lolaraincoat | garden notes for my own reference

One of the ways that I know we had a warm winter by local standards is that so much survived in the garden that I expected would not. It was our first full winter in this house, so I'm just getting used to how our grounds work. Maybe our excellent soil, good light, and -- at least in the back garden -- relatively protected site had something to do with it too?

Anyway here's a partial list of what got through the winter in the front, which used to be almost all lawn but I've been digging in flower beds gradually:

* All the clematis I'm hoping to train over the fences between us and the alley on our north and between our front lawn and the sidewalk to the west, even though it seemed so sickly last year.

* Almost all the lavendar in the new bed just behind the fence between our front lawn and the sidewalk (Spanish lavendar was a bust, though.)

* All the geraniums (cranesbill and some other kind, I forget what)

* The dwarf rosebushes in the new front garden, even though I didn't mulch carefully or do much of anything else to them (the hybrid tea rose that I bought on sale at the end of the summer -- the exact wrong time to plant it -- was just a pile of dry thorny sticks by April, though.)

* Chamomille, corypsis, forget-me-nots, gladiola (inherited from previous owners) and wandering jew (ditto and yes I know it's a weed but it's a pretty flowering weed) and several varieties of irises (they didn't flower last year, but maybe this year?)

And here's what survived in the back, where I am trying gradually to move from purely annual vegetable beds to some combination of fruits, flowers and herbs that would be mostly perennials (and therefore require less springtime planting):

*the small lingonberry bushes that Fishwhistle planted last year, despite their total lack of growth over the first eight months they were in the ground here.

* almost all the stuff that was here when we got here: the peach and apricot trees (which flowered this year! we're going to have fruit, I hope, if we can get to it before the birds do), the grape vine, the garlic, the apparently infinitely self-seeding Boston lettuce, the peonies, the mint, the small but spunky hydrangeas in the back.

* Almost all the flowering vines I'm hoping to train over the fences between us and the alley on our north and between us and our neighbors to the south - azalea and trumpet vines mostly. Two clematis in pots in the sunny rain shadow of the garage wall at the east end of the garden died sad little deaths, though.

* Most of the perennial flowers that I stuck in the southwest corner, half in the shadow of the grape arbor, last year: Jacob's ladder (all but one), spiderwort, creeping speedwell, coneflower, echinachea, poppies, campanella, some of the viola, and some other flowing plants I forget the names of

* Perennial herbs: rue, thyme (thriving! for a change), lemon balm, mint all the hell over the place, chives, those things that might be garlic chives or might just be garlic at the foot of the north trunk of the grape arbor, and the sweet William at the base of the south trunk. Also, some herbs and other vegetables that aren't supposed to be perennial up here but came back anyway: parsley, dill and fennel (self-seeding no doubt), and also onions, oregano, tarragon, and kale.

My goal for the garden, eventually, is to have mainly perennials, front and back, and to replace as much of our front lawn as possible with flower beds. With that in mind, this is what went into the flower beds in front: more lavendar, so that now there's an unbroken line from the northwest corner of the front to the lamppost at the southwest corner; honeysuckle to train over those fences; forsythia, blackeyed susans, coneflower and Japanese anemone from my friend B.'s garden; some gladiolus bulbs which so far show no signs of life, and some foxglove which seems to be thriving, Michealmas daisies, and bergamot.

And this went into the flower beds in the back: Siberian bugloss, more poppies, more echineacha, more Jacob's ladder, more of B.'s coneflowers and black-eyed Susans, and some lamium way in the back under the apricot tree.

But that still left us with a lot of room in the back. We filled up a little space with rhubarb plants and a rasberry bush, which are perennial and will take up more room in years to come -- a lot more room in the case of the rasberry if we're not careful. Most of the remaining space, though, is filled with vegetables and herbs: watercress, tomatoes, tomatillas, beets, spinach, radicchio, arugala, onions, red chard, swisss chard, fennel, brussel sprouts, kale, two types of hot peppers, eggplant, cucumber, zucchini, and some kind of squash that started growing in the compost pile so we won't know what it is for a while yet. Oh, and herbs: besides those that overwintered, we'll have sage (two kinds), basil (two kinds), parsley (two kinds), marjoram, cilantro, marigold, cress, summer savoury, rosemary, and dill.

And we'll also have grapes again, damnit, and probably apricots and maybe even peaches -- the trees flowered, and I saw bees buzzing around them, so here's hoping..

We planted all of that over the last two weeks, which probably explains my sore back. Well, that and the weeding -- the thistles also survived the winter, curse them. There's still a little patch of the vegetable plot open, waiting for the heirloom tomatoes, and quite a lot of the shaded flower bed which will need ... something, but I don't know what yet. And some pots in the sunshine which I'm thinking of filling with morning glory and nastursium.

It turns out that watercress is a member of the nastursium family, that's what I learned yesterday. How about that?