Flowers, Part 2

 And then there are deck flowers.  I haven't planted the pots with the new ones yet, but there are perennials.

The Oriental Lilies exploded the past few days.  From nothing...

To a few...

And more!

It will spectacular in a couple days.

And there is a volunteer in one deck pot from last year!  I will give it special attention!

And the lettuce/celery/pak choi trays are doing well outside now.  

I sure love Spring...

Flowers, Part 1

 Well, the blooming season has finally started!

The Stella D' Oros lilies started first...

I was amazed to see some Tithoniums blooming that I planted 2 years ago.  They are annuals, but described as "self-sowing".  Well, apparently they do!  I'm thrilled.  Self-sowing is as good as perennial.

This is something from the meadow garden I planted a few years ago.  Apparently they need a couple of years to bloom.  I don't know the name.  But they sure are a nice pure yellow!  And there are dozens of them.  I'll have to look through catalog to identify them.

This is actually some sort of weed.  Kind of pretty.  It doesn't seem to be a disease because they all look identical.  I'll allow them if they don't spread too much.

I brought variegated 'Snow-On-The-Mountain' from my parents home a couple of decades ago where it grew naturally.  They survive here in the hotter Mid-Atlantic area, but seem to convert to solid green leaves given the climate.  I am digging up the remaining variegated ones to transplant to shadier and cooler spots, but these do have nice May flowers.  

Yard And Garden

 Some pictures from the yard and garden...

The daylilies are from a week ago.  They are fading now.  But lovely while they last.

The Black-Eyed Susans are blooming.  It hasn't been raining much and they wilted briefly, but they are native and used to it.  They recovered quickly after just a 1/4" of rain the other day.

The Queen Anne's Lace is also a native and blooms through droughts.  I'm moving to native plants more and more.  With some exceptions...

I mowed the Spring Bulb area and plan to cover it to smother the weeds that have crept in.  Which won't bother the Daffodils and Tulips as they like being dry in Summer and Fall.  The stuff growing at the bottom are the Daylillies but there are weeds among them that I need to pull.

I lost control over this area.  Time for hedge trimmer and lopper work!

Always "something".  I got behind last year, and then there was the ladder fall in January, so I stayed behind.  I'm catching up, though.

The good news is that the Black Eyed Susans are spreading and I can take up many as transplants in Fall (the ones growing in the garden paths) and get the meadow bed re-established with them and some other self-sowing flowers in a cleared area.

The Daylilies

Individual pictures of them are great.  But they don't show the whole of the row.

Left half...

 Right half...

And the whole of it.

I'm going to stick a color label at the base of each plant.  Because they are large enough to want to be divided this Fall.  I never object to free plants, and lilies are very hardy.  I think they will make a nice border along the drainage easement (think "artificial creek along property line") because they grow thickly enough to smother weeds and tolerate almost any conditions.

Flower Friday

It has been a strange year for my Spring bulbs.  First, the warm weather encouraged the earliest daffodilsin the front near the house to emerge sooner than they should have.  Then a bizarre hailstorm knocked those earliest ones down and 3 nights in the low 20s finished the job.  The flowers bloomed, but only laying on the ground.  They don't show up very well that way.

But some of those sent up a 2nd wave of flowers, so there was something to look at, though thin.  Still, I have some mid daffodils in front, and the flowers are jusr emerging.    Even that is a bit confused this year.  The new bed in the backyard has 2 kinds also. One is early and one is late, but they are both blooming together now. 

Half of each of those were planted in Fall 2015 and I doubled each type last Fall.  New plantings tend to come up late the 1st year, so I have 4 groups this year.  So the established early ones bloomed and got knocked down.  The new early ones and the established later ones are blooming now, and the new later ones are just emerging.  Things should make more sense next Spring!

Meanwhile, in the good news department, the 6 patches of hyacinths I planted in Fall 2015 never even emerged last Spring, but I let them be hoping some would show up this year.  And they HAVE!  Not as many as I planted but some is better than none.

The Fall 2015 tulips bloomed well  last Spring, but the leaves look rather ratty for some reason.  I assumed they were dying young, but I noticed that they all have bud emerging and that is a good sign.  I can't recall if the leaves were up when the hail hit, but that would explain the leaf damage. 

The soil is not great in the bulb bed, so I plan to fertilize well this weekend and cover the entire bed in 3" of compost when the leaves die back naturally.  I think I will cover it then in landscaping cloth to kill the weeds.  A year of the compost nutrients leaching into the soil should help a lot.  Here is the entire bed.  You can see the daffodils easily; the tulips and hyacinths are in clumps (18 of tulips and 6 of hyacinths).

 I would like more tulips and hyacinths, but you have to bury them in wire cages to protect them from the voles around here and that is a LOT of work digging large deep square holes.  I may just add a lot more daffodils between the cages.  I have an auger that fits in my electric drill and that makes it really easy to plant daffodils.  Drill a dozen holes, put daff bulbs in them, shove soil back over.  Voles don't bother daffodils!

The bottom edge of the bed has a double row of various daylilies.  As they mature, I'll divide and interplant among them.  A 30x3' thick band should look nice.

Every year things will get a bit better!