Gardening, anyone?
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Bulbs are in the fridge and sweet pea, larkspur, stock, snapdragon seeds, Icelandic poppies and ranunculuses arrived in the mail yesterday. I have today and tomorrow off and plan to start prepping beds. I'm 6 weeks out from exchange surgery so am going to have to be creative with shovel and soil bags. Supposedly I can plant all of these this fall and have bloom during the winter. My goal is to have something to cut from my garden year round. I'm down to roses (here when I got here) at this point. Next year I'm going to do two rounds of zinnias and cosmos because the year before last at my rental I started them later and had them till the first frost. This year they were spent by late August. I'm hoping to be able to use my Christmas bonus to buy more flowering bushes to fill out my back hedge some more. This spring I planted an early camelia, lilac, peony, two hydrangeas, flowering quince and princess flowering bush. I'm hoping to have a wall of flowers all the way around the back garden. I bought the place one year ago and then got this DX. Plans are moving slower than expected but its so nice to know I'm hopefully (God willing) going to be able to watch this garden mature over the next 20 years. The sooner I get the bigger stuff in the sooner it will establish itself. I plan to fill in the shady side with a scented white rhododendron, a late blooming camelia and possibly an azalea I don't like most of them. On the sunny part I plan to put in a Lantana, a geranium I rooted taken from a neighbor's yard (with permission) hibiscus, potato bush. and probably a few more roses. The fence could have some vines too but that's down the road. DH has said I can have some of his lawn to triple our vegetable area in the spring. Tomatoes and peppers all summer has inspired him to let go of a section. When we moved in he would hear no part of it. I had giant plans for the front with fruit trees and a full on rose garden but that's just going to have to go in another year from now. My great aunt Joan lived in London in a brown stone on the edge of Kensington Gardens. Her back gate opened up into the public garden and she would leave it open to show off hers. It was a typical English garden with a square of lawn, a flowering hedge around the three sides and Roman urns on each side of the steps onto the lawn. There were articles and even a book with her garden featured. I'm using some of the same flowers she used. She had a wild pet crow. I need one.
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Leaves, Leaves, and more Leaves.
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GMA- so pretty and very artistic too!
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I bought 3 large bags of tulips and daffodils, so we werr planting them yesterday. I am already looking forward to seeing them in the spring.
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Something hopeful about putting bulbs in the ground as the days are closing down.
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Still no frost yet
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Very nice. What is the green shrub in the background?
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rosemary?
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Yes, I have to large rosemary bushes in the background. They grow wild here too. I am getting ready to prune these back, they get huge every summer and have some lovely purple blooms spring and fall.
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Burning bush at the park.0 -
Teka, Yay for doing your bit to help butterflies. They need all the help they can get. I don't think they come this far north in the PNW.
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Another gardener who is getting better at not killing stuff. We recently planted a herb garden, but everything seems to be taking except the coriander (cilantro). It was growing well, then started flowering and dying. We've tried many times to get it going. Any tips?
We have huge gardenia shrubs and jasmine which I love!
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Sparrowhawk, It sounds like your cilantro is acting like an annual. Cutting off the flowers might make it last longer. Or just plant seeds in succession a few weeks apart. Sounds like you might somewhere in the south or California. We have gardenias and jasmine here but not this time of the year.
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This site is a healing balm to soul and body. I hope to post some meager attempts of trying to provide monarch habitat of milk weed here in coastal Texas.
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Thank you, Wrenn! I did cut off the flowers a while ago and I think it helped a bit but the plants didn't thrive for very long.
You are right, I do live in the south - in the Southern Hemisphere! It's time for gardenias and lavender mostly now, and our native flowers which are very hardy in the hot weather.
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Happy New Year! Big snow storm here today. Four inches in the valley (many more in the mountains) and looked over while shoveling the driveway and sidewalk areas to see my chili ristra snow covered, and quite pretty in front of the snow covered rosemary bushes.
Wishing you all a healthy new year!
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Best wishes for New Year 2019!
My desk sits in front of a window to my garden. Today, I glimpsed these flowers on the trellis. I stop often while I'm working at my desk to gaze out the window, and more often while I was doing taxes! What a treat to see roses in bloom in January! But who knows what climate change will bring. The winds have been so strong I thought it was March!
It was a good day to work in the garden today.
Best wishes to all as always,
Marilyn
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Sparrowhawk, you aren’t doing anything wrong with the cilantro, that is just how it grows. It bolts really fast. I’ve decided it just isn’t worth bothering with since it is so cheap at the store. Dill does the same thing for me
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Agree, Melissa. In my experience cilantro is kind of like lettuce. It grows great in early summer and then bolts in the hot weather.
You southerners and southern hemisphere peeps will have to keep us northerners going till spring. Oh and apparently Oregon is stillblooming! I got nothing to show except indoor plants.
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Twohobbies, daffodils in a couple of weeks, but nothing now. My sister gave me some anemone corms. I’ll bet they need to be planted now
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Daffodils are my beacon of spring. I grew up near Chicago but family in NE Oklahoma. My grandma had daffodills blooming in March when we would visit at spring break. Then when I lived in SC my daffodils bloomed first week of Feb which was so exciting and amazing to me to see winter over so early.
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I am growing my own cilantro here in S TX because at least I know it's organic! Also have a kitchen herb garden that includes basils, oreganos, chives, and Italian parsley. My lavender is in full bloom! Picked a cauliflower last week. Today transplanted tomato and pepper seedlings that came up from compost. Lettuce is just about ready to start harvesting. I love, love, love winter gardening here!
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wow Murfy that is great
So nice you can have your organics herbs even in winter. Congratulations it must be very rewarding
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Ranunculus and sweet peas are coming up. Hubby has allowed me to take over some of the lawn for more veggies, cutting a little bit of turf each day. He has to come out and stop me each day because I over do it.
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I love to hear about things popping up. New Mexico is having a real winter for a change with lots of rain and snow. Trust me, this is a good thing as we have been back in a drought and the snow pack is our water supply. What I do know too is that all this moisture is so good for my trees, shrubs, and other perennials in my gardens. I am looking forward to really awesome blooms.
I am going on a junket to Cali in a few weeks and will be looking to see some nice winter blooms out there. Pics to follow soon!
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My monarch caterpillars are working hard to get to the next stage of life. Kinda like us
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Beautiful! Very much like us!
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Hordes of these little squirrels dig up everything I plant or chew on it. This was a get well hanging pot of petunias. He wasn't content on pulling up the plants and dropping them on the patio. He chew up the plastic hangers until he and the pot hit the patio. 
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