Category: Summer Garden

The Rose Garden in Spring & Summer; Daffodils Replace Lavender Border

julia erickson4 Comments

To help me plan for this coming gardening season, I am going through some of my pictures from last year. Here are two pictures of the Rose Garden from last spring and summer.

The first picture is from early spring before the roses bloom. Previously, the path was lined with lavender, but the lavender didn’t work. The purpose of lining the path was to provide interest before the roses started to bloom. The lavender looked great when I first put it in during the summer, but the next season I learned that it is one of the last perennials to wake up from winter–later than the roses themselves. Thus, I pulled out all of the lavender and replaced it with daffodil bulbs. As you can imagine, the daffodils looks much better in spring than the lifeless lavender. The second picture is from late spring when the roses have started to bloom.

The Rose Garden was created from a strip of previously unused lawn. The central brick pathway starts at the back of the Cutting Garden runs through the Rose Garden and ends at the Children’s garden. For more information on the creation of the Rose Garden, click here: http://heirloomgardener.blogspot.com/2007/12/creating-rose-garden.html



A Garden for Late Summer: the Long Border

julia erickson5 Comments

To help me plan for this coming gardening season, I am going through some of my pictures from last year. Here is a picture of the Long Border from last summer. The Long Border is the name of the border in the backyard between the Children’s Garden and the Walled Garden. The Long Border is made of perennials, shrubs and grasses with peak interest in late summer.

For a post on the inspiration for the Long Border, click here: http://heirloomgardener.blogspot.com/2008/02/inspiration-for-long-border-american.html

The Egg Garden in Summer

julia erickson1 Comment

To help me plan for this coming gardening season, I am going through some of my pictures from last year. Here are some of the Egg Garden from last summer. The Egg Garden is the name of the oval garden in the front of my home at the end of the Front Border and in front of the Cutting Garden. The garden is made of perennials, annuals, shrub roses and the crabapple tree. In the garden, there is also a path made of pebbles that connects the front yard to the Cutting Garden.

Heritage Rose: Flowers in December

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This past weekend when it was a bit warmer, I was surprised when I took my daily walk about the garden and noticed Heritage (pictured here back in November) had a few roses opening up still. The warmth seemed to have awakened them, so I decided to cut a few for the house. The frost damaged the outer petals, but once I peeled these away, the flowers were in good enough shape to display. I can’t believe its December and I still have a few roses.

Heritage has been an unbelievable bloomer. It has beautiful, big, fragrant cupped flowers and is definitely one of the stars of the David Austin rose collection. The foliage is super healthy, even during the hot, humid days of summer.

Heritage has many uses in the garden. I started Heritage in a pot on my deck where it did very well its first year but was growing taller than I wanted it to be. I find that many of the Austin roses grow a lot taller than stated with our hot summers.

I re-planted it in the Children’s Garden where it has continued to grow very well. Heritage has very few thorns and offers a lot of flowers for the kids to cut for vases. Heritage also sets hips after I stop deadheading it in August which the squirrels (not the birds) eat in the fall and winter.

For more information about David Austin roses:

http://www.davidaustinroses.com/

Russell’s Cottage Rose

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Russell’s Cottage Rose is one of many old roses in our garden. It is a hybrid of R. multiflora which can be grown as a shrub (as I do) or a pillar. This rose covers itself in June with these beautiful blossoms adding a rich Damask rose scent to the garden. It is one of the easiest roses to grow. It needs very little care to remain healthy and vigorous, although I do fertilize it, prune out deadwood, and shape it after its bloom to keep it the size I want.

Star of the Republic Rose

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This is one of the new roses I tried last year from Antique Rose Emporium. It is one of their pioneer introductions which are supposed to be remontant, healthy, and vigorous. It is all that and more.

I almost pulled it out at the beginning of the season because rabbits had eaten all its leaves and I thought it would not survive. Also, I checked the Antique Rose Emporium website (http://www.antiqueroseemporium.com ) which described the rose as orange, a color I don’t care for in roses. But, I hesitated and left it there. I am now glad that I did.

The roses are beautiful and the shrub is healthy. As it turns out, Star of the Republic is incorrectly described as orange. Although, roses can bloom in slightly different colors depending on soil and exposure, I cannot see how this lovely pink-apricot color could ever be described as orange. In addition, it grew to about four feet — out of reach for the rabbits.

Japanese Beautyberry

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The first picture shows what the Japanese Beautyberry is known for: its distinctive purple berries that appear in autumn and persist into the winter.

The second picture shows what the plant looks like in the summer, on the lower left, beneath the Pee Gee hydrangea.

I like these two stages of the plant, but am less fond of its other stages: the early spring when it looks dead and is late to leaf out; and the autumn when the leaves droop and look lifeless for about a month before they fall off.

They are healthy and vigorous plants. I purchased very small plants and they grew quickly in the first year. Next year, I am cutting them back to six inches off the ground in early spring to avoid the first problem. Further, I keep moving them around my property in hopes of finding the perfect place to enjoy them, and they are not bothered by this.

For fall and winter arrangements, you can cut the branches with the Beautyberries. If you do so when they still have leaves, I recommend that you remove the leaves because they droop immediately after being cut.

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Click here for a follow-up post on propogation: http://heirloomgardener.blogspot.com/2008/02/japanese-beatyberry-unexpected.html

Vegetables and Herbs: How to Build Raised Vegetable Beds (on a Slope/Hill)

julia erickson6 Comments

In my children’s garden, my children and I grow vegetables in addition to flowers. For the last two years, we used the same raised bed construction that I used in the side garden:

http://heirloomgardener.blogspot.com/2007/11/creating-space-for-garden.html

These were short raised beds constructed with six inch wide ipe wood. You can see a picture of one of these beds below from last summer with heirloom lemon cucumbers:

The rabbit fencing around the cucumbers was to keep the resident groundhog from eating the cucumbers in the same way he did the tomatoes.

Towards the end of the summer, we visited New York Botanical Garden’s Home Gardening Center (http://www.nybg.org/hgc_online/hgc_onsite/) and were inspired by their raised beds that were significantly taller than the ones we had constructed. Thus, once we had harvested the last of our cucumbers and zucchinis, my husband deconstructed the old beds and built the new ones you see below:

Ipe was too difficult to work with and costly, so we made these out of cedar wood. We purchased standard six by one inch, un-treated ten foot planks and had them cut in half. Each box (two of three are pictured) is made of three planks on three sides and four planks on the fourth side because our entire property is on a slope. Two additional boards are placed on top on either side to create a place where you can sit, place tools, or when the vegetables have grown, stand.

We filled the bottom of the boxes with compostable garden waste. On top, we added a mix of composted cow manure, Bumper Crop and top soil. Then, to protect the soil, we sowed a cover crop of winter rye that I purchased from Johnny’s Seeds (http://www.johnnyseeds.com/). The winter rye will be turned over in the spring adding even more organic material to the soil.

The overall result was a neater looking garden that will hopefully produce an even more robust crop next year.

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For a follow-post on organically preparing the soil for planting, click here:
http://heirloomgardener.blogspot.com/2008/03/raised-vegetable-beds-organically.html