🌺 gardening journal no. 2: year 2, summer
Out of our three hydrangea shrubs that we were given by my parents, two of them have buds growing this year! Last year, only one shrub had flowers, so I'm excited that there's an additional shrub that we may see flowers grow from. Originally, the hydrangeas were of a purple/bluish color from my parents' garden, but they turned pink once planted in my yard. I got myself some Hollytone fertilizer/acidifier so I wonder if we'll start to see some blue hydrangeas this year (as blue is my favorite color.) Usually the hydrangeas tend to bloom in July, so we'll see in a month or so. I will have to try using this for our azaleas and rhododendrons as well, but they're already past bloom. I'm also not really sure on how to maintain flowering shrubs, so that's more research I'll have to do.
As usual, my parents came up to help with some gardening with my mom giving me a lot of plants she grew or bought. Definitely part of the challenge is removing enough grass from places in order to give ourselves more room to grow more plants (and also decrease the overall mowing space.) Thankfully we did start removing some in our active flowerbeds. Some new additions this year are two yellow mums that I received for Lunar New Year. Supposedly they will grow back next year, so my mom helped plant these as well as a bunch of marigolds.
Some sundrops, bluestars, salvia, and speedwell have been blooming already. The milkweed, lilies, sneezeweeds, peonies, and white mums are growing in leaves and still look healthy, so I suspect they will bloom by the end of the month or so. A friend also kindly gave us some tomato plantlings that we now have a dedicated raised bed in our backyard. I haven't seen them bear fruit yet, but I forgot if tomatoes start to grow in around this time.
Maybe next year, we'll plan to extend the flowerbed we built at the front of our property, as it's quite narrow and doesn't allow for a lot of space to plant new flowers.
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