LysmachiaMoon's blog: Late summer tidy; very dry

What we need is a good soaking "system rain," where a weather system moves in, parks itself for a few days, and rains. We get "passing showers" and about 10 days ago we got a short downpour, but it's not enough and I think the downpour mostly runs off. Everything is looking pretty tired and wilted. I'm not watering most things, but I am spot watering some shrubs. I'm going to try bucketing some water into the Stumpery simply because I think I neglect that area and it needs some TLC. It's also targeted for a good mulching; next truckload I bring in will go there.

I'm starting the Big Tidy, removing a lot of spent flowers and yellowing foliage, cleaning up the edges of beds and borders. Some areas look pretty bad but that's because I wanted to let a few things go thru their full life cycle and set seed. But tomorrow I'm taking out the finished fleabanes, mullein, rocket, poppies, etc because I can't bear to look at that brown anymore.

I worked for several hours in Jungle Cliff Garden that runs down along the deck steps. The Tradescantia have really colonized the lower part of that garden and although they look great early in the summer, they do not die gracefully. The whole clump flattens out, big fleshy stems with brown dead seed heads laying all over everything. I got them all cut back right to the ground, gave them a watering, then mulched them. In a couple weeks, they will send up fresh leaves and look ok til frost. I'm going to divide some of the bigger clumps and move them into the Tropical Garden up on the hill. I want to move only the hot pink colored tradescantia up there, not the blues and mauves.

Spent the day in Winchester, Virginia, at the Museum of the Shenandoah Valley. The museum is very interesting, and the gardens around it are big and beautiful. I believe most of the gardens were laid out in the 18th century (or at any rate they were designed to look so), and it's about as close to an "English garden" as we can get in this climate. Most things were a bit past their best--the place must be spectacular in May/June with crabapples and roses everywhere-- but it was still beautiful and I got a lot of ideas for plant combinations that I'd like to try. One was lamb's ear (Stachys) with a low-growing deep rose colored geranium (Geranium spp., not Pelargonium).

I'm also now willing to give Lantana a try. The greenhouses and big box stores around here sell a lot of it as a perennial, and most of it ends up on the clearance rack because most people know it won't last our winters (zone 6). But they used it in big pots and the variety was this absolutely lovely pink/yellow variety and I fell in love. Definitely something for the Pot Corral next year.

Speaking of the Pot Corral, I got two huge terracotta colored plastic pots at Ollie's discount outlet for only $10 each and then snagged another one at Goodwill for $5. The goodwill find has a damaged bottom, but that's ok, because I am probably going to cut the bottom out entirely and make what Bunny Guinness calls a "baseless pot." So next year the Pot Corral will be even bigger. I'd like to put some of my hostas into pots in the Pot Corral too. I've got a potted hosta in the front that has been growing happily for 3 years now.
One mistake I made was having several of the big pots with a single big plant in them. It look great of course with the big boston ferns, but the banana, the couple of cannas, and the salvia Hot Lips need "something" to fill in. I think I'll pop some trailing ornamental sweet potato plants into these pots to give them a bit more interest. The other mistake was not painting the window boxes that I set down along the front of the Pot Corral and filled with my seed-started Coleus. I'll have to remember to paint them black for next year. They are an odd beige color that doesn't do anything for the plants.

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Put up 5 quarts of beans yesterday. Tomorrow I'm hoping to do a few quarts of saurkraut and dig out the rest of my carrots and put them in jars too. And of course because this is now moving into another of the busy times in the garden, I'm suddenly looking at a HUGE editing project that will take me to the end of the month. Ah well, more money, more plants!
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Update on the rescued kitten: She's doing very well, they've named her Hazel, and she is at least able to see dark and light because she's running around her special room without bumping into anything. I was holding her the other day, wiping off her face and my friend asked me to take a look at her ears (the kitten's, not my friend's!). I pulled out this enormous plug of hard gunk from her right ear, like a cork coming out of bottle. She sat up straight, with this expression like "WOW! I can hear!"

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