Home Grown

This is one of my favorite beds in the garden. It is filled with strawberries, lemon balm, lilies, thyme and apple mint.

The beets are doing great this year. The heavy rains washed the seeds just after I planted them so they are growing in clumps.

The fennel is growing like wildfire.

Thyme is climbing out of the boxes and I love the way it looks strewn through the garden.

The catnip has the most lovely purple flowers in bloom.

My onions are out of this world. They are bigger than golf balls and smaller than baseballs.

My pink geraniums are looking festive on the side porch.

I picked a pint of berries this morning.

Best of all is the tomatoes are getting ripe already! These in the photo have been eaten!!

How is your garden growing?

Saturday night we went to the local bull riding event at a farm nearby. We had a great time.

Lots of cute cowboys for the girls to cheer for.

Patriotic cowgirls riding awesome horses.

But most importantly there were bulls and riders.

Bulls that jumped.

Bulled that bucked.

Bulls that spin.

Bulls that hop.

Bulls that spin.

Bulls that kick.

Bulls that are mean.

Eight seconds is a lot longer than you might think when you are the one sitting on the back of a bull.

All this put me in the mood for a little Chris Le Doux.

I have spent years doing things the way the ‘experts’ say they should be done in gardening. Things like cutting the sod and double digging when putting in new beds. What a stupid stupid waste of time and effort. Never again will I do things that way. This year I am a lazy gardener and I am loving it!

When we put in the new fence I knew it would need something along the driveway to add a sense of home and welcoming to those who found themselves coming to visit us. Oh, boy, is that a very long stretch of driveway to have to plant and work to prepare the ground. Do I cut the sod along the edges and then deep till and mound everything up with compost and mulch? Holy crap just the thought is a daunting task and I don’t think I am up for it. Also the varying full sun/part shade/total shade aspect means I can’t just plant something and walk away from it.

That is when I sat down and formed a plan. I love hosta and knew I wanted a few of those in the shady spots. I love daylily and iris and those take full sun. I love lilacs and jasmine and roses and clematis and liatris and shasta daisy and and and. But the problem is I have no budget to speak of and $100 dollars for 700 feet of gardening won’t go far. Have you seen the prices of nursery plants lately??? Long gone are the days of a $0.98 cents azalea and $2 for fifty iris bulbs. Despite exorbitant prices gardening is one of those things that if you find another gardener who truly loves their garden they are willing to share bits and pieces to spread the love.

In our area we have a ‘plantcycle’ which is the gardeners version of freecycle. Looking for something? Have something to share? Put it on plantcycle. Someone will come dig it up in no time. That is what I did. I posted asking for free plants, mainly hosta, daylily and iris. Two ladies answered my request. The first gave me a bundle of yellow iris. The other, a master gardener, filled the back of my truck with beautiful things from her gardens: white iris, purple iris, liriop, sun drop, hosta, shasta daisy, coral bells, white lilac, purple lilac, and lily of the valley to name just a few. I plan to share many things from my garden with her in return. I have lots and lots of herbs, aloe, hen and chicks, right now that will be passing along.

Then I ordered several rose bushes from Sprill Hill Nursery – that was half my budget but I think I did incredibly well because with a coupon I got 2-for-1 deals and ended up with eight rose bushes for the price of 4. I spent the other half on the K. Van Bourgondien website and, again with a discount offer I was able to order 200 liatris bulbs and 200 brodiaea queen fabiola. Then Monday I lucked out at Costco and picked up 2 bags of their summer blooms collections at an end of season pricing and was able to bring home 6 jackmannii clematis, 12 caesar’s brother iris and 12 yellow bella donna iris. That with everything I have to transplant from around my other garden areas should more than fill the spaces. After they bloom I will move nearly a dozen peonies, more orange ditch lily than you shake a fist at and tons of herbs. Nothing will be safe around here. If you offer it I won’t say no! Next year the fence will be gorgeous AND the bonus is there will be plenty to share. Yayy!!

Now back to my lazy gardening. All of those plants have to go in the ground and that is a lot of digging and pulling grass. Not this time! I have decided to be super lazy and take the advise of a few master gardeners. Plant the plants, smother the grass and let it all compost back into the earth to feed the chosen plants.

First I planted the hosta. I dug my hole, removed the grass and put in the plant and covered the dirt around it.

Next I started layering newspaper around the plants where I wanted to kill out the grass. I ended up using several thicknesses of the newspaper sections. This ended up being 4 or 5 newspapers without the slicks.

Next I started shoveling on the mulch and continuing to lay newspapers down where I wanted to kill the grass.

Soon everything was layered and covered and this section of fence started to look like a garden bed.

For smaller plants I tore a circle out of the center of the paper and gently gathered the leaves and pulled them through the opening then laid out the paper flat around the plant. This is in an area where I plan to plant other things so I did not cover then entire space yet.

The mulch that I am using was made by Steve. As we cut down brush and limbs he uses the chipper and makes these huge piles of wood chips that I mixed with some leaves and horse apples from the stalls over the past winter. The leave mold is awesome!!! You really can’t go to a store and purchase this kind of black gold. This takes time to develop and is worth ever day that it sat as an ugly eyesore and rotted into the this beautiful clean smelling earth to bring new life to new things. One other great thing? It is teaming with these awesome fat worms!!

I am headed back out to continue working in my gardens. Have a great weekend everybody! Thanks for stopping by!!