A Beautiful May, and Another Improvement Done

 

Greetings! It's been a beautiful May here in Iowa. Last week was quite warm, but this week the nights have been unusually cool for this time of year, dipping down into the low 40s, and even frost last night -- definitely not time yet to plant out the tomatoes, pepper, zinnias and dahlia starts that are becoming so large in my sunroom that I'm starting to run out of room.

But I think that might have been our last frost, and I hope that the nighttime temps will soon warm up a bit, so I can start moving things out of the sunroom for the summer and planting the Tropical Garden around my patio again.

The sunny, 60° days this week have been ideal for working outside and getting a few projects done. One is a big improvement that I've been thinking about doing for several years now: putting an edging around my Yellow Garden.

The Yellow Garden

Some background: my Yellow Garden began when we had a large ash tree removed from behind our house in 2014. Thinking it would be nice to brighten up that north side of our yard, I planted a large area behind the house with golden-leaved plants and yellow flowers. (When making new garden areas, I often tend to bite off more than I should....)

Here was the Yellow Garden in 2015. It was a very large space, with yellow-leaved shade plants like hostas and dogwood near the house, and yellow-flowered perennials and annual in the sunny area away from the house. It looked pretty nice as it filled in over the next year or two....

But by 2018, the Yellow Garden was a mess of weeds that I just couldn't get under control. The area was obviously far too large for me to maintain, especially in the middle section near the stepping stone path and bench, so I reduced the garden area in 2019. I made a narrow shady border against the house, and an oval sunny garden bed, seeding grass in the middle area.

By May 2020, the two new areas were much better under control, although I still had a weed and runner grass problem in the oval bed, on the left side nearer to the house. And grass and weeds kept creeping into the oval area from all sides because there were no defined edges to that area.

By late June last year, I had removed all the plants from the left side of the garden to try to get the weeds and runner grass under control. I planned to plant yellow annual flowers in that cleared area at left, but was still trying to keep the Creeping Charlie out of the part near the birdbath (which kept toppling over because it wasn't set on a solid base -- grrr). I obviously needed to do something.

Ta-da! Earlier this week I installed not just the steel edging I had bought for this project, but I also realized I had a bunch of leftover edging bricks lying around from another area I reduced a few years ago. So I installed the steel edging inside of the edging bricks, making a mowing strip that made the edge even better defined. My husband and I also worked on making a better gravel base on which to set the birdbath.

Here's a view showing both garden areas. I plan to plant yellow annual flowers in the left part of the oval bed and in front of the birdbath. I hope this area will much easier to maintain from now on.

So it's good to finally have that planned improvement out of the way. Here's a few pictures of other things happening in my gardens:

The crabapples were blooming beautifully last week.

And they smelled wonderful too.

My fern-leaf peony was so beautiful in my Paradise Garden.

The tree peonies are now blooming too

Another lovely tree peony.

Our eastern redbud looked nice this week too.

I forgot to tie up the top of this Weeping Norway Spruce a few years ago, and it has flopped so badly (and the bottom was eaten off by rabbits two winters ago). I don't know if there's anything I can do about its strange shape at this point, but I noticed it looks like some fantastical creature now -- the "heffalumpagus," I think I'll call it....

It's been wonderful to enjoy the beautiful sunny days and all the flowering trees and shrubs that have been blooming recently. I hope the days (and especially the nights) warm up before too long -- although before we know it, it'll be 95° in the shade, so I guess I shouldn't be in too much of a hurry. The heat will certainly arrive.

Hope you've been enjoying pleasant days and nights in your own gardens. Thanks for reading! -Beth

Wisteria in bud, like little pine cones.