local garden center on the day the reduced the early veggies and she bought them for about 20% of their normal price... so she got lots! She has also planted nasturtiums and marigolds among the plants to help keep away some of the bugs and critters. I don't know enough about organic gardening to know if this will help, but they sure are pretty.

In the center of the garden is okra! The plant itself is pretty and Betsy has been eating from it for at least three weeks. She gives lots of stuff to her neighbors and it just keeps growing.

There is a small planter on the far left edge of this plot. It is filled with tiny radish plants that the neighboring children planted. Radishes are ready to eat in 21 days, so this is a great project for kids. The plants are large enough that they need to be thinned soon, but the kids are on vacation until next week, so that job will have to wait a while.

Betsy has other vegetables inter-planted in her back yard, too. Melon vines grow over boxwood along one fence and tomatoes are planted next to her brick house in the back (for additional heat) and behind a row of perennials. She truly makes creative use of the space she has. These are ideas that lots of folks could use.

Meet the Boomerang

I realized this morning that I have talked several times about the boomerang, but have not really shown it to you. So today's the day.

First the history. When we bought the house nine years ago we made an agreement with the builder that he would put in grass seed (as required by law) but no landscaping at all. We wanted to do it ourselves. The front yard is fairly flat with a gentle slope toward the street that ends in a utility ditch at the edge of the street. There were two established trees - a silver maple on the right [as viewed from the street] and an oak on the left next to the driveway. Each was set in about 1/4 of the width of the lot, leaving about 50% open in the middle of the yard. They provided a good bit of shade all day for the house, but left the front of the property quite sunny. There is shade there only in the morning from the trees next door. [There is also a utility easement that requires that all trees be cut to 25 feet tall, or "side-walled" to keep them out of the electrical lines that parallel the street.]

One of the first things that we planted was a weeping cherry at the front right corner. We chose it because it would not exceed 25 feet tall and we thought it would be lovely. Mitchell watered it carefully every week and it died. When we pulled it up in the fall, we found that the heavy clay of our land had basically formed a clay pot around the roots and had filled with water - effectively drowning the tree. We knew we had a problem. Wanting to landscape the front of our yard tho, we bought a load of topsoil and laid out a bed that would mark the corner of the yard, while leaving room between the bed and the lot line to drive the pickup truck to the back. Essentially, we made a raised bed, but without any sides to hold it up. We tilled the existing soil and mixed the better soil into it and formed a bed - which ended up looking like a boomerang!

Instead of another tree, we picked shrubs and perennials that love the sun: plumbago, garden phlox, clematis, sedum, and weigelia 'Wine and Roses'. Initially there was also a beauty berry that was gorgeous, but which quickly got entirely too large, so we removed it about five years ago. The plumbago came from Garland's garden, and the other plants from Big Blue.

The photo above is the view from the house side. From left to right are sedum 'Madrona', a dogwood, garden phlox, cone flower, and the weigelia. The weigelia has grown well, altho you can see how very one-sided it is. We put a clump of sea oats behind it when they both were small. The sea oats became a bully, so I dug it up last fall and found that the weigelia had grown all of it's branches to the front to get out of the way of the sea oats. I did a fairly severe pruning this spring and am now seeing new branches coming on the house side of the plant. In a few years, it should round out for us. It is gorgeous in the early spring, tho, when it is covered with bright pink flowers. Out of the photo on the left end is the plumbago and on the right end more plumbago and some new phlox I planted this spring.

The photo on the right was taken from the street, so you cannot see all of the bed, but this is what passersby see. That huge clump of phlox started as three plants - dark and light pink. I have divided the clumps over the years and they have grown taller and stronger. There is a small clump of monk's hood hidden in the middle that blooms dark purple in the center of all that pink. I have finally learned to cut more phlox to get additional bloom later into the summer. It's so pretty tho, that I do hate to cut it.

There is a dogwood in this planting now. It started life as a volunteer that sprouted right next to the house. Last fall we decided that it could not possible stay where it was and the only chance of saving it was to move it. There was a gap where the beauty berry came out, so we planted it there. Dogwoods can be iffy. Their taproot does not go straight down, so you cannot be sure that you have dug up enough of it, but it appears that we were lucky with this one. It is now nearly five feet tall. You can see it in the both the photos. I think it will be two or three years before it blooms, but it will be lovely. I have been spraying it weekly for powdery mildew, which can be bad for young trees.

You may also have noticed that we have a "garden feature" in this bed. Just left of the phlox (see top photo and look right of the phlox) is a wrought iron support for a clematis that is long gone - needed more water. It is a pyramid with a pretty filial on top. We decided to leave it when the clematis died, because it looks great peaking out above the rest of the flowers.

The Project - Up Close and Personal

Last week I gave you an update on the xeri-garden, but in retrospect the photo did not do it justice. While I wanted you to see the whole thing, it was too small to see the real detail of what's growing. So we're back to take a closer look.

This is the left end of the bed. Before we look at the plants, take a quick look at the far left corner of the box. When I filled it originally, the dirt was up to the bottom of the top rail. In six weeks it has settled a bit more than two inches completely uncovering the second rail. One thing that I will have to do this fall and perhaps again next spring is to top dress the entire bed with more dirt. I will have to do it carefully to not smother the plants, but if I add it slowly I will be able to build up the level of the dirt as the plants grow taller crowns and keep themselves up and out of the dirt.

Now to the plants. You can easily see the salvia 'Snowhill' that dominates this end of the bed. It has grown and bloomed steadily since the second week after planting. There are only two plants here, but they have already reached 75% of their full grown size, and the butterflies love them. The thyme is just starting to bloom and the two remaining plants are spreading nicely, as are the two remaining evening primroses 'Shimmer' that are the gray-green foliage in the front of this photo.

The most interesting thing, tho, is the penstemon 'Elfin Pink' which is also blooming. Look closely at the right side of this grouping and you can find a tall, slender plant with coral pink flowers. It has bloomed for several weeks and altho it is small, seems well established. I have high hopes for next year. At the far right rear you can see the agastache 'Ava'. It is growing well and has some tall spikes of dark pink flowers that you just can see against the fence. It should at least double in size in a year or two.

In the right hand photo you can see the other half of the xeri-garden and some of the annual flowers that I added for color. At the extreme left is the 'Ava' mentioned above and just past the empty space is the second one. If you look carefully you can see some flowers on that one, too. The big open space is there because I wanted to leave plenty of room for them to grow. Eventually they should fill that space and have hundreds of flower spikes. The big surprise is the cat mint - it has gone wild! See all those pale lavendar fluffy-looking blooms behind and mixed into the petunias? That's cat mint. It smells wonderful (same family as "cat nip") and the butterflies spend whole days in it. You cannot see them, but there are also two penstemon "Violet Dusk' blooming in all that cat mint. They are a bit shorter than the 'Elfin Pink' in the first photo, but eventually I hope they will tower over the cat mint. They are lavendar, but otherwise look just like the 'Elfin Pink'.

When I planted all the petunias, I really was just trying to provide a pop of color to keep this new bed from looking too bad this first year. Well, they love it there and have spread like Topsy! I mixed the purple and pink just for fun, but ended up with a great view as you pull into the driveway - an unintended surprise! My long term plan is to use the far end of that bed as a cutting garden. I have already planted hollyhocks for next year, but will add zennias, stock and other annuals that are good for cutting.

Since it is a bed made entirely from composted dirt, I have had to struggle with weeding - not the usual garden weeds, but odd things from the compost like tomatoes! I have probably pulled 50 tomato plants so far, as well as hundreds of little Queen Anne's Lace plants, and the prize this week goes to a cucumber that is growing just behind the right-most 'Ada'. These all came from seeds of plants that were thrown in the compost heap. Unfortunately the heat in the deteriorating compost was not high enough to kill all the seeds. It makes for an interesting bed!

So, that's a better look at the xeri-garden six weeks later. I should note that I only watered the xeri-part for two weeks after first planting and have relied on nature ever since. [I have watered the petunia-filled end, where the plants are not intended to be water-wise, at least weekly depending on the amount of rain.] So far, they are doing fine and the drainage seems to be working as I planned. Altho I have lost two plants, that's not bad for a new bed and I lost things that are easily replaced. So far, so good.....

Meet Miss Ellie

This elegant lady is spending the next ten days with us while her family vacations on Cape Cod. They will have many aunts and uncles and cousins and other dogs all camping together in a state park on the Cape, but both the twelve-hour drive and the hubbub are too much for this lovely lady, so she is camping with us.

As you can see from her gray muzzle and paws, she is no spring chicken. A hand-me-down dog her family is not sure exactly how old she is, but something around ten seems right. It is nice to have her sprawled on our hearth, or under the deck in the shade while I was gardening this morning. It brings back the good feelings that we had for so many years when we had our own dogs.

We are told that Ellie likes her twice-daily walks and will chase her ball - for a while. She had not been here fifteen minutes before finding the lily pond. By "finding" I mean, of course, "getting into". Somewhere there is a terrified frog! The pond is not a good fit for her, as the bottom is quite small with a large potted water lily taking up most of the available space. But she apparently found it cooling enough that she did it twice!

We already know that she is afraid of shiny floors. Our carpeted house is great for her, altho feeding in the kitchen may be a stretch. We have put throw-rugs from door to door in hopes of breaking up that huge expanse of shine for her. It also seems that she is a bit spooked by the open back of the steps coming up to the house. Although we have four possible ways to enter the house all require coming up to a deck and she doesn't really like doing it. A cookie made the deal this morning, so I am not sure who is training whom!

Somehow dogs seem to bring out the best in people. We show them the overt affection that we sometimes are too inhibited to show to the humans we love. It's easier to touch a dog than a person, and you can tell a dog your deepest secrets without fear of their going any farther.

So, we will enjoy a new routine for the next ten days - walks in the early morning and evening - and a presence in our home. It will be like old times with Jack, or Buck, or Mocha. But when she goes home we will no doubt be happy to have our quiet little house become quiet again.