August 24
Switched Things Around
Very cool and overcast this morning. Actually a tad chilly. After our long, unbearably hot summer when I did not want to do anything in the struggling garden, it was odd.
I dug up three tiny blanketflowers, potted them and put them in rehab along with the Engelmann's daisy, the hollyhock and a sprouted cutting from one of the red flowered Texas betony plants.
I need to figure out how to get these through winter. Indoors maybe?
Then I made some switches: I dug up the Siebold sedum and put it in a shallow pot in the brown urn.
The Blonde Ambition grass that had been in the brown urn was unpotted and put in front of the Sweet Summer Love vine, planted in ground.
When I took it out of the pot it was clear it was getting very root bound. A big grass doesn't want to be in a pot. I like that it hides the open stems of the clematis.
I had to dig up and move the buckwheat that was there. I moved it over to an open spot between the two little pineleaf penstemons.
I moved the other buckwheat on the other side over just a bit too. It was in a spot where the emitter soaked it too much I thought. It's now closer to the open gaura.
Where it had been I put the Strawberry Fields gomphrena. It really was too big for the pot I had it in. It's in the ground now, but will come out soon (it's an annual) and I'll plant the red salvia there.
I want the birdbath garden to get full and lush so that each plant isn't a specimen, but the two circles blend together. Long way to go.
August 23
Too Much All Over
I'm all over the place trying to design what I want around the birdbath and in containers.
They used Japanese-style elements of just a few repeated large plants used over and over, with lots of space between. They had tall upright grasses in clumps of two or three all around, a few mounds of ground covering geraniums spilling purple flowers over rocks, and white flowered shrub roses randomly placed about.
That was it. I wish they had allowed pictures.
My design impulses are to order more and more plants to fill gaps, creating more and more busyness.
I get annoyed that the things I put in this year are still so tiny and undeveloped. The hot weather stunted a lot, and the effect is a garden of random struggling small things.
Photographs just show a few leaves and mulch.
Then I order more stuff to make up for it. It's too much.
Here's all the stuff I just ordered from Bluestone Perennials →
Also, a flat of 9 Mexican feather silky thread grasses for the open field. I'll need to keep them watered, the ones I planted a few years ago all died out except for one that got more water.
They aren't as xeric as I'd like, but I do have a watering process now.
(By the way, I am giving up on the sunflowers along the garage wall. They really do need so much water all the time, and still look puny and sparse and spindly. I'll actually take them all out except for the substantial clump right by the corner.
That will be a cleaner look, and the two Apache Plumes I planted along the garage wall will fill in some day.)
August 21🎈
Red Salvias
On a house tour yesterday I saw the most beautiful red salvias, lovely small mounds densely packed with scarlet flowers. I keep wanting red salvias somewhere in my garden. The Radio Red salvia coccineas in pots worked out okay, but they got leggy and dry.
Salvias do want cutting back to rebloom, so I did that recently, but they didn't do all that well in the small pots I used. I've been trying annual salvias in pots, but I want a perennial shrub salvia.
I don't want the Furman's Red Salvia greggii that High Country Gardens has -- I had it at one point early on and it was too cherry red, not the true red I wanted.
Bluestone Perennials has a meadow sage, Salvia Windwalker Royal Red that looks like what I want. As always, there are no photos on the internet of the plant, only the flowers close up. I want to see its form!
It gets big, about 4 feet tall, but can be kept much lower with spring trimming. Here's where I'd put it -- at the back edge of the outer circle around the birdbath.
The circled spot has a buckwheat (I'd move that) and the emitter there for some reason releases a lot of water -- it's quite wet in that one spot. The salvia would like that.
Instead of multiple pots in front of a few irises, the big red salvia would have more presence, but still have delicate spiky flowers seen over the birdbath.
Bluestone has another meadow sage, much smaller and rounder in a steely blue, called Perfect Profusion.
I'd like to add that to the circle too.
This blooms a lot and is a rounder form that balances the other things in the outer circle. I might put it where I just transplanted the orange kniphofia (that poor torch lily never has a home . . .) I do still want the Engelmann's daisy there, but it's in serious rehab now.
The blue color would look great with the orange Kudos agastache that is directly under the birdbath. That's a really elegant small plant and I'll order another -- again Bluestone has it -- for the other side of the birdbath.
The blanketflowers did absolutely nothing this year, never blooming, so I need a rethink
August 20
Back in the Groove
It was so hot and unpleasant for so long, and it's been so dry, and then we went away, so I haven't done much in the garden for a long while.
Today was warm (and still dry) but breezy and I puttered around and moved things. I watered, of course, that's given.
One thing I'm liking since we got back is the trough of red geraniums with the three blue fescue grasses in red pots behind them. It completes that somewhat empty corner nicely.
I re-potted the scaevola and the gomphrena, switching their pots. The bright purple is now in front and the red gomphrena is in the birdbath garden where the bobbing pompoms offer some color and contrast.
Then I dug up the struggling Engelmann's daisy and potted it for rehab. As always, when I dig up a struggler, the dirt is clodded and dry. This one has an emitter right at the base and I hand watered it a lot too. But it was dry.
In its spot I put the orange kniphofia that has struggled forever. It was in a pot in the shade, getting too much water, but had finally put out skinny new scapes. It wants sun and likes medium moisture soil but well draining.
I cut back the Radio Red salvias. They got leggy in their pots and they dry out every day and look withered.
It looks nice.
Still to do:
🌼 Dig up the one struggling Las Vegas hollyhock along the fence. It hasn't grown a bit and is shrinking now. Needs rehab.
🌺 Dig up the Siebold sedum under the pine and pot it up to put in the Italian urn on the patio (the gaura there isn't doing anything for some reason.) Neither of the yellow flowered Russian stonecrops bloomed this year.
August 17
We Returned
We left on the 10th for California and got back on the 16th.
The three watering stations worked well, using 91 gallons per watering. The birdbath looked better than ever and the pots I put there were wet. I watered that spot every day except Sunday.
The front corner was also nice and wet and looked good. That got watered M, W, F and Sat.
But the shady spot below the railroad ties by the potting bench was inconsistent. One tobacco plant looked green and full, well watered. The other was completely desiccated and seemed to get no water (it was blooming, though). I'll see if it revives with some soaking.
The red salvias were pot bound and leggy before we left, one looked wet and healthy enough, but most were dried out and shriveled when we returned, despite all being closely set together. I may not set up this spot again, it's too cramped and the water came pouring down from where I installed it on the fence.
The kitchen courtyard was okay -- I did not lose the geums, although the newly transplanted white coneflowers are crispy.
August 9
Wow
Half an inch of good soaking rain yesterday. The sun is out this morning and everything looks so different.
Amazing. I water and irrigate constantly and nothing looks anywhere near as good as it all does after a rainstorm.
The sun is out this morning and the world is fresh, cool and sparkling.
I even turned off the newly installed sprinkler system for when we leave, the pots were too wet from the rain. I need to remember to turn them back on -- we leave tomorrow.
It's so nice to have a morning off, where I don't need to go outside and water something or worry over how things look!
August 8
Sprinklers
I tested and adjusted the 3 sprinkler set ups Monday (at 4 a.m. with a flashlight, getting soaking wet) and the water was on. They're noisy, making spitting sounds.
Timers
I goofed and didn't set the correct current date, so the potting bench and the front ones came on today, Tuesday, when I did not expect.
Got it fixed.
The timers are so NOT intuitive. It's hard to figure out the little icons and what they mean and how to keep arrowing down or over or up or whatever to set them. Ugh.
Spray areas
The spray coverage is tricky. With no open room to spray 360 degrees, or even 180, adjusting them to spray in a confined area is a pain, it concentrates the force of the water or hits too much.
The water by the potting bench drives straight down from the fence location, quite intense.
The birdbath area sprays too wide, wetting the stone walkway as much as the mulched area. It covers a big area, and it is set for every day. The birdbath was full after one hour this morning.
But I did get all three adjusted to spray an adequate enough area. Not great but okay.
Pot Locations
It was easy enough to pick up each container and move it to a spray spot. Not a bad chore at all.
It was kind of cool to see various plants in different locations. I like the blue fescue grasses by the front porch, maybe use the red pots behind the green trough of geraniums?
The spray covers a lot of area here, all the way down to the lower patio stones.
Seeing bigger plants around the birdbath gave me hint of how much nicer this garden can be. That whole circle area still needs growth and additional plants for a real impact.
Temps for the week we are gone will be much cooler. Ten degrees cooler in the daytime (down to low and mid 80s) but still sunny. That will help keep these pots from so much stress.
I worried all summer about how this system was going to work. I'll assess when I get back but so far the timers work okay, the areas get water, and moving the pots was easy enough.
August 6
Relentless
Every day is the same, no variation this summer. The mornings are lovely and my plants look okay, not great, but not wilting. They hang on. Still, mornings are cool and nice.
But the day heats up quickly and by late morning I'm inside, plants are struggling in the hot sun, and many wilt. I water every day, the irrigation runs 4 days a week, but we are barely keeping up.
We go away on the 10th for a week in California. I set up three sprinkler areas and will move containers into those spots. I hope the timers and the spray direction work.
But in the kitchen courtyard I'll lose the geums -- they utterly shrivel unless they have deep daily water. And irrigation emitters don't reach the new black hollyhocks or some other plants. I'll lose those. But that's just a few edits, and in place of the geums, which want water and shade here, I'll put in more coneflowers.
What looks nice is the gomphrena in the pot in front. I'll do that again, but put it in the brown pot in the birdbath garden.
I over fertilized, so it's leggy.
I should put one of these in around the birdbath, in the outer ring. It's a nice shape, stays low enough but has some fullness.
The pineleaf penstemons and buckwheats in the outer circle are low little things -- they promised to get full and mounded, but either they won't (my plants are all shrinking) or they will take many years to achieve any form.
The glossy green aronia lost half its leaves and yellowed in the heat, but has recovered now, a smaller, much more open plant.
And the Engelmann's daisy never grew at all this summer. It did put up a skinny cute yellow flower but has put out no leaves, and is limp. It's the size when first planted. The new nepeta did not grow at all either.
(It is so hard to plant something and then wait a year while it remains limp and struggling, wait another year to see if it will put out any growth at all, and then wait a third year to see if it persists, and then have to start all over again with another three year experiment when it doesn't. That's six years to try to get a simple flower garden established, and these are not trees! And during that time the garden simply looks empty where I planted things that don't grow.)
I'm never going to get there. Okay, enough.
The fernbush flowered earlier in the summer and has gone by, but the plant is getting fuller. The yellow Honeycomb butterfly bush is finally a little taller than wide and has a few flowers.
The purple butterfly bush in the kitchen courtyard is tall, overtopping the fence, and it has stayed narrow and vase-shaped, not encroaching on the plants below. But this year the flower spikes seem a grayish purple, not the pretty lavender of other years.
The kitchen courtyard has gone by, but the forms are nice enough. The little grass I planted in the center hasn't grown an inch in two years, though, and can't be seen at all here (next to the rock).
I'll move more of the white coneflowers to the right side for some flowering structure next year.
I took out the three angelonias in front of the irises, they were doing nothing and looked awful. When I pulled them out they came up with puffs of dry dust and clumpy dry dirt. I had been watering them regularly.
The urn on the front portal has a draping dichondra that looks good, but the purple petunia with it will only put out one skimpy droopy flower at a time.
The overall look is bedraggled.
The red annual geraniums in the green trough nearby looked pretty bad and I fertilized them, perhaps too much, as they now have a lot of very dark green leaves and no blooms.
Sigh.
The circle under the birdbath looks a little tiered, but the orange agastache is really pretty. Hard to see in this picture, but it is delicate and light-catching and very nice.
The coreopsis have gone by. I can not get the tall aristata blanketflowers to do anything at all, they have remained all summer as a few green leaves an inch or two high. Nothing at all like last year, when the show in July was spectacular.
Last year:
This year they are complete no-shows. That's disappointing. The creeping thyme has continued to do well and spread, although unevenly, and where I dig up and transplant a bit it doesn't take.
The outer ring around the birdbath is still new, not growing, and just sitting there. I'll add the Blonde Ambition grass when I dig it up to put in the new ironwood tree on the patio. Maybe add a dwarf goldenrod as noted above.
I keep wanting to solve the problem of no-shows and stunted no-grows with more plants.
There's no reward in that.
August 1
Still No Rain
All of July went by with no rain. and August starts the same. We've had a few sprinkles that left the patio cushions wet, but nothing in the rain gauge.
Where are the monsoons?