Month: August 2024

Good morning from the garden!

I have to admit, not much is looking great in my garden right now.  The hostas are full of holes from earwigs and/or slugs, the bee balm is dried up and sad looking, the ferns are on their last legs, the tips on all of the irises are brown, and I don’t even want to talk about the pseudocercospora leaf spot fungus on my lilacs (if you haven’t heard about this, it’s rampant in Minnesota this year due to the amount of wet weather we’ve had, for more info, check out this video from Kare11).

That being said, my Japanese Spikenard is still looking gorgeous.

And the panicle hydrangeas are looking absolutely stunning this week, they love all of the rain we’ve had!  This one is my Vanilla Strawberry …

And this one is Limelight …

Here’s a better photo to put the size of that Limelight in perspective.

It’s easily 11′ to 12′ tall.  I sure do hope my new Quick Fire Fab hydrangeas perform as well for me.  FYI, I did fertilize my hydrangeas in early spring with Espoma Rose-tone.  You don’t really need to fertilize panicle hydrangeas, but I’ve read that they will grow faster if you do.  So you can bet I’ll be out there with the Rose-tone again next spring to fire up those Quick Fire Fabs (pardon the very lame pun).

Since my own garden isn’t looking especially inspiring right now, I’m bringing this Sunday morning in the garden post to you from Green Barn Garden Center’s sunflower field in Isanti, MN.

My niece and I headed up there earlier this week to check it out.

Although it was a bit of a gloomy day (and yes, there was more rain!), the flowers were sunny enough to make up for it.

Being there on a cloudy weekday meant we nearly had the entire place to ourselves.

Sunflowers take about 60 days to bloom, and they bloom for about 7 to 10 days.  So Green Barn plants five crops in succession so that they have at least one section in full bloom throughout the month of August.

They provide a bunch of fun photo spots, like this one with a piano …

or this one with an old fire truck.

There were numerous tractors that one could pose on too.

But my niece and I are of the same mind when it comes to photos of ourselves.  We don’t like them.  I did convince her to pose for just one though.

It started to drizzle about halfway through our wander around the field, so we wrapped things up after checking out a few more of the photo props like these fun bikes.

We paused at the end for one quick selfie, which both of us hated …

but we did it anyway.

If any of you locals are looking for some fun photo ops, Green Barn Garden Center should have sunflowers in bloom through Labor Day weekend.  They charge $7 admission, but you can pose for as many photos as you like (or not, in our case).  Here’s a link so you can check out all of the details.

Good morning from the garden!

Over the past week I’ve been working hard on embracing change.  I fully admit, I’ve never been a fan.  Especially when the change is not by choice.

Ironically, just last week I wrote a blog post from the garden about having patience, and changes in the garden that take years to come to fruition.  But sometimes the opposite happens and a very drastic change takes place in the garden overnight.

Recently my neighbor/handyman Ken decided to have the enormous shade tree in his back yard cut down.

Ken and his wife planted this tree as a small sapling when they moved into their house back in the late 70’s.

After nearly 50 years of growth, it was huge.  Not only did it shade Ken’s entire backyard, it also shaded a good bit of our backyard and also our house.

But lately Ken had been worried about the the age of the tree.  As I’ve mentioned so many times lately, we’ve had a lot of rain this summer and much of it has been accompanied by high winds.  A tree had come down on a house a few blocks away from us and Ken became convinced that the same could happen with his tree.

He had a local ‘landscape & tree’ company come out, and they agreed with him that there was a possibility the tree could come down in a storm (um, isn’t that pretty much true of all trees?).

So he decided to have it taken down (although I practically begged him to reconsider).  Since the pine tree that sits on the property line between our two houses was pretty lopsided after being overwhelmed by the giant tree and would surely look awful with that tree gone, he decided to have that one removed as well.

Last Monday the tree removal crew arrived with a giant crane.  They set it up in Ken’s front yard, and then lifted just one guy and his chain saw up and over the house and into the tree canopy.

He attached ropes to each huge limb before he cut it, and then the crane lifted it up and away.

Little did I realize that they were actually going to swing those giant limbs over our house!

I have to say, it was a bit unnerving to see limbs the size of full trees dangling in the air above our roof.

They then lowered them onto the street.

That’s just one limb!  There were probably about six or seven limbs that size that came off the tree.

There was a crew in the street that then cut them up and loaded them into a huge truck.

It was quite the production.

Once the dust cleared, I was horrified by the destruction.  OK, horrified is a strong word.  How about devasted?  Or maybe heart-broken?  Really, I was just simply sad.

Sad because that beautiful tree was no more.

It really didn’t help that it was a brilliantly sunny afternoon, and suddenly my once gloriously shaded backyard was blisteringly hot.  In addition, all of the more unsightly details, like the utility poles and the far neighbor’s giant pole barn were much more noticeable.

Although that tree was nearly 50 years old, maples can live from 100 to 300 years.  And as it turned out, it was perfectly healthy inside.  I suspect that tree would have easily outlived not only Ken, but Mr. Q and me as well.

On the bright side (pardon the pun), I now have a section of garden that will qualify as ‘full sun’.  I’m trying to see this as an opportunity to grow some of those flowering plants that have eluded me in my mostly shady garden.  I plan to re-work that flower bed next spring by adding some sun-loving plants.

I also decided to put in a hydrangea hedge along the property line where the pine tree was.  It will go from the end of my existing garden to meet up with the lilac hedge along the back.  I purchased six Quick Fire Fab hydrangeas to fill it.

Aren’t they gorgeous?  They have a similar growing habit to the Limelight hydrangeas that I love so much, but they bloom about a month earlier and the flowers start out white then turn a lovely blush pink, followed by a deeper pink by fall.

It will take several years before they get to their full height of 6′ to 8′ tall, but when they do get there I think they will be stunning.  Let’s hope I have better luck with this hedge than I did with those lilacs!

Before planting, I prepared the bed by adding some cow manure and tilling it into the top 6″ or so of soil.  OK, well, by “I” I really mean the super hardworking high school student that I hired to help me with the heavy lifting.  We then added some Espoma Bio-tone Starter to each hole as we planted the hydrangeas (this product is supposed to help the plant develop a strong root system to get established more quickly).  Once the shrubs were all in the ground, we mulched the bed with some black wood mulch.  I don’t like to use wood mulch on perennial beds, but I do like to use it under shrubs.  It reduces weeding, helps retain moisture, and that black color really makes the plants pop.

The sight of that row of gorgeous hydrangeas has cheered me up a little, but I have to admit that the loss of that shade tree has really thrown me.  I know, it was just a tree.  There are so many more important things in life.  I’m trying hard to embrace the change, but I’m really going to miss that tree.

Good morning from the garden!

This morning I thought I would update you on a few of the garden projects that I’ve shared in the past.  These are mostly projects that have taken 3 or more (in one case, many more) years to come to fruition.

As Audrey Hepburn supposedly said, to plant a garden is to believe in tomorrow.  Gardening is rarely an instant gratification sort of endeavor, that’s for sure.

If you’ve been following me for a few years you may remember that I attempted to plant a lilac hedge back in 2011.  OMG, that means it was 13 years ago.  So yeah, this one has required A LOT of patience.

I initially planted a row of the fancy hybrid type lilacs and after 5 years it looked like this …

Wow, that’s embarassing, isn’t it?  What a straggly mess.

The flowers were gorgeous.

But the hedge wasn’t providing any sort of privacy along our back property line, and it certainly didn’t look good, even when in full flower.

Over the next several years I pulled out those fancy lilacs one or two at a time and replaced them.  At first I replaced a couple of them with common lilacs.

The common lilacs have performed beautifully and are now at least 12′ tall and doing the job they were meant to do.

We can no longer see our neighbor’s son’s fishing boat from our back dining room window.

But the flowers on the common lilac just aren’t terribly exciting.

So over the past two years I have gone back to putting in the fancy hybrids (because I never learn).  This time around I gave them a little winter protection from the rabbits though, and that seemed to help quite a bit.

And Mr. Q has been really careful not to spray them with weed killer, instead we are hand pulling the creeping charlie that keeps threatening to take over from the neighbor’s yard (I don’t blame her for not tackling them on her side, she is elderly and has a bad hip, she used to have beautiful gardens and lawn but she has had to let them go).

So far so good with the two newest lilacs, although they need to put on quite a bit more height before the hedge looks more uniform.

However, I’m once again having mixed results with the the hybrids at the other end of the hedge.  They started out looking great this year, but currently a couple of them look a bit sickly.

I’m going to try a couple of things, and then wait and see how they look next year.  However, in the end I may have to pull out a couple more and replace them with those boring common lilacs.

In the meantime, I’ve begun another experiment with this hedge.  I planted three clematis at the base of the lilacs.  They should wind their way up the branches and eventually provide some additional interest after the lilacs themselves bloom early in the season.

Once again, we’ll have to wait and see if that works out.

My goal with this hedge was to provide a natural barrier, but not add a lot of extra maintenance.  So I wasn’t going for a neatly trimmed hedge.  The proper way to prune a lilac is to remove approximately 1/3 of the stems all the way to the ground.  In other words, you’re not supposed to just shear the top off to create a uniform height throughout like you would with a more formal hedge.  If you want that sort of look, I wouldn’t choose lilacs.

My next experiment in the garden was planting a Golden Shadows Pagoda Dogwood in the fern bed in 2022.

The Pagoda Dogwood is an understory tree that will grow in partial shade.  Mine, however, is planted in nearly full shade.  For that reason I really wasn’t sure if it would thrive in this spot.

But it is looking really good this year, and I can finally see it peeking out above the ferns.

I suspect it will be another several years at least before it starts to look like I want it to, so I’ll just have to continue to be patient on that one.

Next up is another experiment, this time with planting a shrub in the shade garden.  I planted a Morden Golden Glow Elderberry in 2021.

This is another one that will grow in partial shade, but I planted it in what would probably be considered full shade.  It does get some late evening sun though.

It is growing somewhat slowly, I’m guessing that’s due to the shade.  The full height range for this plant is 4′ to 5′, but I’d rather it stay on the smaller end.

So far, so good.

Last up I thought I’d share a plant that hasn’t required much patience.  You may remember that last summer I went on the St. Anthony Park garden tour and discovered a trendy plant that everyone seemed to be growing.

This plant has a lot of names.  You can call it Aralia cordata, or ‘Sun King’ Golden Japanese Spikenard.  I just call mine Spike.

Spike is loving life in this nearly full shade spot.  In fact, he’s crowding out a couple of neighboring plants that I’m going to have to now move elsewhere.  But that’s OK, I think this plant is gorgeous and worth the space.

Now, how about you?  Do you have any long-term planting projects like my lilac hedge?  Or maybe a favorite trendy new plant that looks great in year one?  Leave a comment and let me know.

Good morning from the garden!

This morning I thought I would share a mid-summer update on my container plantings.

I can’t remember if I mentioned this in an earlier post or not, but this year I chose to focus on plants with interesting foliage, like these absolutely gorgeous rex begonias, rather than plants grown for showy flowers.

The main reason for this is that I just don’t have enough full-sun locations in my garden to get good results with most flowering annuals like petunias, geraniums, lantana, etc.

That’s why I planted up my rusty urns with some dwarf alberta spruce spirals underplanted with some simple variegated ivy.

I’m quite happy with the results so far.  The spirals are starting to get a little shaggy, so I’m going to have to bite the bullet and prune them soon (I’m a little nervous about getting the shape right).  The ivy has filled in beautifully as well.

Other than that eventual pruning, these have required little to no maintenance all summer.  We’ve gotten so much rain that I have barely even needed to water them.

I also chose to rely on colorful foliage in both of my galvanized boiler window boxes (there is one on the carriage house and one on the potting shed).

The one on the carriage house is mainly taken up by two very vigorous annuals, Lemon Coral sedum and Blackie potato vine.  I did originally have a Lime Marmalade heuchera behind that potato vine, but it was totally being smothered.  So I pulled it out and planted it in the ground.

The other boiler window box contains a Charmed Wine oxalis, a ColorBlaze Mini Me Chartreuse coleus, another Lemon Coral sedum and a burgundy colored rex begonia that I don’t know the name of …

and that colorful plant shooting out of the left side is Autumnale fuschia.

Technically this fuschia is supposed to produce blooms, but it is really grown for its foliage rather than its flowers.  I’m fairly sure that mine has not bloomed even once.  Possibly because I’m not really fertilizing these containers like I would for blooming plants.

My bed frame planter is situated in nearly full shade.  It gets a very brief hit of sun in the early morning hours and that’s about it.  I kept it simple this year with a couple of huge ferns that I purchased at Home Depot, a bunch of caladium, and another Blackie potato vine.

If you look at the potato vine, you can see that I have a lot of insect damage.  I’ve had a massive infestation of earwigs this year, I suspect because it has been so wet.  They’ve done a ton of damage, especially to my hostas, coleus, brunnera and potato vines.

Fortunately they don’t seem to enjoy caladium.

Speaking of which, it has only been recently that the caladium has really taken off.  Caladium like hot, humid weather and we’ve just not had enough heat for it to thrive up until now.

I purchased this caladium at Home Depot in mid-June.  As you’ll read in a moment, I have other caladium that I purchased earlier in the spring, and spent a bit more money on, that is not doing nearly as well as this one.

I didn’t strictly stick to non-flowering plants this year.  I have a trio of rusty urns that I filled with Rockapulco Appleblossom impatiens …

and a pretty pale pink and white upright fuschia (sorry, I didn’t make a note of the name of that one).

But they also include a fair amount of non-flowering stuff like the Creeping Jenny, a Plum Pudding heuchera and another caladium.

As you can see, the caladium is looking less than stellar in these pots.  That’s the caladium that I planted much earlier in the season.  I think our cool spring weather really knocks it back a bit.  Caladium is happier spending a little more time in a greenhouse before being planted out in Minnesota.

I’ve definitely saved the best for last today.  I am really happy with the results in my front window box this year.  You may remember that I considered last year’s front window box a bit of a fail.   So this year I went in a different direction.

When I planted this one up I called it a ‘black and white’ combination.

For the ‘white’ elements, I used white New Guinea impatiens and Proven Winner’s Superbena Whiteout.

Considering that this window box faces northwest and thus gets mostly shade with a couple of hours of evening sun, that verbena is performing quite nicely I think.

I also included the Proven Winner’s Diamond Snow euphorbia.

The Diamond Snow is supposed to be more compact than the Diamond Frost variety, and I can verify that is true (as you can see for yourself above left).

You can also see my non-flowering white element (above right), a white caladium.  The white New Guinea impatiens (above center) are not performing as well as I would like them to, but I just gave them a shot of fertilizer so hopefully they will put on some more blooms soon.

For the ‘black’ elements in my window box I used plants with a deep, dark purple color like the Blackie potato vine, and the Charmed Wine oxalis.

I also included a ‘black’ coleus, but I’m not precisely sure what variety it is.  Possibly Black Coral.

But the real stars of the show in the front window box this year are those gorgeous rex begonias.

I really wasn’t sure how well these would perform for me.  To be honest, I’ve never done well with begonias in the past.  I tend to overwater them causing the crown of the plant to rot.  In fact, I also planted some tuberous begonias this year and they did in fact rot.

But the begonias in this front window box are stunning.

Despite our super rainy weather.  I don’t think I’ve watered this box more than once or twice so far.

My plan is to try to overwinter these begonias this year, and I may try some propagation experiments with them as well.  I’d love to have even more of them next year!

Overall I’m very happy with my decision to focus more on interesting foliage rather than flowers in my containers this year.  But how about you?  Do you prefer to have an abundance of blooming annuals instead?  Leave a comment and let me know.