>> Rick I was looking at that water Hole bed you made thinking something like a mimulus might grow there , Put a rock circle in the middle of the hole , fill it , a water plant bed pot ,
>> I wonder the same thing every time I see that picture of Rick's. Why aren't you doing water gardening extensively, Rick? You could grow outstanding water lotus, and all sorts of marginals in your low spots . . .
I want veggies and lots of bright blooms; would bog plants satisfy?
Also, our summers, or 3 months of most summers, are very dry. (Don;t tell anyone, or they'll all want to move here.) I could run a hose to keep the bog boggy, but if i have a sunny spot, I'd rather grow Brassicas or annual flowers. After that, I would like to get some salvias going, but the only perennial salvias I got started didn't survive a forced move out of one bed that a neighbor took back (the prior owner let me add a bed along our common sidewalk, but then she moved out and a crazy neighbor moved. She kicked my bed out, and cut down trees and a FLOWERING AZALEA! Now where my bed was with baby salvias and Lavatera, there is mud and weeds. Starving, ugly, stunted weeds. I took back all the amended soil I donated, too. So there!
My bed was not yet flamboyant, but the Lavatera would have bloomed in another week. And the salvia would have been cool in a few years. I had multiple species, one cultivar each, so I could have collected sees from each with no cross-pollination. There was some room for each species to spread out. I had enough varieties that I gave them code numbers. "Z" for Zinnia, "LOB" for Lobelia. "Lv" for Lavatera. Very few poppies came up, but they might have re-seeded.
She wanted the bed gone "instantly". Later I learned that she just seems to hate all living things. And LOVES making trouble.
(But the bed WAS on her side, so she was entitled to kick me out. I gave her cherry tomatoes while moving in - now I wish had sprayed them with the nastiest organo-phosphate insecticide ever made. Bon appetite!)
without my bed:
with my bed, getting established:
different perspectives:
