By late July, most people are over their gardening frenzy for the year. According to a friend of my husband who manages a local greenhouse, most plants are purchased before Mother’s Day. The peak being Mother’s Day itself, then it slowly tapers off until the July 4th holiday. After that, people are pretty set until it is time for mums and pumpkins. The plants that are left over in late July are drastically reduced. I could not resist as I drove past the greenhouse up the road. I stopped in to see what was left. I was actually hoping to find more vegetables for my garden since I had just harvested most of the cauliflower and broccoli for the year which left a big opening for something else.
However, no vegetable plants remained. Only flowers and decorative plants were left, mostly perennials. The larger perennials were all 50% off and some were only $1 a piece. Did I really need a trunk-load of perennials? Need? No. But I just couldn’t pass up a deal. We still have spots to fill in our flower beds and the price was right. I also got a few annuals to replace the ones my dog ate out of my pots!
Another nice thing about buying flowers in late July, besides being super cheap, is that many of the plants were flowering so that I could see what they really looked like. I already had purple cone flower in two beds in our yard and I love the way they look. At the greenhouse, I found cone flower in red, orange and yellow! Same with yarrow, I have a white one already and love it, so I bought a yellow and a red.
When I got everything home, it was nearly noon and it was already pretty hot and sticky. So I set everything in the shade and decided to wait until it was cooler out before planting everything. The weather report said that there was to be a big thunderstorm coming in from the west around 7:30 PM. At around 4:00 PM, the sky became overcast and the air started to cool down. I put on my grubby shorts and my garden sandals, grabbed the shovel out of the garage, and headed for the backyard.
I went to work figuring out where to put everything. This is really not my forte, I will admit. In fact, I often move plants around years after I originally plant them because they flower at the wrong time or they are too big for where I put them. So for me, the most difficult part of planting these new additions is figuring out where to put them. I need to look at my beds and simultaneously think about what color the flowers are, when the flowers will bloom, and how big the plant will get.
First, I needed to think of the plants that are already there and what color their flowers are. My goal is to have nice mix of colors throughout, so that I do not have a monotone garden. As is the case for one of my beds; in early June all the pink flowers bloomed, following that, all of the yellow flowers bloomed, never achieving a good mix of color, as I intended.
Which brings me to the second requirement, not only do I need to think about the particular color of my old plants and new additions, but also when they flower. Some flower in early spring and are done for the year. Others flower on and off throughout the seasons. And still others wait to flower until summer or late summer. Since it is now mid-summer, it is still pretty fresh in my memory which flowers bloomed and when, with many flowers in full bloom at present.
The third consideration is the plant’s height and width. It can be deceiving to see a potted plant in the greenhouse. It may be only twelve inches now, but the tag says it reaches up to five feet! This is where I have a hard time visualizing. I think I can see something working well in a particular spot, but when the plant reaches maturity, it sometimes just looks odd and so I move it. I really try to foresee the end result because I hate moving plants after they have been established. They often do not take being uprooted very well. It can take a couple of years for it to recover and sometimes it works out, but sometimes moving a plant kills it.
We have six areas of flower beds. Two in the front yard and four in the backyard, not including our main vegetable garden. In the front yard, one bed flanks our front porch and the other borders our western property line which is buffered by the neighbors low retaining wall. In the backyard, the largest flower bed is really just a continuation of the western flower bed from the front yard which is separated by a fence. It continues along the entire length of our western property line with the retaining wall on our side in the backyard.
The second of the four backyard flower beds was half flowers, half vegetable garden, but last year we established a thorn-less blackberry bush and a strawberry patch in this area. This year I squeezed in a couple of green bean plants to share the trellis with the blackberry, but the blackberry keeps trying to take over.
Bed three borders the top and bottom of a low boulder wall where our yard changes grade. This is the bed that challenges me the most. Because it is in the middle of our most usable yard space, it is weird to have the plants too high, so I keep planting and reorganizing this bed especially. Having plants that are too tall have felt all wrong. The kids and the dog often go through this area while running around the yard. I may be inclined to ask my husband to redo it when we put in a new patio and a deck eventually.
Which brings us to bed number four which has been completely neglected for the past five years. When we first moved into the house 10 years ago, we pulled out masses of rose of Sharon saplings and added some other flowering plants and hostas and kept it looking tidy. Over the past 10 years, we have slowly redone all parts of our yard and this area happens to be the last frontier. Needless to say, we do not spend much time on this bed since we know that we will be ripping it all out to build a new retaining wall and deck off of our kitchen. Stay tuned for that! I am hoping for this fall!
Back to the new plants: I was in the middle of planting when my husband came home at 5:00 PM. He jumped right in to help. I had set everything where it was to be planted and he grabbed another shovel and did twice the work in half the time as I was doing. I had picked two plants to fill in holes in the flower bed by the front porch: one lupine and one geranium. The rest went in the backyard. We planted 3 cone flowers, 2 yarrows, 3 hollyhocks, 1 red flame?, 2? white striped leaves, 3? hot pink boarder, and 2 red dianthus. (However, after deciding where to place the dianthus, I decided to buy about 10 more to edge the entire side of the driveway in the western backyard bed. I had better get back to the greenhouse before all the plants are gone!) We mulched using a pile of mulch Jake brought home last week. We finished by 6:00 PM and the storm blew in at 7:30 PM as promised to give our new plants a well needed watering. It all looks lovely!