Perennial Bed Progress

On April 25, I posted about working on my perennial bed, and I shared this shot of how things looked after I'd dug out all the matted grass and a lot of weeds:

Yesterday, on June 5, the same bed has come along quite well, and here's how it looked (ignore the plywood in the background - that's another project underway!)

I'll give you a little guided tour!  Along the front, in the first picture, you can see some lavender plants, which have now begun to put on new growth and are looking relatively good. There are some red tulips that are finishing.  To the right of the lavender, you'll see a new plant I put in yesterday.  It's a Heuchera "carnival watermelon" that has kind of pinkish-gold leaves.  

Here's a closer shot of the heuchera and surrounding plants.  I like the interesting colour pop and heuchera seems to do quite well for me.  To the left is a cranesbill geranium that wasn't yet up in April, and to the right is a perennial ornamental grass. The cranesbill has dark purply-blue flowers on it that should start showing up fairly soon.  There's a volunteer foxglove coming up just behind the heuchera, and then I've put in a couple of marigolds for summer colour. You can also see the jostaberry in the background, now that its leaves are out, whereas in April it was just twiggy bits!

Here you can see a closer shot of a daylily that is on the rear left side that was barely starting to come out of the ground in the first picture.  The climbing hydrangea on the trellis has now leafed out.  I planted a couple of new Echinacea called "Cheyenne Spirit." The tag showed a bold yellow, but I've since learned that this particular strain can have different flower colours including yellow, orange, cream, and purple.  I hope it is more in the yellow/orange range on the plants I bought because I'm trying to make this bed orange/yellow/red themed.  I'm really not at all fond of red and pink mixed together in one bed, so I prefer to keep my beds in the pink/purple/blue range or the orange/yellow/red range.  There's another blackcurrant on the back left, next to some yellow loosestrife.  I also planted (in the front right of this picture) a coreopsis called "Uptick" that is supposed to be a light yellow with a reddish centre.  If the Echinacea comes out in a colour that doesn't work for me, I'll move it elsewhere in the garden.

On the far left of the bed, I have a lovely geum called "Mrs. Bradshaw" that my mom shared from her garden.  It is already blooming well, and is in the right colour range for this bed.  Over time, it will get bigger and I should be able to divide it. To the right of that, I've planted two Rudbeckia "Toto Rustic" which as you can see, is a two-toned bloom in the yellow/rust colour range.  There is a coral-coloured poppy coming on well in the middle of the shot below, and I put a couple of small heuchera "Bressingham" for their nice mounding habit.  Again, you'll see a few more marigolds (orange and yellow) tucked in the edge of the bed. There is a bachelor's button plant that will bloom soon, but I don't mind the dark blue/purple colour with the orange/yellow flowers, so it can stay there.  There is some purple in the rear right but that's just ajuga (bugleweed) in the lawn.  I leave it for the bees.

Here's a close-up of the Rudbeckia. I thought it was rather pretty at the garden centre, so I couldn't help buying a couple to try.  They only grow 10 to 14 inches tall, so I put it near the front of the bed.

We'll see how things come along with time.  No doubt I'll move some things around or add things over time, but for now, I'm happy to see that it has a bit more organization and will hopefully give good pops of colour over the season.  The volunteer foxgloves will likely be pink, which isn't going to work in the colour theme, but some of mine are a soft apricot colour, so if the seeds came from one of those, I might get lucky and have one that does blossom in the right colour range.  

I'll try to do another update later in the season when things have filled out a bit more.  It will help me next year to look at these pictures and figure out what needs to move or change, and what worked well.

Perennial Bed Clean-up Effort

I have a few existing perennial beds in my yard that really need some TLC.  The last couple of years have been quite busy for me and I just haven't had the time to do them justice.  As a result, they have a lot of weeds and grasses in them and the existing ornamental plants get lost in the mess.  It's difficult to do the clean-up later in the season when things are all the more lush and mature, so I wanted to try to get at least one bed done this spring if I could.  The one I chose to tackle first is the middle-sized one, and it had a really bad case of grass and creeping jenny, which is a cute groundcover but is way too invasive for my liking.

Here's the matted grass and weeds that I started with.  It was dreadful, except for my poor little daffodil, in a sea of grass and mess.

I had to start somewhere, so I began in one little corner. You can see the buried tub where I put my mint so it doesn't take over the world.

The weather was really ideal for doing this work.  We'd had enough rain that the soil could be worked, but the sun was out for much of the weekend, and it was good to be out in the yard.  I saw this lovely little crab spider (not sure on species) scurrying away when I was digging.  So far, there aren't a lot of insects visiting.

The work was pretty daunting.  I used my heavy garden fork to lift all the soil in chunks, and then hand lifted it to pull the matted weedy layer off the top.  I shook out the soil from the root mass and then smoothed over the surface.  I used several carrying buckets to take all the root bundles to the compost heap.  My shoulders are pretty sore this evening, but it was a good 2 days work.  As I uncovered things, I found some good perennials that I left in place.  At times though, it seemed overwhelming.

But by the end of Sunday afternoon, the results were pretty clear.  I even lifted some of the edging rocks and cleaned all the moss off them.

I don't know how many times I went to the compost pile and back, but I know that my fitbit racked up way more steps than usual!  I feel that I now have more space to plant some new, interesting plants that will fill in some of the spaces.

I rescued this cute little Virginia ctenucha larva and popped it back into a leaf pile.  I won't see the adult moths for some months yet.

The plant at the back with the post at the base is a climbing white hydrangea.  On the other side of the trellis is a clematis.  There are some currant bushes in this bed - two blackcurrant, a red currant, and a jostaberry.  There are some tulips just coming in at the front.  There are several lavenders, a large clump of daylilies, two poppies, some yellow loosestrife (also really invasive), a couple of irises that have never bloomed, some pink and white phlox, and an echinops.  I think there might also be an ornamental grass clump. The purple wire chair-like thing accommodates a coir liner in which I usually plant some colourful annuals.

It doesn't look like much right now, but keep in mind that our snow has really only melted recently, so it's just the beginning of the season.  The daffodil is the only one up - the rest out front aren't open yet.  The crocuses have just finished.  I think it could do with some nice clumps of salvia, maybe some heuchera, and perhaps some echinacea or other low-maintenance perennials that will just get on with the business of growing.  I put a few flat rocks down through the bed so I can more easily access certain areas without having to compact the soil with each step. 

Ideally, I'll get some fertilizer in the next week or so to top-dress this bed, and then a few bags of mulch to put down so that hopefully the weeds won't get quite as rampant this year. I would use some of my compost but it needs more time to mature.  I'll have to keep an eye on the weeds and grasses but at least it's possible to see, now, what I've got in there.