The Garden Worm blog Digging up the best dirt on gardening!

August 30, 2014

Best of summer 2014

Filed under: Birdwatching,Creatures,Flowers,Grasses,Our gardens,Summer — Judy @ 3:47 pm

A photo essay of some wonderful plants this summer.

The first one is of my ‘fried egg’ peony – a single type of herbaceous peony. The lighting sort of makes it look like a Georgia O’Keeffe painting, doesn’t it?

White peony

An unknown variety of clematis with huge purple blue flowers. Could be a ‘Jackmanii’ with the reddish ribs, but the anthers are also red. Similar to ‘Ramona’ but darker.

Purple clematis

This is Liatris ‘Kobold’ with mauve flowers blooming from the top down. Bees love it!

Liatris 'Kobold'

The daylilies were floriferous this year. The red one is ‘Chicago Apache’ and the dusky pink one is ‘Catherine Woodbury.’

Hemerocallis 'Chicago Apache'

Hemerocallis 'Catherine Woodbury'

We had lots of hummingbirds flitting around all summer long, but this one decided he wanted to stop and rest for a bit. Lucky me!

Hummingbird

Red bee balm sparklers!

Bee balm

Ornamental grasses are a great addition to the garden, and this brown grass, Carex ‘Toffee Twist,’ goes with everything.

Carex 'Toffee Twist'

We had lots of these little guys running around – we call them all ‘Harvey!’ They love to perch on the rock wall or on top of the stair railing where they can survey everything.

chipmunk

Roses, of course! These are dark pink ‘Cuyahoga’ and red ‘Double Knock-out.’

Roses

More wildlife – notice the big green-eyed fly on the bright yellow-gold coneflower? It’s a type of horse/deer fly called Stonemyia isabellina, a flower feeding non-biting species.

Coneflower

Heading into fall now. Time to clean up the gardens a bit.

August 1, 2014

Outdoor Tour

Filed under: Our gardens,Shows and Tours,Summer — Judy @ 10:58 am

After getting all the clients taken care of, we finally got a chance to tackle our own home. We are pretty much caught up with edging, mulching, and weeding around here and things are looking fairly good. Click the link below to view the pictures.

birdhouseOutdoor Tour 2014

May 15, 2014

Scenes from the homestead

Filed under: Miscellaneous,Our gardens — Judy @ 1:39 pm

Everything is popping out and it is starting to look very lush around here. Hard to keep up with taking pictures of the individual flowers so I’m posting a few scenic landscape pictures today.

From the front door

The hill and veggie gardens

Bottlebrush buckeye

Under the crabapple tree

Qquince,

Those are blueberry blossoms in the lower right of the last picture. I’m anticipating a bumper crop … if the birds and chipmunks don’t get them first!

March 16, 2014

Pruning at home

Filed under: Our gardens,Winter — Judy @ 3:19 pm

After we went to the pruning class, I started really eyeing our own trees to check what needed to be done. One little tree that I view almost daily was really bugging me and I wanted to take care of it. See what I mean?

Pre-pruned crabapple

It is a cute little tree, low branched, but it has a lot of wonky growth going on. So first, some more information on pruning.

There are some other issues to consider before taking the pruning task on. Sure, we are all enthusiastic about getting out there and neatening things up in the winter, but sometimes it is best to just put the pruners away and do something else. Primarily, what I am talking about here is that you need to be aware of what is coming in terms of weather, i.e., the phenomenon of cold acclimation/de-acclimation. Woody plants go through phases of acclimating to the cold temperatures and their cold tolerance is maximal at a certain period of time depending on the species. Pruning in the late fall before the plant truly goes dormant pushes the tree or shrub to start producing more growth that is intolerant to cold and will be highly susceptible to injury and even death of the plant. Once the plant reaches its maximal cold tolerance and then we experience periods of warmer weather rather than sustained cold weather, the plant will begin to de-acclimate, or wake up. Another bout of cold weather will reactivate the acclimation process and subsequent cold protection, but the plant’s ability to repeat this becomes increasingly compromised as the season wears on. What this means is that any injury, pruning or otherwise, just before another cold snap, can cause serious damage or death. Some folks advocate backing away from the pruners anywhere from 3 days to 2 weeks before a plunge in temperatures is predicted. There’s your excuse for being a couch potato! In any case, check the weather forecast, and aim for pruning when there is less time between injury and the time when the plant can recover favorably from the injury (more on this in another post).

This little crabapple got pruned this year about 4 days before we got dumped on with 18 inches of snow and 0 degree night temps. Hopefully, this amount of time will be acceptable to it!

Snow on crabapple

But look at the poor thing two years ago after a late April snowstorm, fully budded and almost all leaved out. So sometimes, you just can’t predict what the weather is going to do!

Snowy crabapple Apr 24 2012

Another factor to consider, although many plants are or can be pruned now in late winter, is that there are some that it might be better to wait until after they bloom to prune. Those are the early spring bloomers such as forsythia, lilac, and early blooming spireas among others, and pruning may remove much of their glorious floral presence. On the other hand, burning bushes, ninebark, barberry, colored twig dogwood, or other plants that are primarily grown for their foliage are prime candidates for pruning before their growth starts in the spring. Note that “bleeders” or trees like maples, birches, and related species, may look unsightly and cause concern, but it usually does no harm to prune them in late winter. So, consider what you are pruning.

Although my crabapple is a spring bloomer, I want to be able to see the flowers and not a lot of vegetative growth.

Crabapple buds

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