Winter Comes to the Garden

In late October, the morning temperature was cool enough to produce this interesting scene. Notice the frost on the house. The frost formed or was left only in the shadow of the the tree (Parottia persica 'Vanessa'). Very cool.

Thanks to birthday donations from Aunt Iris and Shirley, Jeff and I went shopping at the local nursery's 40% off sale in November. This is a great time to shop, especially since here in the NW, fall is a great time to plant new plants.

Here is one of my exciting new shrubs (many of you are rolling eyes, I know). Stachyrus praecox should be a great addition for the winter garden once it grows a little because it blooms in February or so. Check out this link for a picture of the leaves and flowers http://www.vanklaverensnursery.com/plants/Stachyruspraecox.pdf .

Oak leaf hydrangea (Hydrangea quercifolia) will be a great addition in all four seasons with spectacular blooms in the summer and beautiful folliage in the fall. Check out this link for more pictures http://www.hydrangeashydrangeas.com/oakleaf.html .

The last week of school before winter break brought news of an impending storm which was expected to include temperatures not exceeding freezing for many days, snow, wind and general mayhem. Sounds like regular winter stuff to most of you. Western Washington hasn't seen the likes of this type of winter weather since 1991, which happened to be the year we moved out here from Minnesota. We didn't think a lot of it in 1991 since it was still a lot milder than Minnesota. We have become soft since then and the necessity of planting all my new "babies" became rather urgent. In a light jacket over about 2 days, I planted 28 or so plants including 18 4 inch creeping raspberry ground cover plants.

Usually the spectacular nature of a storm is inversely proportional to the amount the weather people talk about it. By that measure, this storm should have been a non-event. Can you believe they got it right? Well they did. We had at least a week with largely below freezing weather and 8 inches to a foot of snow.

Here is the view of the garden out the living room window. The street just beyond the fence became the neighborhood sledding hill. No one hurt themselves on the fence, but a mailbox down to the right a bit suffered as did the person who tangled with it. Nothing major though.

Jeff's fence was even more beautiful with the addition of snow.

The snow is gone now except for a few random blobs. The start of a new year has me thinking of breaking out the seed starting lights and shelves to get going on this year's crop of garden additions. I think I'll go see if the crocuses are up yet. Happy New Year!

Fruits of our Labor

Here are some of the fruits of our labor. This makes it all worthwhile.


Gemma's dahlia.

Three varieties of potatoes.


Several beautiful heads of lettuce early on in the summer.


Lots of ever bearing strawberries. We are hoping the June bearing ones do better next year.

Garden Projects

The last post had a very recent picture of Jeff's trellis project. Here are some others underway.


Future home of the garden shed.


Irrigation is in on the north side and pending on the south.


This is part of an equisetum route. They have these water chestnut like things as well as roots that look like tree branches (old growth equisetum?).


I found out about equisetum root systems and Canadian thistle root systems because I spent hours digging them out of one area. I was very proud of my root collection. This worked very well and I have very little returning horsetail or thistle. Yeah!

Where did the summer go? 4

In the foreground of this picture is the first thing I planted way back in February. Also note the ugly trampoline.


Here is the solution to the ugly trampoline. Jeff is constructing a beautiful trellis that will have purple grapes and golden hops growing on it shortly.


The porch was beautiful.

The driveway is filling in. The wooly thyme is doing better than the creeping thyme.

Where did summer go? 3

Here's the herb garden with nothing.


Who knew parsley could grow so big? The herb garden was definitely one of the most successful parts of the garden so far.

Where did summer go? 2

Note nasty thistles popping up.

Where did the summer go? 1

It cannot possibly be October! My best intentions to be a better blogger obviously did not pan out. Better late than never. We had two terrific vacations, one to the east coast and one to the mid west, and worked very hard on the garden.


Willow enjoyed the catnip (courtesy of Islandwood's garden) to death. Literally. Now he just goes next door to the neighbors patch. Except that he just had to have an abscess drained. That plus his foot boo boo from earlier this year have landed him on permanent house arrest. I will have to experiment with indoor catnip growing.


Here is Jeff planting a witch hazel way back in February just to give you a feel for how desolate things were.

Below are a series of pictures of the same areas (sometimes from different viewpoints) at different times to show how things have grown.



OK - the deal is that I can only get 4 pictures at time into a post. It is rather a pain, but you will just have to follow going backward from "Where did summer go? 1" through to 4.