Putting in a Flower Garden
June 17, 2008
Earlier this year I offered to help put in a new flower bed in at a friend’s house. She told me the colors she liked, I did a bit of research, got the seeds and grew them in cell trays. Here’s a list of all the ones I started from seed:
- Aubrietia ‘Large Flowered Mix’
- Cerastium ‘Snow in Summer’
- Viola ‘Comedy Mixed’
- Forget-Me-Not
- Pinks ‘Old Fashioned Mix’
- Lavender
- Sheperd’s Scabiosa ‘Jasione Laevis’
- Coreopsis ‘Early Sunrise’
- Catananche ‘Coerulea’
- Chrysanthemum ‘Crazy Daisy’
- Echinacea ‘Purple Coneflower’
- Delphinium ‘Pacific Giant’
- Wild lupines
They were busting out of their cell trays and we finally put them into a new home this past weekend. Here’s a shot of the location:
I picked up 6 bags of black earth and 3 bags of sheep manure and brought my spade and shovel as well as my watering can and all the flowers. I placed the flower packets on the ground to get an idea of where to put the seedlings:
This isn’t a very good angle as the bottom of this picture is actually the left side when you are standing with your back to the road. In this picture, I put most of the taller plants in the bottom left with a dip in the middle then back to some taller plants at the top left. The two plants in the middle were mid-size with the plants on the right being shorter.
We used a garden hose to lay out the shape and then used the spade to cut into the sod.
Next we peeled back the sod, flipped it and stamped it down, a really difficult task due to the number of shallow tree roots:
Once that was done, we re-applied our mosquito repellant and started to spread the black earth, topped it with sheep manure and mixed it in:
I don’t know what it is about freshly spread dirt/manure that mosquitoes really like, however, I got a zillion bites that are still itchy. This is how we left it before jumping in the pool:
Had a nice dinner and a few drinks then headed out to finish the bed off by filling it with flower seedlings. This is how it looks from the front:
Overall it only took an hour to prepare the soil and then 15 minutes to plant the flowers (thanks in part to being eaten by mosquitoes). It was a nice and quick project.
Flower Beds are Hoppin’
June 2, 2008
Just wanted to share some photos of the growth and blooms that has been going on in my flower beds.
Allium ‘Gladiator’:
Heuchera ‘Hercules’:
Monstrous bleeding heart that I should have divided:
A gifted bearded iris:
And wonder of all wonders, a resurrected Jack In The Pulpit!
Gigantic hosta that should have been divided:
Some Solomon’s Seal from the neighbour’s yard, Lily of the Valley that I want to get rid of, Bleeding Heart, three brunnera ‘Jack Frost’ in bloom and a lone heuchera ‘Purple Palace’.
Monster rhubarb:
Some pinkish Columbine with pretty little spurs:
‘Saturn’ Hens and Chicks, a truly red sempervivium:
And a nice bunching of not-so-red Hens and Chicks:
Bees In My Tree
May 20, 2008
The apple tree in the front yard has been buzzing with the sounds of bees pollinating the apple blossoms. I was lucky to get a shot of some bee bum as these little guys really don’t sit around to have their picture taken. The blossoms will soon fall off and apples will start to form. I hope the dormant oil I applied will make the apples edible this year.
Around the Flower Beds
May 16, 2008
I went around the flower beds a week ago and took some pictures of the state of the flower beds.
This is the huge Bleeding Heart that I never got around to dividing this year and is on my MUST DIVIDE list for this fall:
I need to start picking the rhubarb as it has exploded in growth on the side of the house:
I’ve found five or six flowering stalks in this jungle and I lopped them all off – flowering stalks takes up all the energy of the plant, reducing the amount of yield from the plant. I’ll continue to monitor this and cut away any emerging flowering stalks.
The clematis tangutica I bought at last year’s Fletcher Wildlife Garden plant sale:
This year the annual native plant sale will be on June 7th and I’ll sadly miss it as I’ll be out of town. I spied a Bleeding Heart plant that had been missed during my perennial division in a precarious spot – the bottom of a gate hinge:
I’ll have to move that soon or it’ll get squished. My two varieties of raspberries are doing well, perhaps a little too well as they are now spreading into the neighbours side of the fence:
You can see some strawberry plants interspersed with the raspberry canes, a combination I like. Here’s a gigantic hosta that I was too lazy to divide this spring, also on the division list:
The Allium ‘Gladiator’ is starting to send up flowers:
The Apeldoorn tulips are almost done their bloom:
Last year’s purchased Weigela survived in its pot – it had been tossed to the side of the flower bed and left for dead during the cold winter months and has made a surprising return:
I’m pretty amazed that it’s alive and reinforces what I can get away with when it comes to plant care. Poor, neglected plant, you’ll have a home by this weekend. I bought this Garland Spirea from the same nursery and it’s already starting to flower:
The Siberian Bugloss Brunnera macrophylla ‘Jack Frost’ is flowering with delicate bright-blue flowers against its silvery, heart-shaped, green-veined leaves:
In the neighbourhood is a variegated hosta from last year’s dig at Dundonald Park:
and a Coral Bells Heuchera hybrid ‘Magic Dream’:
Finally, sadly, here are 7 neglected pots of lilies that were never planted in the ground last fall:
The only thing growing in these pots are dandelions. I have enough of those out in my front lawn.
Tulip Festival at Lunch
May 14, 2008
Ottawa is home to the Tulip Festival, a three-weekend event held in the National Capital that symbolizes the friendship between Ottawa and the Netherlands. During the Second World War Canada provided safe haven for Netherlands’s Princess Juliana and her daughters during the Nazi occupation their homeland and a few year’s later they presented Ottawa with 100,000 tulip bulbs. Since then, Ottawa’s display of tulips has grown to over 3 million.
I decided to check out one of the Official Tulip Parks earlier this week on my lunch hour and headed over to Major’s Hill Park. On my way there was a cute ground hog hoofing it across steps of the War Memorial:
Entering Major’s Hill Park I saw lots of tulips:
Here you can see a stunning tulip bed:
Walking along I came across a collection of one hundred and fifty 5′ tulips, each painted by Ottawa and area visual artists during the 2005 Tulip Festival:
Some were really pretty:
Others abstract:
And others were very creative, especially this one that stood beside a row of portable toilets:
I think my favourite was this one mostly because I’m a fan of anything fish-themed:
Walking further I came across two of the tulip beds:
It was a nice way to spend my lunch hour and eventually I had to head back to work. Of course I had to take one more shot, especially with the Parliament Building’s Peace Tower in the background:
