It's an exciting time for me, as my garden is about to have peony blooms in it for the first time ever!
If you read my blog regularly, you'll know that I like to try new plants every year. For me the potential in a new seed packet or even a few seeds shared by a gardening friend is one of the most exciting things about gardening. I'm not just talking about trying a different variety of tomato (although I recommend doing that too), or red petunias instead of the pink you always get -- I mean try something really different. A plant species or genus that you never have grown before.
Last year when writing about how these large ants always take over one of my hummingbird feeders, I got some good suggestions about how to stop them.
I've been growing cardoon for five or six years now, hoping each year that the plants reach the size and impressive form of the ones I grew the first year. They behave as tender perennials here, or biennials -- sometimes making it through the winter, but usually not.
When I added a couple of new hummingbird feeders earlier this summer in an effort to get the hummers to settle down a little and share, I made more work for myself. You see, hummingbird feeders get filled with sugar water, and there are lots of critters that like sugar water. Hummingbirds, yes, but also woodpeckers, wasps, and ants. Don't forget raccoons too. There's only one creature from that list that is a real problem in my yard though.
When winter starts getting to me, there are a few things I can do. 1) I can go to my growing table in the basement and get a fix of green. This often reminds me of work I need to do though, as some of the plants on the table need some attention. 2) I can browse my gardening books and seed catalogs, dreaming, planning, and counting the days until the last frost date. 3) I can go through my old garden photos, reminding myself what the yard will look like again in just a few months, when it warms. (It's surprising how quickly I forget each year!)
This is one of the first bamboos I planted, in the spring of 2007. It's "Yellow Groove" bamboo (Phyllostachys aureosulcata) and is doing quite well. It's sizing up nicely, and I expected it to put up 18'-20' tall culms next spring. This weekend I removed it and dismantled the planter box.
As mentioned yesterday, I found a few interesting photos of insects and spiders from last summer, and I want to share them with you now. I'll put the "cutest" ones first, saving the "creepiest" for later in the post.
The other morning there was some sort of bone on my driveway, apparently garbage-picked from my neighbor's trashcan and left by raccoons. I thought it was strange that there was still some of the Shake 'n bake-looking coating on it -- the raccoons would have eaten all of that, wouldn't they?
When you spend a lot of time in the garden, one thing you'll start to notice (hopefully) is the abundance of wildlife that surrounds you. I'm not talking about rabbits, deer, birds and the rest. I'm talking about the small garden inhabitants and visitors: the "minor wildlife".
The next thing I did Saturday afternoon was dismantle my temporary greenhouse. I knew this was going to be somewhat of a difficult job, but I was getting tired of looking at it.
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