So I have a whole pile of yellow daylilies that I got from an acquaintance before she decided to defriend on me on facebook. Since we are no longer in contact, I have no idea what these daylilies are. They look similar to the Stella d'oros I see all over the state, but the color is a little off. These seem to have a bit more orange in them than the Stella d'oros. I was frustrated though because I could see the Stellas blooming and reblooming and reblooming all over, but mine had one nice blooming session of a few weeks and then stopped blooming for at least a month.
I was not a huge fan of daylilies our first two summers here, but the way those freebie daylilies exploded into gorgeousness this summer got me very excited about daylilies, and I've started looking much more closely at stores and people's daylilies and doing research online about daylilies. I subscribe to the Iowa Gardener mailing list, and her last e-mail had a link to a video about how to deadhead daylilies. After watching that I watched several related videos and a few of those videos indicated that if you don't cut off the stalk after the daylily forms seeds on it, you won't get reblooms. So I've been cursing my daylilies for the past month when its been my own damn fault they weren't reblooming.
With this new knowledge, I trudged down to our nearest Harbor Freight and bought some pruning sheers rated for 1 in. vines/plants/greenery. I brought them home and attacked all of the dead stalks on our daylilies. I usually do my gardening at night once the kids are settled in for the night, or at least sleepy enough to not run into the street or steal my pruning sheers. So I missed a lot of the stalks because they are hard to see in the dark. A week or so later, one of my noid daylilies that I planted this year (from either a clearance bin at a store with no tags or a freebie someone off of craigslist selling dayliles) sent up a new stalk and bloomed a pretty stella-esque bloom today. I am pretty sure its not actually a Stella though because it started blooming in late afternoon and was going strong in the opening side of things around midnight, so I am pretty sure it is a nocturnal daylily, not a diurnal like I think the Stellas are.
Anyway, the moral of the story is to read, watching, listen, and observe a lot about gardening. I stumbled onto those videos just by being generally curious about daylilies and I am reaping the benefits!
Tuesday, August 20, 2013
Saturday, August 10, 2013
The general state of my yard.
I've tried to maintain blogs in the past, but they seem to require more time and energy than I ever have. However, by the very nature of gardening blogs, they don't require constant year-round entries because there are long parts of the year where gardening doesn't have a lot going on. Therefore, this is a little less intimidating and I really like talking about gardening, but my husband gets horrifically bored listening to me talk about gardening.
Now when I say "gardening" I mostly mean "trying to keep a few really hardy plants alive amongst my family." I've got two kids, host plenty of playdates and family and friends and fires and bbqs, and I've got a mutt/black lab/beagle mix that loves to trample my plants and dig up my newly planted plants. She seems to know which ones I spent the most money on and which ones I am most fond of because those are the ones she destroys the most often.
Because of our lifestyle, so far I've focused mainly on hostas and daylilies because they are hard to kill.
All of my yard is at least part shade, with the back in dappled shade under some big oak trees. Most of the back under the oak trees is a long, steep slope in this dappled shade under big oak trees. So grass does not grow well back there. At the bottom of the slope is my kids' play area. Our neighbors behind us have a very lovely dog, Henry, that my idiot dog loves to run up to and see, ignoring whatever plants are between her and Henry. The small patch of grass I am able to grow between the doom slope and the back porch holds our kiddie pool and water slide, effectively killing off whatever grass that might have been able to grow there. To the south there is a nice concrete patio surrounded by some great hosta beds the previous owner put in 15 years ago, and to the north of the grassy patch is another steep slope in almost full sun where the dog poops. At the bottom of the sunny steep slope is a weed patch that at one point was a flower bed, and that borders our neighbor's gorgeous backyard garden utopia. Which is really embarrassing.
Our entire front yard is a very neglected steep slope with morning sun that gets cut off about midday by the giant cottonwood we're getting trimmed in a couple of weeks and then our house. When we bought the house the retaining walls needed to be rebuilt, so that was the first thing we did. The previous owners just had grass growing on the terrace-y areas behind the retaining walls, and that looked terrible and was hard to mow. The contractors were supposed to till up the area behind the walls so I could plant, but they really did a super lousy job and only tilled up roughly half of it, so I've been fighting grass in there for three summers now. Up by the house are some beds that were planted 15 years ago. The plants that remains are a variety of NOID hostas and some bearded irises that look lovely the one week they bloom, and hideous the rest of the year. On the north side of the front door there are two more beds that were also filled with hostas. I've added strawberries to the north-most empty bed, and the bed closest to the stairs I've tried to add lily of the valley, lamium, a couple of heucheras, some foxglove, and a columbine. We'll see what is there next spring.
Between the driveway and the retaining wall the contractors just left gravel with about an 1/8 inch of dirt. An acquaintance I am no longer in contact with gave me a bunch of yellow daylilies and I threw them on the 1/8 inch of dirt. To my delight, they grew. That same year I also went to a plant sale and got there just as they were closing up. On an impulse I bought a few daylily bulbs that were still left. It did not occur to me at that time to remember or write down the name of the daylilies, so I kick myself a thousand times over for that. This summer a lovely peach one sprang up from those end-of-sale daylilies, and I am optimistic that next summer will yield more blooms from the other NOID daylilies. All of those end-of-sale daylilies are mixed in with the yellow daylilies between the driveway and the wall. There is also a nice sized clump of "tawny daylilies" or ditch lilies in that general area.
In front of the retaining wall was just a steep slope of very hard to mow grass, so I started buying cheap/clearance/free plants and sticking them in that area. Naturally this made it impossible to mow, so I am now trying to get mulch down on the grass around the plants to kill off the grass. We are hoping to put down edging and mulch this weekend. As well as get the hostas from our neighbor, get the petunias from our other neighbor, mow, finish painting the house, trim back the irises, and plant a few plants we picked up last weekend.
Finally the strip between the sidewalk and the street is also overgrown and weedy, but the city is weird about what they allow there, and the city ordinances are vague as well. I've pulled some of the grass out along the edges and inserted some creeping phlox, one of my absolute favorite plants. I've also put three clumps of daylilies in the center of that strip and mulched around them so my husband can still mow that strip.
So there you have it, that is the overwhelming set of opportunities and challenges that are present in my yard. With luck I'll be able to talk about what is working, what isn't working, and what I might try next.
Thanks for reading.
Now when I say "gardening" I mostly mean "trying to keep a few really hardy plants alive amongst my family." I've got two kids, host plenty of playdates and family and friends and fires and bbqs, and I've got a mutt/black lab/beagle mix that loves to trample my plants and dig up my newly planted plants. She seems to know which ones I spent the most money on and which ones I am most fond of because those are the ones she destroys the most often.
Because of our lifestyle, so far I've focused mainly on hostas and daylilies because they are hard to kill.
All of my yard is at least part shade, with the back in dappled shade under some big oak trees. Most of the back under the oak trees is a long, steep slope in this dappled shade under big oak trees. So grass does not grow well back there. At the bottom of the slope is my kids' play area. Our neighbors behind us have a very lovely dog, Henry, that my idiot dog loves to run up to and see, ignoring whatever plants are between her and Henry. The small patch of grass I am able to grow between the doom slope and the back porch holds our kiddie pool and water slide, effectively killing off whatever grass that might have been able to grow there. To the south there is a nice concrete patio surrounded by some great hosta beds the previous owner put in 15 years ago, and to the north of the grassy patch is another steep slope in almost full sun where the dog poops. At the bottom of the sunny steep slope is a weed patch that at one point was a flower bed, and that borders our neighbor's gorgeous backyard garden utopia. Which is really embarrassing.
Our entire front yard is a very neglected steep slope with morning sun that gets cut off about midday by the giant cottonwood we're getting trimmed in a couple of weeks and then our house. When we bought the house the retaining walls needed to be rebuilt, so that was the first thing we did. The previous owners just had grass growing on the terrace-y areas behind the retaining walls, and that looked terrible and was hard to mow. The contractors were supposed to till up the area behind the walls so I could plant, but they really did a super lousy job and only tilled up roughly half of it, so I've been fighting grass in there for three summers now. Up by the house are some beds that were planted 15 years ago. The plants that remains are a variety of NOID hostas and some bearded irises that look lovely the one week they bloom, and hideous the rest of the year. On the north side of the front door there are two more beds that were also filled with hostas. I've added strawberries to the north-most empty bed, and the bed closest to the stairs I've tried to add lily of the valley, lamium, a couple of heucheras, some foxglove, and a columbine. We'll see what is there next spring.
Between the driveway and the retaining wall the contractors just left gravel with about an 1/8 inch of dirt. An acquaintance I am no longer in contact with gave me a bunch of yellow daylilies and I threw them on the 1/8 inch of dirt. To my delight, they grew. That same year I also went to a plant sale and got there just as they were closing up. On an impulse I bought a few daylily bulbs that were still left. It did not occur to me at that time to remember or write down the name of the daylilies, so I kick myself a thousand times over for that. This summer a lovely peach one sprang up from those end-of-sale daylilies, and I am optimistic that next summer will yield more blooms from the other NOID daylilies. All of those end-of-sale daylilies are mixed in with the yellow daylilies between the driveway and the wall. There is also a nice sized clump of "tawny daylilies" or ditch lilies in that general area.
In front of the retaining wall was just a steep slope of very hard to mow grass, so I started buying cheap/clearance/free plants and sticking them in that area. Naturally this made it impossible to mow, so I am now trying to get mulch down on the grass around the plants to kill off the grass. We are hoping to put down edging and mulch this weekend. As well as get the hostas from our neighbor, get the petunias from our other neighbor, mow, finish painting the house, trim back the irises, and plant a few plants we picked up last weekend.
Finally the strip between the sidewalk and the street is also overgrown and weedy, but the city is weird about what they allow there, and the city ordinances are vague as well. I've pulled some of the grass out along the edges and inserted some creeping phlox, one of my absolute favorite plants. I've also put three clumps of daylilies in the center of that strip and mulched around them so my husband can still mow that strip.
So there you have it, that is the overwhelming set of opportunities and challenges that are present in my yard. With luck I'll be able to talk about what is working, what isn't working, and what I might try next.
Thanks for reading.
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