What's going on in your garden today?

Since the sun finally came out I took a walk around, picked a few daffodils, and was happy to see a few honeybees already at work. My Egyptian onions are up, but I have a lot of cleanup to do in the beds. Spring is not here soon enough for me!

Love my Cherry trees this time of year!

I NEED Weeping Cherries! So gorgeous! The Lexington Cemetery is an arboretum with koi ponds, ducks and geese, formal plantings, and loads of blooming trees and shrubs, and they have some of the roadways lined with large, old weeping cherries. What a sight to drive through those tunnels of pink blooms!

I dug about a million dandelions out of my salsa bed yesterday, and am going to finish it up today. Its the first bed I've really attacked this spring, seeing it looking so good is great incentive to move forward and get em all done! I have to make myself stay focused and systematic about it, I'll see something sprouting that reminds me of something somewhere else, then gotta go check it out, find something else, get distracted, start weeding another bed, forget to go back to where I started, LOL. So the system is Salsa bed, then Sky garden, then pink bed, and on and on...

sounds familiar. It's impossible to stay on track with so many things to do!

In spring its so easy to get pulled away from a task. While weeding today I found some Epimedium sprouting, then just had to got check out the others! I'm proud to say that happened after finishing the Salsa bed and the first bed of the Sky garden, LOL.

So many huge lily noses are poking through the ground now- some are bound to be huge this year! I'm so glad I started with the worst bed first. Its such a bear because of clay and rocks there. The soil was great, till we had some septic work done and the soil was turned upside down, leaving the clay subsoil and rocks on top. Thankfully plants still grow well there, I suppose the roots can reach the good stuff.

After finishing that, the other beds seem like a breeze!

As much as I fuss about our clay here, I've been told it is good because it retains moisture and holds nutrients. That certainly seems to be true. As long as you mix in enough soil conditioner that it doesn't harden and crack in the summer, the plants are happy, happy, happy with this soil. (my back, not so much...)

Its very true Kelly, clay also has a high CEC (cation exchange capacity), which allows it to hold nutrients in the soil. The soil here is a clay loam- very nice, just enough clay to hold moisture and nutrients well, but dark and humusy.

Nice! Ours is a beautiful orange/red color. Makes a huge bright mess every time I dig some up that hasn't been amended and it ends up scattered on top of the nice mulch ;-)

Hey, I just stumbled upon this today. I didn't know there was a Cottage Garden Cubit until right now! Glad to find it. Cottage gardening is deffinately my style, there is very little lawn left here as I just have continued to add and expand gardenbeds year after year.

I also like a very packed full jumbled up look which is very cottage garden. I grow veggies, mostly tomatoes now although I used to grow lots more annual edibles. But I also have lots of small fruit shrubs like currant, gooseberry, really dwarf cherry trees, serviceberry, blackberries and lots and lots of blueberry shrubs. Then I have bird attracting shrubs for the backyard songbirds like crabapples, shrub dogwoods, viburnums and more.

Add the butterfly and hummingbird attracting vines and flowers, combine with things that just have pretty flowers, such as roses, daylilies, iris and lilies and its very cottage garden around here.

Actually -- there are TWO CG forums... the other cubit is by the British Neil.

yesterday was a busy day... I came in exhausted, thinking it was about 4:30, but it was only 3pm.

I cleaned up the north bed [hostas] ... did my "slug pre-emergent" ... pulled some ferns [have WAY too any of those]
moved on to the east bed... not much to do that. Cut back my huge jackmanii clematis to where i saw growth.... and I have decided to cut it back in the Fall instead of Spring as it makes such a mess and harder to clean up when all dead and crunchy.

Put a small fence around a small 'cottagy' bed ... in hopes of keeping the neighbors dog from peeing there.... I did notice that 2 of my Purple Knockout Salvias did not survive ... as that is where he pees ... I'm just about reading to get a huge water cannon to shoot at him when he's out there.

after that... i headed way out back to deal with some weeds, then on to a newer bed, where i have my Black Knight Butterfly Bush... and as i'm digging and breaking up the soil to get the weeds out... i can hear Karen asking me why I just dont lasagna garden. [it's really good soil back there, just weedy]

I"ll be heading aback out there today... i was hoping my kid - who refuses to get a job, would be home today as i was gonna put him to work digging and turning soil in a bed that has no perennials... but it looks like he's gonna be gone for the day.

this image isn't the best as it's 2 yrs old... but this is the general area, plus to the left .. but it pretty much looks the same... the BF bush would be in the middle of this image... I'll take the camera out today.

Terese, I've done a sort of modified version of lasagna gardening on areas with good soil by just laying on cardboard and mulching. You'll probably need to plant things there before that method would work for that bed, but something to keep in mind for the future. It takes a couple of months or so to kill the grass off, but its amazing how friable the soil is after attracting all those worms.

I've been making good use of the warm weather too, lots of weeding and clean up under way. It's getting pretty out there!

I loved being able to see the purple and pink hyacinths peeking behind the daffodils in this shot. Kinda fuzzy, but it looks very Easter-ish to me!

Here is an idea I had yesterday. I call it my two pot mini garden. I bought nasturtum plants and was planning on putting them in that big pot I have on the bottom. I wanted them to cascade down the sides. But then I suddenly got the idea I could make it all taller and have more going on if I put another smaller pot into and on top of the first. This way I have room around the lip in pot one to put some of the plants. The rest went up into the top pot. Now they will trail down the sides as they grow.

Oooo! Pics please as they take over.

Will post pictures as they start to bloom. I love nasturtums, I plant some every year.

That's a great idea, Rita.

Love all the cottage garden pictures!

Just found this cubit and joined. Thanks, Neal, for creating the forum. I'll check in as often as I can on breaks and after work!

Welcome, Angie! Glad you found us!

Yesterday's blooms included my first daylily, Sure Show: