Spring Time Fervor

First, here is a picture of my beautiful daughter (and me) before her junior prom. Just had to share... You know how proud we moms get over our gorgeous daughters!

On to gardening.
I can't do it all.
And it's just wrankling me. I realize wrankle isn't actually a word, but it still captures my feelings of late.

We moved to this home three years ago and took over its essentially overgrown and uncultivated two acres.  Of that acreage, I'd say half of is house/driveway and cul-de-sac, and a quarter lawn. The last quarter (maybe even more than a quarter) I've cultivated into garden. A portion of that is devoted to vegetables, raspberries, strawberries and apple trees. Those areas don't require much work. They need to be watered and weeded and occasionally fertilized (esp the vegetables), but mostly they just grow and produce and are satisfying. Maybe not the raspberries, actually.  I love having fresh raspberries, but the plants are piggy and aggressive. So are the strawberries, but they are easier to manage. The raspberries want to spread, and they are winning. In fact, they are spreading into my neighbor's lawn, which eventually is really, really not going to be good for neighborly relations. But I digress.

Photographed below are two of my new gardens. You can see the mailbox garden below isn't quite finished. Or, more accurately, it isn't close to being finished. It's the edging in that back that kills me. It's so damn messy and yet the thought of ripping out the pachysandra and the weeds over there makes me want to cry. I need a bulldozer or a tractor, or at the very least a tiller. But I don't have these things. (Bring out the violins. She has two acres but no tiller! JK.)

Below is another new garden. Last year there was pachysandra surrounding this small dogwood. I ripped that out last fall and planted tulips and daffs. Of course, the problem with tulips and daffs is that they look like horrible after the blooms fade, and if you cut back the foliage they don't bloom well the following year. Actually, the tulips never bloom well the next year anyway, so I may start treating them as annuals. Opinions out there? Tulips as annuals? Anyway. I have to deal with the daff and tulip foliage problem now.  I have about four daylilies in there currently. I could use the daylilies to cover the daff foliage, but you know that never actually works without looking super messy and crowded.

The picture below reveals probably my biggest undertaking this spring.  I had my husband chop out a bunch of dead pine trees this spring so I could create a butterfly garden here. Of course, this has proved 80 billion times harder than I thought it would be. Because this was a woodland area, the pine and leaf layer is at least a 1/2 a foot deep. Also, there is pokeweed EVERYWHERE. I have broken my back trying to dig it out. I left some all the way in the back because I know the birds like the berries in the fall, but that weed is seriously annoying. Ditto with the Black Swallwort. Man that stuff is persistent! Sometimes I fantasize about having a futuristic laser gun that I could point at the weed and zap it out of existence. Wouldn't that be amazing? And it would be so satisfying...Zap Zap Zap. Take that Pokeweed! Die Die Die!

 

Shockingly, most of this above area gets eight hours of sun a day, so I have been able to put in some good butterfly/bee plants--specifically a lot of Joe Pye Weed, various milkweeds, salvias, autumn sedum and agastache. Unfortunately, weeding this area is proving totally overwhelming. Now that the trees are gone and it has full sun the weeds are psyched! It's killing me. Can you tell I'm a bit overwhelmed and disheartened this morning? I'm hoping I will be rewarded by some good growth this summer, so it doesn't look like such a sloppy wasteland.

Here are pictures of areas that desperately need work. I walk by these areas a million times a day and think, What a mess! Argh! I have to deal with that! Below is actually a tiny bit okay right now. I like how the white azalea, pruned early this spring so it might look a little better, looks with the blue hosta. However, this area is overgrown and completely weedy and needs to be re-thought.

Don't even get me started about this area. That vinca... help me!

or this. I'm sure it was a lovely garden at some point (witness the hosta) but it is such a mess right now.

Here are areas that will look nice in a few weeks when things start to bloom.  (The weedy green mat below is foxglove. I have to get down on my hands and knees and thin it.) I find late May a frustrating time for perennial gardening in Massachusetts. The earliest blooms have passed, and the June blooms are yet to come. Nothing blooms right now. Any NE gardeners have suggestions? 

 

Pictured below are my daylily seedlings. I examine them everyday. They seem stalled in their growth. I'm sure this is because I'm watching them too carefully.  I started some of these babies under lights in the basement in October of last year, so I secretly hope some might bloom this summer. I know that is unlikely. But you never know... 

 

I find what is hardest about gardening on such a large scale is that even though you might have one area look amazing. another area is always in need of work. It never looks perfect all at once. Not even close! And yet it seems some achieve this. Is it because I am a one-woman operation who has taken on too much and doesn't have key equipment like a tiller or a tractor or a weeding robot? Man I wish weeding robots existed...

The other frustrating thing about my gardening right now is that I am really the only one who sees it. My kids are teenagers. Need I say more? My husband notices sort of and he also helps me a great deal, but he doesn't really SEE it. For example, he loves ground phlox. We have ground phlox everywhere, and yet when we are out and he sees a patch he comments on how pretty that blue flower is, and couldn't we grow that? And I'm like....but we do grow that!!!! It's everywhere!

Okay, a few more items to mention before I get back outside and wrestle with cultivation:

1. I was digging a hole yesterday and I found the BIGGEST grub I have ever seen. I researched online and discovered it must have been a Staghorn Beetle grub. It was gigantic--we're talking like three inches long and  an inch think. Ewwwwww. On that note, I like to kill lawn grubs when I happen upon them digging, and the other day I smushed one between my fingers and grub guts sprayed onto my face. Isn't that THE MOST DISGUSTING THING you can imagine? It was truly horrifying.

2. There was a huge green frog in my little pond, and now he's gone. Where did he go? I have other smaller frogs, but I'm missing that king daddy frog. (I think he is a green frog but maybe he's a bullfrog? His croak sounded like a green frog, though...)

3. There is a robin nesting in my weeping cherry in front of the house. :)

4. I keep observing birds carrying twigs and I want to follow them so I can figure out where they are nesting so I can spy on them. Earlier this spring we had mourning doves nest close to the house in a pine. Aren't those little snugglers cute?

As I finish this post I am looking out the window. A Red-Tailed hawk is at my birdbath drinking water! Holy moly he's an impressive bird. I wonder if he's checking out the hunting scene? I've never seen a hawk drink from a bird bath... but that does appear to be what he is doing. There is a robin atop a tree close by going absolutely bananas chirping. I wonder if he is warning birds to stay away?  He's still there and it's been five minutes.  

Okay, he just flew away. Watching a hawk close up is very interesting and cool. 

And now I need to get outside. Thanks for reading!