Blooming Friday ~ Plans for the New Year

The garden is one long ongoing project, which is a lot of the fun of it.

Below is a view of the old house site and the path cleared for the house move. Now trees that were in the middle of the woods are at the edge and they look somewhat scraggly. There are some things there which will fill in, like wild blueberries and volunteer wax myrtles, but I'm also adding seedling hawthorn, dogwood, swamp cyrilla, American silverbell and redbuds, trees that typically max out at or under 20 feet. Some of the young trees are already in but I have more to add.

November '09

Looking into the woods from the backyard you can see the need for an understory and softer edge.

June '08

Peeking around from the back of the house is the opposite view from the first picture.

August '08

I have some Buddleia here -- B. lindleyana,B. davidii 'Petit Indigo', 'Royal Red', and 'Potter's Purple'.

Also a prized Gardenia from DH's grandmother's garden, started from a cutting.

I'm not sure how much more I will add to this area, since it's next to where we lead the horses up when the horses are in the paddock behind the house at night. Probably Caryopteris and some grasses ~ Blue Love Grass, Muhlenbergia ~ at the end closest to the paddock.

Looking towards the woods from the front sidewalk and the young Vitex in front of the Buddleias.

June '09

April '08

The garden would benefit from a better backdrop.

I would love to add native Crabapples next to the woods, if I can get any to grow from seed. I buried a dozen fruits from the tree in our floodway field in a compost pile in autumn '09 and nothing came up last year. Hopefully 2 years will do the trick. The native Crabapples are beautiful and common in lowlands around here.

Starting again from where the first picture was taken and continuing down the road that runs between the horse pastures and continues down to the creek ~

as you can see from this picture ditches line the road. There is a total of 2400' of ditch -- not put there by us, either. They're not even very useful, since they run counter to water flow through the farm. I looked into the price of a tractor implement that could mow ditches and was gobsmacked by the price. The plan was then to mow the ditches once a year to keep down the woody stuff, and grow Bidens there. A few years ago there was a very impressive display but dry conditions -- and most importantly, probably, mowing too late, after the seedlings were up -- erased most of those. So it's time to renew them again.

A few came up last year, less than I was hoping for because of the very dry April/May that we had. So I'll put down more Bidens seeds and add more Willowleaf Aster (Aster 'Miss Bessie') this winter.

Looking back up the road, as if headed back to the house ~

The green is nice but I'm really going for this (lower maintenance) effect:

September '08

The overwintering birds love Bidens.

So these are some of the projects I plan to work on this year. Thank you to Katarina at roses and stuff for hosting Blooming Friday.