Very Full Shade Garden

I'm still alive!

Wow, it has been embarrassingly long since I've posted. My deep apologies to my very loyal 5 person fan base!


I'll start with my favorite before I update on the not-so-favorites (i.e. fails!).

Have I mentioned enough times how much I love this garden?!


Looking down from my deck:

And just to the left is our row of Rose of Sharon bushes that are so incredible when they're all in bloom!

Unfortunately, we always seem to get a big storm right when they're at their peak, which bowls them over and they just do not stand back up! Husband had to trim them
down significantly so they are more respectable (he waited until most of the blooms were done to do this...we also try to be conscious of our neighbors and not let them grow into/over their yard).



And as you can see in these pictures, the Phlox bloomed incredibly!

I cannot believe how long those blossoms stay on there! They started in mid-July and are still there, though slowly fading and dropping away.

My fancy little Britt-Marie Crawford bloomed nicely too:

Cheery, yellow flowers that shoot up quite tall! They lasted for a few weeks.


The Astilbes bloom seemed to be a lot shorter than I remember last year; that was a little sad.

And now they're just brown poofs, so that's weird.  But the bumblebees loooooved them when they were in bloom!


This little guy popped up in the path and the leaves looked promising, so I left him and then...ooooh, it's blooming! That's exciting! Must be a nice plant!

Yeaaaah, no. Pretty sure that's a weed.
Pulled it out. Hope I got it before it totally seeded itself :-/

But the elephant ears have finally made a good showing, so hopefully, if I'm careful with the bulbs this year ( 😨 ), they will be huge and beautiful and back to their initial spectacularness next year!


The larger, solid green one in the back has just this past week or two gotten to looking more like the giant leaves you expect with these types of elephant ears....about 8" wide by 12-15" long leaves.


I love the beautiful coloring and pattern of the black variety I have.

Apparently my yard does too because a few weeks ago I found an accidental transplant!!
Just growing
along with all the weeds in the forsaken corner of the garden (that I intend to slowly transform into part of the shade garden until we build a shed there). I have no theories as to how it got there other than perhaps I discarded an old bulb with the weeds I used to stack there to dry out.


Then there's the avocado trees!
The larger/older one has always done very well outside over the summer, but I don't know that I ever remember it doubling in size! Both trees are looking incredible! (Except for the lack of water in the photo at the bottom; shhh, don't judge...I watered them right after the picture was taken and they pop back beautifully!)

This one to the left is the original and is almost 5' tall now!
The one in the photo above (behind the larger elephant ears) has also about doubled during its first summer outside!

May I remind you that both of those came from my compost pile?!

I'm quite proud of the little showing my fuchsia bush all full of blooms...though it's still not much more than a foot tall! I thought with the trees trimmed last year, this summer it would shoot up. Guess it's slow and steady!


Even though by now most of the flowers are fading, the garden is still SO beautiful because of all the rich greens and the colorful leaves mixed in.


And something else is starting to bloom!

Last year we were at the nursery and saw a bunch of Autumn Joy sedum. We were commenting how similar the leaves looked to what my Mom-in-law had given me.
The nursery worker said she loves hers and how beautifully it blooms.
Huh.
Well, then it can't be ours because ours doesn't bloom, but man, does it ever look like what we have!

So then what do I see appearing these last few weeks?!

Little, teeny, adorable, beautiful mauve blossoms!

I guess because it had just been planted that summer, that's why it didn't bloom last year. What a delightful surprise!  It really is carrying the garden nicely into fall as most other blooms are nearly spent now.


I continue to work on my little pebblestone path as I have time and get inspired. It's super cute! Just need to get moving on more of it!
(I also need to raise some of the stones that have gotten covered in mud from being too low.)

Contrary to my usual experience as a gardener, it is a very pretty, happy, self-sustaining little garden!

  

Garden Plot Update

Yet another year and, boy are we a mixed bag of results!

I mean, things are for sure growing! (Scroll through the last pictures I posted from late May / early June if you need proof!)

At the beginning of July, here's an overview...

And then last week, the beginning of August:

Crazy!
I was about to point out that we harvested the beans, when...it has come to my attention that I did not share the beans story!

Well...green beans. Who doesn't loooooove green bean?! Green beans right off the plant...sooooo good! Crunch, crunch, crunch. Love it!

And the bean plants at the plot started growing so well! And then remember that time when your "bush beans" suddenly started climbing the white support mesh...?!
What?! Okay!!


Well, with my love of green beans, imagine my excitement when I show up at the garden plot and see the bean plants FULL of green beans! Yaaaay!

Some were a little too plump and so as I tried them, figured they were just a bit overripe - but others looked just great!

So I picked a bag full!

And came back to the office raving about the wonders of the harvest including - GREEN BEANS!!!

After several minutes of jubilee, my coworker garden plot partner says: "You know those are drying beans, right?"

                      They're what?

Sooooo....you know how you have hard, dry beans that you can soak and cook if you want to do black or refried beans or something not from a can?

Am I the only one who never thought about where they came from?!!


"So...uh...why did we do that?!" {crushed}
"I'm sorry! I thought we decided on those!"
"Well, yeah, that does sound like something I'd do!"  {images of "ooooh, that would be different and fun and exciting and I'd love to have beans like that all winter long!" flash into my head: yup, sounds like me. I have a FABULOUS memory of what we decide in the winter for the spring plant :-/ }

Well, then she tells me the best part:
With these types of beans you can either pick them early, like when they're smaller (before you'd normally pick ripe green beans) and then just eat them like green beans. Or, you leave them on until they dry on the plant and that's when you finish drying them to cook, re-fry, etc.

I basically picked them right in the middle.

Too late for the "early eating" and too early for the drying.

I quit!!!

Thankfully the plants did produce a decent amount more, so hopefully we'll have enough for a whole whopping like 1/2 cup of refried beans.


So after they had turned totally brown and sounded like baby rattles for pygmies, partner harvested the beans that are not green beans and we shall see how they turn out!


For weeks now the lettuce has most definitely bolted!
(But I hate wasting, so I'm eating it anyway! Think I've basically picked off all that's fit to eat; some got REAL bitter! Some only slightly so :-D)

And then the squashes!! (yes, it's way more fun than just saying "squash"...I mean, how boring is a word that's its own plural!!)
Here looking so promising and full and - whoa! - randomly a huge yellow one that was definitely way too far gone to be great, but I attempted to eat it nonetheless.

A humungo zucchini (pretty sure this one came from garden plot partner's home garden, not the plot):

With it I made a double batch of chocolate zucchini bread and a 9x13 pan of zucchini brownies...and still had a third of the thing left!

But sadly, very soon after the photo above was taken, the nastiest little bugs (I'm not an "ew bugs!" kind of a girl...I love bugs - they are beautiful and necessary and fascinating...but not all of them! Some are downright creepy and these guys are straight out of a science fiction movie. I'm quite certain they have little chips implanted in them from an alien race and they're sent here to take us over. Real nasty.) took over. They lay their eggs under the leaves and multiply and decimate squash plants. And spraying did not help...and actually seemed to make the plant die faster! :-/

So very sad on the zucchini front. The squash plant is hanging on - ish - but not producing more flowers yet. It's probably also too late in the season.

So yay for ONE of each kind that were oversized and then all the other little guys rotted away before they got full grown. Very, very sad.

But not all have succumbed to the nasties...

Let's look at the melons in early June:

And July:

                                                                                                       And August!

(Large pumpkin plant from the right corner whose stem
was rotten was removed.)

And why yes that IS the cutest little watermelon starting!!!

Another pumpkin plant doing just dandy...

With a little baby pumpkin peeking out!!
















The late crop of Strawberries is coming! We tasted some very delicious ones recently!
And I'm very happy at how quickly the woolly thyme is filling in; hopefully next year we'll have a lovely, carpeted path!



The potatoes (far back) are finally doing wonderfully! The peanuts did not take nearly as well as we'd hoped, but the ones that did are looking great and a couple tiny sprigs are still trying...














Our peppers this year, like the last few have just been so sad! We have a few promising ones, so we'll see if they get to full size!

And let's talk about tomatoes, shall we?! 

What? Did I hear you say 'jungle'? 

Well yes, that is accurate!

Early July:

So many little grape tomatoes!!

And August:

Please also note the pumpkin vine that snaked its way through all of the cages before we could re-route it! Wouldn't be our garden plot without such happenings, now would it?!

And I cannot get over the size of some of these!! (Hard to get scale here, but those Beefstake are gooooooood gracious! Enormous!)

 So many colors!!!

So yes, while there have been some disappointing failures and "meh" things, the tomatoes are just too much to handle. 

And the grape vine. Ooooohhhhh, the grape vine! Which pulled down the disappointingly weak (and not as advertised) nylon string we used on the perimeter. So we got out last week to put up thick wire (no pictures yet...we just dodged a thunderstorm so there was no chance to stop for a photo op!)

And just for fun...I had extra bulbs and planted them around the perimeter of the fencing. Most got weed-wacked, but the calle lilies were such a fun thing to walk up to!

So there we are. The garden plot in August. Little of this, little of that...little of you don't know what to expect each time you go out!! Hey, what's new?!

More Flowers...

Well, the wildflower border and shade garden aren't the only places that are in bloom...

With the bloom of the lilies, we finally made it out of the "colorless wilderness" that is the few weeks between spring and summer blooms.

Yes, I am aware that taking a photo in this high sunlight condition is terrible;
it's all I have...and editing cannot fix this mess. I tried!

I need to pull out some of the bulbs
in the fall and mix up the colors a
bit more so we're not all pink on one
side and all yellow/red and peach on
the other.














Unfortunately the lilies are pretty short-lived, but thankfully the gladiolus take over quickly.





However, the issue I have with these beauties (aside from the same issue mentioned with the lilies that I need to get in there, pull out the bulbs, label which color they are and re-plant not in groups by color, which is how they've accidentally ended up) is that they do not like to stand up straight!
Somehow I lost all of the little stakes I did have, plus they weren't super tall anyway.

 

So, above is my best attempt at staking these
unruly things!

In addition to the gladiolas, the calle lilies come out too! They are the coolest shapes and I also ended up with peach and yellow colored ones (above) that I don't remember ever having before!

The balloon flowers in bloom:

And my five-o-clocks are in bloom!

This one was a seedling my friend had already started. But I planted a few seeds in pots and one of them has come up on the back deck!



















I also had fun taking photos of my roses one night when the sky was so cool!

Cameras just cannot capture (well, REAL ones probably can!) the gorgeous, robust coloring of these roses! Especially at dusk!

This is the closest I could get with my little camera.

But now they've stayed pretty unspectacular :-/
Just when they do start to get some flowers, it rains hard. They have not "burst" like they did that first bloom.

Very sad.

They probably are overdue for a pruning again, though.

And these are the easy roses! Sometimes, I think I could actually do "real" roses...they are SO pretty after all!

Then husband reminds me that they are quite finicky.
[sigh]
Maybe someday.


'Cause here's the truth!