I can appreciate mornings. The cooler temperatures and softer lighting are great. Especially for working in the garden. Unfortunately, my body just can’t handle it. I’ve never been a morning person. The absolute best scheduling I ever had was when I worked the night shift at a gas station. I was alert and motivated all night, slept well all day; physically and mentally, I was at my best!
Unfortunately, I’m not able to do that now, and this time of year, I find myself being awakened earlier and earlier, no matter what time I make it to bed. This morning, I was up at 4 – 4:30 and just could not get back to sleep.
Still, I managed to get some thing done in the garden after doing my morning rounds.
I finally got this bed weeded. I had to wait until things got bigger. I still had to be really careful, and pulled only what I was 100% sure was a weed. In the first photo above, you can easily spot the nasturtiums and Cosmos. In the second photo, there are little sprouts of what I hope are the asters. I’ve never grown asters from seed, and I’m not sure what they are supposed to look like at this stage. I’ve even looking at photos online and am still not 100% sure. There are just too many things that look like this at this stage!
I couldn’t get everything, of course. I’ll be weeding those awful elm seeds all summer, I’m sure.
I had a surprise when I got to the winter squash bed. I’m not sure what these are.
Those are insects of some kind. They were only on the blossoms, and only on the squash. They’re so tiny, I can’t make out any identifying features. I tried asking in a gardening group and did get a response of one possible thing, but on looking them up, they seemed much bigger. Pretty much anything would be bigger! The solution was to spray with soapy water, so later in the day, I tried that. The blossoms were closed by then, though, so I don’t know how much good it did.
They’re smaller this year. When picking them, I tuck the coils over a finger to carry them. Last year, I was putting them around my wrist.
After I was done my rounds, I headed inside for breakfast and planned to go back out to start working on the trellis bed. In the end, I didn’t make it. I was falling asleep in my chair. I finally gave up and went for a nap. Something I’ve found myself having to do fairly regularly.
I get better sleep in those 1-2 hour morning naps than in an entire night! It is a bit disorienting to wake up and it’s still morning, though. 😄
My goal for today was to get started on the remaining vertical supports for the permanent trellis bed.
As good as I felt, this put me outside at the hottest part of the day.
My goals got shifted, and progress was made. Just on something else!
This area had a double tulip collection planted, with 10 bulbs each of Orca, Pinksize and Double Brownie, and 8 bulbs each of Black Hero, Pamplona and Vanilla Coup planted in it, plus some Bulls Eye tulips off to the side. Aside from the Bulls Eye tulip (which Veseys no longer carries), we’re not sure which is which, anymore!
The tulips weren’t the only things starting to bloom.
The surrounding plum trees have exploded with flower buds!
Everything is about a month behind, but the flowers and leaves are finally appearing!
After checking on the road conditions, I continued checking areas of the inner yard we can now access again. I also checked on the old kitchen garden. It just happened that the sump pump was running, and I was quite amused by what I saw.
Along with the water coming out the end, there was water spraying like fountains out of the hose! There are three areas with holes in them. Once I saw the two smaller holes next to the rain barrel, I pulled up the slack a bit, so that they will hopefully spray on the paving slabs, instead. Once things dry up a bit, I’ll just patch it with some electric tape. We do have spare hose, but I’m still considering adding it to the end of this one, to send the water further away from the house. The ground does slope away from the house rather well, here, so I really don’t need to, but it does give us more options.
Walking through the old kitchen garden, I could see deep hoof prints in the garden beds from the deer. Which made a good indicator of how thawed out the ground is!
Going into the maple grove, I noticed an area was clearer of snow that I wanted to get a closer look at.
Between these two rows of trees is where we planted crocuses. About a quarter of it is still too covered with snow, but I wanted to see if there was any sign of them, where it was clear.
Yes!!! In one section, I found so many little crocuses coming up! Including the one you see here, that has pierced its way through a leaf. :-D
I am just thrilled that they survived the winter. I went to check the area we planted the grape hyacinth in, but it’s still too covered with snow.
With the crocuses coming up, I was curious. Was it possible? I had to check.
YESSSS!!!!!! We have tulips coming up! Just look at them all! I put arrows pointing to the ones I could find. It’s entirely possible there are more, camouflaged among the leaf litter.
There are even a few visible in a section my daughters planted fewer, more unique, tulips. Only a couple are visible in this photo, but there were more.
This is just so exciting! After the deer and other critters decimated the tulips last year, we thought they were done for. It was their first growing season, and we didn’t think they had the chance to establish themselves.
My daughter is so happy. She was heart broken when all her tulips were eaten! One of the things the girls had done was make sure the bulbs were buried extra deep, as recommended on the package to keep them as perennials. A lot of people buy and plant tulips and other bulbs every spring. If they’re buried closer to the surface, they can’t survive our winters. We didn’t want that, so my daughter made the extra effort. It looks like all their hard work paid off!
Now I’m wondering if my daughter’s irises and daffodils, planted along the edge of the old kitchen garden, will come up, too. One type did show some leaves last year, but never got to the point of sending up flowers. Another type didn’t come up at all, that we could see.
Aside from some leaf buds starting to show, this is the first major sign of spring growth we’ve had this year!
Oh, and we have more exciting growth, this time indoors. We’ve got melons sprouting! Two types; the Halona melon, plus one of the grocery store melons I lost the name for.
Flowers and food, there’s lots to look forward to in the gardens this summer!
The girls headed outside this afternoon, and were excited to ask me if I’d seen the tulips.
I had, when I did my rounds this morning, but clearly, something had changed.
The tulips have exploded with flower spikes!
Most of my daughter’s tulips were planted in this spot. Over 50 bulbs in 6 varieties were planted here. We haven’t tried to count how many have come up. I think, by now, any that haven’t come up were casualties of February’s polar vortex. :-(
While just to one side, another group of very different tulips were planted. These are Bull’s Eye tulips (which Veseys apparently no longer carries). Of the 8 bulbs that were planted, it looks like only 3 survived the winter.
I can’t believe how quickly these flower spikes shot up!!
They are not the only ones.
The flower spikes in the grape hyacinths are a bit harder to see, but they are certainly there! Pretty much all of them that we can see have these tiny spikes emerging. Once they start blooming, we’ll finally be able to get a better idea of how many of the 200 we planted survived the winter! :-D
Meanwhile, the winds have only gotten stronger – I had to fight just to open the door to go outside and get these photos! – and the temperatures are still rising. I look forward to the cooler weather and, hopefully, rain to come!
My daughters and I regularly check the areas we planted things in the fall. Especially where we planted so many corms and bulbs.
For those new to this blog (welcome! I’m very happy you’re here!), last fall we planted 200 grape hyacinths in one area (day one, day two). In another, we planted about 100 snow crocuses. My daughters also planted some Iris, Bulls Eye Tulip, plus a variety pack of other tulips, in other areas. We also planted three varieties of hardneck garlic. (all links will open in new tabs, so you won’t lose your place. :-) )
Today, we actually found sprouts!!!
This is a snow crocus. We found one other sprout a few feet away, too. We were so excited!!!
There’s still no sign of anything else, but it’s the crocuses that are supposed to be the earliest to emerge, so this is pretty awesome! We probably won’t see any of the others for some weeks, yet.
We also found…
… a garlic emerging through the mulch!
It wasn’t until I uploaded the photo and was resizing it that I realized there was a second one in the back, the tip just barely visible! I had been checking the garlic beds every now and then, since we took the plastic off, pulling the mulch back to see if there were any sprouts. I had done that earlier, but in a different spot and completely missed the bit of green poking through! Even when my daughter pointed it out, it took a while for me to see it.
These ones are Purple Stripe. After finding them, I checked in the Porcelain Music bed, pulling back the mulch, and I did find a sprout there, too. I put the mulch back. The overnight temperatures are still too cold to take the mulch off.
We are really, really excited to see these!! We have sprooooooots!
*doing the happy dance*
Meanwhile…
After putting some seeds to soak for 24 hours, we planted some Crespo squash seeds.
We planted only 2 seeds in each of 3 double cups. We’ll see how many germinate. They went into the small aquarium greenhouse, along with the more recently planted gourds (still no seedlings sprouting there, yet), and the light fixture that’s there to keep the tank warm.
I keep catching Saffron lying on the screen cover, directly over the light! The little bugger has discovered it’s even warmer than sitting on the light fixtures of the big tank. At least she’s tiny and light!
As you can see in this image from Baker Creek, Crespo squash can get quite large! The only information I can find about these is from the Baker Creek site, and it’s new for them, so there isn’t very much information, and there are no reviews at all. There isn’t even a “days to maturity” available. The package just says to harvest when the skin is very hard. ??
These are from Peru and Bolivia, which do have areas that are the equivalent of our Zone 3 climate, but I have no idea if these are from any of them. Probably not. :-D
Still, I couldn’t resist these amazing looking edibles!! It would be really something, if we could grow these to full maturity.
The luffa have joined the tomatoes and onions in the big aquarium greenhouse. They are big enough now that I’m not as concerned about keeping them extra warm.
I really hope these work out!
Thinking ahead, while the girls and I were walking around, we went by the other area we are considering to put our permanent garden beds and talked about it.
We have decided that this will be it. Our future permanent, accessible raised bed garden.
One of the hesitations about this spot is that it’s always been a high traffic area – that’s why it’s so flat that I’ve been able to mow it! There is a gate to the old hay yard next to the shack by the barn. On the other side of the shack is the ramp that was used to load cattle onto trucks. The gate, however, has had other wire placed across it and it can no longer be opened, and even if that old cattle ramp wasn’t rotting and falling apart, we don’t plan to have cattle. At least not so many that we’d be sending them off to auction. We still drive through parts of it, to access the garage, the barn, etc., but that still leaves a huge area that no one drives through anymore.
In our shorter term plans, we were talking about putting a temporary fence up in the old hay yard, where the remains of another fence still sits.
It’s marked in black in the above photos. This would allow us to remove part of the main fence (marked in orange) and still keep the renter’s cows from getting through.
But if we’re going to put permanent raised beds by the old hay yard, we will want to plant a wind break even sooner, and that was going to be along a permanent fence.
Which would be about where the black lines are in these photos.
If we do that, we can get rid of a lot more of the fence around the old hay yard, much of which is in terrible shape, anyhow. That, in turn, will open up more of the hay yard area to other options. Right now, with that gate blocked off, the only way we can get into the old hay yard that doesn’t involve clambering over a wire fence is either through the barn, or through the electric wire fence at the gate by the barn, then go around the back of the barn, and through the collapsed rails of an old corral.
We will have to do some work on the fence around the outer yard, though, to fill in any areas the renter’s cows can get through, if his electric fence fails again. It wasn’t an issue before, because we could close up the gates to the inner yard, but if we have a garden out there, the cows would make shorter work of it than the deer!
The advantages of this area compared to the others – mostly that it’s already nice and flat – also means that we will probably be able to build the permanent garden beds here sooner than in any of the other locations.
On top of everything else in favour of this area, it’s visible in live feed from the garage security camera. We will be able to see if there are any deer getting into the garden.
Well. Not when we’re asleep, of course, but it’s a start! :-D
Truthfully, the things I ordered today are not for me. They are for my daughters. My excuse is, they both have spring birthdays, so this is my gift to them!
Here is what I’ve ordered. (All links will open in new tabs)
Purple Passion Asparagus: This is the one that got the bug in my ear to order more! The new Vesey’s spring catalogue had come in, and my older daughter came to me, all excited about these. They are not only hardy to zone 2, but apparently are so sweet and tender, they can be eaten raw. She didn’t ask about ordering it, though, since she knew we already had so much.
So I ordered it anyway. :-D We do have some asparagus here; a few brave spears come up in the spring, but not enough to harvest. Asparagus takes 2-3 years to get going, so ordering fresh root stocks now just makes more sense. Once they’re established, they should keep producing for up to 20 years. We’ll be getting the 6 pack of these, delivered in the spring.
April Cross Chinese Radish: This is a Daikon type of radish. I actually don’t like these – or any radishes at all – but my younger daughter really likes Daikon radish, so this is for her!
Red Meat Watermelon Radish: This one is for both my daughters! A white radish with a pink interior and green “shoulders”.
Robin Beet: We got only one variety of beets this year, with a second variety my younger daughter had wanted being out of stock. It’s still out of stock. Both my daughters really liked the deep, dark, sweet beets that we grew last year, so these should be right up their alley. These are “baby” beets, maturing at only 25-30 days.
Black Form Iris: this is another one for my younger daughter. There is another black iris that she had wanted to get for our fall planting, but it was out of stock, and still is. I know she’ll like this one, too. Like the asparagus, this will be delivered in the spring.
So that’s it! Just a little order, at least compared to the last one I made at Vesey’s! :-D I think the girls will really enjoy growing these.
Along with the three types of garlic that came in, my daughters’ flower bulbs arrived.
The tulip collection included 10 bulbs each of Orca, Pinksize and Brownie, and 8 bulbs each of Black Hero, Pamplona and Vanilla Coup. There was also 6 bulbs of Gardenia Daffodil.
So while I was having fun working in the soft soil, planting garlic, the girls did the hard work of digging holes for bulbs in hard soil, and between roots!
They did not take pictures of the process, unfortunately.
The tulips were planted not far from where they’d planted the Bulls Eye tulips that came in earlier. This area was selected for its combination of sunlight and drainage, and because they’re not supposed to be watered, and this is not an area where they might accidentally get watered along with something else.
The tulips need to be planted up to 12 inches deep, if we want them coming back year after year, but that depth includes the depth of any mulch. So they planted the 50+ bulbs at 6 inches, adding a 6 inch leaf mulch. Leaves, however, crumble and settle quite a bit, plus the wind was threatening to blow it way, so they also wet down some peat, which we still have lots of, and added that to the top.
The Gardenia Daffodil had different requirements, so it was planted with the Eye of the Tiger irises planted along one side of the old kitchen garden.
When we are next able to, we’re thinking of picking up a couple of bags of soil to scatter on top of the mulch. The soil under the mulch in the old kitchen garden is much improved from before, but the straw itself, and even the grass clippings, aren’t breaking down very quickly, making it not at all conducive to planting in it. It’s all just too stringy! :-D And now there’s the excess flax straw from inside the cat shelter. Adding some soil and peat, as well as moisture, for the microbes and worms to do their stuff should help it break down faster.
We also got a couple other things off the to-do list today.
Now that the soil around the support post has had a few days to settle (and get stomped down some more, every now and then), our new bird feeder is now hung up. Hopefully, this less decorative design will not get flung around in the wind as much as the church and barn shaped ones were, and with the support now buried in the ground like a fence post, we don’t have to worry about it being knocked over any more!
I also had a chance to work on the grapes, while the girls were still digging holes for tulips.
The first thing that needed to be done was prune them. I hope I did it right. From what I’ve read, they should be pruned above the second bud from the ground, as grapes will be produced on first year vines. The problem was, I couldn’t see any buds at all! So I tried to err on the side of caution.
I had to move the trellis supports so I could get behind to harvest the grapes. Today, I finally set them into the ground in their new locations, so we can squeeze behind them again, if necessary. On the right is a long piece of rebar, but the white support on the left is actually two plastic tubes on a shorter piece of rebar. The bar wasn’t long enough to hold the trellis wire, but it is long enough to support the plastic tube. I had to lift off the piece that was woven into the wire mesh, then reset the position of the other two pieces.
When I set this up as a makeshift trellis, I was able to bang the rebar into the ground with a piece of broken brick I’d found while cleaning up around the storage house. I tried that again, but it broke. So I dug around in the sun room, among the things we’d found in there while cleaning it up. There was an old hammer with a ball peen on one side, and a heavy flat head on the other. Much heavier than a regular hammer. For the long piece of rebar, I had to stand on the stairs to reach the top and start hammering it in.
The head fell off the hammer.
It turned out the handle was rotted out at the head!
Thankfully, I still had the new handle I’d found while cleaning up the old basement. I’d intended it for something else, but it didn’t fit right, so I’d left it for later.
Now, I’m glad it didn’t fit the other thing I’d meant it for!
Mind you, it didn’t fit the head of this hammer, either, but I was able to shave the corners of the top, and got it on. I was able to finish the job!
After hammering the rebar supports into the ground and getting the plastic tube in the wire mesh back in place, I was able to use foam covered garden wires a darling friend found for me, to tie the pruned vines to the mesh. Then I used one of the bamboo poles that we’d used in the squash beds as a support for the top. With the grapes growing so well this past summer, I was able to see the weight of the vines were pulling the wire mesh downwards, so this should add some extra support.
Now, all they need is for some mulch to be added to protect them from the winter’s cold. From what I’ve found out about growing grapes in our zone is that they should be just fine with snow as insulation; the vine would be laid down on the ground to be covered. Planted against the storage house like this, that doesn’t really work out, so mulch it is!
We now have all the flower bulbs we ordered planted – 200 grape hyacinth, 100 snow crocuses, irises, gladiolas, and almost 70 tulips – plus the garlic.
That’s it for fall planting this year.
Now, we need to assess how our vegetable gardening went, and decide what we want to plant next year! :-)
Of all the stuff that we ordered for fall planting this year, the garlic and the grape hyacinth were the two things I wanted. The rest were chosen by my daughters. Especially my younger daughter, who is really interested in flower gardening.
No surprise that she was eager to get out there today, and plant the snow crocuses!
This is the area we worked on today.
The first thing we needed to do was rake and clean up the space.
When I cleaned up in this area, two summers ago, I had to take out a lot of dead trees. I deliberately left really tall stumps, after discovering (the hard way!) what a tripping hazard they were if I didn’t. This year, I have a reciprocating saw, which does a great job of cutting level to the ground.
I took advantage of that.
It took more than a year longer than planned, but most of them are now trimmed. There are just a few further out that I didn’t bother with, yet.
While I was working on that, my daughter finished off the raking, then started scattering the bulbs.
Interestingly, when I looked up the mix on the Vesey’s website, it now has 4, not 5, varieties. It no longer includes the Snowbunting.
After the were all planted, my daughter watered all the areas we planted in, including the grape hyacinth, while I placed more logs to border where we planted.
Here is how it looks now.
It’s too windy to burn the debris from the first rake, which is mostly dead leaves, so that will wait for another day.
This section will have a walking path on both sides. Further north, it’s so shaded under those trees, almost nothing grows under there. Even the row of crab apple trees I found buried under the branches is still struggling – though one branch on one tree did get enough sun to produce some apples! :-/ Anything we end up planting there has to be able to handle a lot of shade, and not much moisture. But that is probably still years from now.
So for this area, we are done with planting for the year. Everything else we’ve got, plus the stuff on back order, will be planted elsewhere. We’ve got another week, at least, of warmer weather, so we will work on keeping these areas well watered.
All of the crocuses are supposed to bloom very early in the spring. I look forward to seeing them! I expect they will be rather spotty for the first few years, until they naturally begin to spread. Until they do, we’ll have to make sure they don’t get overtaken by other things. We can also think about what we might want to plant with them and the grape hyacinth that have different blooming seasons, once we get a good grasp on how they are doing.
At the same time, we’ll be looking into a ground cover in the pathways. By the time this area is done, it should have almost no grass and need no mowing.
One thing we do have to keep in mind as we fill these areas, though, is that we still need to have at least some access into them. If nothing else, we’ll need to pick up fallen branches or remove dead trees!
No, none of our giant sunflowers are blooming, yet. In fact, we didn’t even plant these ones.
Bird seed and deer feed we’ve been leaving at one end of a flower garden have been sprouting. Much of it is in the grass and gets mowed, but right under the platform feeder, we’re letting them grow.
I was surprised to see a sunflower blooming this morning. They are all really quite small plants! From the seeds I’ve seen in the mixes, I expected them to grow much larger.
Another sunflower will be blooming soon! The oats beside it are from the deer feed.
Then there’s whatever this is. Millet, maybe? I don’t know.
There are some other plants that I find myself looking at and wondering; is that from the bird seed? Or is it a weed? :-D
For now, I’m leaving them. We’ll find out soon enough!
With this being our first attempt to do any gardening since we’ve moved back to my family farm, we are learning quite a lot.
One of those things is, there are a lot more rocks in the old garden than I remember as a kid!
I had broken up some of the hillier parts that were making mowing more “damaging” than “difficult”, and the girls had a chance to go at some of those spots with hoes, to break them up and flatten them out. They were only able to do a few before the heat drove them inside.
Even so, they managed to also collect these.
When I was a kid, picking rocks out of the garden was a regular and constant thing we did. It kept things manageable. I don’t know how many years ago that particular chore stopped. I know my parents would not have been able to keep it up, and my siblings that were able to go to the farm more often certainly would not have had time to pick rocks, when there were far more urgent things for them to take care of, while they were there.
We are definitely seeing the difference. It’s one of several reasons why I want to go with raised garden beds. Being on the bed of a ancient glacial lake means there will always, always be rocks working their way up the soil with every frost and thaw. It’s also why we are working on using mulch and layers of material to build up the soil. In the old garden area, mulching where we have the squash beds now is the only reason the area is at all manageable.
The squash seem to like it! Here is another type that has started to bloom. Since the other ones turned out to be sunburst squash, that means this is one of the summer surprise variety pack of zucchini. Not a variety I’ve seen grown before; we grew different types of squash when I was a kid, but never one with these mottled leaves. It should be interesting to see what they are!
The cucamelons are now trellised. I did it in stages, adding the bamboo stakes that wouldn’t be needed in one of the squash beds into the openings on the sides of the chimney blocks, then coming back to add the horizontal lines. Finally, I added a vertical line at each of the cucamelons. I didn’t bother for two of the blocks, as it looks like the cucamelons in them are not going to make it. They’re not dead, but they’re not really growing, either.
Once the vertical lines were in place, I placed tendrils around them, to start training the cucamelons to grow upwards. On one side, I added a line up to an overhanging tree branch to keep the whole thing from sagging from the weight. If necessary, the same can be done on the other side.
This is not where we originally planned to grow the cucamelons. I don’t think they can get as much sun as they need in this location, but we couldn’t delay transplanting them anymore. If we grow these again in the future, we will have to be sure to have a sunnier location ready for them.
I am continuing to build up the old flower garden here, and have been adding layers of straw, leaves and grass clippings mostly at the lower end, closer to the retaining wall. Where the soil has been added is where we transplanted the few fennel that came up, and a couple of those have since died. So we have a whole 3 fennel still growing in there! :-D
For all the layers and additions of mulch, things are still working their way through. The rhubarb and some of the flowers, we are good with. Those horrible invasive vines keep coming up, and there’s a type of flower my mother suddenly decided she didn’t want me to get rid of (after I’d already gotten the okay from her and started the layering) that wants to take over the whole area.
What I had hoped for this garden is to use it as a kitchen garden, to grow things like herbs and the like, as well as some flowers. Maybe some lettuces. My mother keeps going on about how she’d planted onions here, and keeps asking me how her onions are doing, then complaining that I killed them all by mulching the area. :-/ The only place I ever saw onions coming up was along one edge, where I’d taken some fencing and car tire planters out, so I’m not sure what she’s taking about. One has actually come up again, this year, but there was never more than a couple, since we’ve lived here. From the state of the rest of the garden, there was no way she had more than those growing, even going back in my memory to what was there when I was a kid. She only ever had onions growing along that south side, but when she talks about it, she makes it sound like most of the garden was onions and garlic.
The ornamental apple trees had been planted to provide shade, I’ve been told. Then there’s the double lilac, the honeysuckle and the roses. One of the roses finally bloomed this year, but being under one of the apple trees the way it is, it’s really struggling. The Cherokee rose, on the other hand, is spreading like a weed.
Those apple trees are going to cause problems for anything we try to grow there.
I suppose they wouldn’t bother me as much, if they were at least an edible apple. How ironic that the pretty much only apple trees we’ve got that don’t show signs of fungal disease, are the ones that we can’t eat from!
The girls and I have been talking about what we’ll do next, when it comes to growing and planting. They really want to start planting flowers. We’re also talking about finding a way to get the nut orchard collection I’d found, earlier rather than later. Trees take so long to grow, that it would be worthwhile for us to start that as soon as possible. The package deal I’d found is for 100 trees, and we were planning to use the old garden area, including the spaces that have always been a mowed border, for that. The package is over a thousand dollars – and that’s with the bulk discount! With that in mind, they will be working to come up with funds to contribute, so we can get it earlier. Maybe even as early as next spring!
Some other things, however, will be ordered for planting this fall.
One of the things we’ve decided to do is use the bed currently filled with the beets and carrots for garlic, after everything in it now has been harvested. We’ll be ordering a collection of 1 pound each of 3 different types.
Aside from the garlic, we will be ordering lots and lots of flowering bulbs.
As much as I enjoy mowing, there are some areas in between the trees that I would rather not be mowing at all! In fact, if we can not mow in between any of the trees, that would be great. It’s really bad for the mower in there!
So I took a bunch of pictures of different areas, then we went through them to discuss what we would be planting and where. The plan is to fill some areas with naturalizing flowers, and other areas will be kept open as paths, with some sort of ground cover that can be walked on, instead of grass.
Next month, along with the garlic, we will order muscari (aka grape hyacinth), a collection of snow crocuses, a double tulip collection, and various other flowers. The muscari and snow crocuses will be mixed together and basically scattered in select areas where we want low growing plants. The taller flowers, the girls will decide on the exact places. Other areas we want to have low growing plants will have things like creeping phlox in them, or hostas in the shadier areas, and even ferns, eventually, but the areas we want to walk on will have things like different kinds of thyme, while others will have mosses. There are some areas we need to keep flower free, so that my husband, who is allergic to stings, can go into them and not worry about bees.
For our zone, once we order our selections next month, we should expect them to be delivered around the end of September.
I bought an auger attachment for my drill with plans to use it when we did the sunflowers. I decided against using it, because of how rocky the old garden area is. It’s actually sold as a tool for planting bulbs. The muscari alone will be 200 bulbs (we’re getting 2 packages), so that thing is going to get a workout this fall! :-)
At least, that’s what our plans are. I’ve long since learned that no plans are written in stone, so we shall see what we actually get to do when the time comes! :-)
The Re-Farmer 