What to do, What to do

HEMEROCALLIS Hyperion

Hyperion daylily.  I’ve had them around 11 years now, but they’ve only been deer free for 5.  If I could only grow one daylily, this would be it.  Huge flowers, blossoms for several weeks and is a bit fragrant too.  Yep if I could only grow one, this would be it.   There is a reason it’s been called a border favorite for decades.

Or maybe I’d only grow this one.  (you can see where this is going, can’t you?)

Also big & bold, a regular drama queen.  I like to put her next to this one, Pandora’s Box.  They have the same bloom time.

Eupatorium rugosum 'Chocolate'

Behind this dark beauty is a chocolate Joe Pye Weed.  Which I think isn’t really a Joe Pye at all, but the garden centers call it a chocolate Joe Pye.  Next year I want to get all three of them closer together.  This year they are next to some ordinary Cosmos, I really like the effect of the lacy Cosmos foliage next to them.  I’m hoping it will all work, as the Cosmos won’t bloom until the daylilies are through.  And maybe I’ll cut them for bouquets?

Here is the Cosmos foliage.  Cause I like it!

The Good, The Bad and The Ugly Garden

 

Good. Divided the Ajuga Burgandy and it is doing nicely.

Good. Children have caught a bazillion Japanese beetles for me, I pay them a nickel for each one.  Must bring in the hide to receive the bounty.

Bad. I have had to pay the children 12 dollars this week alone.

Good.  The men-folk killed the woodchucks.

Bad.  Before they died the ‘chucks told their friends about the good eats in my garden.  Two more appeared and munched on the lettuce, green beans, the pumpkins, cucumbers, coneflowers, and on and on.

Good.  They only eat the leaves of the bean plants, they left the actual bean pods.

Ugly. The garden after the woodies have dined.  Lots of sad pathetic little green twigs missing all of their leaves.

(photo to follow.)

Ugly.  The roses have canker.  Blech.

Bad.  The fountain is leaking.

Good.  It’s a slow leak and it’s watering the upper bed nicely, during this dry period.

Ugly.  One of the Adirondack chairs is rotting and falling apart.

Ugly. This whiskey barrel planter.  It had a nice bunch of purple and pink tulips this spring, but now.  Yuck-o.

Good.  Happy Returns daylily is still blooming away in the very neglected, very shady backyard.

The Wall That She Built

 

The building of the last wall is what led to the name of the blog, Incremental Progress.  Walls take time, especially when you are a-woman-of-a-certain age, and that age is not 21 or even 30 something, it’s barely hanging on to 40 something and your only heavy moving equipment is your own two legs.

Here in NEPA I’m stuck in the middle of the woods, with very little sun peeking through the trees.  It’s lovely, but annoying when you’d like to plant acres of sunflowers and beebalm.  I realized the sunniest part of my garden was on a steep slope in the front yard, and then it’s only half day sun,  And like all the ground here, rocky.  And the only way I could utilize it was if I  terraced it or put some kind of raised bed there.  Personally I voted for a raised bed, that my husband could build, or terraces that someone else could build, naturally none of these items made it into the budget.  Hard to believe isn’t it.  Shazam.

Here is the problem area, Spring 2007.

Ugly isn’t it?  I’ve disliked it for years, for years, it has gnawed at the back of my brain saying, “fix me, fix me, fix me.”  Sometimes it said, “I’ve got all the sun, ha, ha, ha, and I’m growing weeds here, ha, ha, ha, and if you come down here you’ll trip and fall and won’t that be pretty.”  In the winter it said, “great place to sled, if you’re not worried about the kids bonking their noggins on trees!”

One day I had another one of those Shazam moments.  (Hey, it only took 10 years.)  I could take the rocks from the semi-circle wall down by the playset and use them to build my new rock wall.  Yippee, no trips into the woods hauling rocks and all the nasty things under them back to the wall.  I just had to take down this wall, the first one I’d ever built, full of nice big rocks, and move them 150 feet or so uphill and use them to build the new wall.  Voila!  New wall.  Oh.  I skipped the part about aching joints, sweaty body, and nasty things under rocks. 

Playset with wall that would be moved in front of it.  Hey, that half circle seemed like a good idea at the time.

 And so I began.  See that pathetic excuse for a birdbath in the very front?  That is the pipe to the dry well, it’s what the septic guy looks in when he comes to check your tank.  There is also a big huge concrete thingymajig behind it, that is where he actually puts the hose down, and does whatever those guys do.  The point is I have another problem area.  What to do about the septic is an on going issue here.  Obviously, painting it with granite paint and disguising it to look like a very short birdbath did not work.  Pulling it out is not an option either.  Former neighbor, whom I like to call the ditzy-one, did pulled hers out because she didn’t like the look of it.  That is another story.  Back to work.  There’s a wall to be built here.

Sad first stones when I am trying to get an idea of what it will look like. Visualize!  Visualize! Visualize!

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Off to a nice start with all the important sophisticated rock moving and building tools, a child’s old pink sled, blue bucket for fill and a girl’s best rockwall building friend, the three pound sledge!  Knock those babies into place.

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You never see most of the rocks in a wall.  The majority of the rocks are inside or hidden in the back.

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I’m not sure what I was watering there, maybe myself.

 

The problem here is where to end.  Which is why we dubbed this part of the wall, phase I.

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This is not the end, nor the real corner.  I was just stacking the nice corner pieces to get an idea of how high I was going to have to go on this baby.  Yes, I know real men use a plumb line and a plumb bob, this wall is being built by a woman.  I place the stone, I look, I walk away and look some more to see if it is kinda sort straight.  And then I hit it with the three pound sledge, just because I can.

Early April 08 and the dirt has arrived.

Ta-Da!  Same spot one year later May 2008, with a load of topsoil, and mulch.  The plantings are not firm, they are all the bargins I bought at the end of season sales, and had to dig in somewhere fast.  I’m still thinking through the plantings here as I battle off the woodchucks.

And I swear that is not the same bale of peat moss that was in the first photos.  Really, truly, honestly, it’s a different one.

Breadseed Poppies

My friend and gardening guru Judy gave me these seeds.  She’s been supplying me for a couple of years now.  This year they are all an amazing dark purple/red color.  I think she’s been selecting her favorite burgundy ones so she has all the same.  I had ‘bing’ moment this week and realized that next year I should plant them so they grow up among the ajuga burgundy glow.  Here are the poppies and my attempt at O’Keefe-ing them.

Growing up from the phlox sublata, ummm okay, but not a knock your socks off moment.  Next year I want them to be peeking out of this stuff.

The O’Keefe moment.

 

 

 

 

What’s Blooming?

The Oakleaf hydrangea is nice this year.  I think it’s now three years old.  Has some hefty blooms, despite our icy winter and the attack of the woodchucks.  Now if we can continue to fend off the japanese beetles it should have a pretty good chance.  It’s all about survival out here in the garden!

 

 

Roses, and the Death of Chuck

Yep.  The boybarian of the house got him.  I didn’t see it first hand, but the versions I heard from his sisters included the words, eye, shot, blood spurting.  I did a happy dance.  The boy then had a dream  that Chuck came back, ate of a certain poppy in the garden, grew to a gargantuan size, went into the boy’s bedroom and attacked him.  Also Chuck was sporting an eye patch. 

On a completely different note, the roses are blooming.  Hurrah!  We had a short but mean rainstorm this morning, so New Dawn is a bit droopy, but it smells divine.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The Uninvited Guest

He looks pretty darn happy doesn’t he?  Just taking a stroll through his new digs, not a care in the world.  That’s our groundhog, Mr. Chuck.

A friend suggested her builders method.  Trap them in Havaheart traps and then shoot them.  After a week of this, it seems like a sensible idea.

The Garden of Eatin’ featuring Friar Chuck

He ate the daisy buds.  He ate the white conflower I started from seed last year.  He ate every single pansy blossom.  He ate the lupines, the lettuce,  and the asters.  And while I am surveying all this damage, my fragmented brain is thinking, how can he be so fat eating all these greens?  And where is the baseball bat, ’cause I’m putting an end to this business.  And then after drinking all the water in the fountain, he looked around him and saw that it was good and dug a hole under the front porch.  A hole exactly where I put my foot when I come down or go up the porch a bazzillion times a day. 

On Wednesday my lupines looked like this,

on Thursday this is what was left.

 Tomorrow I hope to write, that Friar Chuck has moved on, to the great groundhog in the sky.

 

Whistling pig my patootie.

 

First Lily (day) of the Season

Happy Returns the cutest little day lily of them all.  First bloom peeked out yesterday and from the look of the many buds this will be a good year for her.  I transplanted these from the very shady neglected backyard to the somewhat more sunny front yard, last year.  It’s actually growing rather than surviving, and I get to see it everytime I go in and out.  Brings a smile to this gardeners face.

I lifted this from the American Hemerocallis Society’s page.  Do you think their members carry cards announcing as much?  Anyhoo I found it interesting.  My daughter’s pet peeve is people (her mom?) who spell lilly with two L’s.  The  AHS people are very clear that daylily is indeed one word.  Just in case you’ve been losing sleep over this matter.

The scientific name for daylily is Hemerocallis, most recently considered to belong in the plant family Hemerocallidaceae. Previously, many older works placed daylilies in the Lily family, Liliaceae. Notice that the preferred spelling is “daylily” as one word. Many dictionaries spell it as two words. The word Hemerocallis is derived from two Greek words meaning “beauty” and “day,” referring to the fact that each flower lasts only one day. To make up for this, there are many flower buds on each daylily flower stalk, and many stalks in each clump of plants, so, the flowering period of a clump is usually several weeks long. And, many cultivars have more than one flowering period.  

An Unwelcome Visitor

 

Olivia has named him Friar Chuck, and he is the cutest little thing, but he and his friend must go!