A little preview of the garden show: this is my garden yesterday. The orange flowers are Geum 'Totally Tangerine' with Hakonechloa 'All Gold'. Those are Dalmatian variegated irises in back. #bloomScrolling #gardening #inmygarden #silentsunday
Other people are going away for the (US) holiday weekend, barbecuing, hiking, whatever. I'm hauling gravel. The garden show is a month from yesterday. The countdown is on! I'm terrible about taking "before" photos but trust me this is a big improvement. And why yes, that is an electric #heatpump on the right there in photo 1. 5 stars. Would recommend. #gardening #PNW #inmygarden
So this is my next garden project. I'm getting the garden ready to participate in a garden tour later this summer so it's all got to look its best. Wood chips (not bark) make excellent mulch for perennial beds (https://s3.wp.wsu.edu/uploads/sites/403/2015/03/wood-chips.pdf). I'm a big advocate of Chip Drop (https://getchipdrop.com) but I can't use it because their trucks won't fit into my small front drive. So I'm having a landscaper deliver chips for a fee. They smell AMAZING.
🧵1/4 #gardening #gardeningMastodon #PNW #inmygarden
Here is an update on mulching. As discussed in the previous post, if there's one gardening axiom I want on my tombstone, it's "no bare dirt"! Mulch is your friend and wood chip mulch has consistently tested the best vs bark, gravel, ground up tires, etc. here are some before and after photos. By June, the chips will have faded to a driftwood silver color.
3/4 #gardening#gardeningMastodon#PNW#inmygarden
Like a horde of muppet ghosts, the young shredded umbrella plants drag themselves out of the mulch and into the light of day. They'll be almost 3 feet tall by the time they are done. They are my favorite plants to watch emerge from the ground. This clump is almost double what I had last year, which makes me very happy. Syneilesis x media, shade to partial shade zones 7(?) and up. #gardening #gardeningMastodon #PNW #inmygarden #BloomScrolling
So I can’t add alt text on the photo on my phone with the new layout so will put it here: #AltText Small brown Mouse with a shiney black eye balancing in a geranium plant.
It was eating the seeds a couple of years back & was not fussed by us watching it & taking photos
Don’t know why, but I just remembered about it. #mouse#inMyGarden#ThrowbackThursday
This past week I joined the Big Butterfly Count. Some ecologists - in the face of the changing global climate - link butterflies’ survival with ours. On Tuesday I recorded the highest number #InMyGarden at one time, over a 15 min. watch. Eight species - Gatekeeper (😍 yay), Red Admiral (5 on a buddleia), Comma, Small Tortoiseshell, Meadow Brown, Peacock, Small & Large Whites. #BigButterflyCount#butterflies#ButterflyConservation#butterfly#SaveButterflies
If you happen to see leaves in your garden with these circular holes cut out of them, don’t fret: these are signs of leaf cutter bees. They actually cut circular discs of leaves to line their nests sometime between mid spring and mid summer. They’re vitally important pollinators and they are struggling. Tell them by the perfect circles they leave (1st image), as opposed to root weevil damage (2nd image).
1/2
One my favorites, the often overlooked balloon flower (Platycodon grandiflorus x ‘Sentimental Blue’). These start out looking like little paper balloons, then they open up as shown here, then once they are spent each one looks like a little used tissue. It is native to Japan (“kikyo”) and if you pay attention you can see its five-petaled shape reproduced on all kinds of decorative textiles and ceramics.
It’s been a wonderful couple of days butterfly spotting #InMyGarden with nine different species visiting us. Newest arrivals are Pararge Aegeria - Speckled Wood - flitting in and out of the shade. And my favourite Pyronia tithonus - the Gatekeeper - with its double eyespots patrolling the hedges in the firey heat of the summer. Pyrotechnic… #GateKeeper#butterflies#SaveButterflies#ButterflyConservation#lepidoptery