New York Renovator

One of the perks of having a perennial garden is that you don’t need to replant everything every spring.

Yet one of the disadvantages to a perennial garden is that nothing blooms until JULY! :-p I don’t know how I did it, but I must have chosen all the plants that *only* bloom at a certain time, so my yard has no color until mid-summer, ugh. Not very good organizing, apparently. Oh well.

So now that we’re into August, my yard is literally ablaze with color. The Rose of Sharon, day lily, black-eyed Susans, purple coneflower, butterfly bush, sage, oriental stargazers, everything! Yay! It’s good to see that the plants aren’t suffering TOO much from my severe neglect this summer and last. I could probably do with some online floral arrangements, too come to think of it.

I’m nuts about blue and red flowers. Next year, I’ll plant more red!

How’s your garden growing?

Befuddled by the billions of weeds cluttering your yard or garden beds? Curious about that odd-looking herb or a nasty plant that stubbornly resists your weed-thwarting efforts? Check out the National Gardening Association Weed Library for identifying that plant. This is a very valuable resource for me. Not only do I have a lot of plants around the homestead, particularly weeds, but the kids are always doing something or another for their science courses.

I haven’t done ANY gardening (yet) this year. It’s just been too busy. Hopefully, we’ll do some major weed-pulling in a few weeks. This is what lies ahead of us….

When I first moved here over a decade ago, I knew next to nothing about gardening. I bought some books and checked some out from the library, and went to work, studying. I learned a lot. The nice thing about gardening is that it’s actually kind of easy. Plants are pretty resilient, and they will endure a good amount of abuse, lol.

So when I moved here, there were few plant: a rhododendron on its last gasps; a front flower bed FILLED with hostas (yuk); a stinging nettle bush next to the driveway (we got rid of that nasty bush the second day we moved in!); and an old Scotch rose disfigured with horribly drippy bags of fluorescent-orange spots. I later found out this was a fungus.

The rose bush, while pretty, was situated right next to the garage wall, in the shadows in an obscure area. I hacked at it to remove it. The thing grew back every year! And every year, I hacked at it again. I cut, I sawed, I weed-whacked. It just stubbornly refused to die! As a matter of fact, it grew back beautifully, free of the orange goop. I guess it had been neglected for so long that my vicious hacking only helped it!

Last year, I didn’t hack it. I was too exhausted. I just left it.

Look at it today. Photo taken this morning.

It’s still in the shadows in that obscure area, by the garage wall. I have to admire the tenacious little thing. It’s blooming like there’s no tomorrow- and I guess that makes sense because I hacked at the poor thing like there was going to be no tomorrow!

So I’m going to leave it. Maybe next year I’ll take the root suckers and plug them elsewhere in the garden. There are a few offshoots of this bush, elsewhere around the yard. They are also blooming prolifically. And they smell HEAVENLY. Oh, those old-fashioned Scotch roses! You can keep your hybrid plastic-surgery models– give me the old fashioned, hardy rose.  They are absolutely delicious. Like any true blood American, I love an underdog. And this rose bush is definitely a contender. LOL

So I have plans to put roses everywhere. I’ll incorporate them into my lilac-laden garden plans. Wouldn’t that be so wonderful– lilacs in May, roses in June. What’s for July and August?

Almost all of it.

If the photo above looks horribly gray and gloomy… that’s because Upstate New York has been horribly gray and gloomy! We were blessed with sunshine about a week ago, but I wasn’t able to enjoy it (was sick). But spring IS on the way, I know it is. Carole blogged about her irises peeping up… I don’t have any iris coming up, but look! Snowdrops!

My gardens all bloom a good two to three weeks after everyone else’s, even my own neighbors’. I cannot figure out why. When all the neighborhood day lilies are ablaze, mine are still just buds. It’s WEIRD. I must be in the middle of some watery micro-climate here.

Here’s my forlorn-looking flower bed.

Oh it looks really bad right now, but in a few months it will look like this:

And then this:

*ssssssighhhhh****

Also called the Red-Hot Poker Plant, the Torch Lily is a pretty nifty addition to my garden. They originate from South Africa and Madagascar. I bought some rhizome-type bulbs on a fluke several years ago, from a catalog store. These perennial plants are hardy to Zone 5 (I am in Zone 4). They are heat- and drought-tolerant (but need water during their growing time), and require full sun.

These had a rather shaky first year, but after that, they have been incredible, easy-care plants. My plants get a lot of abuse, too. My property is situated in a marshy area of the town (there’s a muddy, murky, burgeoning swamp in the neighbor’s back yard); my land rests at the bottom of a very steep hill, and rests in one of the lowest spots in the area. We get a lot of water. As a matter of fact, we are convinced that there is a powerful stream or creek that flows beneath the surface of our land. When digging post holes, we reach water at two feet. Plus, the topography of our land changes dramatically every year. There’s SOMETHING going on under our turf, that’s for sure.

Well, my Torch Lilies are planted in a small strip of soil between the house foundation and the driveway– an area of about 3 feet wide. The ice from the eaves crashes down in that section all winter long, and the plow mows the snowbanks right there, too. Plus, there’s the salt and dirt and movement that attacks any plant next to a driveway. The Torch Lilies continue to shine.

I do not fertilize them, I don’t deadhead them after blooming, I don’t do anything to them! The soil they call home is graveley and not very nutritious, either. But they bloom every year. I love these things!

The Torch Lily grows to about 3 or 4 feet high. They have lots of sword-shaped leaves. The shoots pop up sometime in early June, looking a little like light-green Grape Hyacinths (but much taller and larger). After about a week or two, they burst in color of yellows, oranges, and a dash of light red at the tops. My Torch Lilies always get comments from my visitors– these are quite showy and are rather rare for an Upstate New York cottage garden, I suppose.

Eventually I plan to move these to a larger, more showy part of my garden, but the Torch Lilies seem so happy here right now. I’ve read that they don’t like being disturbed (which is why they took a year or two to establish), so divide them sparingly.

Here in Upstate New York, we remain rather skeptical of spring until at least Tax Day. I mean, snow in April is not a complete anomaly around here. And we really can’t set out any plants, safe from the threat of frost, until after Mother’s Day. Even so, last year in the first week of June we has frost. And then, there’s MY yard. There’s a microclimate here in my yard, at the base of two sloping hills perpendicular to each other. All plants in my yard bloom a good 2-3 weeks AFTER my neighbors’ plants do. I have no idea why this is so– it’s no Stratosphere hotel here to be sure…. maybe because it is so wet here? Or cooler than the other yards? But all my plants, year after year, bloom later than everyone else’s. It figures that I would have such a weird yard. Sigh.

Anyway… look! My peonies are starting to pop up! I love these plants, even though the flowers plop over each other when in bloom. They smell heavenly.

My Grape Hyacinths are back. I did not plant these– they were one of the very few pretty plants growing here when we moved in (the previous owners were real brown thumbs– besides a front bed full of boring, overgrown hostas, the only other plants here were 5 yews and a huge Stinging Nettle Bush).

My lovely lilac tree is budding. AT LAST. The shrub is now about 7 feet tall. I am eagerly waiting for it to tower over this area of the yard, to shield the ugly parking lot next door.

And look! A REAL BLOSSOM! One daffodil, yippeee!

I won’t talk about the other plants that were eaten over the winter, by the STUPID DEER. I hate deer. They chewed through my Privet bushes, my Weeping Willow, my Spirea, my Yuccas, my grapevine, my Iris… GRRRRRR! But I can’t think about them today. They will ruin a perfectly happy, sunny day. But I can still plot my revenge…. heh heh. More to come.

Oh July! I love this month because it’s when everything is glorious buzzing with activity! And my most favorite flower, the fragrant Oriental lily, is blooming. Click the photo for a very large view. You can almost smell them from here.

I clipped a few and have them in the house. Their scent fills the home with their sweet, heady fragrance. Mmmmm.

My son has a growing collection of grasshoppers. He wanted me to post a photo of them. I think they are ickky. But I remember how fascinated I was with bugs when I was his age.

Remember that old hymn that goes,

I come to the garden alone
While the dew is still on the roses
And the voice I hear, falling on my ear,
The Son of God discloses.

And He walks with me, and He talks with me,
And He tells me I am His own,
And the Joy we share as we tarry there,
None other has ever known.

I cannot sleep tonight, and have been visiting some beautiful gardening blogs. I realize that I’ve been so busy the past few weeks that I have neglected my gardens. Today for the first time in weeks, I strolled around the yard to see my gardens. My vegetable garden is weedy, but productive. It was not a good year for lettuce, unfortunately (we eat a lot of salad), but the peas, green beans, and squash are thriving despite my neglect.

Stray tomato plants are everywhere in the garden. Last year, I’d composted old tomatoes, and the seeds survived. They sprouted everywhere I spread the compost. I have left them to grow up between the rows, and now they are bullying the potatoes and beans. Oh well. I have a hard time getting rid of any plant and would rather just let them all grow. Thinning sprouts is an agonizing job for me.

My cucumbers are the cutest, fuzziest little things, still smaller than my pinky. I have a few marble-sized cantaloupe growing, but since we only have about 7 weeks of reliably warm weather left, I wonder if any will mature in time. Onions are poor this year, due to my late sowing and lack of rain. Carrots and turnips look good.

Well, the reason I am thinking of that hymn, one of my old favorites as a girl, is that today I got to see how my flower beds are doing. It was a lovely, colorful walk. My daughters have kept up with the weeding quite well during the five weeks I was bedridden. The weeds have only just returned because we’ve been busy with the plaster and the drywell. But my purple butterfly bush is blooming– oh the joy!

“A Boy and His Cat”

Walking down through my garden path, I realized that I must love yellow/orange and blue/purple flowers together. I hardly have any other combination. Besides the butterfly bush, I have purple Veronica, Russian sage, purple coneflower, magenta bee balm, purple iris, blue anemone, pink turtleheads, blue hydrangea, and several blue Rose of Sharon bushes. I also have a glorious stalk of Purple Loosestrife growing. All these purple flowers are woven between my orange daylilies (which have finally bloomed– they always bloom three weeks after everyone else’s and I don’t know why), black-eyed Susans, orange-red Asian lilies, yellow potentilla, and orange torchlilies. Besides a few white/pink stargazer lilies, that’s it! All together, it is quite a beautiful collage.

Here’s a shot of my pride and joy– my Red Oak that I have nurtured these past four years since it was a little twig in the ground. My house is surrounded by asphalt (being an old parsonage property); in the summer, the steamy asphalt scorches up the yard and house to unbearable levels. My precious oak will resolve that in a few years.

About the Purple Loosestrife– I stole it from a roadside swamp. Shh. I don’t care how much the treehuggers hate it, I love it. You see, loosestrife grows in wet, swampy areas, and chokes off the flow of water. But I have far too much water on my property.

I am waterlogged, actually. So I am going to plant great swaths of loosestrife in the soggy area of my yard. It is also a very colorful and pretty plant, so that’s a plus. Desperate times call for desperate measures! I am going to also get more iris, which likes its feet wet, and some summersweet, which also thrives in wet areas. Hopefully this will solve most of my water problems, before a pond forms permanently!

Here’s an interesting shot– a male peacock and his peahen flew up on top of our shed, then into an oak tree. The neighbors have a variety of birds and critters, and this pair of exotic birds likes to wander in my yard.

It was evening, and the picture came out poorly, but can you make out the iridescent blue between the leaves? They were in the tree for a few hours after nightfall, making the loudest, strangest noises. Reminded me of an owl’s “whooo” a little.