Whew, what a couple of weeks. We went from very cool and very dry to warm and wet, which really got the gardens up and going, especially in the veg. The heat lovers, like sweet potatoes, tomatoes, peppers, and beans are putting on growth now, after a very lackluster start. Just starting to see blossom on the tomatoes and peppers, which is quite late compared to other summers.
Got a nice harvest of peas, but they came on late too, and I don't think it's worth keeping the vines in hopes of a second flush. I'll leave them for now, but I've already interplanted some left-over tomato plants I had hanging around. The black raspberries trained along the back fence of the veg did very well, but the birds ate most before I could get to them. That's ok though. I've got a house wren nesting in the decorative old teapot on a post in the center of the veg and for all the berries she ate, I'm sure she ate a lot more bugs. The black raspberries in the dedicated bed did not fruit nearly as well. I'm seriously considering just moving the plants to along the fence line and doing away with a dedicated bed. Will open up a lot more room for other veg.
The broccoli and cauliflower did very well this year. I got 6 very nice cauliflower and even more broc. The cauliflower wont' come back so I'm going to remove those plants, but I've left the broc and I've harvested more side shoots from them. I've got a younger crop of both coming along but not sure if they'll make heads before the heat really sits down on us.
I've been working on the new border under the old Apple Tree. I got the path cleared off (again) and I've got it mulched most of the way over to my neighbor's yard. Slowly cleaning up the beds on either side. Everything is newly planted there so it's not much to look at just now, but I'm pleased with how well everything came through the winter/spring drought. I'm hoping that by this time next year, that area will be very pretty.
Pot Corral is doing nicely. Again, everything got off to such a slow start, I'm only now seeing some canna flowers, and the banana is still pouting. The seed-stared coleus are very good; I tell myself that if I can start coleus from seed then there's no reason to not try starting petunias from seed this coming winter. Coleus seed is like dust, as is petunia seed, but I had no trouble with getting it to germinate, pricking out, etc.
The everlasting project of the Folly Wall Garden is still languishing. The honeysuckle arbor finally collapsed (did no damage), so I'm considering different ideas to replace it. That whole area is just one big struggle. I pulled out another enormous patch of Monster Grass and I'm waiting for it to resprout so I can spray the young growth with RoundUp. The lovely little Japanese holly that I planted there last fall and that did so well for so long suddenly gave up the ghost. I don't understand why; I kept it watered through the drought. I'll give it a few weeks and if I don't see any life, dig it out and examine the root ball. I just can't seem to get a handle on that whole garden up there. it just doesn't look "right" no matter what i do. I'm hoping that once those new grasses i planted last fall get their feet under them and put on some size it will start to come together.
Right now, the big job is the Major Summer Tidy. All the established borders/beds need a good going-over to deadhead and remove spent "stuff." Worked on the Rose Border this morning and it looks much better. I use a hoe to scrape clean the outermost 6-8 inches of the bed edge and it looks very nice. A lot easier than re-cutting the edge with a spade. Deadheading the roses made a major improvement and I'm hoping some of the shrub roses will put out a second flush. I need to remember to spray them this week, if we get a dry day.
This time of year, it seems like I do most of my gardening with secateurs. The established areas are so packed with flowers/shrubs there's not a whole lot of weeds and I've found that it's usually best to just snip down anything that won't tug out easily. Things like burdock or Canada thistle, I just cut off at ground level and if (usually, invariably) they come back, just keep cutting them down. I can dig out stuff like that in the fall, when the growing season is finished. It's been my experience that digging around and disturbing the soil in mid-summer just opens it up to drying out or else sprouting a whole new host of weed seeds. This holds for in the veg as well; if a weed comes out easily , then I pull it. If not, it gets snipped off right down to the ground. If you can get the blades just below the soil surface, it usually kills it anyways.
A few things were a good surprise: I took a chance on a discounted red flowered coneflower last fall and it actually survived and came back *yay*. I guess I really didn't expect it to survive the winter and it's being blocked by a towering mullein but it's there, thriving, and beautiful. Another surprise was that the blue hydrangea below the grape arbor is blooming like mad this summer for the first time, so apparently caging the bush and packing it with fallen leaves late last fall did the trick. Even though it seemed that a lot of it died right back it was enough to protect the stems and let them bloom. Will def do that again next year with this hydrangea and the several others I have (that I did not protect and are not blooming).
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