"Final" Winter Clean-up

Had a warm Saturday Thanksgiving weekend where I was able to do some, but definitely not all of the clean-up I wanted to do.

But I did cut down stalks, pull some weeds and cover some of the beds with leaves.

So unless next Saturday is warm (today is freezing and snowing!!), I think this might be it for the season!

Still a few little yellow flowers hanging on!

 Also got some additional spring bulbs in the ground; hoping for a full and beautiful next year!

While most things are dying or going dormant, there is one thing that decided to make a comeback in the wildflower border...

CILANTRO INFESTATION IS BACK!!!! 😱

Really hope to get that cleaned up sooner than later!

Front beds all cleaned up with pansies planted.

I moved the "grass"-looking spring bloomer (pretty sure it's some type of dianthus) to under the rose bush. Kind of using it as a ground cover since it only blooms a bit in the spring and then just sits on top of my tulip border like a giant plop of grass.

I'm also trying leaving more summer bulbs than usual in the ground (lilies and gladiolas). I pulled a few out, but most are staying!

Definitely need to get back out and dig up the lost canna that's now in its 3rd year of expanding and wow has it exploded!

Edible garden all cleared (ish) and covered in leaves.

The herbs, though, are doing beautifully!

So there we have it. Yet again. The end of a season. 

I get about 6 weeks off, then it's time to start the spring planning!!

Baby, it's COLD outside!

What do things look like after you get your first real freeze?

The cannas sure look atrocious! They were still bright green with a few yellowing/brown tips the day before!

We had some wacky November coldness. I know that we always have the likelihood of freezing even at the end of October and definitely in November, but somehow I don't remember it getting down to the TWENTIES two nights in row!



I went out afterwards to survey the damage and boy is the change instant with many plants! The growing and dying and starting again process is absolutely fascinating...plants are strange and wonderful little "creatures".


Time to pull out the ugly stuff and let it go for next year.

But the cilantro is doing marvelously! (And the weeds around it, shhh!)

And the camellias are in bloom!

So pretty! They look like someone pasted them on!
And the shape right now looks like a Christmas tree!

The red "Yuletide" is in the shade garden, growing more each year. 

And then the brand new one up front by the stoop is blooming too.
We bought 2 last year for each side of the stoop and one didn't make it, so this is its replacement.

Problem is, we went to buy this replacement, but couldn't remember what color we had bought! 

So there's a chance that this new once is a bright fuchsia and its partner on the other side of the stoop is totally not.

The other isn't blooming yet, so we'll see.
(Update: not entirely sure how I didn't think of it earlier - the whole reason I take pictures and blog is to see from year to year! Of course I have a picture of what color it was/is....it's the same color pink! Success!)

But the original from last year is also looking a little sad too even though it's still green and has survived a full year now. I need to treat the soil again next year and put up more netting to keep the neighborhood cats out...{so many angry words I can't use}... not sure cat droppings are what is affecting the bushes, but I can't think what else would be?! 

It's a tough spot; not great sunlight, so a couple bushes haven't done well there, but I thought the camellia (shade plant) might do better. The nursery guy recommended some systemic fertilizer, so hopefully that helped and these guys will survive whatever my weird little house, lack of gardening skills and neighborhood cats throw at them!

Unrelated, but speaking of end of the season stuff...I harvested the two small butternut squashes that came from the accidental vine in the back edible garden. We ate one the other night and it was pretty "mealy". Oh well. They were free.

So, I just have a couple more spring bulbs to put out (I know I'm late) and summer ones to get in, but yes, definitely feels like the gardening season is over. Alas.

Time to move to indoor gardening!

Final Attempt

Several weeks ago I dug up my tulip border yet again. The sad performance in the spring made me concerned that when I'd moved stuff around, trying to save the bulbs, perhaps I'd done more harm :-/

I found quite a few rotting bulbs too, so there's that.

I pulled out the hardy geraniums and other perennials and the snapdragons which likely aren't coming back next year judging from the look of them, set them all aside in pots, and then proceeded to dig tarpfuls of dirt from the border...slowly, so that I could save bulbs I found.

It was a disaster! Took so long and I had to dig down so deep to put in new mole deterrent fabric, which I'm sure won't work because they're the spawn of Satan and are determined to ruin my beds, and we had to go to an event in the afternoon, but I hadn't gotten all of the dirt back into the bed, but thought, you know what: I'm just going to leave it half done.

Then husband tells me it's supposed to rain all night. 

WHYYYYYYYY!!! WHY DO YOU HATE ME?!

So after the event, out we went, him mowing in the dark (he'd had to work all day :-/ ) and me putting dirt back into the border.

PS - if you ever need a body buried, come to my house - the amount of nighttime digging I seem to do means the neighbors already know I'm a freak and so wouldn't think anything of it if one of the holes dug at night happened to be a bit longer and deeper than usual. Just sayin'.

Got the old bulbs and a bunch of new ones (because, hello! always must have more flowers!) in the dirt, geraniums put back in, and the bed covered in soil by the light of the streetlamp.

I had somehow, inexplicably ended up with an extra wheelbarrow full of dirt. Well that's odd.

So I had husband dump it in the back corner by a tree where I keep extra dirt for when I need it.

Well, a few days later, I go back out to finish the border, it's now been rained on for like 12 hours straight and I pack it down more and realize that I need a bunch more dirt!

So yes. I take multiple smaller wheelbarrow trips to the backyard to get what essentially ended up being that single, full wheelbarrow load that I'd had husband dump. [sigh]

Packed it up almost to the top and then I used the last of a bag of potting soil to top it off. Looks SO much better now that it's not just my usual sandy soil up the sidewalk!

So, dear bulbs - see you in the spring. Don't fail me!!

Work your magic, little fairies!

I bring you yet another story too incredible to leave untold...


A coworker - one of the sweetest people you will ever meet - has taken such a liking to my fairy garden at work that she decided to plant one herself!

So she bought a giant jar of pickles, saved the jar after it was empty and planted a couple little plants. I donated two different types of clippings from mine and away it went!

~ * ~ * ~ * ~ * ~ * ~

She was leaving for a 2 week vacation and sent a plea my way: "Dear Garden Fairy". Aw!
I said of course I would look after the garden while she was gone and so I proudly marched it upstairs to take its place beside mine; basking in sunlight!

I swapped out a couple struggling plants with new, bought little fake mushrooms and a mini fence, added some sand and just made it all cute like she's talked about wanting to do.

She was so delighted when she got back! And was amazed at how well the plants were doing having had sunlight!


~ * ~ * ~ * ~ * ~ * ~

A couple weeks later and she's concerned the plants aren't doing well again; problem is that she's on the lower level and on the north side, so not much sunlight in her little area.

I offered a Fairy Garden Daycare service and she eagerly accepted.
She brought it up to my desk to enjoy sunlight again.


I soon noticed that the soil was very wet; hmmm, she must have watered it pretty heavily.
So I left the lid off, kept it in the sun and watched for it to dry out.

Multiple days in and the soil is still wet. Hmmm.

And then I discover she has a little worm in there! Wow!! I want one!

I show another coworker and upon slightly tilting the jar, she saw bubbles moving through the worm tunnels pretty close to the top of the dirt...which means only one thing:

There was at least 5" of water in the 12" jar! The soil was saturated!

Welp; only thing to do is let it dry out.

A few more days go by. Not only is it moist, it's still puddling (this has been nearly a week since she watered it!) I actually start sponging the dirt with paper towels to help! It's SO wet!

Most of the plants are quickly browning and wilting. :-(

We decide that putting it outside in the sun will help it dry out some more, so she takes it away.

Days later: still wet :-/

We're going to need all the little fairies working their magic to bring this one back!

~ * ~ * ~ * ~ * ~ * ~

The next week, I go down to see how it's doing.
She's devastated: even the beautiful plant that had done well when all others started wilting was looking real sad.

Really?

I'm kind of surprised; I mean, I know the soil is so wet, but plants are pretty hardy...is it browning or yellowing or just bending?

She says the tip is getting brown and drooping.

Interesting. Not sure what to do.

"It was fine yesterday and then today..." [imitates a drooping]

So odd; I guess it could have been rotting in the wet soil and just taken this whole time to finally wilt away...?

"I did try to move them around a little bit to save them, so I hope I didn't damage them!"

Oh my!

"Oh and I added some fertilizer to the dirt to help"

You what?

How much?

[Horrified]: "A lot!!"

I'm done!

"Maybe I should just pull it all out and start over?"

Yup...pretty sure that's about our only option right now.

~ * ~ * ~ * ~ * ~ * ~

Before and After:

I know she's sad, so I feel bad laughing, but it is too, too funny!

Worst case, she starts over; I already have clippings in water waiting for the roots to grow, so it's not a huge deal.

She's a great vegetable gardener, but obviously small plants in small, enclosed containers need VERY different care than vegetable gardens!  I told her to stop over-loving it! :-D

Oh we got rather a great chuckle at these fairy garden adventures!

To be continued!

Closing Up the Garden

Well, the time came to put the garden to bed...except instead of covering the beds and saying goodbye for spring, we put them to work!


Here is the mess we arrived to a few Saturdays ago:

Yes, there were teeny, baby, unripe peppers
still on there that I took home!

But it was highly productive and we cleaned up and re-planted six beds!

Re-planted with what, you ask?

A cover crop!!

We bought a mix that's great to restore nutrients into the soil along with an inoculator (which we can never remember the name of nor do we really know how it entirely works).

We cleaned out the dead plants and weeds, turned over the beds, planted the seed mix, and spread leaves on top (and hose on that to keep the leaves from blowing away until they'd been rained on).

We also found a scary amount of slugs :-/
That has not been our previous experience, so this is concerning. Also explained the super bizarre "jelly sacs" we found in one of the beds. (Like, did our garden get into bubble tea...? ooohhh....Google says no, it's something far horrible-er.)

So I entered myself into the slug-throwing discus contest and got some pretty decent awards for distance. (The benefits of having a plot next to the woods!)
Nasty buggers!


The leaves for covering I brought from home.
How do you keep a tall (and ridiculously stuffed full) bag of leaves from falling over in your car?

I was insanely proud of this one! :-D


Just pulled the backseat's seatbelt into the "trunk" and it fit around the back absolutely perfectly so it wasn't going anywhere!











We were sore and largely numb after 3 hours working in 50 degrees, but were very pleased with the progress.

     The beds all (almost all) cleaned up!

And we didn't leave empty-handed because we harvested our potatoes!!!

They're mostly little squirts, but I roasted mine up and they were delicious!


Because of time, coldness and the fact that there was still quite a bit of green on the peanut leaves, I said we should leave them in the ground and I'd come out some weeknight and harvest them.

Yeaaaah, except that I forgot the time change was that night which means it gets dark at 5!


So this week I left work early to give me about an hour and a half and ended up needing every minute of that! Shockingly, not because of the peanut harvesting, though!

So last year, we had read that you're supposed to loosen the dirt around them and gently pull the plants which will come up with all their little "fingers" still attached to the subterranean peanuts.
Except that we waited until I think December to harvest them and they were not a nice shade of yellow...they were brown and dead and a disaster!
We ended up digging for the no-longer-attached peanuts in what had become a mud bed!


This year, because of the frost we got at the end of last week, the plants had gone from their green with yellow tips to that deep green/blackish color of frosted plants. Perfect time to get them out!

So, rather skeptically, I dug around them with my shovel, gathered the plant arms, gentle pulled ....aaaaaaaand.....


out they came!!!

It was beautiful! Sure enough, most of the little "fingers" were strong enough to hold onto their peanuts and lift them from the dirt.
Made me so happy!



I dug around a bit and found a few more as I was turning over the bed, but that only produced a small pile of loose ones; by and large most are still attached on these huge bunches! Perfect for hanging to dry! In case you couldn't tell:    I'M SO EXCITED!!!


Here's the stash on a full size black garbage bag. Great crop!

We were disappointed that in about half the bed, the peanuts we planted just never "took". But this is a great crop! Probably more than last year since we had quite a few rotten ones because we'd let them sit in the muddy earth so long!

In turning over the bed, I discovered what I think is the reason why the peanuts only took in one part of the bed:

Clay.

Thick, mucky, horrible, rock-like clay!

I do NOT remember that when we turned it over last year, so no idea what happened there, but everywhere the peanuts hadn't grown was this awful stuff that took me forever to dug out and try to chop up.
By then it was getting dark fast and I was sore and my fingers were going numb ("50 degrees means I'll be fine in a long sleeve shirt and gardening gloves if I'm working, right?" mmmhmmm.)

So I did the best I could, planted the cover crop and we'll have to do some major restoration on that in the spring!   Come on alfalfa seeds and wormies! Do your magic!

I finished up, proudly slinging my peanut filled black Santa sack, just as the sun was setting and clouds were rolling in...

And here's what it looks like with one more bed all cleaned up. 

Just have carrots and garlic to harvest at some point.

And then the atrocious strawberry bed and tiny bean bed to clean-up, but you know what? It's cold. They may just wait until spring!

So some successes, many failures. 

Next year is another year!

Fairy Gardens!

Ok, I've become a bit obsessed with fairy gardens.

I mean, I love plants.
I love little things.
I love fairy tales.
I love designing.

Put them together and you have a magical hobby creating magical places for fairies to come hide!


It started when my friend gave me this incredible apothecary jar; I instantly knew what I wanted to do with it: fairy garden!

I bought two little plants and a cute little wheelbarrow

Love the vibrancy of this leaf!

 (and later added the mushrooms), went out to my backyard to get some moss, used old fish tank stones and built a little hobbit hole garden!

But where'd I get the door?!

Dearest husband carved it for me and I painted it!
(Still haven't found a good button for the door knob, though :-/ )

It sits on my desk at work bringing me much happiness!

Well that's it - I was hooked!

I then started seeing concepts for making fairy gardens from broken pots and I just happened to have some broken pots handy!




I was SO please with how this one turned out!

It's all moss, weeds and mushrooms from my backyard along with plant clippings from my original one and then some miniatures I'd bought at a fairy store many years before.




Just waiting for fairies to come sit down to tea...






Unfortunately I may have made a slightly important strategic error...

Forgot to put rocks in the bottom :-(

So the water just runs right through and takes dirt with it. The whole thing is sinking.
Plus, it's a pretty rough design to keep watered since there is so much open space.

This is sadly how it looks now...

When I did my first one -  plants have definitely
taken off since then! (See below for now)

But oh the ideas I have to come!   😇


It is rather a common thing, after seeing pictures or discussing ideas, to hear me exclaim "Fairy Gardens Everywhere!"   or   "The world would be a much happier place if everyone had fairy gardens".


I couldn't find a meme that said it, so I made my own.


Words to live by, folks...

The Avocado

I have previously shared the story of my accidental avocado tree.

Here's my favorite part:

  (from my May 1st post linked above)

"I'm hoping...leaves shoot out from every possible place..."
"the [original] one really can't get much bigger..."

Ha!

Let's review, shall we?

May, 2015 - cute little accidental avocado tree gets put in the shade garden...

It grows a bit, comes inside, then goes back out for the summer of 2016.
By August 2016, it's looking pretty dandy; it has TWO branches now!

Back in for the winter.

Comes out in April/May 2017, gets put in a bigger pot while its original pot goes to brand new little brother...

And out in the garden they go.
And thrive.

Like - scarily so!


Let's look, shall we?

May versus October:

  

Grew about a foot (which means almost double its height!)

Aaaaaand the original?

May......                                                                         October......

😯

How is that possible?!!

All summer it just kept exploding! It loved its new, bigger pot!

And then it hits me.....uhhhhhh ohhhhhhh.....

                                                                                           .....there's a hole in the bottom.



I had images of lifting the pot to find an inch diameter root shooting 2 feet into the ground!


I gently lifted the pot, heard the familiar popping sound and slight resistance of roots being pulled out, aaaaaand....

Oh! That's not bad!

Just a couple tiny ones coming out!

So I'm amazed at that tree!


In review:

April...                                                                                    October...

It has the craziest, most ridiculous, Dr. Seuss
curvy trunk!

(Me being the genius that I am, brought them up from the garden and decided "oh! It's going to rain tonight and all tomorrow, so I'll leave them out on the deck to get watered and then take them in tomorrow before the frost warning"... mmmhm...and what exactly do you do with five foot tall trees that are sopping wet?!!        Towels...lots of towels!)

There they sat for several days (I have the most gracious, patient, supportive-of-my-hobbies-and-insanity husband!)
Once they dried, I found winter spots for them.

Filling a corner:

And keeping the also crazy, Dr. Seuss money tree company behind the couch:

Oh! And the LEAVES!!
I am not kidding, the biggest ones are about the size of a football if you flattened it (keep your Patriots jokes to yourself).

They are enormous!
      (Google images tells me that's not normal...as in, full grown trees seem to have leaves smaller than the avocados they produce, sooooo....?  Maybe because they can't make avocados, they're putting all their effort into leaves...?)



So, this year I did not have a compost-induced, 30' squash vine in the front yard, but I did have two compost-induced avocados trees absolutely explode!


The adventures of accidents!