Garden panoramas

Well, I've taken the end of August panorama and I thought I'd show off the progression of the back garden through this spring and summer.

April

I didn't have the idea of doing the panoramas at first, so the mid-April pictures are actually two sets that didn't overlap enough to allow them to be stitched together.

Mid April left side of hill

Mid April right side of hill

The early daffodils really stand out against the red mulch.

Late April

Beginning to see where the bigger elements of the garden are returning to the spring garden.

May

Mid May

Beginning to see the Azaleas in the center show their color.

Late May

By late May there has been a lot of growth and filling in, even the vegetable garden on the far right is showing growth.

June

Mid June

In June we started seeing the Primrose and the Rose Campion - bunches of yellow and pinkish red.

Late June

July

Mid July

By mid July we were seeing a LOT of the green spikey plants all over, but particularly in the center - blocking our view of the butterfly bushes..

Late July

I made a decision that the green spikey things were weeds - they were taking over and growing so big that we couldn't see much else. - except the mutant tomato bushes taking over the vegetable garden.  There are only 3 tomato bushes in that garden over there on the right.

August

Mid August

It was a very mild August, very few days in the 90's and none that I can remember in the 100's. Everything continued to thrive, but we don't have much blossoming out back in the late summer.  We had a very healthy hibiscus in the front yard, but those pictures are in other posts.

Late August

August has continued mild (a little hot this week, but nothing to complain about.) The mutatnt tomato plants are still going strong - we're getting between a pint and a quart of cherry tomatoes almost every day.

September and October

There will still be plenty to do and more tomatoes to harvest, but the major flowering and gardening for this season is winding down.  I'm already making plans for next year, but this project has given me a longer perspective on the cycles of the garden through the Spring and Summer months.  I need to find some more late blooming plants o help fill out all the greenery of August and September.

Macro Hibiscus

On my way out for my walk in the woods yesterday i spotted some hibiscus blooming in the front yard. I'm not out front as much as the backyard - so I don't get as many pictures of the front.  The hibiscus are usually well over my head, so it was nice to see some down where I could get some decent angles.  The light was cooperating mostly, morning sun, but not too harsh.  I had my camera with me, since I was heading out to the wildlife refuge.

I've been experimenting with the macro settings on my camera. Hey - I'm a guy and it's a technology toy - I need to experiment.  I can't (and don't want to) get ultra close to the bees and butterflies or the birds.  So, I've been experimenting with the macro settings on more stationary subjects.  And the hibiscus volunteered.

Here are two of the blooms at my level on the bush.

And with the zoom I was able to get a decent close-up shot.

But them I switched over to the macro setting (and to a bloom with less shadow at the center.) You can see some fun details like the spill of pollen on the petal below the stamen.

And even closer in macro mode. More details of the pollen on the stamen and on the petal below it, and the veins and coloring of the petals.

The I switched over to a super-macro setting and got really really close (much more than any critter would allow.)

The detail of the pollen, and the coloring in the petals is amazing - I never could achieve that much detail with just a zoom (not with my camera.)

Then I combined the super macro shot with some post processing digital zoom and got this:

WOW!!

I'll keep experimenting and keep posting about my progress.

Executive Decision - They're WEEDS

Over the last couple posts I've been trying to identify a group of plants that have made a big impact on the back hill.  The "Green Spikey Things" have been multiplying and growing taller. The tallest group were up to about 7 feet tall and beginning to spread out at the top - threatening to become a canopy of green over the rest of the garden.  My garden is not a shade garden - it gets sun all day and there's no telling what a shade canopy would do.  So this week we made an executive decision. They're weeds.

If they had been across the back fence and providing privacy screening, then maybe we wouldn't call them weeds.  But they were growing in the middle of the hill and blocking our view of the butterfly bushes behind them.

The garden path was totally blocked and there was no visibility beyond the screen of Green Spikey Things.

Fortunately they were easy to pull.  Even the 6-7 foot tall ones didn't have roots and deeper than 3-4 inches.  So I filled up 2 big yard debris bags this afternoon after church and now I can see the garden.

And now I can get back to the more remote corners and keep getting pictures of the pollinated and pollinators.

And an added bonus is that the hill is more presentable for the end of the month panorama next week.

Creating a photo log of the back hill

By far the biggest garden we have is on the hill in the backyard.  There are numerous other bits and pieces around the house, but the back hill is the biggest continuous bed.  I've been taking pictures of sections of it for years, but last summer started stitching together some of the sequences to create panoramic scenes of the whole hill.

This year I'm taking the panoramic scenes a step further and creating a series of pictures over time to show the garden as it grows through the season.  So far I have three pictures and have put them together in a sequences collage.

 The top picture is mid-April right after I had spent a weekend putting down the mulch.  I was not very careful in overlapping the original pictures, so the stitching did not work well.  It's actually two different stitched images placed next to each other.  The center image is late April, and the third one is mid-May (then there is room for several more to be added later.)

Here are the images separately - to see more detail.

<-- 2 pictures Mid April

 Mid April 3 pictures ->

Late April

And today (mid-May)

Since I'm still learning what I'm doing out there, this will give me a chance to see what is blooming when. So next year I'll have a quick reference guide that is very specifically tailored to my garden.

Now I am going to ask for help.  I have several plants that I don't know what they are (so I'm not sure what to do for them.)  Here is a gallery of pictures.  If you know what these are, please leave a comment and tell me. I'll group them by numbers to make it easier to keep track.

Plant 1 - along the garden path in several spots - getting to about 12 -18 inches tall

Plant 2 in the center left of the hill - lots of sun

Plant 3 - at the far right on the hill - plenty of full sun.

Plant 4 - ground cover - mostly behind the crimson barberry in the center behind the arbor. 

If you know what these are - please leave a comment and let me know so that I'll know how to care for them.

It's Mulch Time

It's Mulch Time.

After building (and filling) the raised garden bed last week it was time to get to mulching the garden on the hill.  This is the first year I've tackled the project myself and not paid a landscaper to do the heavy lifting. (But I guess the heavy lifting was last weekend and the dirt for the raised bed,)

So I started by making two trips to Lowe's to get 30 bags of mulch.

It took two trips because I couldn't fit that much into one load in the Rav.  This is when I remember my red pick up for so many years ago...

Once I had it all unloaded I had to get it staged.

Mr Hill, meet Mr Mulch.

Of course once I had it staged, and the fence closed (most importantly "and the fence closed") I had helpers trying to see what was going on.

What's you doing Daddy?

So, to make a long story short - it's DONE.  It took most of the day, but I still had time to run up to the store and get the makings for cheeseburgers on the grill and a bottle of Dragonfly from Far Eastern Shore Winery.  Gloria had spent the afternoon cleaning patio furniture, so she was ready for dinner alfresco and a bottle of wine.

Here's the results of another long (but rewarding) day in the garden.

The red mulch really makes the daffodils pop.

Later this spring we hope to see signs of life on the blueberry bushes and the butterfly bushes (center and top of hill respectively.).

The entrance to the garden path, with two guardians with solar lanterns to light the way.

A dogwood tree near the top center, and a lilac bush to the left and down from the dogwood.

This is a big garden - I was beat by the time I made it to this end.

I'm tired, but it is so rewarding to do something where I can see results immediately.  The new plantings take awhile to see if they've taken hold, but something like building the raised bed, and putting down the mulch has an immediacy like I can find when I'm cooking.  Not the sort of intangible results of leading a software development team (my full time job.) I'm sure that this is a big part of why I'm finding the gardening to be so rewarding. (But being able to play with the electric trimmer and the chainsaw do have their charms as well.)

I put the snow shovel away

Enough of THIS:

We had a chance to get beyond basic clean-up of the garden over the weekend.  We’ve been talking (and researching) about different options for a raised garden bed for a few weeks.   In a couple of the places we’re lived, I’ve build garden beds for Gloria to plant flowers or vegetables.  Last spring we got a couple of big planters for the patio (a ½ whiskey barrel and other pot just a little smaller,) but this year we wanted to go bigger.  But we also wanted something high off the ground that would be easy to tend.

I’ve looked at plans for DIY beds and at kits available from local sources.  I wasn’t sure about the DIY options because I didn’t know how we would be able to get the lumber home so that I could start working on it.  Not to mention that the scratch built boxes are a lot more work.

So last week, Gloria found a kit at Lowe's that makes a 4 foot by 4 foot by 6 inch raised bed. They’re designed so that they can be stacked. We were out most of the day Saturday, but after we got home and took care of the kids, we went up and picked up 4 kits. So I had the makings of a box 4’ x 4’ x 24 inches.

Sunday’s project was putting it together. It was pretty easy and went together quickly. It was also nice that the corners are designed with a spike that anchor it into the ground and serve to lock the upper layers together.

½ way up

The completed box

Then it was time to add the dirt.

This is most of it, I had to go back and get 3 more bags of garden soil.  It totaled to 30 cubic feet of dirt. I had 12 cubic feet of plain topsoil and 18 cubic feet of flower and vegetable garden soil. 

The bird seed was also in the Rav and had to be unloaded. I left it up there for the picture figuring on making a comment like:

I wonder what I'll get from these seeds?

I did a little research this morning and it came in somewhere around 2600 pounds of dirt.  I put in over 1 ¼ tons of dirt yesterday.  The research was after taking a couple extra strength Tylenol.

But now it’s ready for planting.

Gloria has already picked out a selection of bedding plants to go in there and in the two planters from last year.  She has 3 kinds of tomatoes, 4 bell pepper plants, some romaine lettuce, a rosemary plant, and some basil. (There might be something else, but I can’t remember all the specifics from as far back as Saturday, it was a long weekend.)

While I was working on the new garden bed, Gloria was cleaning and putting preservative on the patio furniture.

They've gotten a "weathered" look that we're trying to recover from.

I did take a break after the box was built and started working on dinner. I butterflied a whole chicken. I made a rub of pesto and some roasted red pepper sauce we had and rubbed it under the skin of the chicken. I put it back in the refrigerator for a couple of hours while I filled up the garden box with dirt. Gloria made our springtime favorite salad – asparagus and tomatoes. We had some pasta salad and I decided to cut up a pineapple and grill some spears since I had the grill hot.

I got the chicken going and we got ready for our neighbor to join us.

On Saturday we had gotten some new wines form our friends at Far Eastern Shore Winery http://www.fareasternshorewinery.com/ . They have two new wines, Lotus and Dragonfly.

We approve of the new wines. J  We actually went through 3 bottles while we were relaxing from our toils of the day.  I think that had something to do with my not being too sore when I went to bed last night.

Well, dinner was relaxed with fun company and a feeling of accomplishment after a busy weekend.

I still have work to do in the front yard, and I need to put mulch down on the back garden.  But, I put the snow shovels away in the shed and we’re moving on to Spring.  (The final confirmation will be the cherry blossoms in the back yard.  They’re budding now and should be out within a week or two.)