Garden Report — October 10

I took advan­tage of one last day of fine weath­er to do a bunch of clean up and some late sea­son planting.

This is what hap­pens if you for­get and leave the fel­cos on the wall of the gar­den bed. Damn. That’ll take a cou­ple of hours to put right.

We had a lot of dam­age from last win­ters hard, long freezes. I’d left a bunch of almost cer­tain­ly dead things in the gar­den in the hope that a few of them might recov­er or re-sprout from the roots. No joy. So the first order of busi­ness was to take out the dead things. Four “Dark Knight” but­ter­fly bush­es and a Kore­an Dog­wood are now on the brush pile. I also lost the Rose­marys that were climb­ing down the rock wall behind the herb bed.

There were some suc­cess­es though. The var­ie­gat­ed sage in this pic­ture was a mushy dis­as­ter in mid-Feb­ru­ary. It did quite nice­ly. I cut it back twice this summer.

On the oth­er hand the cen­ter of the laven­ders which had got­ten rank and spindly last sum­mer died out com­plete­ly. Leav­ing a nasty hole in my favorite bed.

Not relat­ed to last win­ter’s deep freeze, these slen­der deutzias have nev­er been hap­py in the harsh glare that comes off the barn and shop, as well as the grav­eled work yard. Prefers Full Sun on the nurs­ery tag does­n’t always mean prefers to be baked daily.

They now have a new home next to one of the Snake Bark Maples in the front yard. There’s still a fair amount of sun there but not the intense heat. I’ll see how they do next summer.

The bed beside the garage on the front of the house has most of my damp lov­ing shade plants in it. (And most of my deer food — Hostas, eat­en to the ground again, sigh.) The grass and a stand of Siber­ian Iris­es have become seri­ous­ly over­grown. Both should have been divid­ed last year. This spring at the lat­est. It took both Jim and I and a lot of shov­el­ing and lev­er­ing to get these out.

We found this lit­tle sur­prise in among the iris foliage. I think they’re puff ball mush­rooms. I remem­ber eat­ing puff balls as a kid and being told that it was very hard to make a mis­take about what kind of mush­room you were pick­ing. I’m too chick­en to try it out with­out an expert along.

We also pulled out the ker­ria. It’s too rangy, and rank, and all sorts of nasty. There’s now a nice lit­tle rebloom­ing lilac in it’s spot. The tag says to 5′. Which would be about perfect.

We put one chunk of the grass back in where it had come out of, and put three clumps of iris across the back of the bed.

Here’s the bed all fin­ished. Too bad about the stumps of hostas lin­ing the front edge. Next week­end I’ll trim up the left over foliage on the iris­es. The grass I’ll leave — the leaves dry out and rat­tle nice­ly in the wind.

We took four more clumps of the iris and one of the grass and added them to the bed in front of the library. Next year I’ll try to get the peren­ni­als into this bed. It gets a nice 8 ear­ly hours of sun a day.

I can’t find the tag to iden­ti­fy this lit­tle fel­low. He’s lived in a cou­ple of spots in the gar­dens. Hope­ful­ly he’ll be hap­py here across the walk way from the Cypress

I picked up a cou­ple of new laven­ders to fill in the hole. An Eng­lish type for a change. They seem so small and help­less in there.

We dropped the last chunk of the divid­ed grass onto the point of the bed that faces the barn. Behind it you can see the smoke tree that we put in a cou­ple of weeks ago.

In the same bed I added a black mon­do grass in the place of a long dead aza­lea. Right now it looks like black grass on black dirt but once it and the nan­d­i­nas next to it fill in a bit, the con­trast between the long black blades of the grass and small red gold leaves of the nan­d­i­na should be nice.

Jim loves Japan­ese maples so we added one to our col­lec­tion. This mound­ing red cut-leaf should make a nice focal point out on the point of one of the beds by the porch.

The bird bath bed is still show­ing some evi­dence of sum­mer. The dut­sy miller still looks good and there are some pur­ple flow­ers on the nicotinia.

I am a total suck­er for the bright­ly pack­aged bulbs that begin to appear next to the check­out in the nurs­ery this time of year. The blank spot in this bed got a bag of mixed species tulips (30 bulbs) and a bag of dwarf iris (10 bulbs). No clue at to which species the tulips are — only that they are a “Nat­u­ral­iz­ing Blend” hope­ful­ly that means that they’ll come up more than a cou­ple of times.

Rob­byn gave me a bunch of beard­ed iris rhi­zomes a cou­ple of weeks ago. I put them in this sun­ny well drained spot near the pas­ture. Close enough to the elec­tric fences that the deer might leave them alone long enough to bloom. Yup we have plen­ty of rocks.

It’s a good thing I fin­ished up yes­ter­day. This morn­ing it was below freez­ing. The irri­ga­tion sys­tem ran, this morn­ing. The leaves on the smoke tree have a nice sparkle to them, oops. No harm, no foul. The sys­tem is installed deeply enough that the occa­sion­al frosty morn­ing isn’t a prob­lem. We’ll emp­ty it next week­end. I just want­ed to be sure that the new plants got a lit­tle extra water for the a cou­ple of days.

I also clipped off the last of the laven­der blooms yes­ter­day. I brought them inside to dry out. They’ll sit on the hearth and slow­ly get used as tin­der for the fires. The smell is wonderful.

Start­ing with this post you can see the botan­i­cal names and vari­ety names of the plants in the pic­tures by mou­s­ing over.

I keep the tags from the plants that I buy in ziplock bags by year so that I can go back and look up exact­ly what’s what. It was quite depress­ing to look through the tags while I was try­ing to con­firm the vari­ety name on the grass I divid­ed. I’ve put in tons of peren­ni­als, and they’ve almost all dis­ap­peared. Freezes, drought, deer and chick­ens all take a toll. No won­der I don’t enjoy gar­den­ing as much as I used to.