Getting cracking at Shepard Lane Garden

 

Working on an expansion at the front garden.  It doesn't look like much now, but the other area was added last year and it did so well, and retained so much moisture without watering, that we are trying to expand out a few more feet.  Next year, we might even go another layer deep.  We grew rooted parsley, carrots, kale and basil here last year and used almost all of it.


These are wild roses growing down under the power lines by the side of our road.  There is a big thicket of them there, and they seem to bloom only for a few days a year.  The purfume off of them wafts across the road and through the field - it is always telltale that there will be a carpet of small pink roses to be found if you go and look.

They mow them down often, so the other year my daughter and I took a cutting and brought it home to root.  IT has done so well even through not being watered in its new pot beside the pole garden.  This year it has it's own bloom, at the same time the mother plant bloomed up at the roadside.  I hope to plant it in the woods or just behind our pole garden, which was created around wild 'woods irises' that we wanted to keep from getting run over and then we added daylilies, a fence for morning glory and moonflower, hosta, a snowball bush and this pink rose bush below that was a rescue off of the 'can you save it' clearance shelf at the home center.


I don't even remember the variety anymore, but it has definitely grown and is absolutely covered with beautiful pink roses.

mesclun mix in the garden - I've tried a bit of the red already and will have to go through my seed collection to see if I have more to start in the pots nearby


And the black hollyhocks are back in wonderful form this year, also in that pole garden.  I tried so many years to establish hollyhocks around the property, always failing.  And then, one years I planted them what I considered 'way too late' (about now actually) and they came up and were knee high by Fall - and bloomed the next year.  I didn't even think they might want a warm start and a 'first year'.. but apparently that is what they really needed.  Each year now they bloom beautiful dark maroon purple black flowers :)  Today, I caught a tiny spider visitor on this spire, but only after I went in and look at the pictures!  He / She? is SO tiny!  The flower buds themselves are not large, and the spider is so much smaller I never even noticed it or a web out there.



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