I noticed that the two 'Home Run' roses on the South side of the house are really growing actively, and it's time to chop them back a little (or a lot). Here's the first one:
What may be the main focal point of my garden is the central patio. It's a great place to sit and enjoy the sights and sounds of the yard, and it's also nice to look at, in season:
I was poking around in the mulch under some of my bamboo plants the other day looking for new shoots, and I saw what to me is one of the coolest mini discoveries that you can find in mulch: Bird's Nest Fungus
It's grey, chilly, and pretty windy today, but today's goal is the big grass and some more chipping. Here's the grass:
Recently I've become a big fan of moss. I don't know much about it, and until a couple years ago it was always just something that grew in certain places in my lawn.
I'm going to tackle these two larger grasses today. Simple, straightforward, and messy. Make sure you're wearing long sleeves and gloves, grab the loppers, and get to work!
I've been growing bamboo for a few years now, and the emergence of the year's new shoots in the Spring is one of the most exciting times in the garden! Things are a little slower this year than last, probably because it's been a bit colder this year, but I should start seeing more shoots any day now.
As I mentioned in the last cleanup post, my holding area for material to be fed into my chipper was pretty full:
Beautiful weather today, so I plan on spending a little more time and tackling one of my largest beds. Here's the top part (where I've already done some cleanup the other day and removed the large ornamental grass):
When you get a few minutes after the clouds are gone, the sun starts shining, and Spring is in the air...
After a Friday that was sunny and warm (almost 70ºF), it really was not good weather Saturday. Cloudy, cold, windy, and sprinkling rain every once in a while -- not the kind of day that I want to spend in the garden. But work was getting frustrating, and there's a lot left to do out there, so I decided to spend a couple more hours on cleanup. I noticed that the butterfly bushes were starting to leaf out, and some of the perennials are really starting to emerge, so I'll start with those.
One bird that is always welcome in my garden is the wren. (Truthfully, all birds are welcome in my garden, except for maybe a swarm of grackles because they'll empty the bird feeder in 2 minutes.) Wrens eat harmful bugs like caterpillars, they have a really nice song, and they're pretty curious. I mainly see Carolina wrens here, but we'll get house wrens too. I think I've seen a Winter wren once or twice as well, but sometimes it's hard to tell what type of little brown bird is flitting around under the plants. You see a little motion, catch a glimpse of brown, and that's about it until it bursts out and flies away.
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| Photo by Manjith Kainickara, Wikimedia Commons |
It's the time of year when it can be really nice, sunny, and warm one day, then cold, rainy, and dismal the next. So let's take a look at the signs of Spring while it's still nice. After all of the photos of brown lately, we need some color!
Another lunchtime cleanup job in the nice warm sun! It's time to get the Winter's worth of sunflower seed shells off the driveway, and get that whole area looking better. It's a mess:
Again without much time I decided to tackle a job that I've put off for years: pruning the honeysuckle vine. This is one of my first additions to my garden, and was planted in 2002 I believe.
Continuing my review of my bamboo plants and the winter damage they received, here are a few of my groundcover or "shrub" bamboos. These are plants that will most likely never get more than 2-5' tall. A garden needs balance, and these shorter plants are part of that.
This Indocalumus longiauritus looks pretty good. Has some damage on several leaves, but stayed mostly green. Pretty impressive considering the winter we had:
Just a quick look at some of the cold damage that my bamboo plants received this past winter. We had a colder than normal winter in St. Louis this year, with temperatures hanging in the single digits (F) and even negative single digits for several days. Thanks to that Arctic cold air mass that settled over the middle of the country, there were days when we had lower temperatures than Chicago, which almost never happens!
The Spring of 2006 was a big one in my garden, as we had the locust trees that were closest to and overhanging the house removed. That opened up our yard in an immediate and drastic way, but left me with pretty much a blank canvas in the area right behind the house, what I referred to as "the bowl" since it was a bowl-shaped depression. My idea was to put a patio here, with a pergola for some shade since all of the trees were now gone. If you've ever had a substantial tree removed, you know how your yard can change from full shade to full, blazing sun in no time. It's a shocking, scary change, but a great opportunity to grow a bunch more sun-loving plants.
I won't get into the details of the design right now, other than to say that a key feature was going to be a much-needed staircase with a "stream" running downhill next to it.
Another day of garden bed cleanup! Nice and sunny, which is great for my spirits, but since the bed I'll be working on is partly in the shade cast by the house and deck, it's going to make for some tough photos. Here's the bed:
Today was nice and sunny, so even though I was short on time I took advantage of the weather and cleaned up another small area. Just a couple of ornamental grasses to chop and a little raking. The perfect size job for lunchtime.
I did very little to clean up the garden last Fall. Part of it was lack of time as I was really busy with work, and the other part of it was lack of desire. Oh, it's not that I don't like cleaning up the yard: raking leaves, pulling down dead vines, cutting down dormant perennials, etc. I do enjoy it. I just don't want to do it. I like looking at dead plant matter over the winter.
After I partially emptied the greenhouse, I took a walk around to inspect my other bamboos. This is not unusual -- I do it quite often -- but after seeing all the nice, fresh green of the protected bamboo, I wanted to see what our colder-than-normal winter did to the in-ground plants. When I got to the 'Spectabilis' (Phyllostachys aureosulcata f. Spectabilis):
One of my main plant passions right now is bamboo. I'll be talking about it quite a bit over the next few weeks, but all you need to know right now is that I acquired several new plants last fall, and already had several in pots of all sizes.
A tree fell. Just one tree.
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