Making inroads with the home gardens

A couple years ago, while trying to maximize use of space in my genus garden, I accidentally removed the bulbs of a few beautiful purple crocus and three or four lavender and pink hyacinth plants. I was left with a solitary white crocus from the original bulb planting.

Last week, I cleared out the last crocus plant and transplanted it into the circular garden in the middle of the backyard, where it joined well-established tulips (a pastel orange color, highlighted by stripes of purple). To the circular garden, I also added several new purple crocus plants (such as the those shown in the photo leading off the post) and a couple yellow daffodils, deciding to make that garden one of predominantly spring bulbs since those blooms go away just about the time blooms flower on the the red bud tree in the garden's center. We also put some lavender hyacinth and yellow tulips into the front garden.

The new plantings in the backyard, which gets more sun than the front, have already bloomed; foliage for the tulips and transplanted crocus there are up, so blooms from those should be forthcoming in the weeks ahead.

The transplanting enabled me to convert the entire genus garden to one of vegetables and strawberries. That garden has plantings of various forms of lettuce and some broccoli, and in a yet another nearby bed, one I refer to as my cucumber garden, there are broccoli, cauliflower and some cabbage. I'll put cucumbers in there once the spring plantings mature.

Speaking of transplants, for several years I've wanted to break up and transplant four well-established plants in separate gardens in the backyard -- the two day lilies in my genus garden (one of which had become surrounded by my sprawling strawberries) and the two sedum plants that served as bookends to my rear backyard fence line bed for about six years now.

The sedum have gotten huge ... and for the past three years, then have been been dwarfed by adjacent Henry's Garnet bushes. So I decided to give the bushes a bit more room to expand -- and me a better opportunity to keep them in check before the branches extend outside the garden boundaries.

I broke up all four plants and relocated them in two rows to a heretofore undeveloped patch of grass outside the back fence line facing the alley. It'll be interesting to see in the years ahead how well they do there ... and how (or even if) they spruce up the alley landscape as I had envisioned. I filled the lily spots in the genus garden with broccoli plants, short-term uses. The holes left by the sedum plants are unfilled at this time.

Photo geek stuff: I shot everything for this post with my Canon 6D equipped with a Sigma 105mm f/2.8 macro lens. I set the camera at 100 ISO and switched between f/5.6 and f/8, with the shutter set at 1/400. Ordinarily I like to stop another stop or two (i.e., f/8 or f/11) for floral closeups, but I was in an exploratory mood ... and decided to see what a little shallower depth of field would render.

Above: A perspective shot of the circular garden, with the new crocus and daffodils already in bloom. Foliage for the orange tulips is showing. The tree trunk belongs to the red bud, which I allowed to grow from seed dropped into the yard from a next-door neighbor's tree, which is no longer there. 

Above and below: Two more closeups of the new crocus.

Above: A closeup of one of the daffodils. 

Above and below: Looks at the genus garden, showing some of the strawberry foliage in the foreground in both photos and new lettuce plants in the background. The dirt adjacent to the pot in the photo above is where one of the day lilies used to be. A couple broccoli plants are there now. 

Above: Foliage and blooms from a plant that had started in my neighbor's yard on the other side of the property line fence found its way on my side. The blooms were pretty enough last year that I decided to see what it would bring this year.

Above: The start of one this year's large-petaled Asiatic lilies in the same bed as the spillover plant immediately above. 

Pink Asiatic lily's turn to bloom

Yesterday, the day after the first of my yellow Asiatic lilies bloomed, I got to see the first blooms from one of the pink Asiatic lilies. To "complete" the blog representation, I went out and took more shots of that, and grabbed a few shots of broccoli crowns while I was at it.

Concluding today's post are two more images of yellow blooms and a look at one of two blueberry bushes I mentioned in Sunday's post.

The joy from gardening

Every May since I began to enjoy gardening eight years ago or so, the anticipation builds in earnest. I find myself constantly peeking out my kitchen window to observe or note any progress on the plants that will give me the earliest pleasure from my efforts to give them every opportunity to do what they do best.

By May, I've already seen the crocus and tulips (and hyacinth until I accidentally dug up the bulbs three autumns ago while trying to put fall plants into the ground) come and go, although tulips often linger into mid-May. After the tulips had withered, I usually had to wait until late May before the spectacular pastel yellow and pink Asiatic lilies would bloom. I've never seen Asiatic lilies with blooms this large and elegant, and would you believe I ordered the bulbs four summers ago from an ad I saw and clipped in USA Weekend, a magazine insert in my Sunday newspaper?

This year, a year after I planted a strawberry starter, the plant produced its first harvest, and I've been picking -- and thoroughly enjoying -- the fruits of last year's labor for the past two weeks. I was so thrilled that I went out and bought and planted a blueberry bush last month. Next year at this time, I hope to be doubly fruit-thrilled. As a bonus, I was able to cut a sprig Monday from the first bearer of the broccoli seeds planted in late February.

The first Asiatic lilies to open -- from a plant with yellow flowers -- blossomed overnight yesterday. My eyes popped this morning when I saw the blooms when doing the aforementioned surveillance from the kitchen window. I decided it was time to take some photographs -- of the lilies and the strawberries, and to document progress on the cucumbers, broccoli plants, cauliflower, tomatoes, lettuce, a new hosta plant, roses, my new Earth Box and yet another first-year vegetable (not to mention perennial!) -- asparagus. I used my Sigma 105mm f/2.8 macro lens for all of these shots, beginning with the tight shot of a strawberry leading off the post.

I also grabbed some shots of my house and garage exterior as it looked today, about halfway through a new paint job. A crew spent four days last weekend water blasting and scraping, applying a good amount of trim and managing to get a modest layer of primer down on about one-fourth of the west side.

So today's post is about that shoot. I did the shoot probably right around the time the Indianapolis 500-Mile Race was beginning at the Indianapolis Motor Speedway, about 10 miles away. Many of these shots should be self-explanatory if you read through the above text; I'll add captions where appropriate. 

 

Above: One of the pink Asiatic lilies is bulging, certain to blossom in the next day or so. 

Above: The strawberry plant, which not only has borne fruit this year but grown and expanded. It's butting up against a day lily (stella d'ora) on the left. 

Above: Broccoli plants dominate the front row, which is what I call my genus garden (developed in a former grass median of an old-fashioned two-path driveway); a cauliflower plant is on the far left. In the background are cucumbers (left) and the Asiatic lilies (right).

Above: The whispy tops of the first-year asparagus plant.

Above: Closeup of the in-ground cucumbers.

Above: The Earth Box. All four seeds sprouted: Tomatoes (back right), cucumber (back left), carrots (front left) and one I can't remember.

Above: I took this thinking about how this painting project has been like turning my house upside down ... or something to that defect.

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Above: A leaf on a first-year hosta plant. 

Above: A bloom from a rose plant that is the only plant in any of my gardens that has been with me since the day I moved into the house 21+ years ago.

Above: A shot of the narrow area between my garage and the next-door neighbor's fence.

Above: I started this post with strawberries, I figured I'd end it with 'em, too. I picked and ate these immediately after taking this picture.

Getting down low in the gardens

Photographically, I'm leading with my attempt at shooting something different when I ventured out into my gardens last weekend. The shot above and the first two below were shot from ground level.

Yes, I know the ground-level vantage point isn't new, but it isn't done nearly as often as the straight-on shot, and I can't say I've seen may ground-level garden shots, so ... in my endeavors to try to capture new or different vantage points, I grabbed my macro lens -- in quest for high-quality images -- and hit the lawn when I took these. I particularly like the way the low sight line gives prominence to the asiatic lily buds, putting them on equal terms with the blooms. In the first two below, that's my lettuce and day lily in the first image, and a view of the row of asiatic lilies below it.

The second reason for this post was to herald the blooms of the aforementioned asiatic lilies -- whose yellow and pink petals are much bigger and more elegant than most asiatic lilies I've seen before. These lilies have become the jewel in my garden, something I look forward to each year when they start to bloom in early to mid-June like this. Sadly, a wicked storm can tear apart the blooms in a flinch. I managed to take these images before the big storms came through last weekend. The storms tore a few petals from the blooms, but most ... amazingly ... survived.

And the third reason for the post (read on below the lily pics) ...
















... was to chuckle about how nature snookered me. Remember the May 30, 2010, post about flowers blooming on bean seedlings? I now think that's s hooey. The image below, taken Saturday, is the same plant shown May 30 (then with a solitary bloom). Clearly this ain't no bean plant (there are a couple of bean plants, however, coming up very near to this, though). So ... I have that Internet story -- which told me bean plants show flowers early on -- to curse (and blame!).

But the more key story here is ... where did this petunia plant come from? I did not plan it, plant it or sow seed for this. As I mentioned in my previous post, I grew petunias with exactly these types of purple-and-white blooms two (2) summers ago in this very same portion of my genus garden. But petunias are annuals; they don't survive after their one-and-only season. So how could this be? Someone once told me that birds (and occasionally squirrels) will pick up seed from one place, fly it around and then drop it indiscriminately. That's the only explanation I can think of for this; and to think it dropped in the same area of my garden where it grew two years ago. A gardening miracle?

And to those who think I buried the lead of this post, well ... maybe I did. I just didn't want to lead with the embarrassment. Call me proud!

The "bean" bloom plant today

The "bean" blooms

Cucumber foliage is running rampant

Broccoli, next to the cucumbers