Garden Timeline 2025

During 2025, we continued to make small improvements in garden areas, and to finish eliminating several areas that no longer worked.

New Picket Fence

In Fall 2025, we finally bit the bullet and replaced our rotting wood fence with a vinyl fence. One of the things I've really loved about this house since we bought it (in 2008, more than 18 years ago) was the white picket fence surrounding it. But it was totally rotten within a few years, so we replaced it in 2011 with a cedar picket fence, which every 2-3 years our family has spent a day or two laboriously painting. But still it too rotted: the pickets were breaking off when I touched them and even the posts were rotting out of the ground. Grr. 

I considered steel and aluminum fences, but they don't make flat pickets in those materials (at least here in the US), and composite still isn't very good according to reviews. So vinyl it had to be. 

The new fence looks so better than the rotting previous fence, and the better vinyl fences have improved quite a bit in the past decades, so maybe it will look good for a while. And we'll never have to paint it again!

But the fence installers displaced many of the paving stones inside the fence when removing the old posts, so my gardens were a wreck and needed to be fixed the following spring.

RIP Rainbow Border

I continued to work on eliminating my largest perennial border, which I originally named the Rainbow Border. I began removing plants from it in fall of 2023, and I thought I had taken out most of them, but in spring 2024 after everything came up, I was shocked that the border still looked completely full. :-)

So I vowed to remove the rest of plants in Fall 2024, but then I had some shoulder issues and could hardly do any work then. I was finally able to remove most of the rest of them in Spring 2025.

I moved many of the plants to the bed under our old windmill:

This didn't look like much yet.

In the fall, we seeded the Rainbow Border area with grass.

Seeded Grass

In Spring 2025, we tilled and seeded grass in the back part of the North Island and it grew in nicely. That bed used to have my collection of tree and intersectional Itoh peonies.

The grass was starting to grow in nicely in the part of the North Island that we eliminated. But I guess I missed moving one tree peony--I'll have to move that one this fall.

We also got rid of one of our oldest garden beds, which I called the Mint Circle. This bed existed when we bought our property, and because I planted mint there when we first moved here, which was impossible to get rid of, that's how the bed got its name. (It smelled pretty nice and was useful too, so I didn't really mind the mint.) 

I usually planted annual flowers in it, but it was never very great, so this spring we dug out the edging pavers, tilled it, and seeded it:

We tilled and seeded grass in the bed formerly known as the Mint Circle. 

At the last minute, I did dig out some of the mint and put it in a large pot on our patio, so we could enjoy mint juleps, etc. 

However, we probably will need to add more soil and re-seed the area formerly known as the Mint Circle again in the future, as there is a depression in the ground there which we didn't notice when the soil was fluffed up by the tiller. (I suspect that this bed was originally made when former property owners removed a tree in this spot. And then years of us pulling weeds removed a significant amount of soil.)

2026>>