Yesterday I walked out to the start of Just Plum Happy season. True, my husband’s favorite daylily, “Just Plum Happy” had it’s first blooms Tuesday. But yesterday …
Persian Market opened
That is the one who’s sister bud got blown off by the landscape maintenance. She shined bright today. Even at 9:45 at night she was still gorgeous.
Tuesday the peach daylily wrapped up the season
and yesterday was saying goodbye til next year
wherever that may be. I am hoping what this picture also shows is the first day of a pollinator created seed pod. If possible. Her season was only three blooms long because her sister scape was one of the very few scapes damaged during the roofing project. We are thankful for the three blooms we got.
The South Seas daylily was taking the day off after a magnificent display Tuesday.
And the Blue Mouse Ears hostas have reached their crescendo and are winding down for the season. They, like us, are not fans of the heat, and are settling in to be a lovely green/blue backdrop for the rest of the season.
The spiders love to use them for web making, and when they are blooming the spiders get their way. All bets are off when they start to go to seed.
Finally, one of my dozen 2 year old daylilies also bloomed yesterday. I have to look up the name. For now it is Beautiful, Early Morning Tulip Shaped before it opens, Gorgeous Peachy Pink daylily.
Yah, that’s it. For now 🙂
oh, okay …
The forget-me-nots continue to co-exist with the clover, continues to co-exist at the base of the daylilies, and next to the Blue Mouse Ears hostas.
So much prettier than just landscape rock. Reminds me of old English gardens. Depth.
Yesterday we were talking with my mother-in-law and she asked, “Did you give me some peach daylilies?” Indeed I did.
I have one here as well. I bought three and put two in front oh those many years ago – 16? Those two out front did not do as well in that location, so I pulled them out. I didn’t have a place for them and my mother-in-law was tearing out grass along the side of her yard and putting in a new garden. Those two daylilies have done so well there!
Oh the gardens that have grown at her house! The creations, the fish pond, cyclops the one eyed fish who wintered in a big aquarium in their basement, flowers, fruits, vegetables, my first iris rhysomes were from her. My in-laws showed up after we bought our first house – with a tin garden bucket of 40 purple iris rhysomes. It all began with that, my friends. Those 40 iris rhysomes were 400 3 years later. I gave them to neighbors and got others back. Some of those gardens were still going strong when we moved. I leave a trail of gardens all over – hahaha!
The soil of my gardening mind had been tilled at a very early age with weekend visits to my own grandmother, and work in her vegetable garden. My mother also had gardens along the way. And my dorm room was full of houseplants that moved through to our first apartment. But my mother-in-law gets the credit for giving me a love for perennial gardening, almost 40 years ago. And now, she is enjoying my gifts back to her. The sister to the two that are blooming in her garden right now is blooming in my garden right now. In fact today.
Today’s pic is of my husband’s favorite daylily – Just Plum Happy. It is so close to blooming. Probably tomorrow. And when it starts the garden is super-alive for a whole month.
A friend recently gave me a couple zucchini starts. Blast from the past – like 30 years past – when I started and was growing vining edibles on the edge of our back yard. And the parcel of land next to us got sold. And construction started. And the vining edibles got scraped up and plowed into the construction dirt pile. Ugghhh. Well, I reasoned, I am the only one in our family who likes zucchini anyway. The melon plants would have been nice though. Lemonade out of lemons, friends gave me some of their harvest many years. I purchased from the farmer’s market as well. And this year I tried again, and planted those little zucchini starts from my friend in a plant pot, just to see what happened. In a pot because that meets association bylaws. Which I can understand. But we did have one resident a few years back who grew corn. Not in pots. (LMBO!!!) And, as an aside, we have lived by corn fields, if not right on the edge of corn fields, for 32 years. My dream house is either on the edge of a corn field or on the edge of the woods, with a little brook, which we doggone near have at the little house up north, but I digress – widely. Back on topic 😉
The zucchini starts grew and yesterday a flower bloomed. A couple verses have come to mind. First was the Job verse (1:21) “The Lord giveth, and the Lord taketh away. Blessed be the name of the Lord.” But, as sad as it was that the landscape maintenance kid stepped on my Praying Hands hosta and smooshed it, stepped on and broke off two daylily plants, and trimmed shrubs that were coming up on flowering season, I hardly think that even remotely approaches Job. The next thing that came to mind was “When the Lord closes one door, somewhere he opens a window.” Sound of Music. I can fly with that. And indeed I did make that little angels singing sound when I saw the first flower on the zucchini plant. Free flowers, I thought! Yellow! Trumpet shaped when they open so maybe the pollinators will even enjoy them! And if I can get a tomato cage (my daughter-in-law had an extra one a month ago), I can even train it. Lord knows it may meet it’s untimely demise if I don’t do something to keep it from the weed whipping and spraying/blower maxing/don’t bother to look where you’re stomping jubilance.
The zucchini loves this corner spot. The spot the Patriot hosta didn’t like (way too sunny). The spot where I considered growing a few sunflowers – hahaha!
Yes those are forget-me-nots in the rock – that I keep well away from the lawn. Yes, those are marks from my favorite lawn chair – I don’t care. Look at that big healthy hosta next to that zucchini in a pot.
Hobbies – what a treat. Something you choose to do, without a time clock accountability, however you can, when you can, if you can. Something you get lost in.
It takes a while to find a hobby that is satisfying and fulfilling enough to keep you coming back. I have many friends who love to craft – make beautiful home-made cards, scrapbook, sew, knit, crochet, quilt. I have a friend who is an author. We have friends who are certifiable MENSA people, who hold patents, who design medical devices that save lives. I have a sister, and we have a son who, in their spare time develope finance and budget and investment spreadsheets with formulas that make my eyes cross. My husband LOVES to cook, and wander around grocery stores looking for ingredients for his creations. Who does that? – lol – JK. Good thing because when he doesn’t cook I revert to a very predictable set of easy favorites!
I like to design gardens, dig in the dirt, maintain those creations, and continuously enhance them. Therein lies my 3 1/2 year rollercoaster. From the (now) camping land, to the (now may get sold) very little house up north, to the townhouse LANDSCAPING (read July 15, 2022 for explanation), there have been continual roadblocks. Because I like to garden where I live. Not six blocks or six miles or 360 miles away. I like to tend my gardens. I like to get up and watch the sky turn from dark to barely light and see the lilies barely open, see the “outside” of the buds as they turn into petals that fold over and show a completely different coloring inside. I like my coffee outside in the garden after I have had a few walks around in the “barely there” light. I like the rotations from shade to sun to shade and sitting for hours on a Saturday just looking – in my scrubby clothes, jeans pulled up from the bottom to my knees (as my husband says “pirate” style), hair a mess, dog on my lap, hopefully presentable if neighbors stop by to see what’s blooming. I don’t want to go weed at a church every Thursday. That is not what makes me tick. I want to be IN the garden, where we live.
So … I am on the hunt AGAIN for a solution. Because looking at bushes lined up like soldiers at the townhouse doesn’t do it for me. Because our camping land already has more beauty than I could ever put together, and on a much larger scale than I would ever attempt. Because my husband doesn’t like how small the very small house up north felt when we actually began spending days there. And because we have grandbaby pull to the cities.
A nice small, easy to manage house, with an old back yard I can turn into a garden with grass paths and no ridiculous cycle of fertilizing and watering so the grass gets to a height you don’t like and you cut it – week after week. Ok, I will stop on the lawn speech 🙂
There is a solution out there. I hope it arrives by the time I retire. I am really hoping.
I recently had a milestone birthday. The kids, as always, asked what I would like. I told them I wanted something special that would be fun for years. I asked for a long rectangular planter with a squirrel and bunny proof lid to grow my daylily seedlings each year.
Wow! It is beautiful, and perfect for me!
They bought the planter part, and put that together, and then designed and built the squirrel and bunny proof part. The top is built with a lip on the frame so it doesn’t slide around, and it just lifts off, so no hinge, no chain, and no tipping if there is no weight in it yet each spring.
I want to be able to move it at leisure, so no dirt directly in it either. (They brought me 3 buckets of dirt from the local garden store.)
I used to plant the seeds indoors in March, and have a table of seedlings indoors for 10 weeks, but last year I said no to that, and now plant all of the seeds from the same parent together in a pot (or two if there are a lot from that plant). I do that in late May, because we can get frost even until Memorial day, and I want those plants to be hearty. They get covers until germination and about an inch or so of seedling, and then – open air. I know – but last year I had a bumper year compared to other years with other methods.
This year I used five plant pots – two pots with seeds from Purple d’Oro, one with seeds from Marque Moon, one with seeds from China Doll, and one with seeds from South Seas.
I identify the parent plant just for fun, but, in reality last year’s seedlings all got planted in one new garden, with no markers identifying the parent plants. I know! 😦 But I’m not the propagator. The bees and birds are. I’m just in it to see what happens. So far a lot of greens, but no blooms. Yet. Still fun 😊
I only have one daylily from the direct sow years. It is four years old. I am hoping it finally blooms this year.
“Baby” from “South Seas” parent, surrounded by forget-me-nots that will bloom next year.
I have 15 plants from the potting method – three from two years ago when they were started indoors, and a dozen from last year when they were started in a “community pot” of same parent, outdoors. All still waiting to bloom. Some still tiny.
As a student, I was definitely not drawn to history. Seemed like an awful lot of talk that may or may not be factual. Math, now there you have something! My love of math turned into a love of data. I am an analyst at heart, and by trade, with a whole lot of love for data driven project planning and implementation (“DO”) in the mix. Analysis is for a purpose – to inform on a course for future “DO”. And, yes, at the root, we analyze data based on history.
I fell in love with a history and political science guy, oh so many years ago. What a pair we have made all these years. Me wanting to dig deeper, find patterns, analyze trends, and him exposing me to things in history and politics which, to me, often make absolutely no logical sense.
Along the way I got interested in gardening and was particularly interested in the gardens at historic forts we visited. Those made sense – food, beauty, for the family, for the community. I used my love of data to study what would work in different areas of our yard. I started building out gardens. I found I liked plants with history, plants with a story to tell.
Alas! The kids grew up, we made the bumpy transition to townhome living, and my sprawling, sometimes out of control gardens came to an end. Townhome bylaws. But my analytical mind said why not petition the board to put in our own landscaping? What’s the worst they can say? No? They said yes – three times – initial plantings to augment the shrubs, and two expansions.
I have pretty decent gardens now at the townhouse – ones that kept my gardening mind busy for 18 years, gave me 9 months per year of exercise, and one that neighbors and friends say they enjoy. Remember we garden as much for others as ourselves. Wherever we may be.
We have also spent a couple decades now of time in northern Minnesota, and it is me who digs into the history there. It gives me perspective, appreciation of a much more rugged, challenging time, and really makes me appreciate all the incredibly hard work, personal sacrifice, and an attitude of resourcefulness that was exemplified in that time. It is a thing of beauty that explorers can come to areas that are maintained for them, purely enjoy, spend little to no money, experience time away from the stress of the city, and then drive away with no committment to better, or even maintain it. The “right” to enjoy all that now is because of all the “DO” respecting nature, yet making that beauty accessible, that was forged by those before us, and is done on a continual basis on our behalf . I am grateful.
And now we come to my latest thoughts. On my micro scale, I always wonder what positive, lasting, move forward “DO” I can contribute to continue what others before us have accomplished. I like to do that through gardening. I love to leave tiny trails of garden love and share abundance. I am reasonable with what can be used, and cognizant of what I can physically accomplish, but I still love to share and “DO”.
So I have a friend who quietly goes about this. She researches history, she shares her findings, and she and her husband have maintained the grounds of a historic cemetary when others walked away, when there is little money for “DO”. There is money for supplies, but “DO”, like cut the grass, trim the trees – that is volunteer. They fight for preservation of that history in a beautiful way that honors those interred there. Those that gave their lives to country, those that gave generously and served community selflessly, those whose place of interment would be left unmaintained because there is no money attached. And those whose contributions and life lessons would be lost as part of history informing further “DO”.
My friend and her husband challenge me. I have things to give. I have more plants to divide. Plants I won’t use at the little house gardens up north. They might look nice at the cemetary. A little trail of positive contributions. We garden just as much for others as ourselves.
The hosta pictured below can go to the cemetary in the spring, if they want it. It is an “Elegans” hosta. It could be divided into 3 pieces and form a lovely start to a woodland edge garden, away from the beaten path and not adding to any mowing complexity. Some cardboard, three hostas, some mulch. A little “DO”. We’ll see what spring brings as far as additional ideas and “DO”.
Susan's Daily Garden 
