Growing Bearded Iris

As I think you can tell from the pictures I post on this blog, I love growing bearded iris. I've written about the many colors of iris and the various iris I have collected over the years.  I'm a blogger for MainLine Gardening, an online gardening community. Today's post is a simple introduction to Growing Iris.  There is a link at the end of the blog entry that will take you to the best source of information on bearded iris, the American Iris Society. I could look at pictures on their site all day long. 

Growing Asparagus in the Home Garden

Asparagus in the vegetable garden.

Growing asparagus in the home garden has been a fun learning experience for us.  I ordered asparagus "Jersey Knight" from the Burpee catalog - two year old crowns.  I paid a lot more for them, but the promise is that the more mature asparagus crowns mean I can harvest some asparagus spears next year instead of waiting two years or more.  At the rate my asparagus is growing, I'm wondering if it might not be sooner!

I chose asparagus Jersey Knight for its promised early harvest and disease resistance. While asparagus is a pretty hardy perennial vegetable, it can be subject to rust and fusarium root rot.  Planting crowns purchased from a reputable nursery helps ensure disease-free root stock.  Good cultivation practices also prevent problems.

Asparagus like a rich, sandy loam soil, which for most of us in Virginia is the exact opposite of what we have.  Most gardens around here are dealing with heavy clay to clay loam.  Our solution to this problem is of course the raised beds we installed in the vegetable garden.  We simply built the wooden raised beds and dumped in bags of topsoil, peat, compost (trucked in by a local company) and compost from the garden compost pile.  The result is a well-drained rich soil that's not exactly sandy loam, but a compost-rich loam that most of the vegetables plants seem to like.

The crowns came right on time from Burpee and we kept them in a cool, dark spot in the garage until ready to plan.  We had to move all the herbs out of the herb bed first.  I decided to move the herbs into the flower garden and around the edge of the clearing.  Really tough, invasive herbs such as mint, oregano and catnip were moved to the edge of the woods.  More decorative herbs and fragrant herbs such as lemon balm and sage I moved into the flower garden.  The sage loves its new home and is actually blooming profusely now, adding lovely purple flowers to the garden.  It is so big it looks like a shrub!  (By the way, both the mint and oregano are so invasive it grew right out from the raised beds and into the grass between the beds. When I cut the lawn each week, I'm assailed with the scents of mint and oregano.  It either smells like a Bath & Body Works shop or a pizzeria, depending on which area of the lawn I'm cutting, and when the two strong scents mingle together it's not particularly appetizing.)

Culinary sage blooming in the flower garden.

We lost more soil from that raised bed than we bargained for when we dug up the herbs, so we lost another day while Hubby ran out to Lowe's for replacement soil.  Several bags of soil later, we were ready to plant the crowns. We followed the directions carefully and spread out the roots, lining up the crowns to give the asparagus plenty of room. We just pulled up soil around the roots but left the crowns bare, and didn't fill in more soil in the garden bed.  We began a process of watering them daily.

Within about 10 days, a few signs of life appeared, and we cheered the first airy fronds. Then they began sprouting in earnest! It looks like a weird alien bed with the asparagus fronds waving about.

As of today, 22 of the 24 asparagus crowns are alive and producing foliage.  We added more soil once all of them appeared healthy, filling in the bed.  We also placed a soaker hose around the asparagus, making U-shaped pins to hold the hose in place from old wire coat hangers. (The frugal gardener's answers to expensive landscape pins.)

We are a long time away from harvesting the asparagus, but so far, so good.  It's fun to see them waving in the breeze and I can't wait to watch their development!

More information on growing asparagus from the Virginia Cooperative Extension office. 

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Virginia Wildflowers

My friend, fellow writer and Master Gardener, Cynthia Wood, has started a great project documenting one of Virginia's natural treasures - Virginia wildflowers, specifically local wild flowers at Bear Creek State Park and Holliday Lake State Park (one of my favorite local hiking spots.)  She has a website and a Facebook page devoted to Virginia wildflowers.  Please "like" her Facebook page and if you drop her a note, let her know you found her information through Jeanne at Seven Oaks.

Facebook page for Virginia Wildflowers: https://www.facebook.com/VirginiaWildflowers
Website: Virginia Wildflowers: https://www.facebook.com/VirginiaWildflowers/info

A Lumpy First Quilting Project and the Joy of Discovery

Yesterday it was raining buckets outside, a welcome sight for this gardener.  We hadn't had this much rain in many weeks and the clay soil was already so baked it was beginning to crack. I was getting tired of carrying buckets of water around the garden to keep my new transplants alive.  Nearly 36 hours of rain later, the garden looks fresh, green and...moist.

It's unusual to have a rainy Sunday.  I sat down to an afternoon of play.  I finished my quilted pillow. I have no idea what I am doing.  I have never sewed, but I love quilts.  Somehow I managed to collect a bunch of fabric scraps over the years in a variety of blue and yellow hues. I seem to have a fondness for pairing those colors together, the way I like to pair peach and aqua together.  My bedroom is blue, and so I decided to sew together some patches and make a pillow.  I used my Christmas present, the new Janome sewing machine I bought from Sew Simple in Lynchburg.  I can't say enough great things about the sewing machine or the shop...they were wonderful and this model Janome is like the idiot's guide to sewing.  Literally.  It has little numbers and arrows showing you how to thread the machine. It's like connect the dots sewing.  That is my kind of machine. 

So here is my lump, bumpy pillow.  It's uneven. One side is poking up more than another.  It won't win any prizes.  Many children sew better than I do. I don't care. I had fun making it.

The reason I share my lumpy bumpy pillow with you is this.  I was raised in a super strict household where play was frowned upon past the age of six.  After that age, work was the watchword.  We were expected to work so hard at our schoolwork that we brought home straight A's regardless of the subject. We were to  work hard at home and were assigned tasks far beyond what our age normally dictated. This was to "build character." I was not allowed to play sports and only academic clubs were allowed. These would further my school work; sports were nothing but a waste of time and money.  And so on.

By the time I turned 16 and was able to get a part time job, my parents didn't just encourage me to work...they practically pushed me out the door. While it's true that I was highly motivated to take a part time job to pay for my horse back riding lessons (a frivolity my siblings gifted me with for my 16th birthday and a long cherished dream),  my parents saw hard work as the ultimate virtue.

If you sewed, it was to make clothing...not because it was creative expression, but because the clothing was better made or less expensive than store-bought clothing.

If you gardened, it wasn't for fun.  It was to win prizes (competition) or grow food (money saving.)

If you rode your bicycle, it wasn't for pleasure...it was to get from one place to the other.

Everything was for a purpose.

I devoured Gretchen Rubin's book The Happiness Project in three days flat, and it was she who inspired me to finish my lumpy bumpy pillow.  In her book, she explores a year of testing the various hypothesis around how to become happier.  But what struck me was her exploration and identification of unspoken "rules" she'd had about herself.  Some "rules" were good, and some kept her back.  Another thing that struck me was that play is good.  Getting away from that hard, grinding approach to work is GOOD for the soul, the spirit, and happiness.

She made me sit back and question this unspoken rule that play was frowned upon and that every activity had to be for a purpose, that every activity undertaken by an adult in our family had to be bigger, better and best.  She made me question the unspoken and odd rule we had growing up that if you wanted to do something your older siblings wanted to do - even if it was some activity that spoke to you, that inspired you, that made you happy - well, you were just 'copying' someone else.  For years my sister teased me that my interest in gardening was just me trying to copy another sister.  Well, she is wrong.  I love to garden.  Gardening makes me happy.  I never learned how to sew because that was another sister's "thing."  I have one sister who sews beautiful tailored clothes. She made me my first good business suit when I entered the work force and it was lovely. (I still have it even though I have gained too much weight to wear it; I won't part with it.)  The other sister took up sewing, but her "thing" was quilting.  She made me a gorgeous double wedding ring quilt for my wedding that I have hanging up in my bedroom.  I don't want to use it on the bed because my cats sleep on the bed and shed all the time.  I keep a store-bought quilt on the bed that I can just throw into the laundry in case of kitty accidents or hair.

But I have always longed to sew. I remember the whirr of my mother's sewing machine and it is like the background song of my childhood.  She was an excellent seamstress and there are many pictures of myself and my sisters wearing Easter dresses she created.  My favorite was white with flocked purple tulips on it and a lot of purple rickrack. Remember rickrack, the 70s answer to trimming anything? I'm just grateful she never bought the Ronco Be-dazzler.

I tried taking a sewing class when I lived in Floral Park. I dutifully trekked up to Sewanhaka High School for the evening course.  I never took home ec in high school because I was music nerd (still am); my electives were piano, chorus and music theory, which left no time for cooking or sewing classes.

I tried sewing a dress in that class and it was a big, shapeless black tent.  It was so ugly I couldn't bear to even save the material.  Patterns made me cry.  I got so frustrated. The teacher kept saying to me to have patience with myself, but that old habit ingrained in me from childhood of expecting to BE the best because I HAD to be the best because that is what my parents expected and demanded of us kicked in.   I quit the class.

Now I know better. I know that it is okay to let hobbies be hobbies. It is okay to not only not be the best but to putter around with something that gives you joy and pleasure.  It is okay for me to quilt, garden, sew, and do other things that I enjoy.  So what if my sisters like doing them too? Just gives us one more thing to share when we are together.

Every childhood has its rules and every family has its quirks.  As I read The Happiness Project, I realized that the important thing is not getting stuck in the quirks.  The important thing is that when you get to adulthood, you can be dispassionate and detached enough to recognize, analyze, and scrutinize those childhood rules.  You can keep what works and leave behind what doesn't.

For my parents, hard work and striving was the key to getting out of poverty.  My grandfather died when my mother was only 3 and during the height of the Great Depression, leaving my disabled grandmother with little income and three daughters to feed.  My dad's family were immigrants striving to succeed in America during a time when prejudice against German immigrants ran high.  To my parents, the iron-clad rule "Be the best" and "Anything you do must be productive, earn money, and be the best" was necessary to lift them out of poverty.

Their rules aren't my rules.  I am not living in the Great Depression no matter what the newscasters may say about the economy.  I have good work that I love to do, and I have a roof over my head and a full pantry.  I respect that my parents may have had to strive every hour of every day to get ahead, but I am not in that same atmosphere.  My life is my own.

And so out came the scraps of material.  Out came endless cups of tea and the radio tuned to the Lynchburg classical music station. I set up my sewing machine at the kitchen table, set up the ironing board on the island, and went to work.

While I puttered and sewed, I watched a huge wild tom turkey out in the yard.  In the pouring rain he went from space to space behind the vegetable garden, pecking for insects.   I paused, sipped my tea, and watched this fascinating (and bedraggled) tom turkey in the rain.  And suddenly I thought, "Life is good.  Life is fine."

So here is my lumpy bumpy pillow and all that it represents. I added it to the mount of pillows on the bed, those decorative pillows men never understand and women crave.  And every time I look at it, I smile and feel alive again.

That's what creative play does for you.

The Colors of Iris

Iris "Cherub's Smile" - worth the wait

The colors of iris include every color of the rainbow...and colors so sweet, so pale, so rich, you'll probably become as fascinated as I am by iris.  Back on Long Island where I grew up, iris were uncommon. I'm not sure why but I don't remember many iris in the gardens in Floral Park nor in Huntington.  My in-laws had a patch of white and purple irises in a little bed in their front yard.  They have a heavy scent, like grape soda pop, when the sun shines on them and warms them.  My father in law dug up the rhizomes and put them in a plastic bag and carried them down to Virginia when he moved in with us.  We planted them on the slope next to the driveway that became the sunny perennial garden, before we even knew it would become a garden, and they have spread out nicely.

Yellow iris with lemon fragrance, a gift from my friend Joan's garden

Here in south central Virginia, iris thrive. There are so many iris that I have seen them growing along road banks on back roads, big swathes of color and sword-shaped foliage.  There are some that appear to be 'wild'; across the road from us is a stand of loblolly pine, and there smack in front of it is a patch of pale blue iris growing on the bank above the drainage ditch for rainwater. Across the street and down a few houses is a home with exactly that same shade of iris. I don't know if someone planted those pale blue iris in front of the pines or if a squirrel dug up a rhizome and replanted it. I suspect a squirrel-gardener was at work.

The colors of iris fascinate me.  As soon as I saw how well they grew, I planted two rhizomes from packs I purchased at Wal-Mart. And then - I waited. And waited.  Part of the trouble was that I'd ruined the soil in that part of the garden, totally by accident.  When we decided to make pathways through the perennial garden, we thought we would put down a layer of sand first, then stones for the path. BIG mistake.  We did not do the edging first nor did we have any erosion barriers, and we completely under estimated the slope above.  Rainwater washed all the sand into the garden bed.  When you mix sand and red clay you get... crap. Pure, unadulterated cement-like soil that nothing grows in.  We managed to kill almost all the shade garden plants in that bed and what we didn't kill through our ignorance the deer finished off later.  So much for the shade garden.  I made it my mission to replenish the soil and carted so many buckets of compost to that spot that I've lost count.

Well, something worked, because the iris survived the sand mistake.  For three years, they have pushed out their foliage and nothing else.  I'd forgotten what colors they were, and the plant tags I'd stuck into the ground near them broke.  The writing wore away.  I knew one was a pink-blue and the other a blue, and one had the word "rain" in the name and the other "cherub" but beyond that, I just prayed they would survive.

This year is the year.  The compost and inches of mulch we'd placed over the garden bed we ruined have helped.   I planted butterfly bushes along the back of that bed, offspring of the original plants in the butterfly garden, and a few columbine raised from seeds.  The daylilies from the original garden kit we purchased are back.  There's even a hosta struggling to rise from the dead; I keep thinking, "You're deer food" but it won't listen to me.  Fortunately, I learned my lesson about hosta and deer that first year, and now I have hosta plants as foundation plants near the front and back porches, areas deer fear to tread and areas Shadow can patrol even from inside the house.

But there, in that sandy mess, rising from the ashes of my ignorance were my iris.  This year, the many colors of iris are resplendent in the garden.  The purple and white grape-scented ones from my in-laws have blossoms ready to show.  The pale blue, dark and light purple, and lemon-scented yellow iris from my friend Joan's garden are all blooming profusely.  And there along the back edge....iris "Cherub's Smile."  Blooming brilliantly with large ruffled petals and a beautiful mix of pale pink and light blue in the petals.

Iris "Cherub's Smile"

How did I know this one was Cherub's Smile if the tags wore away? Fortunately, I'd been more diligent about keeping my garden journal back then.  Garden journal is too fancy a name for what I do.  I have a three ring binder with loose leaf pages in it. I write notes and I tape seed packets and plant package information there when I plant something.  There it was - the plant information from the two iris rhizomes I'd purchased at Wal-Mart, complete with pictures. "Cherub's Smile" was the pale colored one.  The picture on the package shows a pale pink, and mine has pale pink and blue, but I don't trust package labels.  Having worked as a marketing manager for many years and learning a lot about the printing process, I know that colors can be off on labels.  It's Cherub's Smile or if it's really not, then it's the fault of the grower who made a mistake with it.

At any rate, this iris is no mistake.  It's gorgeous.  The many colors of the iris are resplendent today.  We expect heavy rains tomorrow, with a big storm moving in, so I raced out to photograph as many of my iris as I could.  Enjoy the colors of the iris in my garden!

• Bearded Iris Culture Fact Sheet from the USDA to help you grow your own bearded iris.

More Information on Caring for Strawberries

I'm a blogger for Mainline Gardening, an online gardening community, and today's post expands on my tips for strawberry garden care posted earlier this week.  My own strawberry patch is chock full of flowers now but no berries.  I feel like coaxing, "Here, pollinators! Here, pollinators!" like you coax a kitty to the door.  Maybe I need the bee equivalent of a can of tuna? I don't know but I sure hope they show up soon. They were certainly hard at work on the orchard trees and if luck is with us and we don't get socked with a big drought this year I may actually get enough peaches to write about and a few pears, too.  We shall see.....

Here's the post for those who would like more strawberry gardening tips:  Spring Strawberry Bed Preparation

Starting a Butterfly Garden

Starting a butterfly garden, butterfly garden plants and attracting butterflies to the garden is one of my favorite past times, and something that started accidentally here at Seven Oaks and sort of took on a life of its own.  Last night was my final Master Gardening program class, and each student had to present on a topic of his or her choice.  I presented on how to start a butterfly garden.  Some Facebook friends were interested in the topic, so I made my presentation into a PDF and am adding it to the Free Gardening Resources library I've started here on the blog.  I'll also link to it below and write articles on it since it seemed to be of interest.  We had some really stand out presentations last night, and I especially loved the presentations on aspects of gardening with children.  One lady is as obsessed with sunflowers as I am; who knew?  Another lady ran a fantastic program at her day care center, teaching the small children under her care how to grow vegetables, and then inviting them into the kitchen with her to cook and can them.  The pictures of the pre-school children in the vegetable garden grinning as they held up beans and tomatoes were priceless.

My presentation on Starting a Butterfly Garden includes both the PowerPoint slides I used and the speaker's notes, which I hope illustrate the concept adequately.  As I mentioned, I started a butterfly garden by accident. I'd always wanted one but those plans in magazines are intimidating.  Half the time, the plants recommended in the article aren't available at the garden center, and I forget the list when I go, so the garden never gets built.  The solution that I chose for Seven Oaks was a series of "kits."  Each kit was ordered online from a catalog and included a plan and the plants. It is sort of like paint-by-numbers gardening.  Over the past four years, I've added more plants to attract and support butterflies in the garden solely because I love watching the colorful insects play among the flowers. Most of the butterfly garden plants bloom profusely and are tough as nails, surviving our poor soil and hot, dry summers with aplomb.  You can't ask for more than that.

The presentation is saved as an Adobe Acrobat file, so it should open on most computers.

Please enjoy:  Starting a Butterfly Garden.

Strawberry Garden Care

Strawberries needing transplant in my garden.

Strawberry garden care and spring strawberry garden clean up is an important part of raising strawberries. Whenever you plant a bed of strawberries, you can expect some clean up each year.

• The first task is to remove the mulch from the bed.  I usually do this as soon as the weather warms up. As long as there's no danger of a deep frost, it should be fine.
• Next, I weed the bed thoroughly. I'm always amazed at how prolific the weeds are around here.  We had a mild winter in Virginia, and the strawberry bed grew an array of weeds.  I removed big clumps of clover, grass and a bunch of the yucky stuff.
• My next step in spring strawberry garden clean up is to look for plants that need to be moved.  Strawberries multiply by putting our runners called stolons.  Along the runners, they produce so-called "daughter" plants that develop roots.  Each parent plant is called a mother plant.  It's safe to dig up the daughter plants in the spring and move to them to another, less crowded section of the garden. Give your strawberries plenty of room and they'll reward you with new plants to replace older ones that die out.
• Lastly, I fertilize my strawberries with a top dressing of compost. I mix it into the soil a bit and make sure to keep the plants well-watered throughout the spring.  Good water supply ensures good berries, and my plants repay my work with abundant flowers. My mouth is already watering at the thought of the berries to come. 

I planted ever-bearing strawberries here at Seven Oaks, which means I usually get smaller harvests from May through June and a second crop in the fall. The berries are smaller than the June-bearing kind, but I'm fine with that.  I eat them raw, just washing them off and trimming the stems, and they're always delicious.  You don't need any sugar when you grow your own strawberries!

Swiss Chard Recipe

This Swiss chard recipe was my lunch yesterday, and there's nothing like fixing lunch from food you grew yourself.  Also nothing like rinsing the Swiss chard in the sink and finding the first earwig of the season, but better earwigs than slugs in my kitchen, that's for sure.  In all seriousness, Swiss chard is a wonderful health-boosting vegetable that is very easy to grow in the spring garden.  I prefer it cooked to raw in salads, as I find the leaves rather tough. Cooked, however, it's tender like spinach, and when paired with garlic, I find it irresistible. Try growing Swiss chard and be sure to bookmark my Swiss chard recipe so you can enjoy lunch from the garden.

Here's the recipe for Easy Five Minute Swiss Chard.

If you make it, let me know how it turns out for you!

Blooming Today at Seven Oaks

Today's blog post is simply this: pictures of what's blooming at Seven Oaks.  Plus I couldn't resist snapping a quick picture of the perennial garden with my gardening helper, Pierre, jaunting along the pathway.  This is the garden we built into the steep slope next to the driveway.  We have one small section of pathway to complete and I have more sections to weed this year, but I wanted to take a 'before' picture today so you could see the bones of the garden...the hardscapes...the beautiful form that hubby and I created....and in a few short weeks I will take another image from the same spot and you can see it in bloom. 

Pierre in the perennial garden

Iris

Kerria japonica, shrub that attracts many pollinators

Yellow columbine grown from seed

Keeping Those Plants Warm

Well, if you're like me and you fell for all the signs that we were all set to have a hot early spring...oops.  Tonight is supposed to get cold here in Virginia!  And of course, I have a few geraniums planted in the window boxes and I've got tomatoes hardening off on the porch. Luckily, having lived in the temperamental spring climate of Long Island all my life, I never put my tomatoes in until I'm absolutely sure we are well beyond the last frost date of spring.  I keep them in pots, and they are in a nice, sturdy tray. On cold nights I just pull the tray into the garage, which is 10-20 degrees warmer than the outside air, or I pull them into the house for the night. The trick is to remember to bring them back out in the morning.

What can you do, however, if you got fooled into thinking spring was already here and you planted some tender vegetables, herbs or flowers? If there's a frost warning, you can make newspaper cones or tents and put them over the plants. Be sure to anchor them with rocks or sticks used like pegs and take them off in the morning. You can make something called a cloche, which is like a mini greenhouse, out of a 2 liter soda pop bottle or a gallon milk or juice container. Wash the container out thoroughly with soap and water and dry it.  Then very carefully cut off the spout area, leaving most of the bottle open.  Pop it like a cap over the plants and put a rock on top to anchor it in place. Always remove all covers from the plants during the day.  Unless it's going to stay in the 30s or 40s by day, it is better to take the caps off during the day and allow for good air circulation and sunlight than to risk overheating the plants. You'd be amazed at how hot it can get under those protective covers.  Newspaper will also block sunshine, which your plants need for photosynthesis to make their food.

My raised beds keep the temperature a bit warmer than the surrounding areas. A friend who owns a construction company gave me the most marvelous windows that fit right over the raised beds.  He was remodeling a high school gymnasium and had to replace their windows, so these are big, metal-framed glass windows with louvers.  I can put the whole window over the beds and open or close the glass if I need to.  Now before I had the luxury of such windows, I used clear plexiglass anchored with rocks to make a little bit of a cold frame over my raised vegetable beds.  Works just fine as long as you don't squash the plants with the glass AND you must remember to remove them in the morning. It's amazing how fast the temperature can rise inside the glass once the spring sun is up, and you don't want either cold (frost) or heat (from the sun baking through the glass) to damage your vegetables.

There are commercial products on the market to keep plants warmer, too.  The "Wall of Water" is a plastic sleeves with bladders or pockets on it that fits around vegetable plants.  You fill the pockets or bladders with tap water, and they act like solar heaters, absorbing the sun's rays by day and giving off gentle heat by night.  You need one per plant if you choose to use them.

I made my own solar heaters for the porch where I have seedlings hardening off.  I am testing them this year.  I used plastic gallon milk containers and washed them out.  I fill them with water and allow them to heat  up in the sun during the day.  Then I place a ring of them around the tender plants in their little pots on the porch.  My hope is that the radiant heat from each of the gallon containers keeps the ambient air temperate slightly warmer. The plants are also under the porch roof, so that frost does not settle on the leaves.  Hopefully, this will get the hardier perennials through the next few cold nights.

The good news is that the cool temperatures have encourage the tulips to last a long, long time. I love my tulips and the unusual and unseasonable heat meant that I lost some petals from the precocious bloomers, but the usual pastel mix is doing great.  Pansies also do just fine during these cold snaps, and my purple and yellow pansies add a jaunty note to the garden.

I wish all my Jewish friends a Blessed Passover, and to all my Christian friends, a blessed Good Friday today as we recall Our Lord's death.  Soon to be followed by Easter, the most joyful holiday of the year.  If you aren't Christian or Jewish, then my wish is that the spring brings you many flowers, and the Easter bunny brings you much chocolate. I think that covers all bases today.

Have a beautiful day, everyone!

Columbine, Jewel of the Spring Garden

I love columbine (Aquilegia.)  My first experience with columbine came only here in Virginia.  We didn't grow it in my childhood garden and I vaguely remember it at the garden center where I worked.  I saw it at Lowe's here in Virginia and planted one, but like potato chips or M&Ms, you can't just have one columbine.  And believe me, they see to that themselves; they seed prolifically, and I now have a lovely patch of smaller columbines under the large parent plant shown here like a hen with her chicks.

Today's gardening essay for Main Line Gardens is on the columbine.  Enjoy!

Blooming Today at Seven Oaks

Pour yourself a cup of coffee or tea, sit back, and enjoy a photo tour through two of my garden areas today....a tour of beautiful spring blooms.  Have a blessed Palm Sunday, everyone.

The patio garden. Blooming today: pansies, phlox, tulips and columbine.

Graceful Columbine

Pastel tulips

The garden area under the peach tree was an accident.  We buried PVC pipes underground to allow rainwater from the roof to flow through the gutters, down the drain spout, and flow far away from the house.  A natural slope ensures that all the water flows downhill and away from the foundation.  John got the idea to build a raised bed there so that rainwater would provide plenty of moisture to the garden bed and I would have one more garden to plant flowers.  Because it it within a few feet of the kitchen, the deer do not bother it (yet) and if a deer does stray close, Shadow's barks from inside the house send them fleeing back to the woods.

The peach tree was in the orchard, and it had about two leaves and looked like it was dying.  So we dug it up and moved it, and bought a replacement peach tree at Lowe's for the orchard.  The replacement tree is thriving and lo and behold, this tree is too!  It LOVES having the constant water supply and it does not get waterlogged because the garden is on a slope. You can't really see it, but the ground does slope down right below the bed.  Excess water drips away.  I planted many tulips in the bed and the zinnias reseed freely.  The zinnias are also starting to emerge....

The struggling peach tree is now the biggest in the garden.

Rembrandt Tulips

 

Another Rembrandt...I love this color...like a flame!

Mix of pastels and Rembrandt tulips near peach tree

Closeup of the tulip mix

....like a closed flame...more tulips