Category: Garden

Almost (Spring 2023)

Oh boy! Where do we start? I do indeed love our seasons, but this year, in my humble opinion, has been a very long winter. It probably doesn’t help that we took our first ever planned warm weather actual vacation this year, and I still have “beach” on my mind. But alas, beach gardening is not a thing, I don’t think, so no plans to move just yet 😉

I like to say I am a “Thursday” sort of girl – the whole (weekend) yet ahead, but right … almost … there … I feel that way right now. The snow is melting, and I do see the grass and garden emerging. I suppose in July I will miss all this snow. But for now, sooooo done with this view.

Wrapping up

The hummingbirds have been gone for a week and a half, the geese are flocking up and filling the skies with their wonderful honking, we have had our first frost, the shamrocks are out of the gardens and up by the patio, transitioning to their eventual move indoors for the winter, and the daylily seeds are almost all harvested, and in envelopes, safely stored until February stratification time.

We have also worked through a lot of what we brought back from the little house up north. Some was not worth sharing, but definitely needed purging. We are once again in a “manageable decluttered” state. Not perfect, but back to continual maintenance.

I recently planted the two hostas that were really struggling at that little house up north, back into the garden here, the last transitional piece. As a bonus, we hear from our former neighbors that the new homeowners are very nice. A match, and a blessing indeed. We were blessed to enjoy that wonderful home during its, and indeed our, transitional period, and had wonderful memories there to enjoy for a lifetime, including friendships we carry forward.

Now the fall things at the townhouse remain – cutting back the garden after the color is largely gone, balancing between enjoying the last bit, and getting winterized before significant snow flies. It is part of the cycle, and a good time to wind down the garden blog for the 2022 season.

So I bid you a fond adieu until the gardens pick up in spring 2023. I will post from time to time as “share worthy” things come up in the interim, and will catch up next spring for another garden season.

Take care!

A recent sunrise. I stood in awe!

Hybrid – harvesting seeds

Where do I separate daylily seeds from pods?

Outside on the Traeger of course 😉

Well, most recently, that is.

Because if I don’t, the pod will sit on our clutter hot spot, the dining room table, for maybe days, and then I will deliberate – Save the pod? Or just the seeds? Is this thought related to save the clothes tags until you wash up the clothes the first time? Should I save the pod until the seeds germinate? Oh, the things I do!

Discipline, GF!

Separate the seeds from the pod, gather the seeds, put them in the envelope that is already labeled, put the envelope back in the safe storage space (not the dining room table ;)), where they will be joined by siblings until all seeds are gathered, and put the pod (which you, on purpose, out of discipline, left outside on the Treager) in an enticing place in the garden, to be eaten by – whatever eats empty seed pods. Bugs?

Clutter prevention 101, or is it 2 by 2? Or 19 by 19? Because that’s how many viable Purple D’Oro seed pods we got this year.

And now there are 5

Plus 1

Because a plus 1 is fun. Right?

OK, I will stop 😊

Hybrid – bonus

Oh boy! I was afraid of this! My garden blog ideas got together for lunch with my decluttering thoughts, and collaboratively raised a question. A very small one in the grand scheme of things, but nevertheless …

“Are these seeds worth putting in an envelope and saving for next spring’s planting?”

There – it’s out there.

These are seeds from a 2 year old, first year blooming daylily that enticed pollinators, and then enticed the bunny, probably “Gigantus Bunimous”, to try it’s luck at midnight dinner, and, alas, must have been driven away, or preferred something better. It was left on the ground 5 feet away from the daylily, but I knew where it came from because I was watching, hoping, the pod would produce viable seeds.

Remember, I am a gardener, not a landscaper. I rescued that seed pod from being breakfast for the squirrels, and put it in the seedling box, on the off chance it was mature enough to somehow produce viable seeds. And seed it did produce. But they do not look viable. And they are sitting, where? On my clutter hot spot – the dining room table.

Discipline!

Will they go in an envelope, or out to the garden for critter enjoyment?

Look closely.

Frost warning

As some of you may have guessed, I queue up blog posts. Many are not time sensitive, so whenever they come up is fine. But this one is actually today. Yeay!

Fall! It’s here! And it’s accompanying temperature drops are coming, fast. We already had a frost warning up north, and we will dip into the 30s for lows here next week. The shamrocks will be coming in some time in the next couple weeks, and it is time to finish up any transplanting. The summer of 2022 is gone.

Life has been a little intense, and I, for one, could really use a weekend in the gardens. Hoping for that. There is a chance of rain late tonight/early tomorrow. But looking good Sat/Sun.

We are also getting antsy with “what does our home, go forward, look like” thoughts. We saw something that was enticing, but before we even had time to think – gone. That is the way it still is here. Snooze, you lose.

We need more family gathering space, and definitely more kitchen functionality, so our thinking caps are on. What does that look like?

And, as always, the landscape v garden issue continues to roll around in my head. I garden. I do not landscape. That is who I am. Our living situation needs to satisfy that. As I shared in a previous blog, I don’t want to go weed at a church on Thursday nights. I want to garden, here.

So lots of grey cells firing. Time will tell.

One thing is certain, we are feeling cramped and cluttered with the stuff from the little house up north coming back here. There will be a lot more decluttering/purging blogs to motivate (and entertain) for sure! In fact, I think there is another one coming up, today. Enjoy!

All this STUFF!!!

I consider us to be fairly good at keeping the townhouse pretty free of un-needed, non-joy producing stuff. I don’t mind storing a reasonable amount of consumables (think the tp shortage of 2020), but the townhouse is too small to keep much stuff for “some day when”. And our kids have long ago moved out and years ago stopped replying to my texts with pictures, asking, “Do you want any of this?” Code for “No”.

I have a pretty low clutter threshold, and clutter above that for more than a few days really affects me. Plus, hanging on to stuff that we used to use but no longer do, while someone else may be able to use it, just seems, well … wasteful.

Our recent condensing of the stuff from the little house up north has been interesting. We kept that place very minimal (like “when are you going to decorate?” minimal), so there wasn’t a huge amount to bring back, but still … Think kitchen items, and consumables, household staples, things that go in cabinets, but now had no place to go at the townhouse. Thankfully, there was a minimal amount of furniture that needed to come back. There were also leftover renovation materials we had no plans for, like the 500 LINEAR feet of floor trim that was left over when I, on a Black Friday order early in the morning, having never done a renovation, confidently calculated we needed 3 TIMES the amount of floor trim we actually ended up using. Yes, I did get a call from our contractor saying, “That’s a lot of floor trim!”. Hahaha!!! We should have returned the unneeded trim, but we didn’t.

And then … AND THEN … there were the gardens. The precious daylily seedlings, the Blue Mouse Ears divisions, the lift and shifts, and all the trellises. Not to mention all the hand placed rocks I used for borders …

My personal challenge regarding the gardens was: Do you have a space for those to come back? Answer: I could make way for a bit – for the super struggling, deer eaten, decimated hostas that would just die up there if I leave them.

I can’t have trellises at the townhouse over 4′ and the bear(s) up north by the camper would just play with them. So the trellises stay with the new owners

As for the daylilies, the realtor assured me the new owners said they would love it if I left the daylilies, both mature and seedlings. The deer, miraculously, left the sedum and daylilies alone. In the end, I reminded myself of the joy I get from leaving a trail of my garden creations, and I decided “All but the decimated hostas should stay”. Bless the new homeowners of the little house up north with the gardens I started. Hopefully they will maintain them them far better than I ever could part-time, and enjoy them, and maybe even add on to them.