Rose bush is in bloom!

All three rose buds have finally bloomed! And the blooms are absolutely beautiful. The color is absolutely stunning. See for yourself:

Crescendo rose blossom

If only something didn't take bites out of the bud before it bloomed. I don't know what it was, but I did find a bristly rose slug on one once...

More plants!

We got lots of new plants this past weekend - all of them gifts!

I'll start with some plants that my parents brought for us. First is a beautiful hydrangea plant:

Hydrangea macrophylla 'Endless Summer'

This plant like part sun and grows to 5 feet high and 4 feet wide. I'm thinking about putting it on the north side of the house that was recently "renovated", but still working on that.

They also gave us another beautiful fuchsia hanging plant which we hung on the front porch:

Fuchsia hanging plant

This plants also likes part sun, so I'm hoping that it gets enough there.

Next, my mom and I made a visit to a nearby plant nursery, and of course we couldn't leave empty-handed... and my mom insisted on paying.

Here's what we bought home:

Japanese Painted Fern 'Pictum'

Creeping Phlox 'Candy Stripes'

Goat's Beard 'Misty Lace'

Calibrachoa hanging plant

The fern, creeping phlox, and goat's beard haven't yet been planted (speaking of goat's beard, I should introduce him to his dwarf relative). I hung the hanging plant in the back yard. It needs full sun, so I'm really hoping it does ok there.

I'm planning on trying to find a designer to help figure out what to do with the north side of the house, and what to replace some of the old overgrown bushes in the front yard with. Until then I'm going to hold off on planting anything in the front yard.

Thanks again to my parents for all the plants!

Calum Memorial Garden is planted

The sun came out today for just a little bit and allowed the temperature to reach 72 degrees, so my wife and I got out and worked on the memorial garden for our son and planted the plants that we purchased yesterday.

I started out by digging up the phlox and transplanting it to the front yard. My options for where to put it were limited, but I snuck it in near the hydrangea tree:

Phlox transplanted to the front yard.

It will hopefully be more happy there. However, prior to moving it I noticed that the lower leaves of about half the plant had some dark speckles on the leaves.

Dark speckles on lower leaves of Phlox.

I thought that it might be the powdery mildew disease that Phlox are prone to getting and it might be, however, upon looking at photos of the disease online, it doesn't look very similar, being not white and all. In any case I pruned off every leaf that had it. The really interesting thing is that those speckles weren't present yesterday. I looked at a zoomed in photo taken yesterday and they don't appear to be there:

Photo of the same plant just yesterday with no speckles present.

I did a quick online search and found a forum post with pictures that look similar (yes, quite the scientific diagnosis). According to the responses it's leaf spot fungal disease / septoria divaricata fungus and is spread from the soil. This would make sense since we were digging up plants there and soil was flying everywhere and I know some landed on and near the phlox plant. We also had rain last night that could have splashed it up onto the leaves. I'll be keeping a close eye on the other plants we just put in in that area. I need to get some mulch ASAP to help prevent it from getting on the plant leaves. I can't believe how quickly that infected the plant. I hope it survives because I really like it, and of course all of the new plants that we just labored over.

Anyway, I also transplanted the other hosta that was behind the phlox to the north side of the house along with the other hosta I transplanted over there yesterday. Boy are there a lot of roots over there. I could barely find a spot to plant them (oh and I almost cut our cable line...). Here's a shot of what that area looks like now:

North side of the house with hosta transplants.

There'll be a stone pathway through there soon someday.

And after deciding how to arrange the plants (which was borderline random), my wife and I got to planting them and this is how it ended up:

Calum Memorial Garden

To finish it off we are going to get an engraved stone to put in it.

Here is the list of plants that we planted:

Wild Sweet William, Woodlan Phlox
'Blue Moon'
(Phlox divaricata)

Jacob's Ladder (Polemonium reptans)

Tiarella 'Jeepers Creepers'
Creeping Foam Flower

'Praying Hands' Hosta

Dwarf Goatsbeard
(Aruncus aethusifolius)

Bleeding Heart
(Dicentra spectabilis 'Alba')

Golden Bleeding Heart
(Dicentra spectabilis 'Gold Heart')

White-flowered Epimedium
(Epimedium x youngianum 'Niveum')

New Guinea Impatiens
(Impatiens hawkeri)

Who names these things?? Woodland Phlox - hey that sounds nice; Jacob's ladder - sure, I can buy that; but Jeepers Creepers? Dwarf Goatsbeard? Huh??

Anyway, in addition to the garden, my wife put together the pot of Begonias for the patio:

Pot of Begonias.

Brigitte & Nadine Rhine Begonia

They look lovely! My parents gave us a pot of yellow begonias as a house warming gift in 2007 and they bloom beautifully all summer long! That is why I bought them.

And finally to wrap this long post up, I planted another pretty hosta that we purchased next to some other hostas in the backyard:

It's the lighter colored green one in between the two large ones
toward the left center.

Hosta 'Orange Marmaloade'

Good luck, plants.

Grass update

We'll start with the backyard. The grass is growing, but still very slowly and very thin. Fine fescue is so fine. It's hard to see that ever filling in, but we'll see. Here's some shots (there's not a whole lot to see):

Still thin and patchy, but you can see the fine fescue more clearly now.

This area (NW) seems to be getting more green. It used to be mostly dirt.

Now on to the front yard... With each mowing I am more and more impressed with how well the new grass has been filling in. I'm very excited about it. More and more areas are looking really nice and the patchiness continues to diminish, as well as the weeds. There's still the very contrasty tall fescue, but hopefully that will start to die off soon. To my eyes it seems lighter in color so I wonder if it's on it's way to turning yellow/brown (i.e. dying). I'm really excited to see that grass go.

Here's a few shots of the front yard after a fresh cut:

Still thin near the driveway, but slowly getting thicker.

Next to the road still needs some work, but other than that it's looking great.

The contrasting colors is so obvious...

 

One of my favorite spots. Very thick turf. I could use that as a pillow.

  

New grass next to the side walk by the road - getting very thick! Mmm!

I'll end with a couple of shots of a tulip that happened to come up and bloom this year under the oak tree.

Pretty color.

Looking straight down (if you look closely,
you can see a tiny spider on the right side).

Daisy progress

The daisies continue their growing! Here's a shot I took yesterday:

Daisies in the window.

Daisy seeds are germinating

The daisy seeds in my Daisy Grow Kit are germinating. That didn't take long! I actually noticed it yesterday morning, so it took roughly 6 days.

After 8 days

Daisy Grow Kit!

Today my wife gave me this daisy growing kit!

It is rather high maintenance!

Daisy Alaska (Chrysanthemum maximum)

I'm very excited! I have it in the window that gets the most sun - hopefully it's enough!

Thank you, My Love!

The plants are starting to come up

I took a look around the garden beds and I noticed that many other plants are starting to grow in addition to the daffodils. Here are a few photos:

Phlox

Astilbe (I think)

The 'Montgomery' Astilbe

Rose bush buds

I believe this is a Crocus (right) next to a tulip (left).

I'm excited!

2010: Part 1

In 2010, I was a bit more busy. I did some planting in July and major work on the lawn in the fall.

For this post, I'm just going to cover the July plantings. These are the perennials that I planted in the front yard:

'Kobold' Spike Gayfeather, 'Montgomery' Astilbe, Perennial Gaillardia

And here are the perennials that I planted in the back yard:

'Nora Leigh' Garden Plox, Coral Bells, 'Midnight Rose' Coral Bells

I also planted some Impatiens. Here are some photos of what it looked like once planted:

Phlox, surrounded by three Impatiens. Also visible are some Hostas and the
Japanese Maple.

This is just to the right of the above photo. Both Coral Bells. Also
visible is a large Hosta.

And finally, I bought some potted plants (one was a Geranium) and a hanging plant of some sort.

Geranium

Hanging plant. I can't remember what this was, but the pink/orange
 flowers opened when it was sunny. Very beautiful.

An awesome colorful leafy plant that I will definitely be getting again.
These leafs were in excess of 8" in length. Unfortunately,
I don't remember the name. 

This is a close-up of the Phlox. Very beautiful.
Unfortunately, it lost its flowers as time went on.

Everything did fairly well except for the Phlox and Geranium. The Phlox didn't get enough light and quickly lost all of its blossoms and struggled to grow more (but stayed alive), and the Geranium I over-watered. Lessons learned: Geraniums like it dry; Phlox need more light - being in the backyard, I'm not surprised and knew when I bought it that it probably wasn't going to have enough light. I'm going to try to transplant it this spring to the front yard in a hopefully sunnier spot. We'll see how that goes...

In the next post, I'll cover the lawn project that I did in the fall.