Third Year In My Garden

Coming into my third year.. I still don't feel that the yard is "mine". It still belongs to the previous owner, and perhaps, a part of it always well belong to her. Sometimes I wish I could meet her, or correspond with her, tell her how much I appreciate the work and time she put into the garden.

This spring I dug a pond.. with a little help from the kids.. oval shape and 2 1/2 ft deep. For the area I don't know if I could have made it any bigger or different.. size and location determined that for the most part. But what a wonderful addition to the yard. I can see it from my kitchen through the patio door.. and it is positioned right off of the back patio. I enjoy the water flow of the waterfall.. one thing I might want to rework at some point is the level of the pond... it is not level on all sides, so I cannot completely fill the pond on all sides to hide the liner.. but sometimes the pond consumes too much of my time and I don't get to the other areas of my yard.

I also put in a bog garden (with perforated liner) behind the pond so that I can put in marginal plants and bog plants. One concern is that a lot of high moisture loving plants also prefer shade.. which this area of the pond does not have.. so I have to watch what I plant in the area as they can become scorched. I planted my pond plants too early.. put them in and then got a cold night that set the plants back. My lily did not bloom, but I am hoping that this year it will (07). The other water plants came along nicely.. wind was an issue with the taller plants. About a month after I put in the pond I applied at Tagawa garden center, and got the job in ponds/ houseplants. YEAH!!! I have learned so much about ponding.

The rest of the summer I, again, put in a veggie garden, tried to plant later in the season so that I could harvest in the fall when the kids are home. Tried fall planting but didn't get it harvested. I have not had good success with my veggie garden. Disappointed. Watering consistently is a problem I have.. heat. As always I make a promise to do things differently "next year".

I laid flagstone in the corner of the yard with thyme between the stones. This is a nice seating area.. I want to put up a trellis for vines and plant more plants in the corner. (Next Year). In the heat of the day I was moving hot, heavy flagstone. It got to be a labor intensive job... still not quite finished.. need to fill in some areas between the flagstone and pick up a few small pieces to complete the area leading up to the pond. The thyme by the small stream grew in wonderfully. Planted some perennials in the raised bed. Still have things to work on this "next year". But I like how it is all coming together.

My roses had two wonderful bloom times this year. During the heat of the summer they slowed down on blooming. I finally feel like I am taking ownership of my yard. As I tend the yard and make it "mine". I love it more and more every year.

So many things I still want to do.. it will take time. But I love it.

My Third Year in MY Garden

Last summer, my third year, I finally feel that I was able to really get into the dirt of things. I drew up a rough draft of the yard, laying out the hardscapes of things, and slowly started to plot what plants are located where. As I was able to spend sometime with my garden I was able to find what all was out there. In the front yard I have lily of the valley, I have coneflowers and daisies. In the spring I have tulips and narcissus and hyacinth. Lilies and iris. Alpine strawberries and columbine. I am finding what is working and what needs more work. (Not that I have gotten anything done about the "more work" part, but I at least have made note of it).

Last spring I put a pond and bog garden in the back yard, next to the extended patio area. I put rock around the new raised flower bed in the back yard and laid a flagstone patio in the back corner. I attempted to plant plants, but found there was so much hardscaping to do that the planting was only a small part of the garden renovation. I removed the rotting wood around the rose gardens and replaced with rock.. it looks good.. not as rustic.

Last fall I planted garlic. Had planned to plant tulips, but the snow came before I was able to get them in the ground, so they are in the bottom of my fridge, hoping they make it through the summer in the fridge.

Second Year in my Garden

The second year in my new Garden I found myself wanting to devote more time to working in the garden and patching the bare spots and doing more than just quickie weeding frenzies, which is what the first year was all about. I wanted to "bond" with my garden and make it my own.. instead I felt like a caretaker of the garden.. tending the garden for the previous owner. I wanted to make it my own.

I have moved around many times in my life and almost every place that I have lived, I end up putting in a garden.. a veggie garden; flower gardens are a luxury and can only be put in after the essentials of the garden is taken care of first. This is the mentality of being raised by a parent/ grandparents of the depression era.. so every time I broke ground it was spent preparing and weeding and maintaining a veggie garden, who had time for the enjoyment of flower gardening?

As I spent another year in my new Garden, I realized the yard was already prepared. I had a veggie garden already dug and fenced in.. AND I had flower gardens throughout the yard. It dawned on me what a wonderful place I had taken possession of. The yard had SO MUCH going for it. I wanted to work it and make it mine.

The second year I again planted the veggie garden and tried to keep up with the weeds. And once again I was spending too much time on the river and at my boyfriend's instead of getting time in my garden. I was making notes, mental notes, of what all was in the garden.. the diversity and variety of the micro environments throughout the yard. So much potential. The summer came and went and I was only able to work to keep the weeds at bay and maintain the yard. I tried to put down sod in the backyard but with the dry weather it burned up and died. No such luck with the sod. My first year I put in a concrete patio area and realized it wasn't wide enough to accommodate a patio table/chair set, so this year I added bricks and extended the patio area into an "L" shape.

So I put away my garden tools and once again vowed to spend more time in the yard, next year.

First Year in my New Yard

In late summer of 2003 I found a home for my family. It had the right number of bedrooms, and with three kids, that's not easy to do without taking out a second mortgage before even getting the first one... I peeked into the backyard, shrugged and made the comment that it was a work-in-progress. The backyard had little impact, no grass/ weeds instead. What I didn't immediately notice were the shrubs and potential of the yard.

My first year of gardening was a year of discovery. I really didn't spend much time digging around in the yard. My then current relationship took up a lot of my time as we went rafting and spent time working on his yard and helping him with his needs over mine. I would take brief moments to dash over to my house and weed without really seeing what was planted. Because of the short amount of time that I had to work on my yard this first year, I felt overwhelmed instead of appreciative of what I was working with. I pruned the roses and tried to plant the veggie garden. Since I was gone at stretches of time and the weather was extremely dry things didn't go/ grow/ well at all.

I ended the summer with the promise that I would spend more time in my garden, "next season".

Springs Frustrations

Okay, I didn't plant my tulips that didn't make it into the ground last fall.. I am going to keep them in the fridge and hope they make it to through the summer so that I can plant them this fall. So far, so good.

Every other day we have been getting enough moisture to keep the ground wet and the air cool.. too cool and damp to get out and work the ground. Anytime that I have a day off it is either snowing or raining.. I can't get any yard work done!!!! All I can do is look at the work I wish I could be doing. I was able to tackle the front yard.. raked, fertilized, and reseeded. But then it snowed and got cold, so I don't know if the grass seed will germinate or if it is too cold. The fertilizer should be good however.

Last week I spent sometime demolishing my waterfall setup in the pond, put in a waterfall tank set up instead of just rocks.. but I didn't get it high enough over the pond for sound effects and looks, so I want to redo the redo I just did. I am going to put in a two stage waterfall area.. dig the waterfall tank higher and back about two/three feet, have the waterfall fall into a small water holding area that will then spill into the pond.. I need to pick up some liner and maybe some more rocks.. this will bite into my bog garden area.. but I can "live with that"... Tonight at work I am going to pick up some more pond liner and when I get a chance dig in for the revised waterfall set up.. hope this is the final revision. Cause I want to get the plants established around the pond this year.. plant some groundcover and plants.. and get some grass around the area, so it doesn't look so barren around the backyard.

Til the weather clears I guess I'll be blogging instead of bogging.

Spring has sprung

The snow has finally melted, seeping into the ground, with greenery bursting through with promises of flowers to come. I have been out a couple times now, doing spring cleaning and it is such a wonderful time to be out digging around the potential of the season to come. I enjoy the pleasure of the promise.

I am going to plant my tulips that didn't get planted and hope for the best. They have been in the fridge for the last twelve weeks, so they have recieved the consistent chilling that they need in order to bloom. So cross my fingers and hope. I am generating my list of seeds and plants.. and I know as I walk the aisles at the garden center I will also do impulsive choices, but thats the fun of it all.

I want to plant perennials, and when I buy, I am going to buy no less than three plants of each. And for annuals, I am going to fill the yard with plants. I should also consider seeds.. but I have only a marginal success rate with seeds.

Can't stop Planning

Maybe that's why I am wanting to get out to the garden, so I can stop coming up with new plans and more "work" for myself. As I look through books and see the multitude of ideas, I see all these things that I can incorporate in my garden/ yard.

SE CORNER:

Build an arbor in the corner that's at least two feet over the existing fence/ posts in triangular form with beams overhead. Move rocks and plant vines and flowers along the fence.. this will provide shade and privacy to the area.

Trim lower branches from the evergreen.. amend soil and plant shade plants under the evergreen.

Build a wall/ trellis privacy screen at the end of the patio. For privacy and shade. On the cement slab coming off from the kitchen install a wood deck/ platform.

The list goes on and on... I enjoy planning and hoping to make these plans a reality. But the longer it takes for spring and actual yardwork to arrive the more plans I keep adding to my list of things to do.

Kristi