Flowers & Herbs

Last Saturday I woke up early and went down to the St. Paul Farmers Market for the the first time this season. It was bustling with people and flowers and herbs. And of course rhubarb and asparagus and other early season veggies here in the great north. It was quite a site. The flowers were remarkable. Everywhere you looked people were taking photos of the grandeur of it all. I picked up two beautiful baskets of hanging petunias for either side of our back door. They add lots of cheer to the back yard and I loooove them!

In addition the to the two baskets, I also bought herbs to fill the herb garden between the strawberry patch and our massive rhubarb plant. 3 basil plants, rosemary, cilantro, thyme, sage and lavender.

All of these I also grew last year, with the exception of the lavender. I am determined to get lavender in our yard, and since it didn't work to start from seed I just picked a little guy at the market.

I didn't worry to much about how they were going to be placed in the garden. I just set them down and made sure there was good spacing between them to give them room to grow. Then I rearranged a bit. I put the basil plants closest to the door, because, lets be honest, those are the ones I'm going to be going at the most. Henec the fact that I put in THREE plants.

And I gave the lavender a big spacious spot in the back.

The remaining herbs (sage, cilantro, thyme and rosemary) were put in between the basil plants and the lavender. The only consideration I made here was to put the sage by the rosemary because I thought the silver of the sage would look nice next to the purple of the lavender. 

Here is the herb garden in all of it's newly planted glory. You will notice (with the help of some text) that I have also trans-planted a little hasta that was barely surviving at our fence line. And our chives from last year came up on their own this year. Back at the fence line I am going to grow two types of beans. It might not look like there is room in this picture but...

If you look from here, you can see that this is the PERFECT place to cram a few more veggies in. If you ask me, fresh garden beans are second only to tomatoes. So the more the merrier.

                           

Have a lovely memorial day weekend! I hope to be back again, sooner than later, but no promises. 

Friday Walkabout

Since I have gardening on the mind, I thought I would take you for a walkabout through our yard and show you some of the improvements we did last year and of course point out the things I would like to do this year.

Let's start out front. You saw the house the other day from this angle. What you don't see in this picture is that where the grass ends in the photo, the yard suddenly slopes downward. We plan to put in a retaining wall there, hopefully sometime this summer. (I happen to know that it is number one on This Earths to do list, so that is pretty promising.)

If you are standing on the other side of the front of the house, and its not such a gray day, it looks like this. The other HUGE project I would love to do, this year, is paint the outside of the house, the stucco part of the house. I am thinking yellow, because it would contrast nice with the brown shingles on the top of the house a give it a nice pop. Just about anything would be better than patchy-tan stucco.

Along the side of the house and wrapping around the front is one long garden bed. It might be more appropriate to call this a "mulched area". When we moved there were two Goldflame Spirea shrubs (see above) in front of the house and along the side was an uncontrolled area of lily of the valley, some ferns that volunteered from the neighbors yard and a ton of milkweed (see below). We cleaned this all up last spring and planted orange and yellow lilies, purple iris, coral bell, a peony bushy, some ground cover I don't know of the name of, a few succulents and at least one other flowering plant that I am blanking on now. All of this came from my mother's yard before she sold her house.  Thanks mom!!

Before:

After:

                                

And if we keep on walking on to the back yard, through the side gate, we have another bed that was cleaned up last year. It too was over run with lily of the valley (my arch-nemesis). We planted a lot of the same stuff here that we planted out front plus some hosta's, fountain grasses and a rasberry bush from the neighbors yard.

Before:

 And after

Let's pull back a little though and give you the long shot. Which includes the two 4x6 garden beds we built last spring.

In the above photo you see the sidewalk of to the left, that's where we are headed next. This bed was already here when we moved in. Yay! The side in the lower part of the photo is our strawberry patch. The other side is a herb garden that I planted last year and plan to do again this year. Over in the corner is our Rhubarb. Oh, and see that gutter hanging out in the middle of the sidewalk. I HATE that thing. I am hoping to put a rain barrel there and remove that so no one trips over it and dies.

If we pull back from here, you can see the whole of the back yard near the house that we have been talking about. I can't wait for an after picture with the house painted.

The perimeter and the far side and the back of yard are also lined with a garden bed/mulched area, it's about 2 feet deep. (That little line in the image below is meant to help you understand what I am taking about because I don't have any close ups for you). This where our two peony bushes are. And some Purple Clematis which is growing on that white trellis-y thing. The Clematis did not survive the fence building project  of 2011 but is already starting to come back this year. Fingers crossed. We put in lilies, coral bell, ground cover and a few other items last spring. I also planted tulips along this perimeter in the fall. They are coming up now but no actual flowers have bloomed as of today.

And so our walkabout comes to an end with a final photo of the last garden bed in the back corner of the yard. There are lots of hosta's back there and some other green stuff. It's a dark little corner so the colorful plants aren't so happy back yonder, but it's nice still. And how about that tree?? Two of me can not wrap my arms around it. We think she is older than our house. She provides lots of shade, especially in the back part of our yard which we love.

Now, if you are still reading, it's time for a little game. In the back corner garden is a little bird bath. You can hardly make it out in this picture, but it's there, I promise. And it's in a few other places through out this post too. Can you guess how many spots we put that bird bath in before it ended up there? I'll tell you this, it was in more places that you find in this here walkabout.

You can expect a lot more posts about the yard in the coming months, here is a little list of projects I hope to get done this year:

• -Add a two tiered retaining wall to the front yard to correct slope
• -Plant lots of flowers in the new bed of the retaining wall
• -Paint the exterior of the house - yellow??
• -Fix gutter to flow into rain barrel
• -Add trellis over the back gate
• -Add third garden bed
• -Plant more flowers

Attack of the Daylilies

I like flowers as much as the next gal, but I would be lying if I said I really appreciated the work and effort it takes to make a yard beautiful with them before last spring. Last spring being the first spring in our new home. As the snow melted I anxiously awaited for something, ANYTHING to grow up from the earth of our smallish city lot. You might recall this photo that I posted on Facebook, with MUCH glee, last April 24th:

Coincidentally, April 24th is still two weeks out and our Rhubarb already looks like this:

In case the full impact of this difference isn't sinking in, let me just point out that the wing span of this here Rhubarb is nearly 4 feet. Dang!

I digress.

Truthfully, there wasn't a whole lot going on in the yard on the flower front. Two lovely Peony bushes in the back yard, a bombastic strawberry patch, and a row of Hastas lining the garage. Oh and this cutie, which I believe is a Loraine Sunshine Sunflower:

My mother likes to brag that she had 17 flower gardens at the house I grew up in AND all of the flowers she either got free from someone who was thinning out their flowers or that she split from her own flowers. I don't have the green thumb she has just yet but I like this idea of splitting plants that you have and making the most of what other people don't want.

So, when my buddy Dave from The Small Cities (shout out! ;-) told me he was going to be thinning out a section of overgrown daylilies from his yard, I choose to see this as a golden opportunity to add some curb appeal to our sad but getting there front yard. See, we have this little patch between the sidewalk and the road that could use some lovin'.

Why focus my attention here? I have a few reasons for this. First, we are planning to put in a lovely retaining wall in the front yard to correct an unfortunate slope issue (sorry, I don't have any pics right now) so planting anything in the front yard at this point would be futile. Also, since this patch is on the road, it tends to be a landing ground for peoples garbage. Seriously. Cigarette buts, candy wrappers, bits of paper. It's annoying. My hope is two fold, that flowers here will discourage folks from dropping their garbage on the ground in the nearby areas because its so pretty and inspiring (okay, that might be asking a little much - sadly) but also to perhaps conceal a little bit of that trash if it must exist.

First thing first, I split the flowers into small bunches so I could plant a decent spread and let the flowers grow out at their out pace. There were quite a few. (Say "Hi" to the garlic!)

Then I got down to the real back breaking part, removing the grass. (Bonus, I skipped the gym in light of this projects sweat factor.)

I actually removed the grass/planted the flowers in two phases because I started this after work and couldn't get it all done in one night. This is phase one: 2 deep, 4 wide:

This is phase two: 2 deep, 7 wide (I realize the sun make its kinda hard to see in this photo).

As it turns out, the width of this patch is more or less perfectly centered in front of our house. (Again, you are just going to have to trust me on this one because I don't have a photo for you.) I actually didn't plan that, I just used what I had and the fates worked with me. When it is all grown and flowering, it's going to add a nice bit of symmetry to the space.

When you transplant flowers, there is always a chance they won't actually flower the first year they are in. I know this to be true because last year we transplanted a ton of flowers from my mother's yard in Illinois, some flowered, some didn't. But landscaping is a long term project if there ever was one - particularly if you are going with the cost effective reuse - recycle method. There are some advantages you can give your plants though.

1. A healthy dose of organically rich soil right around the roots. We have a compost bin in our backyard, so every time I put a plant in I scooped in a few handfuls of that compost, the flowers didn't say it out loud, but I know they were thankful. 
2. Once all the plants are in, I sprinkled a little Miracle Grow over all of them. Yeah, Miracle Grow, don't knock it; it's not cheating. It's basically the equivalent of taking your vitamins. There are organic versions and versions that keep weeds at bay - so go on and feel good about using it.
3. WATER. WATER. WATER. When you put the plants in, water the crap out of them. Again, leaning on the wisdom of my mother, "once you feel like you have watered them enough, keep watering." These little ladies really can't be over watered at this stage in the game. Then water again every few days until they start looking real healthy and are standing at attention like they should be.
4. Finally, if you feel like they are looking a little droopy and sad after a week or so, I highly recommend cutting back the foliage, to just a few inches. Easier said than done when all you want are the flowers, I know. But the important thing here is that what is happening under the soil is getting a chance to take root. Everything above ground is taking energy away from what is happening below ground. Cutting back at the get-go, even when you first plant (I couldn't bare to do it on day one) is going to give your flowers the best chance of rebounding and growing up strong and healthy. 
5. Did I mention water? Yay, water some more.

We still need to mulch this patch, but we need to mulch the whole yard, so that is it's own project for another day. 

Before I go, I wanted to give a little shout out to our Cherry Blossom Tree in the front yard. It's starting to cherry blossom all over the place. And it's SOOO pretty!!

Also, if you live in St. Paul I know of at least one plant exchange you might be interested, brought to you by the West Side Community Organization. They are awesome. What up, West Side!?!?