hearth-Craft

I planted a butterfly garden last fall on the side of our house with full sun exposure.  Most of the day lillies, asiatic lillies, the butterfly bush and the tall snapdragons did well.  I lost the echinacea and lavender.

So after a bit more reading this year, I decided that my big mistake was to have planted those particular perennials in the fall instead of the spring due to my Zone 6 conditions. I plan to plant them again next spring in the hopes of an even better butterfly garden.

In the meantime, we’ve had a lot of visitors to my herb garden in the forms of gently buzzing bees as well as nice dragon flies at our pond. Dragon flies are good because they eat mosquitoes and I’m not really a fan of mosquitoes.

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For the past couple of years since we first bought the house, I was pretty focused on gardens of edibles: veggies, fruit, herbs…

This year, I’ve expanded the range of the plants around the house from edibles to beauty that feeds the heart. Pretty flowers, gorgeous blooms and wonderful scents that fill the air.

There’s the pretty columbine and the late blooming, snowy white tulips…

 

And the pretty dogwood that isn’t white flowered or hot pink flowered - but just the perfect cream with soft pink tips that I love….

And of course, the many irises that Hel and her family brought to me for my housewarming that have grown in beautifully.  It was a joke at the time because Hel had deliberately brought me over a hundred various bulbs and irises to plant, figuring I’d never plant them all. But I did, I really did.

  

Then there’s the Queen of the Night that Rich and Vickie gave us five or six years ago as a small leaf cutting. It finally grew large enough to flower, and boy was it worth the wait.  Pale pink with a snowy white center and a scent that filled the air in all its night-blooming glory.

As if that weren’t enough, my step-grandmother gifted me with this lovely red variant of the Queen of the Night that produces these vibrant flowers as well… 

 

Click on any of the thumbnails to embiggen.

Truly, I’m loving the gardens this year. I’ve also discovered the wonder of dahlias and am trying to grow several varieties.  I’ve got two types of peonies that I’m also hoping to grow - one a tree variety and another a very unusual color variation. And of course, there’s the six new types of roses that arrived this spring and that I’m growing in pots until we can decide where to put them.

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Yes, it’s just the beginning of March - but for those of you who grow peppers and tomatoes, you might want to get started with seeds indoors if you live in the sameZone as I do.  Me? I started my seeds a week or two ago, at leasts the ones that have a long germination time and require a long time to develop solid root systems for transplant.

• Thai Hot Peppers - Bird type: these are some of the hottest peppers you can grow.  They are absolutely essential to authentic Thai cooking and I always have them on hand.
• Thai Hot Peppers - F1 Hybrid tpye: also pretty hot, a little bigger with good flavor.
• Thai Eggplants: small, round eggplants that are mostly white.  Slightly sweet, tasty raw and absolutely awesome in curries.
• Golden Sweet Bell Peppers: so yummy raw, beautiful in the garden and great with salads or with sausage and peppers.
• Baby Bell Golden Peppers: Very similar, but itty bitty tiny. Supposedly perfect to stuff with some cheese or savory filling and pop in the mouth.
• Tomatoes - Juliet Grape Tomato type: Super sweet grape toomatoes that my guys love.  Really prolific producer too.
• Tomatoes - Whopper Tomato type: perfect size to slice up and layer in sandwiches.  MY guys love those for flavor and they also end up perfect when sliced and served with fresh buffalo mozzarella, a little extra virgin olive oil and fresh basil.
• Tomatoes - Tangerine type: these tomatoes are a first for me, orange and supposedly tangy sweet. I thought it would be interesting to try them.
• Cucumbers: we’re trying a psace saving bush variety since hubby likes cucumbers in his salad.
• Winter Bon bon Squash: a really nice meaty squash that tastes great boiled, baked or steamed.
• Amy Melon: a light green melon that is light and wonderfully sweet.

The garden will of course have directly sowed sugar snap peas and pak boong, but neither of those need seed starting indoors. Also, the herb garden is slotted for 4 types of basil (Thai Siam, Thai Holy, Italian Sweet and Lemon), parsley, dill, sage and rosemary.  I might try thyme if I see it at one of the farm stands this spring.

The rose garden has gone through a major change though.  Instead of raised beds, I’m going to grow my roses in a container garden on the deck.  This is because we do plan to move in the next year to two years and I didn’t want to shock my roses when I took them with us.  So into containers they will go instead of into raised bed and I’ll be planting sunflowers out in the wonderful raised bed hubby built me last fall. In preparation, hubby is taking me to the gardening store today to select matching pots and pick up the appropriate potting soil. My roses will be arriving on March 24 and I want to have everything ready for them.

Additionally, the potted plants we have indoors have been getting tender loving care.  Daddy let aphids take over the kaffir limes downstairs under grow lights - so I need to trim them, wash each of them individually and spray them with a protective spray. He thinks it’s a waste of time - but I’m not willing to wait the additional month or two until it’s safe to put them outside.

Spring is definitely on its way and we’ve got the seeds started and potting supplies to be ready for it!

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We stepped into the room and Lauren gasped.

“It’s…it’s like the antithesis of being at your place…” , she whispered.

It was a lovely sun room and there we were, surrounded by exotic plants.  Each and every one of them dry as bone, beyond withered and barely alive.  Some were completely beyond saving, long dead and turning to dust under our fingertips.  Others had a few struggling buds attempting to grow towards the sunlight, deriving moisture from the very air since the soil was so arid that it literally was crumbling to dust as well.

We’ll make a note here that my mother loves plants.  She especially loves plants that have beautiful flowers or lovely scents. However, she realy doesn’t have a knack for caring for them - that would include an odd inability to ever water any of the ones she has in her home.

The result? I’ve acquired another 10 year old kaffir lime tree, a key lime tree, several cuttings of galangha root and six unidentified Thai tuber plants that result in large lovely shiny green heart shaped leaves similar to an elephant ear plant but smaller.  All of them are barely alive. I don’t have the room really to be taking care of them, but they are all worth saving if possible.

Pictures coming soon…

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