Like always…

Plenty to do in the garden but I only have two hands. The first poppy of the season is in bloom and it made me really happy when I spotted it, even though I’m not that happy about the color. I want it to be really red and not that red/orange color… but hey. All my poppy pictures look exactly the same... need more practice.


The papaya is enjoying the sun on the balcony. I really didn't expect it to grow but it did, and it looks nice against the blue house. But will it make it through the winter? I think it's too warm and dry for him but we'll see.


Introducing Prins Padda. I think he's a cutie! He needs to move down to The Tea Corner though but... I need to sweep The Tea Corner.


The boxes are filled with potatoes and corn, only one kind of potatoes is peeking up though. I had to get the box that had “Arvid, you old rascal!” written on the side of it.

The Tea Corner

I think I want some grass and poppies there. Sounds easy somehow, I’m sure it’s not and I’ll complain about something late but at the time it seems like a good idea.

Annual poppies and feather grass (stipa pennata). My feather grass does not look like that, I hope it will one day… mine are just a few straws. Picture found here.

Current plants at The Tea Corner
1. Poppies, annual and perennial
2. English Poppies (I don’t want them there and I’m removing them the moment I see them)
3. Aquilegia (removing them)
4. Tulips
5. Allium
6. Lavender
7. Bleeding heart
8. Climbing rose “Flammentanz”
9. Elephant grass (miscanthus)
10. Lily of the valley
11. Anemone nemorosa
12. Daisies (bellis perennis)
13. Peony (There should be but I haven’t seen it yet, have I killed it? That’s what I thought before and I bought a new one)
14. Iris
15. Scabiosa
16. Rudbeckia
17. Boxwood
18. Forget-me-not
19. Tiger lilies
20. Garlic

There could be more plants, what a horrible mixture of plants… I don’t like it at all but it’s become a place where I just plant things because I don’t have many flower beds. What are the colors here… red, pink, purple, blue, lavender, green, white, yellow, orange. Sometimes I just want to start over… but what would I do different if I started over?

I think I have some Stipa seeds so I'm off to plant them.

Learning the hard way…

Planning has always been the main problem in the garden, well the lack of… I usually think that the small size is the problem but it’s not. Me not planning is the problem. Like with my Aquilegia vulgaris seeds I collected, “Oh, I just pour them out all over the place”, now I have Aquilegia all over the place and I’m not that found of them. There’s plenty in The Tea Corner and I feel poppies are more appropriate and besides, I like poppies a lot more.

So I am now trying to get rid of them from The Tea Corner to make room for some poppies. Perhaps I should plant the Aquilegia by the hedge? It’s just weeds there anyway and I don’t mind some flowers between the weeds… The area by the hedge is awful…

Someone said, “A gardener’s work is never done”, so true.

Herbs

I bought a rosemary and peppermint. Planted each of them in pots and placed them in the greenhouse for the time being. I wish I had a way to store rosemary for the winter but so far no luck. They smell so nice! I’ll place the peppermint at The Tea Corner and hopefully there will be some butterflies around.

My day so far…

Went to a garden centre called “Blomsterlandet”, it’s a big chain and they have the popular things but nothing really exciting and the plants are… well they are cheap. There used to be another garden store called “Hortus”, the plants were a little bit more expensive but the quality was much better, now it’s more about quantity and not quality I’m afraid.

I managed to leave the place with this weird looking toad… with a crown on his head, what the F? It’s not my style at all but he has these big eyes and he looked at me like, “Save me!” and I had to have him. He’s called “Prins Padda” which means, Prince Toad (very creative) and I placed him in The Tea Corner. My mom bought a crossed eyed gnome… I find those sorts of things tacky but, oh well.

At the grocery store I bought some pansies for Inka Dude and some Oregano, last year there were lots and lots of butterflies swooping around my other plants and I want more butterflies so I got one more and I planted it by the greenhouse. But by the looks of it I’ll need a peppermint as well, wow!

(picture found here)

A few seeds got planted in pots:
Sunflowers “Magic Roundabout”
Sweetpea “Bijou”
Echinops bannaticus
Echinacea purpurea ”White Swan”

Yesterday I planted a few things as well:
Horned Pansy
Dipsacus fullonum
Aimées Passionflower
Aimées Cardinal Climber Ipomoea × multifida

Today

Planted some poppies by the greenhouse, “Victoria Louise” and I still have a few pots left of her but not idea where to plant her so I will have to tuck her and all of her little friends in for winter and come up with something next season. I wonder how long it will take before they bloom… Maybe tiny little blossom next season? Let’s hope so. So that means that it was probably “Carneum” that I planted by the Tea Corner. (I’m very sloppy and I always lose track of what I plant where and so on.)

Took a few lavender cuttings and another yew, I used some rooting hormone on all of them. Even though I have several small plants of lavender everywhere and will most likely sow more next spring… why? Because I can I guess.

My garden rooms

At first you just plant some bulbs and some perennials you don’t know the name of, then, slowly almost sneaking up on you, you start to name certain areas in the garden.

In my garden I have The Front Yard, dull badly planned flower bed with two bleeding hearts (Dicentra spectabilis) taking up most space and they bloom pretty quickly and become very boring. This spring was great with lots of tulips (that the deer didn’t eat for some strange reason, was it because I planted garlic there?) sticking up from a sea of forget me not but then there wasn’t much going on. Must come up with something, perhaps move the bleeding hearts and plant roses instead.

(It was hard to find a picture of the front yard, that how bad it is. I had to reuse a picture, in the spring it’s pretty okay. Spring 2008)

By the two wooden pillars to the balcony there’s honeysuckle and the other pillar there’s a clematis. They are pretty mistreated and have nothing to climb on.

Then in the front yard there’s this The Slope where nothing but weeds wrong, horrible. I want to build a stone wall and then have a low fence on it and then a nice hedge.

(This is what the slope looks like when you’re standing on the road, so beautiful! Summer 2007)

Then there’s The Tea Corner, two climbing roses, ‘Flammentanz’ and a pretty boring flowerbed where I planted a nice lavender edge this year, let’s hope it will be nice next season (garden people say season and not year). Other than that there’s just a peony which I thought I had killed but apparently not, a ‘Sarah Bernhardt’ and some Miscanthus giganteum which is probably the most exciting thing in the Tea Corner.

(Most parts of the garden are pretty in the springtime. 2008)

The Backyard is where the greenhouse is and where the berries grow, raspberries (yellow and red), redcurrant, gooseberries (which no one eats) and a vine with horrible white grapes. It’s a complete mess back there and this nasty weed that I believe is sent from Satan, Snowberry Symphoricarpos albus. Not sure if I’ll ever get rid of all of it. Then there’s this big oak throwing acorns everywhere and you have to pick all of them up by hand because they will grow and then it’s not as easy to get rid of them.

(A funny looking opium poppy the white cross makes me think of the Danish flag. 2008)

Then there’s The Terrace which is made of wood so most pots there, a small patch of grass but it’s just roots and a thin layer of dusty soil, a large oak with a swing-ish rope that my grandpa made back in the day. This fall we planted a rose by the oak so let’s see how that goes. Got lots of lavender babies, they are easy to sow so I’ll plant some by the rose and see if they want to grow.

(A red Pelargonium against the blue house. 2007)

That's my garden rooms, The Front Yard, The Slope, The Tea Corner, The Backyard and The Terrace.