🌻May garden update

Checking in with the blog’s namesake

Buddies. Remember when this was gonna be a gardening blog? Let’s go outside!

I am truly obsessed with #TheFunkyard.

It’s come a long way.

The deck (which Andy built in 2023) is my favorite room in the house.

These photos are already nearly a month old (May 9), I’ll have to send a June update soon because everything is already so different.

The raised beds are doing… fine. I confess I was a little over-eager this year and jumped the gun, planting a big batch of herbs and veggies before the last frost. (I know better, I promise.) When overnight temperatures dipped, I remembered to cover the dahlias (pink flowers in the bed above), a first-time impulse buy this year, but neglected everything else. Most things survived except for some Thai basil and, sadly, about 10 hot peppers. One sage plant (farthest left in the photo above) was dug up I believe the very first night it was in the ground (by a squirrel presumably) and left roots-up to dry out overnight—I replanted it first thing in the morning but now, weeks later, it hasn’t died but it hasn’t looked good, either.

Andy replaced our dead hot peppers, so we now have fresh healthy ones planted among the nearly-dead ones. The latter are hanging on. We also have chives, which come back year after year. And another impulse buy: asparagus! (The three frondy plants in the center.) I have not yet Googled “how to grow asparagus” so your guess is as good as mine as to what’s gonna happen with those. (I’ll get to it.)

Our next raised bed is mostly dill, which is an annual but self-seeds itself every year. I need to thin them out (5 or even 50 plants with room to grow makes a better crop than 50,000 all on top of each other). If you want some dill, and want to stop by KC to get some, let me know. I was also excited that this bed grew a big cilantro plant on its own, but just like every single year, it immediately bolted and now tastes bad. I plant cilantro every single year, and every single year it never gets big enough to harvest a single leaf before it bolts and turns bitter.

My final impulse buy (so far) was strawberries. Three each of two different varieties, one “early” and one “all-the-time” (er, “everbearing”). The night before this photo was taken they were destroyed by vandals (rabbits?) — each plant survived with a leaf or two, so they should grow back.

All over the yard, little partridge peas are popping up. These are an annual native wildflower, and each year I collect the seeds and scatter them to a new section of the yard. They’re a legume (bean and pea relative) which means they’re a nitrogen fixer and are, in theory, good for the soil. So in addition to just liking them a lot, I’m also kind of hoping they’ll give the terrible soil in our yard a little boost.

These plants’ great-great-great-great grandparents were a part of my prairie research at Michigan State (2014-2016). I ended up with lots of leftover seeds, which I’ve planted in various gardens. In 2019 or so, in West Allis (WI), I discovered that my bag of seeds was moldy and dumped them all into my flower bed. To my delight, a ton still sprouted, and I’ve been collecting and replanting the seeds each year ever since.

We’ve got columbines in bloom all over.

And a serious bumper crop of, I believe, daisy fleabane. It’s one of those weed-wildflower borderline species, so I might end up pulling most of it up. But for now I’m willing to give it a chance and see if it looks nice when it blooms.

I also just got a new phone, ending my “if new phones are really so tough do they really need a case?” experiment early. (If you’re wondering: Yes. Still need a case.) I was hoping to find some good critters to test out my new macro lens, and you’ll have to settle for some ladybugs trying to get some privacy.

My monarda is looking fabulous this year. I rearranged and thinned a lot of the plants in the main bed (which we call “the donut”) to give some plants more breathing room. The sole monarda was one of the main plants that really needed to get unburied. I like that I can actually see it this year.

Our elderberry is also thriving. We’ve had a really good spring, weather-wise, for plants. Lots of rain and nothing too squirrely with the temperatures. This elderberry had a rough beginning of its life: When Gideon was a puppy and could jump the fence, we had him on a long lead for a while that connected to the fence behind where this shrub is. He’d often get tangled in it, snapping off the baby twigs regularly. I think it’s finally fully recovered, as long as I don’t hit it with the mower.

We’ve got one or two wee baby ninebarks. It’s a native shrub we’re trying to grow along our back fence, to start to re-create some sort of hedge to replace all the invasive bush honeysuckle we removed.

Wait till you see the blooms on this prickly pear. This is probably the happiest plant in the whole yard, which tells you something about our soil and weather…

I planted a butterfly milkweed or three a year or two ago, and thought they had all died. Not only was I mistaken, but apparently what few blooms we had had actually set seed! Now I have a hundred butterfly milkweed! They’re hard to make out in this photo, but they have skinny leaves, and are in the center- and right-foreground, and scattered all throughout the background. I’m letting them get a little bigger before I start to move them around (growing in the cracks of the rock garden border is not ideal).

I’ve had a potted aloe plant indoors for about two years, and it had been getting increasingly weird—sprouting up lots of tiny new leaves while the big old leaves struggled. I always wondered if it wasn’t getting enough sun or needed to be repotted. The other day, a dog (I blame Samson) knocked it off its table and its pot shattered on the floor, so it was time. Turns out, all those little weird leaves were new individual plants. So I now have 18 aloe plants. I set them out in the sunshine and… this is what happened. Plant people will not be surprised: they sun bleached. Plants that are used to low light can’t actually handle blazing direct sun! I have moved these to a shadier spot and they are slowly recovering and turning green again.

A cutie wild geranium.

Bluestars (Amsonia).

The catmint along our driveway was up by the house when we moved in, and there was only a couple of boxwoods here along this rock wall. We just divided what we had and spread them along the top, and they’ve been filling in fabulously.

Peonies!

Apparently I am not motivated by curb appeal at all, because this front bed is the most neglected area of the whole garden. Luckily, these dianthus came back from a previous year!

Who’s this? A surprise squash growing out of our stash of old pots! We didn’t get any squash whenever we actually tried growing them. Maybe neglect will give us a crop this season.

K bye!