In lawn news, when I finally dragged the lawnmower out of its hiding place the other day, I discovered that the lawn's shagginess was not grass (ha! Imagine! GRASS, in MY LAWN? Surely you jest!) but some sort of feathery weed. I had noticed the feathery foliage before, but it was a pain in the ass to attack with my trusty weeder so I'd given up on it.

Now that it was about to bloom, it was conveniently much easier to spot and also much easier to get a grip on and yank. So I grubbed all of it out before mowing.

And good job I did, because come to find out, the stuff goes by the name of RAGWEED.

Time for a picture post!

The sun bed, with the cosmos looking particularly wild and woolly.


The wall bed, with the golden oregano going berserk (compare with the freshly planted stuff among the pictures here). Now THAT's groundcover. The delphinium has withered to a bare stick, but the internets assure me that this happens sometimes when it gets hot and that it will be back in force next year.


The corner bed, with bleeding heart moved, rhododendron and sedge grass planted, and weeds beaten back. Again, compare. Looking at least slightly more civilized, eh? I just have to wreak further havoc and devastation on the celandine that's raging along the fence.


Now blooming:

The gypsophila has gotten a second wind and is blooming all over the place.


Surprise! It turns out I did actually manage to plant some cupid's dart. They looked very much like the bachelors' buttons as seedlings, so I planted them all together. I'd been wondering why these weren't getting as tall as the other ones.


One of the heleniums shriveled up and died - we'll see if it comes back - but this one's doing fine.


And here are the asters. They start out white and then get gradually more purple as the flowers open more.

Continuing thesis and baby related insanity on the home front means not much in the way of garden news, alas. Hopefully I will get a chance to snap some pictures in the next few days. Meanwhile I am unwinding with schemes and ruminations.

To Do in the Next Couple Months
* As mentioned, move bleeding heart and plant remaining unplanted plants
* Plant bulbs when they arrive
* Move the pampas grass, which will end up hiding the maple if it gets as tall as promised in its current location
* Cover magnolia and maple when it gets cold out
* Attempt to weed the back lawn a bit
* Possibly dig up the last bed in my patio arrangement and let it sit under mulch over the winter; I may not get around to doing anything with it next year but at least I won't have to worry about it multiplying weeds on me

Things I Will Do Next Year
* Either find another location for the cosmos or don't bother with it. As much as I love the stuff, it is too tall for its current location; it hides the climbing rose almost completely. The cleome can stay put, although I might scatter it around a little more.
* Need to use taller stakes on the delphiniums, provided they come back.
* Don't bother with the geraniums, but plant lots of begonias of many colours in the shade.
* Gird up my loins like a man and pick-n-squish all the nasty goddamn lily beetles, since they don't seem to respond to anything else short of chemical assassination.
* Chop back the invading grape vines and anonymous climbing stuff coming over the west fence.
* Mow the lawn once in a while; take Ed Lawrence's advice about raking the hell out of the creeping charlie early in the spring.
* As stated many times before: MULCH.
* Focus on filling up the shadier beds in my mad spring plant-buying.

Not a whole lot going on out there these days; this is due in part to preoccupation with other projects, but it doesn't help that it's just that time of year. Although this year, despite the seasonal rattiness of the ferns, things are still looking pretty good, so that's progress over my last garden. The climbing rose has buds like whoa - not sure if it just blooms late or if it just took this long to get established. The maple is, well, much the same, but it's not dead, so that counts as victory, right?

I mustered out briefly today to do some poking around and weeding. Pulled a whole mess of celandine out of the corner bed. I also, regretfully, dug out the dogwood, although I imagine it will be back. It's just too big and leggy for that spot, which makes the whole bed look like a mess, and I don't have anywhere else to put it right now. The bleeding heart is having a similarly wild and woolly effect on its surroundings by sprawling all over everything, so my evil plan for a week or two hence is to dig it up and move it further out into the bed. The rhododendron I snapped up on sale, meanwhile, should make a tidier replacement.

To my surprise, there's also an azalea still alive back there, and it actually looks pretty happy. I think it got chewed on in the spring - I suspect the neighbourhood groundhog, which has also snacked on my parsley and canterbury bells; must lay down some blood meal at some point - but it actually managed to flower a little while ago, and is growing busily. Once I get the bleeding heart out of the way it may even be visible.

In my crashing around I startled what I thought at first was a cricket, but it turned out to be a toad - a teeeeeeny tiny toad, about half the length of my thumb. How cool! I hope this means that the big toad I met once or twice has had babies somewhere. By the time I came back with my camera, alas, it had disappeared.

So today I struck the first blow in a task I have really not been looking forward to: rejuvenating the lawn.

I hate lawns, for the record. A lawn to me is a big fat waste of space, resources, and effort; also persnickety and generally a pain in the ass to maintain. I plan to get rid of as much lawn as I possibly can over the years to come, but I've got enough going on in the back yard right now that the front is just going to have to wait, especially since I don't want to annoy the neighbours with my flying-by-the-seat-of-my-pants hodgepodge of n00bish garden experiments. I will do my early messing around in the back yard and plan the front more carefully.

BUT in the meantime, there is still this sea of grass to deal with out front. Well, sea of weeds, really. I don't know what is going on, none of our neighbours have anything like the weed problem we do. Maybe I just don't mow often enough. In any case, my evil scheme going forward is as follows: weed like a madwoman; actually mow the lawn once in a blue moon; and dethatch, aerate, topdress, and overseed next month. Then we'll see what happens. If it still looks like crap in the spring, I will throw up my hands and declare it a lost cause.

So today I went out and bought a "Grampa's Weeder" from Lee Valley, one of the best garden purchases I have made all year. This thing uses minimal effort but still makes short work of plantains, dandelions, and even those bastard wood violets. If it has a central root (as opposed to, say, something like creeping charlie, which roots everywhere it touches the freaking ground) you can use this baby to wreak havoc and devastation upon it.

I then went out and spent 2h digging up all the plantains and dandelions and many additional nameless weeds. (It drives me crazy not knowing the names of weeds. Not that knowing what they are really gives me any useful information - it's a weed, right, what more do you need to know? But somehow it's so much more satisfying to yank it out when you know what it's called. "Aha, you bastard such-and-such, I have you now!!") The difference all this diligent effort made is depressingly subtle. Tomorrow I will muster out there again and tackle the rest of the wood violets and the nameless yellow-flowering stuff that's all over the front third of the yard. And also the goddamn creeping charlie, I suppose, although I'm not sure there's much point. What a thug of a plant that stuff is.

In honour of our houseiversary, I present a "compare and contrast" edition of the picture post!

FRONT YARD

Alas, I didn't take pictures of this when we first moved in, but for future reference, here's now:


Not much change from this perspective, really. Except I managed to kill the hanging basket plants. Oh well, this is the longest I've ever kept such things alive, so I'm not too badly dismayed.

Closer up, however, there's been a few changes at least:


Ah, mulch, how I ♥ you. Also, most of the herbaceous plants in here are my additions, except the daylily. When we first moved in all the rest of that was daylilies and violets.

BACK YARD

Progress! Looking around the yard from west to east:







Compare to this time last year:










Details of the beds:

Sun bed


Wall bed


Corner bed (Extremely weedy and in need of attention)


Side bed (Needs to be mostly redone - dammit)



The patio thyme is growing slowly, but it's growing:


These are now confirmed as Bachelor's Buttons:

Today I hit Ritchie's Feed & Seed out in the other end of town. I had plans to stop by Peter Knippel Nursery too, but as it turned out Ritchie's had more than enough stuff I couldn't resist. To make up for my binge buying I am once again imposing a two-week plant-buying freeze. No more plants for me until August 2!

Much like eating an entire box of chocolate chip cookies, however, it was SO worth it. The spoils:

* Lucifer crocosmia - YET ANOTHER sun plant, but I've actually had my eye on this one for a while. Besides, the foliage makes a nice contrast in the back of the sun bed.


* golden oregano - couldn't resist the combination of the bright chartreuse colour and the texture of the plant.


* Black Scallop ajuga - more funky ground cover.


* toad lilies - another one I've had my eye on for some time. They bloom late, for an added bonus.


* Blue Butterfly delphiniums - delicate foliage and luminous blue flowers.


* Black Knight delphinium - even floppier than the ones I already have, but the blue-purple colour was completely irresistable. The picture below doesn't do it justice, this plant just glows.


* Japanese Blood Grass - I found the forest grass I was looking for but it looked kind of ratty in person; this stuff was much cooler.


* Ice Dance sedge grass - also cooler than the forest grass.


* Drumstick primrose - have been keeping an eye out for this stuff, having read about it in magazines.