Port Potager

We added a small landscaping project to our to-do list this weekend:  It was incredibly sunny yesterday, so the photo isn’t great. Hopefully you can see that Kirk added a brick edging to delineate the small flower garden in front of my office. Before, it just kind of blended into the utility yard — and that meant that tons of weeds bled over into the flower garden. Now there are no weeds at all, since Kirk took a hoe to the whole area.  To keep the weeds out of our hair forever, we’re adding some landscaping fabric and will cover the whole area with wood chips. This will make a nice surface for the area in front of the compost bins and chicken coop, and hopefully any new weeds that pop up will be easy to pull. The new little wall left some space to plant, so I moved the hosta and black cohosh that used to be along the side wall of the office to the front bed. I also added some pink snapdragons to fill in the gaps.  From another angle, yo...

Last fall I moved into my tiny office in the back yard, and this spring Kirk put up one small finishing touch: the lattice around the foundation. That means I could plant a little garden by the stairs: This is a tough spot, because it is shaded for most of the day by the maple tree in the compost yard. Some areas get strong afternoon sun, but I would call the exposure partial shade to full shade in spots. One full shade area is along the side, where I planted hosta and snakeroot: The snakeroot has very dark leaves, which is hard to see against the compost. Here’s a better look: Both of these shade-loving plants should eventually fill in. They’ll also have fragrant flowers in the summer (hosta) and fall (snakeroot), so I’m hoping the fragrance blows right in the windows of my office. The hosta variety is "Guacamole," which is supposed to have a nice scent. This whole garden is about smelling good! Around the front (which gets a little more sun...

Remember the little shade garden outside of our screened-in porch? Last summer I planted some sweet woodruff, valerian, and lily of the valley in the shadiest part, and it all came up nicely this spring: This week I filled in the gaps between hosta plants in the partial shade sections with some sweet-smelling annuals:  The littlest ones in the front are white sweet alyssum . I have these stretching all along the front of this border. The taller plants behind them are stock , which look sort of like ruffled snapdragons and smell really nice: sweet, but also spicy like cloves. Here’s a close-up of one that’s starting to bloom: There are also some heliotrope in the mix (they’re the ones with the purple buds): The heliotrope is in the sunniest end of this border, and hopefully it will still be bright enough here once the maple tree leafs out. I also started some seeds in the gaps: evening-scented stock and sweet mignonette, both of which are o...

Glad I made it outside to cut flowers yesterday before today's downpours came and crushed a bunch of our cutting bed plants. Here's what I'm enjoying in the vase this week: hosta, snapdragons, and zinnia black-eyed Susans rose, Chinese forget-me-not, lavender, and yarrow

Today's Flower Friday is a tale of two cutting gardens. On one hand, we see the happy mayhem of just cutting whatever happens to be blooming and throwing it into a mason jar: Baby's breath, phlox, black-eyed Susans, zinnia, bachelor's buttons, penstemon, hosta, and snapdragon.  On the other hand, we see the result of some carefully controlled color selections. When I first started planting the cutting garden , I chose perennials in a range of sunset colors: orange, peachy-salmons, golden yellows, plus deep purples and blues for contrast. I also tried to choose seeds for annuals that fit that scheme this past spring as well (though looking back, I can see that some things didn't bloom). Anyway, the idea was that anything in bloom at any given time would look good together. I guess that's true of the first bouquet, but below is a primo case study of what I was going for with that sunset color scheme: Echinacea, yarrow, roses, foxglove, and Chin...

Perhaps you recall that last summer I spent a month in Costa Rica . During that time, Kirk took care of the garden by himself. He did a great job keeping up with the vegetables, but there wasn't any time left for just one person (with a day job) to keep up the perennial border. So this year it needed a lot of work. All the weeds that weren't pulled last year went to seed, so I had my work cut out for me in that department. There were also some plants that didn't make it through the winter and others that were in serious need of dividing.  The best part of summer vacation is having the time to get lost in an outdoor task, and that's just what I did this past weekend. Or maybe week. It's nice to forget what day it is, too. Anyway, here's the result of the perennial border overhaul. This section will take us from the garden gate along the driveway to the corner of the bed.  Immediately outside the garden gate at the top of the driveway is a cl...

Back in May, I decided to revamp the little daffodil and hosta border in front of our three-season porch to be filled with more fragrant flowers. The idea here is that these plants are right outside the screened jalousie windows where the furniture is on our porch, so we could enjoy plants that smell nice right outside the windows. The challenge is that this area is also shaded by the sugar maple , which makes choosing flowers tricky. There are lots of leafy plants for shade, but not many flowers. Luckily, not all of the area is in darkness. The left is the shadiest; the right has more sun: So as you can see, I moved the hosta into the shady section, and set out a new hydrangea in the partial-sun portion. Hydrangeas don't smell like anything at all, but I love blue ones, and wanted to create a little vignette of my summertime favorites: blue hydrangeas, white daisies, and orange daylilies:  That should look better in the future when everything fills in and bl...

When I wasn't at the ball fields for the kids' baseball games this past (long) weekend, I finally was able to tackle a project I'd been meaning to get to all spring. The weather decided to cooperate (mostly), and I buckled down got to work on updating the perennial border.  The harsh winter we had wasn't at all kind to some of our perennials. Several plants that normally wouldn't have trouble overwintering died back to just a few scraggly stems, or bit the dust completely. Some casualties included both artemisia, some stonecrop, the carnations, and most of a heucherella (if you're really interested in the evolution of the border, you can scroll through previous posts about it to see just what I'm talking about). This left me with some holes to fill this year, which I did my moving some existing things around and buying some new plants. My hatchback full of plants include a white peony ("Mrs. Edward Harding"), three white salvia (...

It's hot, and the 100-degree high in the garden on Wednesday may have confused our flowers. There are lots of dried-out zinnias and marigolds to be found out there, but I managed to find some good ones anyway this week.  Zinnia and yarrow. Tiegan's birthday present wrapped with zinnia and cosmos. Snapdragons, echinacea (flowers and seed heads), and zinnia. Hosta leaves and zinnias. Rose and hosta leaf.