Tag: Daylilies

Hats off. Weekend fun.

The buckets and plant pots that protected the daylilies, hostas, and sedum during the roofing project are off, but will have one more appearance in the next couple weeks when the gutter and fascia work is going on.

After that very long, hard to wait but dreading the potential collateral damage May, it was great to get back in the garden.

First up was removing the remainder of the tree seedlings. That got done yesterday. The total of buckets this year was down from the past few years – 5, compared to the usual 7. Hurray!

The dying tulip greens that got smooshd also got pulled. They were done anyway.
sadly, also a daylily piece from the project smoosh, but next year …

Then the pollinator created, harvested daylily seeds from 2021 finally got planted. Another post on that coming soon.

The sunflower seedlings also all got pulled. They were an experiment, but the rolling roofing dumpster made that decision for me. My husband was very happy – hahaha!!!

Today my thoughts turned to the front entry garden. It needs love.

One of the Blue Mouse Ears hostas out back also got a little smooshed with the roofing project. That was ok because it needed to be divided anyway, and the flowers get hit by the sprinkler, so moving the whole plant is probably a good idea. Blue Mouse Ears are the perfect size for the entryway area, and with dappled sun due to the Amur Maple they will look great for years to come. That area also had the remnant of a Rainforest Sunrise hosta I mostly moved up north, but it got a bit smooshed too so this will not be it’s shining year. I had to cut away the smooshed leaves. No worries, it will pop back next year. But besides a center hosta and the few Blue Mouse Ears divisions, and the low growing sedum, what to put in that area for color? No to annuals I think. Daily watering – ugghhh. That is for bird baths – haha! No to sedum divisions – the two low growing sedum are enough. Asian lilies seem to die out there, and the stems are not great after bloom either. They require layering to cover those up. So it may be daylilies. I am concerned about the dappled sun, but maybe. Still contemplating.

Finally, the center of one of the back garden areas was pretty bare. Plenty of baby forget-me-nots that will bloom next year, but it needs something additional. I pulled a nice daylily from there to go up north last year, and right afterward I saw how bare that area was and regretted it. Bummer. So that area needs love. But low investment. Trying out the green shamrock. Not sure. Might need a trip to the garden store.

So that was the weekend garden fun. Super enjoyed it.

Oh boy!

Here it comes – the best garden planting time of the year, some planned time off work, and ideas floating around in my mind.

The ideas mostly involve dividing hostas, but those are all really slow to show this year.

So far the daylilies and sedum have won the race over the hostas to begin to dot the garden with that fabulous color of spring green.

Decision Time and Priorities

Last year was a weird year for home improvement projects. Labor and materials were an issue. At the townhouse there was no exception. Planned, and even marked, projects got pushed off and pushed off and eventually pushed to this year.

Yesterday my husband asked me if I had seen the landscape company come and spray our grass and flag an area in the front rock. I hadn’t. I went and looked. Sure enough, the area is marked for what looks like last year’s project – getting the gutter runoff diverted underground. It seems odd to me – the new roofs aren’t even started, and certainly the gutters that need to be replaced and re-angled aren’t on. But who knows? So I have a few decisions – Do I move the ninebark and a few sedum and a daylily from that newly marked area in front?

Last fall

Well, the daylily and the sedum are probably a yes – I would spend energy on finding new homes for those. They do well at the little house up north and could go there. Even if they become deer food, that would be better than becoming landscape discards.

Digging out a shrub at the townhouse? Probably not. The landscape provider’s trimming is different from what I used to do – less rounded and more like a pillar. I might have replaced it myself in a few years with a perennial. That whole front area was actually on my list of potential projects this year.

More and more, however, I am convincing myself the time for significant landscape investing at the townhome is … not this year. Maintenance, absolutely. Puttering, for sure. But hard work and money investing – not this year. Whether this is a more permanent change in approach for the townhome gardens, or just this season, time will tell. But definitely all signs are pointing to a “sit tight” garden year right now.

Now, whatever will I do with my daylily seeds this year? Add to that “rookery” up north?

Tender Love daylily – first year bloom

Last fall I bought a dozen daylilies to start the garden at the small house up north. Only five, however, got planted there. We were swamped with interior work and my creativity was just not flowing for the garden. I need think time sitting outside looking at an area for my garden ideas to gel. We were barely having any time out in the potential garden areas. And I was a bit nervous about the deer. So, the other 7 new daylilies got planted at the townhouse. A few came up in the townhouse gardens this year, the most exciting being the very late blooming, fragrant Tender Love.

I can already tell I will buy more. They feel like they will be like Blue Mouse Ears hostas to me. Each year I added more until I literally ran out of room in the area. I think Tender Love daylilies will be the perfect companion to the Blue Mouse Ears hostas, each shining at their own time, in the front of the garden.

An aside – Yes, that is clover in the garden. I left some for the bees and bunnies in the early years and it stayed. I pull it when it gets too much.

Back to the Tender Love daylilies Blue Mouse Ears pairing 🙂 Soon a bunch of the Blue Mouse Ears hostas will make the transfer up north. Not all, but some that need dividing and are crowded. Dare I move the Tender Love daylily too? Or splurge and order a few for up north?

The cheap in me says move it. The tender heart in me says it bloomed so perfectly right where it is, leave it. It is quite dainty. We’ll see how the remaining bud survives the landscape maintenance. That will probably be the decider.

That’s not a weed

It might be time to move some more things if your association landscape maintenance company repeatedly blows the daylilies so hard the petals come off,

and even sometimes the flowers break off the stem,

and you watch one of the workers try to pull a mature daylily up as if it’s a weed.

This is what it looked like before – mature enough to bloom.

This is what it looks like now

  • leaves ripped to the ground

This is what the coneflower looks like now – stems broken, petals sheared off.

No question about what happened. I watched from inside as it happened.

I had planned to leave a bunch of the plants I have bought and raised from seed here, as they have thrived here and many people have enjoyed them, but they are just getting destroyed.

It is very sad. I may need a bigger garden up north.

Catch Up Time

It was a season of daylily abundance here. Day after day there were 30+ daylilies blooming everywhere I looked. An incredible treat coming out of a now mature daylily garden.

Up north at the little reno house, success! It doesn’t look like much in pictures, the front porch needs love, and the old shed needs paint, but the deer are now staying away from the new plantings. What worked? It could be that our dog likes to “leave his calling card” right outside the “entrance” to the two areas, or it could be the mulch. Time will tell.

So after so much trial and error with up north gardens in the past 3 years, how did I settle on what to do? It was actually a “happy accident”.

The association board at the townhouse (from which I am now retired), decided to have all rock gardens between the garages pulled out and replaced with asphalt. In the rock garden between our garage and the neighbor’s garage there was some history I decided to preserve. There were rocks from a previous neighbor’s parents’ farm that we had used to keep the landscape rock somewhat contained, and there was an alpine current bush that my father had given me 15 years ago that had thrived there, providing many a happy day for our neighborhood birds. The rocks went up north in two batches in big bins (which are now quite beat up from the weight but oh well, it’s for the new garden!).

For the foundation, because the soil at that little house is rocky and needs some gardening love, I chose to do a modified lasagne garden, putting a layer of heavy cardboard down on the very old lawn, adding soil where needed, securing the cardboard in place with the rocks, and putting a good 6″ of mulch on top of that. I worked the cardboard around the plantings. Then I trimmed the areas with the smaller rocks.

Because I was tentative on how well things would work, and because the results of my previous up north gardens were less than optimal, I built in sections. I brought up plants from things that needed dividing or saving from the townhouse gardens. The Rainforest Sunrise hosta needed to come out of one of the areas in the townhouse garden because it was getting crowded. The shrub start was from rootings off the alpine currant that was removed. The sedum were cuttings and divisions. The daylilies were from last year’s purchases and plantings, and the daylily seedlings were from last year’s Purple D’Oro seed harvest.

The plants I put in before I decided on the modified lasagne method took a bit of a hit from the deer, but since I put the mulch in the deer have left everything alone. Fingers crossed.

There is so much more that needs to go up in the next 8 weeks. Two trellises went up because we had to replace the ac at the townhouse. The new ac unit was bigger, necessitating the removal of the trellises. I cut back that clematis, and it will be moved next. Beyond that, the Blue Mouse Ears desperately need dividing, a Patriot Hosta has really burned this year in the landscape rock and drought and needs moving, and I should move some crowded hostas out of the area across the path from the weigelia. That will probably fill the current garden up at the little house, and then I will finish putting the rest of the mulch in. After that, sleep new little garden. Rest up for next year.