Here is the view of sweet peas, squash, carrots, beets, lettuce and spinach (going to seed), and my Big Rock Potato Mountain range, with the God of the Garden overseeing all.
And here is the garden from the other side. I started the tomatoes indoors in January--and I bought a few fancy heirloom tomatoes at the Farmers Market--stripes, or purple, or something. So I have 3 cages of each growing here: yellow, cherry, early girl, roma, and one other I think. Again here is the potato mountain range--which was a valuable lesson! Come to find out, you bury potato plants as they grow to increase yield (apparently they produce potatoes all the way up the plant--who knew?? Thank you Jessica McAleese!). So since my potatoes were between 1-2.5' high by the time I learned this, I had to create this ridge of dirt covering the bottoms of the plants. We'll see how it works!
Here are the new beds I made--hard to see, of course. In front is the cucumber/pumpkin patch--including a pumpkin growing for the Farmer's Market big pumpkin contest--I'm going for it! Cucumbers are hard to get started for some reason--I wouldn't recommend starting squash-like plants indoors--except maybe a few weeks early so that they get started enough to not be a squirrel delicacy as pumpkin and corn seeds are!! Behind the pumpkin patch is my corn patch--kind of spotty because of squirrel bandits I'm guessing, so I've interspersed pumpkins and tomatillos in that bed. My friend Cathy is learning about plants that grow together complimentarily--and apparently squash, corn, and beans are good companion plants. Might experiment with that next year. Off to the right is a flower bed with lots of things that have been either moved or started from seed. Should look good this year--painted daisy, yarrow, love in a mist, california poppy, scarlet flax (can't get scarlet flax to do well...), and salvia.
John's fruit trees--apple, apple, apple. Killed a cherry and peach last year, but these three seem to be doing well and I think we even found a few apples on one--I believe these are 3 years old.OK, on to the flowers, and how there is always something new to learn or adapt to! Take my current dilemma that did not exist a few years ago in my landscape--shade.
When I bought my house in 2000, this was a full sun spot! So I planted full-sun flowers that are currently very sad and confused. I'll be doing a lot of plant moving around and hard-scaping in these areas hopefully this year. What are some pretty things that grow in full shade? Astible. Don't like hostas. Any suggestions would be wonderful (low-water, of course).
Every single one of these plants are for full, hot sun! Ugh. Penstemon. False sunflower. Sedum(?). Gayfeather. I actually moved them from a full-sun hillside because they were all tipping over on the steep hillside (another problem that has emerged--trial and error). Now they are in full shade. 3rd location's a charm, let's hope.
Another spot that is supposed to be full sun--most of these plants came from a friend Kim Shirley who has taught me a lot about low-water landscaping. I'm her weeding slave from time to time and she answers all my questions and has given me these plants which are all doing well, for being in shade when they should be in sun...
This is my miracle plant--a wild four o'clock that was given to me as a baby from Kim. It has somehow survived two years of doing nothing, and now seems to be doing what it's supposed to do--although I'm sure Kim's is 10 times bigger. No water, huge, with pretty purple flowers. Keep your fingers crossed!
While I am sure these flowers will be way happier in SUN, here are some Sweet William (Dianthus), bachelors buttons, with poppies in the back. This is my "start from seed" section of the garden, so all of these flowers are seed-born. The sweet william keeps coming back better than ever each year--I'm starting to really like them!
This is John's and my favorite dianthus. So pretty! Behind it is another dianthus ready to bloom and a larkspur--also a sun-loving flower...
Here is a beautiful penstemon I moved from the hillside that actually managed to get planted where it belongs. I'm no photographer so I apologize for the quality of these photos! Hopefully you can see the amazing fuscia flowers coming off this thing!
Down by the end of the driveway I want to be my "super-duper dry zone"--mostly because it's way on the edge and it's hard to water. So in the front we have ice plant (perennial--although spotty when it comes to over-wintering*), and then I'm filling the area in with portulaca--an annual succulent that has really pretty flowers and needs very little water. In fact, I tried to start portulaca from seed and I totally over-watered them (I think) so they barely grew.*over-wintering--a fancy way to say "surviving the winter." I think.
View up the driveway and hillside. When I bought the house, this area was all rocks. Which have come in very handy with my landscaping! Over the years I've planted things right, and wrong. I've recently been trying to seed the hillside with flowers where I am examining my second problem--gravity. Shade and gravity are my current gardening issues. And whatever is munching little holes in some of my flower plants. Steep hillside = short plants. NOT tall plants like what I've got planted here--poppy, bachelor button, larkspur, sunflowers, blue flax. Why? Because they TIP OVER when there is nothing but lots of air underneath them on one side. Duh. So, I'll be re-doing this area too--probably moving over all those plants from Kim that are low-growing, and I do have some lovely veronica and wooly thyme that are growing there already. Should look great once I've got this hillside figured out.
Moving on to my (aah, angels singing) buffalo grass lawn. Doesn't it look great? Buffalo grass is a low-water turf grass--needs about 1/3 the water of a normal lawn, maybe even less. And it looks great when it's all cleaned up. Hallelujah! I started this lawn like 6 years ago and made a ton of mistakes (no need for plugs--seed will work fine--and for pete's sake don't plant your plugs in August...), but now it's looking great. In that front flower bed I have some of my favorite plants--hummingbird mint and my number 1-with-a-bullet (with-a-bullet) most amazing plant--the chocolate flower. Small yellow flowers with a brown center that has a very strong cocoa smell. Way low-water, and supposedly reseeds like a banshee but I've never been able to get them to do that. Seeds are kind of funky but I think I'll try planting them from seed this winter and see how I do. TIP: if you are going to start perennials from seed from your garden you need to put the seeds in the freezer for a few months--they need that freeze to germinate, or something.
View of the house. We tried to match the house colors to what the Sylvia Beach Hotel in Newport, OR looks like. We got pretty close considering we had dime-size, faded paint chips from the hotel. We added the scarlet paint, because I insisted on a red porch when we (and by we I mean John) painted the house a few years ago. The prayer flags were up at our wedding. 
Here are the dogs in the backyard which they insist on trashing. That's a half-buffalo grass, half-dog pee spots and weeds lawn. I'm going on a murderous rampage and killing those weeds and getting this lawn going in the right direction soon--now that it's stopped raining! That center flower bed has larkspur, allium, columbine, some weird pink annual penstemon-looking thing, sunflowers, pasque flower, and a few others. In general, it's really hard to keep color all summer long--it's been an interesting task trying to get good color all summer since perennials just bloom at their specific time, do their thing for a few weeks or so, and then fade. I've got some nice long-blooming plants in general, but maintaining even color all summer is a trick. OK, that's it for now! Can't wait to see the potatoes when they're done. Have a great week!
No comments:
Post a Comment