š» gardening journal no. 1: year 1-2, spring
I wanted to start documenting my journey as a new gardener. I started a year ago, and it's been very exciting seeing plants and such come back this year. My main goals at this time are to do lawn-alternatives and to use native plants where possible. For simplicity, I'm using common names rather than scientific ones.
Our property originally came with:
- azaleas (red, white)
- Chinese arborvitae -> would like to eventually dig up and replace
- rhododendrons (purple)
- some sort of short pine trees
- a whole bunch of grass and boulder retaining walls
The tricky part is handling the areas where grass meets rock as we have a couple of boulder retaining walls. For one, it's very hard to mow as the yard slopes downwards. It's also just not very aesthetically pleasing. I'm not sure if this is necessarily the best move, but I've basically been manually digging up grass and trying to replace it with some sort of evergreen, groundcover, or perennial flower. This is a very long-term task as there's a whole lot of grass, and I only have so much stamina and sunlight to work with in a day (also barring any weather conditions that would prohibit me being outside).
The new plants we've been growing (with much courtesy to my enthusiastic parents and a handful of plants that I enthusiastically bought from a local nursery):
- fall sneezeweed
- moss phlox (including hybrids)
- hydrangeas
- peonies
- sundrops
- eastern bluestar
- scarlet beebalm
- three-toothed cinquefoil
- max chrysanthemum
- lobelia (blue)
- speedwell (blue)
- salvia (purple)
- rose milkweed
- spicebush -> I really want to see a spicebush butterfly in my garden one day
The plants that I don't recall planting, but they're here now:
- peach-leaved bellflowers
- lance-leaved coreopsis
Seeds that have yet to be planted:
- marigolds (red/orange, yellow)
- zinnias
- dahlias
I'm proud to say that the vast majority of these plants have already started growing and showing buds. The moss phlox in particular surprised me as I really thought they wouldn't grow much over the winter, especially when they were being crowded out by grass and weeds over the summer, but they exploded in size and bloomed wonderfully. I transplanted some of them to mimic how our neighbors have some moss phlox creeping over their boulders, and it seems to be a common landscaping choice with some other homes as well. I was also worried that the milkweed seeds had powdery mildew/mold when I tried to use a technique called "jarmination" but it seems that the parent plant is growing back. The sneezeweeds are also delightfully growing back in full force despite my attempts to disperse many of its seeds in the falltime (it doesn't appear any of the seeds I planted grew anything š„²). I also attempted to separate some of them to different areas of the yard to see if they will grow. Luckily it has been raining the past couple of days. They seem to get droopy when they first move, but once they settle in and get watered, they seem to perk back up. Hopefully most of them will survive in their new areas, as they are absolutely bee magnets and I hope to help out the pollinators when I can.
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