Good morning from the garden!
I know it’s only late April, but I have been patiently waiting all winter for spring to arrive. Since returning from my mom’s house, where it was in the 80’s and sunny, I’m officially now impatiently waiting.
I’ve also been watching many of my favorite garden YouTube channels (Garden Answer, Hello Garden, The Impatient Gardener and Dig, Plant, Water, Repeat), and most of them are far ahead of my formerly zone 4b/now zone 5a garden. With the exception of The Impatient Gardener, because she’s in Wisconsin. But I have a serious case of spring garden envy when I see these videos with hostas already completely leafed out, crabapples in full bloom and masses of tulips and daffodils flowering.
I’ve done pretty much all I can in the garden for now until I can plant annuals, which around here is not until mid-May at the earliest. However, our average last frost date is May 21, and the official recommendation is to wait until the last week of May to plant.
I rarely follow that advice though. I definitely can get some pansies in way before that, which is why I went ahead and planted some up this week.
Pansies are pretty cold-tolerant so they will be OK unless we get below 20 degrees or so. If I see any cold nights in the forecast, I can just cover them up with some old sheets to protect them a bit.
There are a handful of bulbs blooming in my garden already too. Remember those leucojum’s I planted last fall?
They’ve come up and are pretty sweet. I’m hoping that they multiply for next year.
They’ve turned out to be deer resistant too, which is nice. Especially since once again the deer have munched most of my tulips down to the ground. I have a couple of groupings that I managed to protect with chicken wire, but the deer got to all the rest. Please remind me to quit trying to grow tulips, it’s just not going to happen for me.
That being said, I have a handful of tulips that the deer missed that are blooming now …
It looks as though grape hyacinths are also a safe bet. I was pretty excited to see them coming up and blooming for me.
You may remember that I purchased them already potted up and blooming in about mid-May last year.
After using them as a photo prop, I decided to pop them in the ground and see what happened.
They were perfect right between my Maiden Hair ferns and those small lime green hostas (that I don’t know the name of).
Unfortunately, their normal bloom time appears to be much earlier than mid-May (ie. now), and the hostas and ferns are barely even out of the ground yet. So the grape hyacinths stand alone this year.
I have just one variety of daffodil blooming this week …
The rest of the daffodils in the garden are up, and they have buds, but they seem far from opening.
Daffodils are also deer resistant, so maybe I need to add more of them this fall as well.
I do have a few perennials that are already blooming including variegated vinca and bleeding heart. My fern-leaf bleeding heart is particularly pretty right now.
This type of bleeding heart is a workhorse in the garden because it will keep blooming all summer, unlike the more traditional bleeding heart which blooms early and then pretty much dies back and looks terrible for the rest of the season.
Maybe I should quit feeling sorry for myself. My gardens may not be completely up and filled out yet, but they are getting started. What’s up and/or blooming where you are? Leave a comment and let me know.
q is for quandie 
We have a few things blooming at the moment: snapdragons, iris, creeping phlox, jessamin, pansies, clematis, and amaryllis. Gone are the daffodils and hyacinth. The deer eat our day lilies, so we haven’t seen any of those ever since we moved here (southeastern NC near the coast) 9 years ago. We are looking forward to black-eyed Susan, azaleas, crape myrtles, and some other plants we don’t know the names of but know they produce flowers. We can’t grow tulips here…something about not having long enough cold time, although we haven’t tried. I miss our gardens and plants in central Ohio, too, where we had lilacs and mock orange bushes. It’s nice seeing your garden. I’ll look forward to updates.
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Those darn deer! They eat my day lilies as well, and in fact we are digging up a big bed of them from behind the shed and just discarding them. Not only do the deer munch on them, but that bed is full of creeping bellflower and I think the only way to eradicate it will be to dig out the entire thing and start over from scratch. I would miss the lilacs if I were you too, but it sounds like you have lots of other lovely things to look forward to including the azaleas. My parents lived near Charlotte for a few years and had an entire yard full of gorgeous azaleas. There are only a handful of azaleas that will grow here, and they don’t really put on the same sort of show that you get down there.
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