This is the planning post for What’s Blooming. The ideas that we are mulling over — or that should be I am mulling over. I make all the garden decisions LOL. John helps construct stuff. He still has no interest in actual gardening, but at least I can get him to help dig stumps and make pathways.  I know he enjoys looking the gardens and appreciates the hard work that goes into them. These pictures coming up kind of show the scope of work that still needs to be done around here. 

Anyhoo, we got the bushes cut down in the front bed. Did I say it turns out there were only 2? They were so spread out. That’s good because there are only 2 stumps to dig up, but they are really big. We may have to dig down and cut them off below the soil level if they don’t come up.

The plan is to have the path come around the front of this bed like on the other side:

I just plopped rocks down to get an idea of the look. We  probably have enough slate to curve all the way around to the side, which we didn’t think was going to happen. The other option is to put in a little slate path to a sitting area for a bistro set:

That T-rex head thing is supposed to be the path and sitting area. I have Zero drawing skills. I bet if I tried to draw a T-rex, it wouldn’t look as good as that. 

I am still undecided about keeping the rhododendrens.

There were probably 4 or so here with a couple stumps and some very old growth. I whacked one way down and was hoping it would put on new growth last year, but it didn’t. So it’s unlikely rejuvenation pruning will work on these. The stems are so woody and thick that new  bud growth probably won’t happen. The flowers are so pretty and the bees love it, so I might wait until after they flower to take them out, or I might try moving them to the back and see if I can’t resurrect them.  They just don’t look very good.

My tulips are popping up everywhere now:

I haven’t cleaned up much of the old growth from last year yet since we are supposed to get more cold weather. I left the straw on my roses and the tender aliums to give them a little more protected time. I’ll pull that off in a couple weeks.

The water feature we are looking at will go in the back of the house off the patio. This bed is a wreck, even after I got the majority of plants out of it and broken glass  – and those pieces of wood buried in there. I tell you, the state of this house when we bought it makes me so angry sometimes.

We are going to use that slope to create a tiered pondless waterfall and then have plants around it We thought about having a pond, but I don’t want pond maintenance  and also for safety in case anybody’s kid or pet wandered back there.  With the pondless, the water is in a resevoir that is covered up, but the water can drain through the surface back to the reservoir. It disappears like magic!

Here are my rock piles to choose from to build it:

That would have cost a lot of money to buy all that rock – and there is more along the fence I could dig up if I wanted.   Notice that I have a pallet for a planter project, too. Too many projects!

Debby posted about her beautiful garden today and we have a similar idea. I also have plans for a fairy garden right at the edge of the patio. Can’t you picture a little door on this tree with some tiny things around it?

The patio starts right below this picture, so it’s perfect for viewing.

Here’s is something else we tried that actually worked! I have a squirrel buster feeder, which is great, but I can’t put large seeds in it. We decided to try a squirrel baffle on a pole with another feeder:

It works! I wasn’t sure it would, but they cannot seem to get on the baffle. It tips them off no matter how hard they try – and kind of funny to watch. You just need it far enough away from things so they can’t leap onto it. The other point is that the pole needs to be just a pole without a foot at the bottom or you can’t slide the baffle on it (if that makes sense). I need to get more of these. There was a cardinal pair feeding at the feeders today. I’m sure it’s the same pair from last year since they over winter. They had babies last year and brought the little ones into our yard, which was fun to watch – although they would not shut up. 

Anyway, as you can see – there is a ton of work to be done here at Radiance Manor. I am a little embarrassed showing all these photos that look like a trash house, but there you go.

On a plant note, I see that at least a few of my lupines survived the winter!

I really hope these bloom. So much is still dormant in the gardens. At least I know something made it 😀

I am so excited — so excited, look what I spied today!!!

I can’t believe the tulips are poking up already. Those didn’t show up until April last year.  I am over the moon about that!  I guess it doesn’t take much to make me happy 😀 Now to impatiently run outside every day and see how big they are getting.

On to some more things that will be arriving for the garden in a couple months:

More foxglove. I can’t resist a free shipping and 50% discount sale. These companies know what they’re doing in January, I tell you.

It a mixed bunch, so I don’t know what colors will be coming, which is kind of fun. I like surprises.

I am trying this plant again – torch lily, aka red hot poker. A name John finds the need to make jokes about for some reason…

I tried these before a few years ago and they didn’t make it. The torch lilies are normally to zone 6, but there is one variety that is supposed to be hardy to 5 (which is our zone). So, I’m trying it again.

This is a plant that I was going to grow from seed, but then it was on sale for not much more than a packet of seeds would be. Normally I would never get an annual by mail, but there is always a first time for everything, right?

Purple passion flower. It’s a vine and I love the look. These are all from Michigan Bulb Company. They have kind of mixed reviews online, so I don’t know what to expect with these.

We have 2 big outdoor projects planned for next year. One is the water feature in the back bed next to the house. We are going to use all of those rocks I dug up to make a pondless waterfall of sorts. 

The design is still in the thought process. The other project is the complete rennovation of the front bed on the other side of the house. Last year was working on the left side of the house, this year is the right wild and wooly side:

All of those shrubs are coming out. They are really overgrown and I hate them. I think there are 3 or 4 bushes in that pile.  I am hoping to keep the rhododendrons on the left there, but I think they might be too old and woody. I pruned one of them way down and will see if it comes back. If it does, then I will prune the other. If it doesn’t I will take these down.

We will be doing the slate walkway along the front of this bed just like on the other side and putting my bench in there to be able to sit out front. 

We can’t do much just yet as the ground is still too wet and soggy to be doing much, but I have an itchy trigger finger LOL

It’s cold right now, but we are supposed to have temps reaching almost 60 next week!! Plus we can see the ground because the snow is pretty much all melted. That makes me want to talk gardening, so I will do that here. John’s eyes glaze over a lot when I’m talking about the garden  😆  At least he can name some plants now, which is a start.

I am making plans for the gardens — like I haven’t been doing that all winter, right?  I did a lot of plant shopping in January at the 50% ordering sale from various vendors. Good thing I did that before all the medical bills came or I wouldn’t be ordering anything now  🙄 

Some of what is coming include an Annabelle hydrangea:

I got this because it is cold hardy to zone 4. It will grow to 5 feet or a little more, but I got a small baby one for cost reasons.

These are from American Meadows (I’m using their pictures). That’s a new company for me. I got some iris rhizomes from them last fall and decided to order again.

One of my goals with my garden is to be pollinator and bird friendly. On the bike paths, we see a lot of Joe Pye Weed and it is a butterfly magnet. However, it grows 6 feet tall and that’s just too big for my garden. I was really excited to see they have come out with a baby Joe!  And it was 50% off, so I about punched a hole in the keyboard getting that into my cart.

This will only get 2-3 feet tall, so a good size for a backyard garden.

I’m also in love with floxgloves. I had a couple last year and  Debby sent me some pretty white ones. American Meadows had one on sale that I probably bought more for the name: Candy Mountain.

Remember that song from O Brother Where Art Thou?

Oh, I’m bound to go where there ain’t no snow
Where the rain don’t fall and the wind don’t blow
In the Big Rock Candy Mountains

So yeah, I’ll be singing that when I’m working in the garden. 

American Meadows has a sale going on now. It’s not 50%, but discounted at any rate. (Do not purchase anything, Lori)

I’ll talk about the other orders in the future. It will be like Christmas come May!

The growing season is just about done around here.  We are getting freezing temps this weekend, which will toast pretty much anything left. 

It’s still good for planting perennials, though.  I couldn’t resist another end-of-season sale from Hosta’s Direct on Heuchera and got 5 more baby plants for $3.95 each!

I contacted them today about planting with the freeze coming and they suggested waiting until Monday when the temps will be back in the 30s overnight. 

One last globe thistle is blooming now:

The hydrangea has totally turned pink now from white:

It’s perfect for today’s pink picture!

There are a few stray blooms on the butterfly bush as well.

More buds on the rose bushes, too.  I am going to cover this and hope it survives the freeze. This is the Enchanted Evening.

Then there is the cardinal flower:

I really hope I can protect the foxglove as well. It has a large spike that is only about half open right now.

I love the purple speckled throats on these blooms, don’t you?

The Fair Bianca still has oodles of flowers and buds on it:

I’ll be covering that up as well.  I can bring the potted mums into the garage overnight, so those will be okay.  Not sure about the black-eyed Susan, though:

Last gasp of the snapdragons as well:

Still a lot going on in the garden, actually. I need to neaten up the fall display this weekend once the rain passes through.

We have our carving pumpkins! Gotta get ready for the carving party 😀  Not sure if biking will happen or not this weekend. Rainy Saturday and pretty cold Sunday. Not to mention we have a lot of projects underway… again.

I still have blooms!  And not just fall blooms, either. I had to sneak outside during a break in the rain to get some photos, so everything is going to be wet!

The Fair Bianca has more blooms on it now than it did in June when I first got it. This rose smells amazing, too. It meets all criteria for me in a rose: reblooming, fragrant, hardy, disease resistant. Guess that is why it is here in my garden…

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The moon flower has more buds on it.  We had a really, really cold night that got into the 30s last week and it nipped a lot of mature buds, but some of the tiny ones survived and now are ready to open.

I like the mature buds as much as the open flowers!

Debby had sent me some foxgloves and I also had some from Bluestone that I planted. I was expecting them to flower probably next year, but I looked out the other day and saw a spike growing!

This is called Pam’s Choice Split. I am excited about the blooms because that means seeds and more flowers for next year! Hooray for free!

I need to get in the bed when it is drier to get more photos of this. My pantlegs got all wet from brushing against stuff.  The things I do for this blog.

Snapdragon:

My mums are looking good for fall:

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I also got some kale, which I have in small pots:

Not a huge fan of the kale, decorative or eating 🙂  It does have nice color in the fall, though, and it lasts into frost.  And it does have pink in it for the pink picture!

The front garden is fairly bursting with unorganized color and I love it.

It wasn’t until later that I noticed one of my mum pots had fallen off the hay bales. Can you spot it?

We will have a typical fall weekend around here. There are lots of festivals around and I will be on the hunt for some fall color with my camera!

It’s getting near the end of the what’s blooming posts.  That’s a little sad. There are still some things happening, though, including the last flush of rose blooms.  This is the enchanted evening:

This will be today’s pink picture as well.  Please click here to support free mammograms!

I am playing around with focus here:

Fair Bianca:

We have the front yard set up for fall now:

We got a white pumpkin. I have always wanted to get one to decorate with, so I did this year!

Mums:

The moon flowers keep sending out blooms.

They really are so lovely:

I am trying a photo optimizer to hopefully let photos load quicker. They don’t need to be as huge as they come off my camera to show on the internet, so I am going to try this out.

Not much fall color on the trees yet. We were hoping there would be more to show John’s folks while they are here, so we might go into the Adirondacks this weekend and see if there is more color.

It’s time to starting turning the garden into fall.  Cleaning out the tired annuals, planting bulbs and fall perennials. 

The bed looks a little empty without the tall annuals:

The new drill bit works pretty well for planting.  I did 30 bulbs in 30 minutes.  It took me a few minutes to get the hang of it.

I found it easier to pull the drill in and out a few times to get the dirt out. Also, if you rotate the drill around a little, you can make the hole wider, which is good for some of the bigger bulbs.  You do have to make sure you don’t have roots in there or they catch on the drill. I was going to plant bulbs on the side of the house where we haven’t turned the bed over yet and there were too many roots in the ground to make holes. All in all, this certainly is helping. I think having the soil a bit more moist would help as well.

My agastache is still blooming:

The agastache have really been workhorses in the garden. Long blooming and they just always look good. I haven’t needed to deadhead them or do anything other than water them.

I planted a baby calycanthus in the spring that looked like this:

Now is like this:

It sent out 2 really long branches. I have a question in to Bluestone about whether I should prune those back to match the shorter, smaller growth or see if the other branches will catch up. It is supposed to be a shrub at some point.  It’s such a young plant that I am not quite sure what to do with it.

I have another flush of blooms happening on the Fair Bianca:

There are a ton of buds on this, too.  I love that late season flush of rose blooms!

There is a bloom on the Enchanted Evening as well, with more buds popping.

My snapdragons are just piles of greenery with some stems sticking out. Lesson learned that I need to stake these tall ones and stake them early.

The globe thistles sent out some more blooms. Quite late, too, although I certainly don’t mind!

This weekend is dragging out some fall stuff for decorating. I took a break from work today and went shopping for some base decorations.  I got a couple hay bales and some 2 bushel baskets:

John and I need to do some planning and stuff on how to decorate – then implement. John maybe not so willingly pulled into that LOL!

We should have good weather for long riding this weekend as well!

I have a couple new blooms to show this week!  Nothing like late bloomers (see what I did there?)

I still am stuck on close up shots of the garden. Looks like a Daddy Longlegs on the coneflower.

Did you know that DLL is not really a spider?  I saw some science show the other day that said that.

Off to the back yard. This is the back patio work in progress. The middle windows are the dining room that overlook the back. From the front of the house, that is the ground level, but we have the walkout basement.

To the right of that tree is the in-progress shade bed.  This was one of my plants I just put in there. Solomon Seal:

The hydrangea flowers are starting to turn pink now.

Some of the blooms are amazingly massive and weight down the whole branch.

That’s one bloom!

So, I planted 3 types of flowers by seed this year. I did french marigolds, moonflowers and teddybear sunflowers.  Two of those are just blooming now.  Here are the teddybears:

I know they are supposed to be a dwarf sunflower, but these are tiny!  Not sure what happened with them. They don’t look like the picture on the seed package.

Autumn Joy sedum, now in color.

Cardinal flower:

This one kind of glows in the evening light. It’s very pretty.

I also have what I believe is some kind of bittersweet maybe:

I left this up. It can be kind of invasive, and actually this is pulling heavily on the shrub that it is intwined in, so I will probably remove it.

Out front I am just about ready to pull the cosmos and the remaining cleome.  I think I might get some hay bales and put pumpkins out or something to fill the space.  The cosmos have a few blooms left and a bunch of new seedlings, actually. I am going to leave those and see how big they get before frost.  Anyway, a birdie must have dropped a seed here because a little wild sunflower popped up.

I was beginning to think my moonflowers were never going to bloom this year and I walked out the other day and boom – I saw a huge bloom!

There are a lot more buds, too, which look pretty neat:

Moonflowers open up at dusk and close in the morning sun. They are like the opposite of  morning glories.  The blooms are very fragrant – and the plant is poisonous, so don’t eat it.

I’m glad to finally get some blooms on these. I do seem to have trouble growing plants from seed.  I might invest in a grow light to do more annuals indoors this winter and start them earlier.

We hope to see more balloons this weekend and go on a hike. The weather should be pretty nice to be outside.  It’s just about my favorite time of year!