So the veggie garden is doing a lot, all the plants are bigger, darker and thicker. Clearly they are all adoring our soil despite my guilt at not amending it a bunch with compost like I’d planned to this year. It is exciting to check the garden every few days, and my daughter had a blast making mounds out of loose soil and planting zucchini seeds in them. We spent part of the weekend mulching the tomato patch with newspaper, then a windy day came along and blew it all over the yard. But none of this makes for good pictures, so we also took a garden walk and took some pictures that do make for some good garden pron.
Our dwarf siberian irises
Our spiderwort, and a bonus ladybug
The dianthus my daughter talked me into buying this year. These are planted outside my bedroom window and they smell sooooo good!
A closer shot
Dianthus from across the street
Another variation of the same plant
Pansies, also from across the street
One of my favorite ways to garden
Ah, everything is so beautiful! I love the dianthus, though I have to admit I’m not familiar with them. I do have absolutely gorgeous irises this year, about four feet tall! I also just put in lilacs and I also splurged and got four rose bushes, a Lincoln, a yellow something-or-other, a White Lace, and a Peace. I’ve never done roses before so I’m desperately looking online for care instructions!
There’s gotta be a message board somewhere that can help
The dianthus are pretty easy to care for. We just put them in last year and that was that. I’d love to have lilacs, but I don’t know where I’d put them.
Yeah, you have to have plenty of space for them to grow. A local guy lives down the mountain from me, and he has a friggin’ WALL of lilacs at least 12 feet tall and maybe 20 feet wide. They are amazing! I’m attempting to reproduce his success. The only issue I have is that on the top of the mountain where I’m at, the ground is much rockier and drier because of rainwater runoff.
We live on a corner lot, so we’re restricted with the height of our plants in some areas of the yard and I know how big they get, so I’m not sure they should be planted right against the house, you know? Between out house and our neighbors’ might be good, except it doesn’t get full sun, so I’m not sure if a lilac would survive there or not. The azaleas love it though. The woes of being in a city, there seems to be a building or a legal requirement preventing it, no matter what. I’ve thought about goring them along the space between our garage and our neighbor’s fence, which would pretty up the area and make it less friendly to out of control weeds, but it would make that area impossible to access from our side of the fence so if something went wrong.
You could try rhododendrons. We have a vast majority growing here, some in the worst conditions imaginable. Although they can get as big as lilacs if you let them run wild, you can trim them so they’re bushier rather than taller, and they still bloom beautifully.