Garden Tips

The first day back from a vacation full of amazing people is always such a hard transition. A let down in the instant happiness and memories when faced with mountains of laundry and house chores. Add in that my husband left immediately for a four day work trip - fourth one this month - and you get a blog post about my happy place, my garden. I'm with the British on this, my entire yard is a garden, yard does no justice to the beauty.  So in lieu of chores that make me sad, I'll give you tips I've learned. Like: not only are herbs delicious to eat, a lot of them repel mosquitos. So load up your patio with rosemary, sage, and cat mint which flowers. Geraniums and citronella (in the geranium family) keep flies away. Citronella also fights mosquitos. So not only do you get beautiful pops of color but practical perks of no pesky flies. Those window boxes in Europe have known this for ages. It's really a loss to society that these things are not well known.

The same design tips apply in your garden as in your house. Create depth with various heights. Use odd numbers not even. Create color pallets. I like to use white for clean elegance and simplicity. Reds, purples, and pinks for drama. Yellows for cheeriness. Pastels: pinks, oranges, and yellows for a soft feel. Different beds have different color pallets in my yard. Put in the bones and structure with trees and shrubs. Add flowers of differing bloom times so your yard continues to wow from spring through fall. Asters and mums are good fall bloomers that sprout in the spring and flower late August through September.

Best grown on a south facing bed are roses and irises. They will get huge and happy with all the sun. Put banana peels on the base of roses just under the soil. Hydrangeas do need some sun to do really well. You can change the color of the bloom to pink with a higher ph base soil, white with a little base, purple with a little acid, deep blue with a high acid soil. Dead head dahlias for better blooms. Berries will cross pollinate within 25 ft I was told this spring.

Lest you think my garden is all flourish and fancy;  we live in a harsh climate of dry hot and cold and zero nutrient clay soil. We have to constantly feed and amend the soil. Constantly. We lose a bunch of plants every year to the cold and heat. It's super disheartening. My entire front bed's bone structure had to be replaced after the cold killed my laurels and rhodies. Three of my trees got burned from the cold bad and don't look full at all. We lost a tree to a fungus that we didn't know about until it was too late to save. Two of three trellises we started building for our grapes a year ago remain unfinished. I weeded my beds six days ago before the trip and they are back with avengance because we turned our sprinklers way up so nothing would die in the 100 + heat while we were gone. I was giving my climbing rose a haircut and stabbed my fingernail deep with a huge root and asked my husband to finish and we accidentally chopped off the best flower part that took two years to grow.  One St. John wort came back well and its mate barely survived the winter. Things take a long time to mature here because of the bad soil, lack of water, and extremes in temperature, and thus, short growing season.

On my south wall I have six roses of various color and variety. Four are brand new from the winter killing the other ones.  Three peonies, six lavender, and one Russian sage as a border. And it's all chock full of weeds I just weeded. We have a lot of flowers this year to focus on the honeybees and butterflies and hummingbirds. The county sprayed something last summer and wiped out most of the bees. 🙄😡😡😡 We used to have bees everywhere, now we are lucky to have twenty in our whole yard at a time. Beekeepers can't find swarms to hive. It's all very irresponsible and devastating to vegetation.

 Here's where I would insert garden pictures. Oh well, my phone and blog are not cooperating with loading photos today.