Garden Status Update: 39 Days and Counting

Allium 'Purple Sensation'

For the first time, my garden will be open for the price of a ticket to garden walk enthusiasts for the Waushara County Master Gardeners Garden Walk.  That same number of days ago, my garden had 4" to 6" of snow cover and was still recovering from an ice storm of nearly epic proportions.

I'm stressing just a little.

One of the gardeners on the walk, I heard, is installing a pond just to take her garden up a notch.  Dr. Apps is concerned none of his daylilies except the very earliest ones will be in bloom.  I have so many unfinished tasks, I cannot even begin to enumerate them, but weeding out June grass, edging, and mulching top my list.

Darrel and I both have flat after flat of cuttings and seedlings we've grown still to be planted.  It threatened a coleus killing frost the night before last!  It's been hard to harden off plants with the threat of frost still present, let alone get them into spots in pots and the ground.  And while I like to garden, I can't do it 24/7 (not with rain), and with a vegetable garden to get in at my brother's and other miscellaneous weeding in others' gardens.

Colorful creeping phlox along sidewalk will be a nice green mat by then.

Woodland phlox, starry solomon, and speedwell will give way to campanula 'Elizabeth' in this bed.

Orange azalea 'Mandarin Lights' will just be a soft green shrub instead of splotches of vibrant orange against my brown fence.

There are beautiful plants to admire right now in my garden.  I also had my first supper from my potager, a salad with baby lettuce, pea shoots, spring onions, mustard greens, asparagus, and cabbage leaves.  The strawberry bed is loaded down with pendulous umbrels of strawberries and the rhubarb is thinking about cobbler.

Lily of the Valley

And who doesn't like lily of the valley?  Rounding a corner and gettinga whiff of its scent is joy after a long winter.  What is not joy, is that it picked this year to creep across my pea gravel path with world domination in mind, right after it conquers my hosta bed.

Baby Boo

And Baby Gardener is finally walking, and decidedly a baller as shown in this picture during a T-ball game at my Dad's 80th birthday celebration.  Boo like asparagus over my award-winning oatmeal raisin cookies!  Definitely Baby Gardener!

In between rain storms, I took Dr. Apps up on his offer to spray my front daylily border's June grass.  It's a 40'+ border I won't need to weed, and who knows more about how to spray grass in daylilies than Dr. Apps? 

And I've noticed many of the neighbors have outdone themselves primping their yards this year, like not only are our two gardens on display, but it's like that curb appeal show: "Curb Appeal-- The Block" only "Carden Walk-- The Block.  All except this neighbor...

...whose house you can sort of see over my fence and who has had the siding ripped off his house for about a month.  I was sort of getting used to the black only to come home yesterday and find it had been Tyvek-ed.  I have heard green siding, which could be a lot of different things.  But it is a big borrowed view in my garden, so fingers are crossed. 

Yes, there is a lot to do, here in central Wisconsin, and as usual, most not under my control.

I did get these wire plant stands planted.  Most years I don't.  This year I married a wire basket to the plant stand with fencing wire, painted them white and got new cocoa fiber liners for them.  They are sort of tipsy so they are wired to my fence and into the ground.

So 39 days and counting...

Garden Confessional

Azalea 'Rosebud'

 Forgive me, for I have sinned.  I bought a plant I did not plan to buy, nor did I have a place in mind for which I was looking for just that particular plant.

I trialed it in this spot for about a week by digging the hole and placing the shrub still in its pot in the hole.  I left it there just to see what I thought about it in the landscape.

The tag

You can see how it would stand out even just in bud when I walked through the shrub section of a nursery in Green Lake.

I'm always looking for flowering shrubs for my shrub border.  Azaleas are tough here, so I typically stay away from them, but I am hearing of some good gardeners having some successes with particular cultivars so I've been trying to up my game.  I have a couple azalea mollis and a PJM, and some unnamed species.  'Rosebud' joins this group.  I am hoping it is not deciduous like mollis and evergreen like the others, but I honestly don't know at this point.  I realized with my extended winter this years, I just don't want to see through my primarily deciduous shrub and tree border.  The neighbor adjacent to me there has a ridiculously hoarder/trashy/junky run-down property, the blight of our particularly nice neighborhood.

So what plants do you need to make confessions about this spring?