Garden Timeline 2019

2019

In 2019, I finally realized my dream to visit England and see some its most famous gardens. We were away for most of June, so I didn't plant much, afraid new plants might not survive without watering in our absence. 

But I did do a few changes and improvements in 2019:

1. Kitchen Garden Fence

My handyman, my kids and I finally got around to building a relatively inexpensive fence around our kitchen garden. The rabbits and deer have been getting worse each year, and this fence has really made the vegetable gardening that my husband does much easier and better. I don't know why we didn't do this years ago.  

2. New Bench Area in Paradise Garden

This spring, I tore out the "stairway to nowhere" that was left when we enclosed our front porch into a sunroom. I laid gravel and paving stones against the house and put a new bench there. Now this garden area has both a shaded place to sit during the hot days of summer (at left, under the pergola), and a sunny place to sit in spring and autumn (the new bench), when the sun feels good. I really enjoyed this spot during sunny autumn days this fall.

3. Downsized the Yellow Garden

This was the Yellow Garden in 2018. It didn't look bad when the daylilies and black-eyed Susans were blooming, but the large half near the house was always a mass of weeds. I tried planting tons of hostas in that shady area near the house, but that part of the garden was just too hard to manage.

I made the sunny part of the Yellow Garden into an island bed, separate from a foundation border next to the house. By October there was a new grass area between the two beds, and I'll install edging around the island bed. I think this will be much easier to take care of, and we'll still have the cheery yellow garden island to look out at.

4. North Island Changes

The North Island has a collection of flowering shrubs and small trees. Unfortunately, some of the trees were severely damaged by rabbits in Winter 2018, and some of the rhododendrons and other acid-preferring shrubs I planted in this area  haven't survived, despite my applications of soil acidifiers. We removed most of the shrubs and trees on the other side of the large tree.

The area on the far side of the large tree is now cleared, and we used the stepping stones removed from the Yellow Garden to make a couple of paths through this North Island.

I'll add more Japanese tree peonies and intersectional or Itoh peonies in this North Island, like these pictured this past May. They're expensive plants, so I'll probably only add one or two each year.

5. Pond Gardens

The Pond Gardens were a wonderful area for years, filled with pink roses, 'Bright Eyes' phlox and 'Sweetness' dianthus plants I started from seeds back in 2012 (they smelled so fragrant!). But runner grass kept encroaching into the beds, and they became impossible to maintain.

In 2018, I cleared the beds...

...installed steel edging around the outside of the beds...

I left the beds empty in 2018 and 2019, getting the remaining runner grass and weeds under control. In September 2019, I amended the poor soil in them by dumping six inches of leaf compost on top of them. In the spring I'll plant annual petunias and dahlias between the boxwoods and the roses. If the runner grass comes back, it will be easier to eradicate it if mostly annuals are planted here.

2020 >>