Late March hopes

A tiny crocus bloomed last week, open when the sun was shining -- which sadly hasn't happened again since then.

Greetings from the land of cloudy, cold days! After a few warm, sunny days earlier this month, the weather has been rainy, cold and/or windy (usually all three) nearly every day -- and the forecast for the next eight days looks no better. Worse still, it just now started snowing and we're predicted to get an inch and a half. :-(

A cold, overcast spring would get me down in any year, but in this month of social distancing, life would seem so much more cheery if it were sunny. Even if the temperature were unusually cold, some sunny days would make even just reading in my sunroom seem like a tropical vacation. But we gardeners know better than anyone that we don't get to choose our weather -- especially in springtime.

But we did have several sunny days earlier this month, and I was able to make the most of them: I have managed to get out a few times to start cutting back and raking out my garden beds. And I did even manage to get one small project done (see photos below). But because I am an avowed fair-weather gardener, all progress has since come to a halt and shows no promise of resuming any time soon. Maybe next weekend will be nicer....

A Project Completed:

The good news is that I did manage to get one small project done: fixing the edge of a border against my house. We built a library addition onto our house in 2011, and I made a border against the south wall of the addition. It's a great place for spring bulbs, south-facing with good drainage, so bulbs bloom earlier there than in many other parts of my gardens:

Here's a picture of the Addition Front Border a few years ago in April: the bulbs made a pretty good show there.

But the edging bricks that I laid back in 2012 had begun to sink down in one area to the left of the window, so grass was able to grow over the lowered bricks into the bed. For the past several years, I've had to dig out a lot of grass from this border every spring when I rake out the bed, and by autumn it's always grown back again. I finally decided to raise the level of the bricks.

Here's a photo of the area showing the extent to which the bricks had sunken down.

Grass invading! (And beautiful spring color.)

Last week, I decided to raise the edging bricks, but after I started to dig them out, I thought it might be even better to install a metal edging strip inside the brick edging as well, to more effectively keep the grass out. So I drove to our local improvement store and bought ten 8-foot steel edging strips, unloaded them at home, and installed everything.

This looks much better, and I hope it will keep the grass out. 

I installed the metal edging all the way along the edge of the lawn, against the bottom of the fence (inside of which is my Paradise Garden), and along the outside of the bricks outlining the end of my delphinium bed, which is part of my front border, shown at right. My delphinium bed was taken over by runner grass several years ago, so this will be a good improvement, I hope. 

I'll need to replace some of the soil that I repeatedly dug out from the Addition Front Border when I was removing the grass -- the soil level is now lower than it ought to be. But I'll be able to plant some more bulbs this fall, as well as other plants. Many of the old plants and bulbs were casualties of my war on grass over the past few years. With any luck, this area will now be easier to maintain and look better too.

It's good to get at least one project done before the rush of spring planting and other projects that always takes place in April.

I hope you have managed to spend some time outside in your own gardens, enjoying warm sunny days during this stressful time of self-isolating -- and, of course, that you and your families remain healthy. Best Regards, and thanks for reading! -Beth

Soon....

March is here!

Winter aconites (Eranthus hyemalis) are blooming -- the first flowers of the year!

Greetings! It's now finally March, which marks the beginning of meteorological spring (as opposed to astronomical spring, which begins March 21st or so -- it's on March 20th this year). But any sort of spring sounds good enough for Midwesterners after another winter.

Although I really can't complain -- this past winter has been pretty mild, as far as Iowa winters go.

We got two snows in October, which was unusually early and made me worry about the severity of the winter ahead. But the temperatures have not been nearly as cold as they often are: we got down to -7°F or so several times, but not much colder than that. (Compared to last year's particularly cold low of -27°F, this year has seemed like a balmy walk on a Florida beach!)

But now we're into March, which really does feel better -- especially since the snow is gone. Last weekend we enjoyed temps in the 50s and even up to around 60°F, and it was lovely to be able to walk around our garden areas again and look at things after the winter (and see all the work that should be done this month).

Here's a few shots of things in the first week of March:

We've been able to sit on the bench at right in the Paradise Garden already 2-3 times this winter on sunny warmer days, which has been very enjoyable. A few things need to be cut back and raked out before bulbs come up. And the paving stones at far right have settled down, so that soil from the bed next to the house keeps washing out over them when it rains. We'll need to re-lay that row of them so they're higher and slope away from the house, so that doesn't happen any more. But it won't be long until bulbs start coming up and it's time to plant a few cool-season annuals like pansies and snapdragons in this garden!

I never got around to pulling out all the dead annuals around our patio last fall, so that's pretty high on my list of things to do when we get a nice day. I also need to paint the posts of this new pergola we made two summers ago (they're treated lumber, so they needed to age a bit before painting them -- but they were damp during most of last year, which was exceptionally rainy, so I haven't gotten around to doing it yet). But I have plans for this area:

Another view of the same patio area. I'm planning to make a tropical garden around this area this year. I'll move the large mock orange shrub by the back left post (it no longer blooms, now that the pergola is shading it), as well as the reblooming lilac next to the back right post, and few other things too. Then I'll plant fast-growing tropical annuals as well as houseplants out for the summer around this area. It's hard to imagine a tropical garden here right now at the end of winter, but it will be fun to see how it works out by July and August, when we're experiencing tropical temperatures.

This is the sort of look that I'm aiming for around my patio:
foliage in shady areas, plus a few flowers in the sunnier areas.

Back to reality. My largest border (the border formerly known as the Rainbow Border, which I might just as well keep calling by that name) obviously needs to be cut back and raked out after winter. I've been working to improve the planting in this border for the past several years, and I'll continue to improve it this year.

The Rainbow Border looked better last year than it had before. Little by little....

I haven't posted since early November, but I've kept myself very busy over the winter finishing up my book, Iowa Gardens of the Past: Lost & Historic Gardens of Iowa, 1850-1980 (iowagardens.com and Facebook), which I hope to publish in early May. I can't be definite about the date, because I had it printed in China, and while it's done and has left the factory, the coronavirus has caused a snafu in the transpacific shipping schedules, and I have no idea if the 1,000 copies I ordered are on a ship yet or if they're still sitting in a container on the docks. Nothing to be done about it: Force Majeure and all that. They'll arrive when they arrive (before May, I hope...). And when they do arrive, I'll be pretty busy promoting and selling them for at least a couple of months.

On that note, if anyone is interested in receiving a free review copy, I'd love to send you one if you'll write a couple sentences about it on Amazon.com. Just drop me a note in the comments.

But I'm also planning to make time to do a few small projects and improvements in my gardens this year too. I've never opened my garden to the public before, and I'm thinking that I might try to do so next year (not this year). I'll try to get things in order this year, and then spruce things up with new paint, etc. next spring. Because I live in a rural area about 15 minutes from town, I'll try to find 2-3 other gardens in my part of the county to open on the same day, and make it an "Open Gardens" event to draw more visitors from town.

I'll need to do an assessment of the areas in my gardens and make a few improvements, and then I'll feel good about opening it to the public for the first time. I know that gardeners open their gardens all the time (and in fact I encourage gardeners in town to share their gardens for our local Open Gardens Weekend, of which I'm the chair, so I have no excuse not to do this myself), but I'm still a bit nerve-racked when thinking about opening my own gardens. I guess I need to live a bit more dangerously....

Anyway, I hope that spring is arriving pleasantly for you in your own gardens, and that many warm, sunny days are just around the corner for you. Thanks for reading! -Beth

These daffodils are up and they show that things are starting.