Gardening Tips
The ClubHouse: Archives: Gardening Tips
Tess | Sunday, June 02, 2002 - 02:33 am     My DH and daughter planted a bunch of pansies for me on Mother's Day. It's tradition in our family that they plant fowers in the garden for me on that day. This year the little one got to choose. Purple seems to be her favorite color these days.
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Tess | Sunday, June 02, 2002 - 02:40 am     The last 2 are very special to me as well. The top is the English Primrose which is the first flower to appear in my garden every spring.
The second is a small section of a branch on our little flowering crabapple tree in the backyard. My dad died March 1, 1999 and as a memorial to him my mom, sister and I decided it would be wonderful to plant a tree. Dad was an avid gardener and he could work magic with roses and camilias --oh such a wide variety of flowers, vegetables and trees. Mom and sis decided that instead of having the tree planted somewhere in a park it should be at our house. We had a memorial service at the house and some of Dad's ashes were sprinkled in with the roots. Each year we take a photo with our daughter next to "Grandpa's tree" to document how much each has grown since the previous spring.
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Grooch | Sunday, June 02, 2002 - 05:05 am     Very nice, Tess. I wish I could grow some of these. We used to have crabapple trees at my mother's house. I miss all these flowers. |
Juju2bigdog | Sunday, June 02, 2002 - 08:46 am     Beautiful pictures, Tess. You and your camera do good work. When we bought this house last year, there were three trees on the south side of the house that I was pretty sure were flowering trees, but we had no idea what they were. Turns out they are crabapples (Bigdog phoned the previous homeowner who planted them), and they bloomed like crazy while I was in Europe. |
Schoolmarm | Sunday, June 02, 2002 - 10:41 am     Great pics, Tess! I was thinking about planting some pansies, and I may still have one of my students do that for me...my knee still has a little dead spot (but it's much better than last year) so kneeling to plant is not a good idea for me. This year I went with the purple/blue/pink theme. My tulips are almost done...they were purple, pink and white. The Grape Hyacinths are done. The bluebells are almost done. So much for most of the bulbs. Right now in the garden, I have some purple/black iris getting ready to bloom. Planted pink impatiens and dark purple wave petunias. Usually I don't like petunias, but I had a wave one in a porch pot last year and liked it. I have matching petunias in my hanging planter. I have two beatuiful pink dalias blooming right now. My mums are coming up! First time I've ever had either mums or daisies come back up. About six of the twelve made it through our rotten winter. I have four "porch pots" of flowering plants...violas, purple pansies, impatiens, a shasty daisy, pink geranium, pink begoinia, and some assorted green stuff. It's pretty! I have a maple tree volunteering under the wheelchair ramp. I suppose that I should transplant it! |
Juju2bigdog | Sunday, June 02, 2002 - 12:27 pm     Dahlias now? |
Teatime | Sunday, June 02, 2002 - 07:30 pm     Bee-YOOO-tiful pictures, Tess! I have the same bleeding hearts, one of my favorites too. I planted green/white hostas at the base of mine, makes a great cover up when the bleeding heart dies back in the summer heat. We have a "Grandpa tree" also, some kind of flowering red-leafed plum. It was planted in 1998 when my dad died and my youngest child was born shortly after. So your story especially touched me. Schoolmarm, I love your color scheme! Your pots sound beautiful. I do a lot of pink/white/blue/purple. I am trying to get my yard back to lots of the old varieties of perennials because our house is so old fashioned so it looks right. The white lilacs are blooming and so is the lily-of-the-valley. It smells absolutely divine. I stay outside and just sniff like crazy every chance I get! Luckily my neighbors are just as nutty about their own plants so I don't get too many strange looks. Okay, I could hog this thread... Looking forward to anyone else's pictures. Happy gardening! |
Tess | Sunday, June 02, 2002 - 08:28 pm     Teatime, that's a great idea about the hostas at the bottom of the bleeding hearts. We always plant shade loving annuals at the bottom of ours but hostas would be less work! We have a row of them on the north side of the house along the path to the backyard which will be ready to divide in a year or so. I'll keep that in mind. |
Missy666 | Thursday, June 06, 2002 - 01:07 pm     Hi everyone, I've been reading all the great advise on planting and flowers everyone has posted here. I have really enjoyed some of the usefull hints and suggestions I have read. I am also from Minnesota and at times it is tough to get things to grow from year to year. I like perrenials just because they are suppose to come back year after year, but annuals usally do bloom for the whole season so it's a toss up of what to buy. |
Tess | Thursday, June 06, 2002 - 02:02 pm     Hi, Missy, I live right in your area so at least there is someone else here in the same climate zone. I am slowly adding to my perennials year by year and then always supplement with 2 or 3 flats of annuals to fill in any empty spaces. On Tuesday, at Bachman's, I found a new variety of bleeding hearts I hadn't seen before and snatched up 3 of those along with several varieties of columbine to replace the ones that were bunny food last year. I also found some Korean violets which I've never even heard of before. I think I would have come home with many more plants if it hadn't been pouring rain at the time. What do you have in your garden? |
Missy666 | Friday, June 07, 2002 - 05:49 am     I have a lot of different varieties of lillies, they are my favorite flower. I also have some ires, cone flowers, black eyed susans, asters, tulips, crocus, daffedils, corriopsus, mumms, last year I planted some columbine for the first time, I couldn't beleive how pretty these are this year, I will have to invest in somemore of these. I also have hostas, prim roses, astibies, I would like to get some bleeding hearts to mix in with the hostas, but they will need to wait till next year. I plan on redoing my entire flower beds next spring, they are getting too out of control right now, I'm having a hard time determining what is a weed and what is a flower. I plan on marking each item as it blooms this year so I know where everything is for replanting next year. I'm not buying any new perrenials this year, and I am limiting my annuals to just a few plants this year, just so I can get myself reorganized and save the money so next year I can go all out. |
Tess | Friday, June 07, 2002 - 06:25 pm     Wow, that sounds like quite a wonderful garden! My husband is building a large raised bed in the backyard where I will finally be able to plant some sun-loving perennials. I don't think he'll have it ready in time to plant anything of note this year, however. He has too many projects going at once......just part of the "joys" of being a home-owner. Our primroses are just about done for the season but the purple coneflowers and coreopsis are coming in nicely. The bunnies and squirrels got to all of our tulips and daffodils this year except for one lonely jonquil. |
Missy666 | Saturday, June 08, 2002 - 08:24 am     I know what it's like having all the different projects going on at one time. I am going to be putting in a raised garden in next year, I would have loved to do it this year, but due to cost and not knowing where everything was this year I decided to wait till next year. This year I will mark everything with sticks, so that next year I can find them when I want to replant them. What kind of a raised garden are you putting in Tess? I would like to use the decorative rock, but I will probably go with the green treated logs, I think they would be cheaper. My prim roses aren't doing well this year, looks like only one of them is going to bloom, one is just now coming out of the ground, I think it was up earlier and froze out. None of the rest are coming up, I think they died on me. Rabbits and squirrels also got over 100 of my tulips, I even plant extras just for them. I have an area next to my lilic busches that I plant a bunch of tupips just for the rabbits in the hopes they will stay away from my regular garden, not this year, they ate theirs plus mine. |
Tess | Saturday, June 08, 2002 - 06:22 pm     That's a shame about the tulips. I'm debating whether to even try to plant any this fall. What the bunnies don't eat, the deer get...or the squirrels dig up the bulbs. For the raised bed we have landscape bricks that stack and make sort of a terraced look almost. We have over 300 of them but so far we just have the outline mapped out. We had to have 2 big evergreens taken out last year so this is going in their place. The bricks now have to be moved so that the ground underneath can be leveled then we start over. It will be about 3 feet high and 100 bricks around (100') in a sort of irregular oval shape. The bricks were a little over $1 apiece so I don't know how that compares to landscape timbers. In the meantime, shrubs and weeds have sprung up with all the rain we've been having. They'll need to be dug out, too, before we put the liner down and then the topsoil. Yikes, this job sounds bigger and bigger all typed out like this! A friend of mine in Mpls over by Lake Nokomis has a garden that makes her house look like an English cottage, winding path to the front door and all. It really is beautiful. Her back gardens are just as wonderful. I wouldn't be surprised if you primroses started up in April when it was really hot then got buried in the snow. I used to have 3 plants but only one survived the first winter. That one is the first of the perennials up and blooming every year now. I think I'll try them again when we have the back bed ready to go. Good luck getting everything marked this year so you're ready to rearrange next spring! |
Missy666 | Sunday, June 09, 2002 - 05:38 am     Looks like you have your hands full Tess, but it sounds like a fun project. I love creating new designs in the yard, but for some reason mine don't always turn out how I imagined. Your oval design sounds really nice and the decoritive bricks are a great idea, they really make the flower bed stand out. |
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