Sad Deaths, but Hope for New Life

In the spring our neighbor pointed out a giant dead spot at the top of the trunk of our maple in the back of our yard. We couldn't really see it from where we usually are, but it was obvious from his yard. Well shoot!
We also had a sweetgum tree with a lot of dead branches. Bummer #2.

In beautiful fortuitousness, I did a plant swap with a woman who ended up being an aborist. I asked her for recommendations on tree companies who would tell me honestly how the trees were doing (versus the dime-a-dozen companies whose entire job is basically to remove trees and it's in their financial interest to do so).

I had 2 companies come out and both agreed: the sweetgum, which had more dead branches by the day, needed to come down. The maple could probably be saved and helped, but it was a double trunk tree, one of which was leaning to the right (you know, over 2 of our neighbors' sheds 😳). So they could chop off the dead part at the top of the straight trunk, but were worried that it would mess with the balance of the tree because of the double trunks. The solution would involve hundreds of dollars in trimming, shoring up the diagonal trunk, and fertilizing. And there's of course no guarantee that would actually save the tree.
We're just not in the position to be able to pay for that now and end up having to pay to remove it anyway in one or a few years. 

Both would have to come down.

I was crushed.

I loooooooooooove trees. 

I get angry and sad when I see trees coming down, especially since most of the time people are removing trees because they're inconvenient and pay no attention to the horrendous damage they do to our way of life in taking away something so essential to clean air and the way the ecosystem functions!

But dying trees are a different story, especially ones that have in their path 3 sheds, 2 houses, 4-5 fences, not to mention chickens! Definitely a situation of needing to be responsible neighbors.

I wanted to wait until after a summer party where I strung lovely ribbon banners between them and enjoyed our beautiful, abundantly green yard! And let husband get his last few months with the perfect hammock trees.
Then there was a delay in a company getting back to me and we were traveling and suddenly it was October! And they needed to come down immediately if we were going to be able to plant new. Thankfully I contacted the other (of course more expensive) company and they had me scheduled in 2 days and were incredible to work with.   

The day arrived.

7:15 in the morning I went out to mark the sections we wanted to save for woodworking projects, and as I was so close to the tree, was surprised at how big it is. You don't appreciate the diameter of these trunks until you're up close. Stab in my heart as I looked up at this giant. And tears came. Yes, I cried over a tree. It truly hurt to think of losing these gorgeous, probably 30+ year old trees and to imagine the bareness of that half of my yard when they were gone.

7:30 they arrived and the tragedy commenced.
Thankfully it was SO fascinating to watch. They are truly gifted in their work. My toddlers - even the constantly wriggling 1-year-old - were mesmerized. The 3-year-old and I spent 3 hours throughout the morning going from window to window and the deck watching the process. That really did help a lot what would otherwise have been unbearable to watch.

Yikes it would be truly awful without the remaining trees to slightly fill in the gaping hole. The cherry tree in the foreground looks dead, but that's just because it's the first to lose its leaves every year. Thankfully it's alive and well since husband started pruning dead sections off.

Very different view from our neighbor's 😔

The yard is definitely naked. So bright and so bare in that corner. I'm worried that my shade garden will get too much sun now too!  

Sooooo much sun now! Aaaahhh!!!

I cannot stop being thankful for the remaining oak and my glorious black gum that I DO still have. And for the lovely trees in my neighbor's yard that still give some visual interest to that corner.

The trees ended up being way more rotted than we'd guessed too. That was very helpful confirmation that we absolutely did the right thing. And I got a yikes-ton of mulch out of it too!

Meanwhile - this wonderful arborist had mentioned a Maryland program where for just $25 you can get a native tree and plant it yourself. I was in!
Unfortunately I dropped the ball big time all summer on deciding what trees we wanted and travel in September took my mind away, so that I finally contacted her in early October sure it was too late. But because the trees were able to be removed so quickly and the folks in charge of the program said they think they could squeeze our order in AND most importantly because she had already been out to our yard and we did a "virtual visit" video call before she had to head out of town, she was able to put together the needed plat and talk through placement for the species I was interested in and WE'RE GETTING OUR TREES!!

They'll be 4-6' tall. A far, far cry and nowhere near a replacement for the 30-40' trees that had to come down, but it's at least the right move to help the need for more natives. It also helped ease some of the grief of losing the trees - getting excited about something new to watch grow over the years!

More Wildflowers!

As  alluded to, I did some big changes in my bed formerly known as the "Edibles Garden"...

I ripped it all out! 

I forgot to take a true before picture, but here's the first picture from May after over an hour of just moving the pots and starting to clear the front 3' of weeding 😳😳 It was a LOT! (It would have gone quicker if I hadn't been trying to save the violets to transplant to my new wildflower garden path.)

Eventually I got the entire thing weeded, then dumped a bunch of compost, churned it all together (these are very technical gardening terms) and sprinkled pretty much the entire 1/4lb (over 120,000!) bag of native wildflower seeds!

Time to wait...

Early July they were sprouting!

(Naturally also with many tomato and squash seedlings basking in their release from the compost bin. Also by then I had pulled out the pea plants that were finished and planted more seeds in that strip.)

3 weeks later they were knee / thigh high and obvious that only one species was dominating...

And that species was cosmos!

By mid-August we had a cosmos jungle!

Beautiful! And a good thing that they took over too since researching each of the species listed on the seed packet led me to discover that very few are actually native and some are quite aggressive. 😡 

I need to be vigilant next year about watching the seedlings, comparing them to the photos I stored, and ripping out any undesirables that are trying to gain ground.

Thankfully over half of the seed packet was annuals anyway, and since nearly everything was crowded out by the cosmos, I shouldn't have to worry about them having reseeded themselves.

Hoping! 

We went away for a week at the end of September and came back to find that despite the growing season being basically over, it had grown another 2 feet, showing no signs of stopping, and was now less jungle and more I'm-here-to-take-over-your-species:-all-humans-must-bow-before-my-greatness.

Look at it compared to the height of the grill! Or my second story deck for that matter!

Next year should be quite the adventure. 😳

Meanwhile, I did keep a few edibles there in pots...of course my herbs, a cherry tomato seedling from a friend, aaaaaand.....the cherry tomato reseeded volunteer I've come to rely on every year! 😁😁

Husband mocks this little volunteer since it usually takes SO long to get going that we don't get tomatoes until October. This year however, it did great! It outstripped the friend's seedling and started producing first! We've had a great little crop through the whole end of summer that's continuing now into October!

So that's the adventure of my massive vegetable garden put to bed....no pun intended. It seems it will be much more productive as a wildflower bed and now that I have a baseline established, I can continue propagating and collecting true natives from others and make it a spectacular extension of my other bed. 

And now we need to have a moment of silence for the end of an era....

RIP, cilantro.

Yes, unfortunately I neglected that bed far too long and I let the wonderfully native, beneficial, though "weedy" fleabane crowd pretty much everything else out. I had hoped that when I ripped it all out and turned over the soil, perhaps a rogue seed would make its way up and the cilantro would live on! But alas. If that's the case, the cosmos crowded out any chance of its coming to true life.
Such a bummer; that was a delightful, happiest of all my  accidents. And one I'm quite certain I could never duplicate, though maybe some time I'll buck up the courage to get a plant and see how it fares and if it seeds as vigorously and heartily as my beloved original. [sigh]

But lovely! (minus the trash cans 🙄)

New and Improved Bed

Clearly my edible adventures, while amusing, haven't been a tale of abundant sustenance throughout the glorious summer days of fresh produce.

Problem #1: I don't get enough sun.
That's only gotten worse as our loveliest (black gum) tree in the middle of the yard has gotten bigger and provided more shade.

Using twine to lay out a rough outline for placing the stones....this was
April 2022, so clearly the construction got a bit behind 😄

Problem #2: water.
Our yard is extremely sloped, so even trying to build up the dirt in the edible plot and put extra wood at the bottom to hold in water probably wasn't sufficient. It's even worse along the sidewalk where the blackberry and raspberry bushes were planted. You're talking an almost 45∘ angle drop at a few points that then slopes more gradually until it "levels out", by which I mean continues even more gradually all the way to the corner of the yard.

I had a fleeting thought about building a raised bed of sorts, but didn't get serious until our neighbor offered stones she was getting rid of in 2021.

Simaltaneously as I've gotten more into natives, I decided that being busy with 2 tiny people means I definitely have time for MORE gardening and so it's definitely time to make BIGGER wildflower beds! Yeaaaah.
So I finally decided to jump in and go go go this year!
(In all seriousness, the beauty of my new style of gardening is that you're NOT constantly weeding these pristine beds with wide open dirt/mulched spaces. Violets are your friend, my friend - embrace them!)

Since the slope is more gradual towards the fence and I wanted an access path, I started there to help determine where the wall needed to actually start...

Ok, digging sod absolutely sucks, can we all just agree on that?! I don't understand why it takes so long or feels so hard, but it just kills me every time how exhausting it is to remove the tiniest portion! [end rant]

I put down one stone and then planted violets I have all over the yard to keep the dirt from washing away until I plant more of a variety.

A few weeks later I started on the wall!

That was held up by needing to get a drain pipe extension, but once we got that I took another Saturday, spent most of the day doing working, and finished with just a few paving stones to spare!

The next week I was able to pull out the last bit of grass from the bed and fill in when we bought more bags of soil and voila!

Toddler absolutely loved the building process because she had "stairs". Though that went away when I finished it, she's still quite enamored with her little trail she seems sure was created as a thoroughfare just for her.

I was able to finish my last few stepping stones soon after and had plenty of violets to spare after redoing the original edible bed (that's coming next!)

And then the flowers came into bloom and oooohhhh, just lovely!

I just really love how it turned out and can't wait to widen the wildflower border more next year, because how beautiful is all this?!

I was nervous about transplanting my strawberries at the end of June because it had gotten very hot, but they did absolutely wonderful and in fact ended up putting out blooms. I'm thinking, 'ummm...it's not possible that that means....' Yup! Sure enough! We got a few random strawberries! They are loving their new home!

I moved my hardy kale over there since our blackberry bush sadly bit the dust. We'll likely get another next year.
And our raspberries?

My Dad-in-law takes one look at it and goes, "uuuhhh, hate to tell you, but that's not a raspberry bush."
Well that's what the tag said!
Verdict once they popped....wineberries. This is why you don't buy plants from Lowe's 🤦

Oh well, the girls love them, and while sister thinks she now has a retaining wall freeway, baby seems to think she has a built-in buffet counter. Feet on the ground she can pull herself up holding onto the retaining wall and magic! Berries are right at the height of her face! She'd cleaned off an entire branch before we realized it. 😄

Two of the dahlia bulbs I planted the previous year came back up...

While I'm not loving having this wide open dirt space to weed, I'm looking forward to seeing how the peas do there next year and a few other things I'll try out. Yay for the one place in my backyard that gets more than 3 hours of sun! And now it can hold water!
I'll mulch it and try to get more of my creeping thyme to grow there to help cut down on weeds as well. So here we go on our abundant summer crops! In my 2-3' x 8' bed 😜

And I now have piles of sod all over my yard...I'm trying to get rid of grass in favor of more environmentally friendly options, so where am I going to put it?! There's currently a stack behind my shed and I basically carpeted the entire under the deck stairs space to keep cats from using it as their litter box 😑 I filled in some bare spots and otherwise will probably just dry it out and chuck it.

"But wait - what about your original edible bed" you ask?

More on that next time 😁

 

Spring Blooms

There is great satisfaction and relief in rather hands-off gardening during a busy season of life. Not that I don't love gardening, but when your time is restricted, my to-do list oriented personality gets stressed. 

These lovely white violets popped up in my shade garden

Having perennials that just faithfully show up looking beautiful, and letting groundcovers take over to cut down on weeding, and leaving dead leaves/stems/debris in place longer (or permanently in less visible places) to avoid disturbing hatching bug friends AND recognizing many "weeds" as beneficial natives and letting them go makes for a significantly less amount of work!

Granted, it does make the beds look "messier" by many standards, but I'm hoping the neighbors forgive me when the flowers come into bloom....and come into bloom this year they did!

I don't remember ever having a year where the lilies were so spectacular!

Paired up with the multi-colored nigella and this new pink little foxglovey friend it was just a lovely show! 
I found said friend (it's penstemon x mexicali - beard-tongue "Red Rocks") at a nursery in the natives section; skeptical, I did a very brief Google search and seeing that beardtongue foxglove are native, I did a "well good enough" on it being a cultivar. 🙈  

Weirdly my daisy greens randomly sprouted up, dying off at the bottom, but then haven't bloomed...maybe in fall...? My hydrangea never bloomed either! Granted it was a very weird spring. Little rain and we entered summer in a drought, but with delightfully abnormally cool weather. Then the rain hit in droves and the heat soon followed. Plants and bugs and all the rest of us aren't quite sure what to do.

The tulip border performed nicely with the variety of grape hyacinth and daffodils soon followed by the few tulips that still come up...

One thing that was decidedly not hands-off, keep it natural, let it go were the deck pots! For the first time since before the pandemic when I showed up to the nurseries in May to find them cleaned out, so just planted some random native "weeds" and said oh well for this year...(and then I had babies, so yeah, no) I got annuals and filled them up!

And was reminded a big reason why I'd stopped - gracious it costs a fortune! But ooooh so pretty.

My Dad came into town the first weekend of May and we made it just lovely...

I did leave some fleabane and plant some salvia, canna bulbs and black-eyed susans along with zennia seeds to help supplement the annuals. Everything is growing wonderfully and they've just gotten fuller and brighter and lovelier all the time...

And now mid-summer (whoops, I'm ahead of my spring theme 😜) they are glorious-er and glorious-er (yup, it's totally a word). I comment on them almost every time I look outside. Just so much happiness in bright flowers!

And one super fun pop of color are these yellow Kalanchoe that a former coworker brought me. I have several other colors all of which rarely bloom anymore and are tiny and leggy. I decided they're probably reaching for sun and what would happen if I took it outside....hmmm. Well it thrives! And when the blooms die off and you deadhead it, they come right back within a week instead of months between blooms indoors! It's the cheeriest pop of color out there!

One spring disappointment was confirming that the photinia is really not coming back. So very sad. It's a gorgeous bush that just bit the dust randomly last year, then made signs of possibly new life, buuuut not so much. No new growth this year shows it's really gone gone. 

But! One exciting addition was baby nuthatches in our birdhouse!!!

One of the best signs of spring!