Finally a little time in the gardens! This weekend we traveled back to NY to visit some family. We had lunch with Ryan’s sister, then dinner with his mother and stayed the night at my parent’s house. When we got back home it was still nice out so I headed out to the gardens to get the first spring weeding done and reveal what plants survived the winter! Then I picked up the yard so we could mow this week.
First up – my perennial garden, surprisingly I got quite a few plants back this year. I’m not seeing any sign of a few of the plants but it’s still early so I’m not giving up hope. Plus i think I kept a few weeds because they looked pretty right now and I wasn’t sure what we planted.
Perennial Garden coming back to life
The Epimedium (there are 2) is really blooming.
Epimedium blooming away
I’m taking a quick review of what we planted which can be seen here: Perennial cutting garden. It looks like both Epimediums (2) survived as well as all Mountain Bluets (3). Lily of the Valley survived but I thought it was a weed so I weeded it back pretty strongly (my neighbor has it there too), it will grow in again most likely.
I didn’t see the Valerium (2) coming in – but I don’t really know what it looks like so I may have weeded it out. Actually I just looked at a picture and that one may have been coming back but if so it was popping up all over the place and already blooming (seems too early?) and I thought it was a weed (oops) so I pulled it out.
The chives (3) are coming in very nicely and the Bergenia (1) came back too. At least one Dark Geranium came back (maybe both).
What I didn’t see coming back were the daisies and the black eyed susans. I also don’t know what the Echinacia looks like so i couldn’t’ tell that one. I’m going to keep an eye out on that side of the garden, I did not weed as strongly over there knowing I didn’t see the plants yet.
And the rose garden. These i weeded and cleaned up a bit. 3 of the 4 bushes are coming back beautifully. One has no buds yet (white roses), I’m not giving up complete hope yet because it was such a late bloomer and budder last year but it may not have survived. The silvery plants I cut back because they had new growth in the center and were a little unwieldy. We’ll see if my efforts destroyed them or helped them.
Rose garden coming back to life
The raspberry bushes came back very strong, I cut out some dead wood and removed some of the baby plants that were too close to the lilies. 3 of my lilies are coming back! I don’t’ remember if i planted 3 or 4. They look great so far! I’d like to reorganize some of my perennials from the roses side and put them in front of the raspberries to tie the two gardens together but so far no time!
After gardening I headed inside to continue the vacuuming of the demolition area. I got it pretty cleaned up, enough so we can now use it and I started moving some tools and trim in there. I’ll continue this progress each night, my goal is to have the tv room set up as a proper livingroom for company by Friday night!