Hi! This year is at it’s end so I began the preparing garden for next year. At the side of our house we have a couple of square meters of land that I want to plant with perennials and bulbs. The reasoning is to have something that is not grass, that looks nice through the entire year and also blooms most of the time. So last two years we were preparing the land and clearing all of the grass. We also planted some perennials. Some of them like lambs ears managed to stay, others like my golden thujas died 🙁
Preparing in the previous years
A little bit of what we did in the previous two years. When we bought the house, the area was covered in grass and had 3 bushes of hibiscus and one bush of japanese quince. All we managed to do that year was to remove the grass and take out the hibiscus bushes that were old and overgrown.
Year two preparations consisted of constantly trying to be atop of the grass, which we didn’t manage. It simply went wild on us in the summer. We left the japanese quince at the beginning, it gave us nice flowers in the spring, but at the end of the year we decided to remove it.
That year, I planted the first perennials – lamb ears and golden rain thujas. Unfortunatelly that turned out to be the year of the thuja desease and my golden thujas succumbed to the desease. In the autumn we removed the dead thujas and grass jungle that has grown during the summer. Since we were working on the house to get it ready for moving in, we didn’t have the time to constantly pull out the grass that was growing like mad. My mum got me the chrisanthemums that I wanted to plant but I left them in the containers because we used a bit of total herbicide on the place that japanese quice was. I also planted a lavender that my father in law gave me. And that was it for that year. Frost soon crept in and the grass stopped growing.
This year’s stuggle
The spring came and all was well. Grass wasn’t growing and I propagted some of now exceptionally well established lambs ears. They were soon full in bloom as was the lavender. And I finally planted those chrisanthemums 🙂 .But the grass, oh that grass, again crept in on us. We managed to have the place grassless till the end of April. Then we had to go for couple of business trips during the weekends and with the amount of rainfall that we had, grass was more then happy to grow. Those weekends that I was home and had the time to do the weeding, I was ill and running a fever. Sooooo, we again ended with grass jungle.
So in the autumn we started preparing again. It took us one weekend when we joined forces with my Mum to get the grass under the control. We had to pull out all of the thistles and danderlions. And the horsetail grass was back on the menu. But we managed. After that grass did try to come back, but last weekend I gave it a good battle and it’s now completely gone. And I only pulled 8 bushes of horsetail grass. We finally are getting rid of it. Yay!
Autumn planting in this year
With all of the grass removed and land preparing done, I planted new perennials. My Mum was getting rid of some lavanders and brough me two big plants and some branches with roots on them to plant in the garden, so I planted the two big plants and one of the branches. She also gave me one chrisanthemum that was missing and one sedum. I planted the chrisanthemum by the sedum and one big lavender beside it. Now it all looks much better. For Spring time I wanted to have my faves to edmire and i planted some bulbs of daffodils and tulips. So my flowering plan for next years would be:
- daffodils in the march
- tulips in the april and beginning of may
- mahonias throughout the summer – they will arrive soon
- lambs ears in the may and july
- lavenders in the july and back in september
- Sedums in september and early october
- and chrisanthemums in the october and november.
During the winter time I should have mahonia leaves, and lavender and lambs ears leaves since they are evergreen. So it should be a full year perennial border 🙂 . Hopefully my lavenders won’t decide to go for a walk again. I really don’t know why do they do that. Now if i could only get lambs ears to stop producing these strange vodka bottle flowers, it’d be awesome, or at least if those vodka bottle flowers were full instead of empty 😀 .
Cheers to the new planting year!