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Area 12: Lasagna Bed
May 23: This bed is still doing well. The Lysimachia is filling out much bigger than I anticipated, but that's a good thing. The Obedient Plants are up and growing but don't seem to be in any rush, so I'll have to be patient. I'm just happy to see that they all survived the winter.The Daffodils came up strong and gave us some nice creamy white flowers to enjoy for a time. They have been dead-headed now and the leaves are fading. The Tulips are just about finished. Tall, deep-purple blossoms made for a very striking first season. The Grape Hyacinth popped up everywhere, if I lost any of the bulbs to squirrels you wouldn't have known it.
Now the bad news! Something has been digging at the roots of one of the cedars and it is looking much the worse for wear. I have already written it off and am making plans for it's removal. I am willing to give it one season to attempt a comeback however, as it is only 'mostly' dead (I loved Billy Crystal in The Princess Bride).
And the last comment. Below I mentioned that I was attempting to add a layer of coffee grounds as a mulch. I've given up on this idea. I found that the grounds were simply being washed into and under the shredded leaf mulch that was already there. While I have no doubt the grounds are beneficial to the beds, as a consistent mulch in this case I would need to put down a whole lot more of the coffee grounds than the bed could handle. I am still religiously adding the buckets of grounds and filters to the compost pile, but that is the only place.
That's it for this round.
I was recently reading about the Obedient Plant (Physostegia virginiana) and thought this was pretty cute: "The common name comes from the peculiar habit of the individual flowers: Move them as you will. They remain in the last position you gave them, until another tap with a finger rearranges them." - A Year of Flowers, Peter Loewer.
Thanks for stopping by,
Brett
Previous Entries:
April 21: Things are alive in here. The Yews/Cedars in the back all seemed to survive, up front you can see the tulips/daffodils/muscari pushing up, and if you look carefully behind the barrels you'll see the loosestrife (Lysimachia punctata) popping out from under the mulch. Why is this bed so many shades of brown? Most of it is shredded leaves, some of it is coffee grounds which I've been slowly spreading across the bed, and the darkest patches just in front of the barrels is a bit of leftover topsoil I had in a bag in the garage.
Installed in the fall of 2000, it hasn't had time to develop yet. The photo above was taken near the middle of February of this year. Below I show the plantings as they went in. We'll see what was able to survive the winter soon.
In the future I hope to link the plants themselves to informative pages, but let's deal with one step at a time.