Wildflower meadow

I spent the weekend doing a final weeding of the prospective wildflower meadow. All the yard waste has composted down to a couple of inches and now that it's raked out it looks like brown velveteen. The seeds have either arrived or are on their way and in a few more weeks when it looks like the weather will stay cold I will sow the forbs and grasses.

Things I will plant next spring

• 3 more Sunshine Blue blueberries to replace the ones that got trampled.
• A couple more southern highbush blueberries to keep in reserve.
• Rosa alba maxima to be planted as a neighbor for Souvenir du Docteur Jamain
• Rose 'Safari', a tiny thing from Heirloom that is a gorgeous pinky, salmony color.
• A dozen Dodecatheon meadia, Shooting Star, ordered bare root from Prairie Moon, to be planted in front of the oakleaf hydrangeas with the Virginia bluebells.
• Magnolia virginiana ‘Moonglow’, a sweet bay magnolia. This will go in the front yard in the space that became plantable after my neighbor removed the dying maple tree.
• Aesculus pavia, red buckeye. This will go in Hagen's Woods to replace the redbud that quite mysteriously died.

Autumn projects

The weather finally cooled off, we had a couple of good, soaking rains that softened up the ground and I've finally made some progress on fall chores. The yard looks pretty respectable now.

• The bed along the fence is edged and weeded.
• The sprawling roses are now tethered to the fence.
• The daylilies and irises are planted.
• The pot ghetto under the apple tree has been cleaned up.
• The seedlings and rooted cuttings are outside where they will winter over.
• The 'meadow' is weeded and raked and ready to be sown with wild flowers and native grasses.
• The seedling wildflowers are planted in the 'meadow'.
• The asparagus has been cut back.
• I have started building this year's compost hump.
• The blueberries are weeded and ready to mulch.
• The fig is wrapped in row cover and mulched with a couple of bags of leaves I begged from a neighbor.
• Dug the red twig dogwoods out from under the big pine tree, planted 4 in the back hedge and gave the rest to my neighbor.

Still to do:

• Mulch the blueberries. I'm going to fill in around them so they become an
  extension of the mulched edge at the back of the lot.
• Shovel up last year's compost hump and see how it did under the burlap
  cover
• Weed and mulch the main rose bed.
• Once I'm sure the weather will stay cold I will sow the 'meadow'.
• Repair the garden shed roof. The poor shed needs to be replaced but this
  should get me through the winter.

Cooler temps

This past week we have had a very welcome break in the heat. Nights have been positively chilly and days beautiful. Sunday afternoon I cleaned up one of the foundation beds. I weeded out everything except the violets. I've decided to let them fill in as a ground cover under the shrubs since they are a larval host plant for fritillary butterflies. I saw quite a few investigating the patch while I worked. The back row is planted with fothergilla gardenii. In front of that are some dwarf iteas and dwarf clethra alnifolia. Two of the clethra 'Sixteen Candles' did not make it throught the summer heat. I was able to find 'Hummingbird' locally so planted two of them. I changed my mind yet again about the New Jersey Tea, ceanothus americanus and planted 20 quart sized seedlings as a front row.

All three kinds of shrubs get fuzzy white, fragrant flowers at one time or another during the year. They are supposed to be attractive to butterflies and hummingbirds.

Passionately prolific

I had read that the passion flower vine, passiflora incarnata, is called maypop because it pops up all over the yard. I can attest that this is true and may become a problem. So far the vine swarmed up all over the Carolina silverbell to the point that it was weighing the branches down dangerously. I pulled a bunch of it off the tree and discarded it but there's still plenty left. It has set quite a few blob shaped green fruits. At this unripe stage they have an odd scent, not exactly pleasant or unpleasant. I'll see what they're like when they ripen. I think they're supposed to be popular with squirrels and other critters.

Change of plans

It's so much easier to move plants in my head than with a shovel. I have some New Jersey Tea (Ceanothus americanus) that I was going to plant along the back edge of the wildflower meadow. I've been reading about maintenance and realized that you have to mow the thing each year, probably not a good thing for a shrub like the NJ tea. I think that instead I will move the too tall redtwig dogwoods out from under the pine tree in the front yard and replace it with the 2 foot tall NJ tea and keep woody plants out of the meadow.

This is both a host and nectar plant for butterflies. It also attracts insects that hummingbirds need to supplement their nectar diet.

New daylilies

I am not entirely pleased with my daylily border. There are too many that are the approximate color of a school bus when I prefer clear yellows and peachy colored ones. I'm sure I used to have some of the spider formed ones but they seem not to have made the move from the old house. I found a vendor with amazingly reasonable prices on daylilies and placed an order. I've requested that they hold the shipment until September when the weather cools a bit. Maybe these aren't the latest and hottest varieties but they are pretty colors and think they will improve the border.

http://www.alldaylilies.com/daylilies.htm

Redbud, RIP

Several of us on my street had nice specimens of the redbud cultivar 'Forest Pansy', the one whose leaves hold a deep red color all season long. For no reason anyone could guess Jackie's tree failed to bloom or leaf out this spring and was finally pronounced past help. I looked out last week and saw that mine had turned completely