For those of you who come to my blog to see what I’m creating, during early garden season my art takes a back seat. However, once the weather heats up, I’ll be back inside playing.
So today I’m talking about the new iris bed, and some other stuff going on around here outside. This new area was just full of weeds, trees, and lots of hostas.
So I spent quite a bit of time last week cleaning up this area, including digging up and giving away all of the hostas. Here are some of the hostas that went to other homes.
After pulling weeds, trees and the hostas, Dave brought in the tiller. Then I raked in compost and added the irises. In this bed are irises from a couple areas where they have never bloomed. I also added irises Jill gave me this year.
I’m hoping a couple old irises I’ve not seen in years will bloom next year. Here is the finished bed. They look like little soldiers!
I also cleaned up one of the two areas next to the shed door. Here is how it looked.
Here is the left bed now with the Astilbe I moved from my shade area. I still need to mulch it. The other bed was not worked on it once I saw the poison ivy. I’ll wait to work on it later.
I’m excited to see who will show up next year. Here are our other iris areas. This is a bed on the side of the house that has a lot of the old irises. They were planted way before we moved in, and before the dogwood grew so large. I moved several of the irises that didn’t bloom to the new area. You also see on the right Jurassic Park which I planted a couple years ago just to make sure I had extras. It bloomed because it does get some sun early on.
Dave started this area a couple years ago.
This is the main bed that used to be a lavender area.
And the left and right beds
One more thing about irises. Here are two irises not on the tour. The first is the Louisiana iris.
The other is the one that blooms way early, and is more of a ground cover than an iris. It’s called Iris Cristata Blue Giant.
I love the view out of my window of the Kousa Dogwood trees.
A couple years ago I had back issues, and I had a hard time working on the asparagus bed. So now we just let the ferns grow up, and then mow it all down in the spring. However, I do like to mow between the three rows during the harvesting season. There are lots of weeds (which I used to fight all season), but we still have gotten plenty of asparagus. I enjoy harvesting and eating the asparagus much more than I did when I had to work on the bed. It doesn’t look pretty, but it produces great spears! On a positive note, my back issues are much better!
One of my favorite meals made with these spears is Asparagus Mimosa. Here it is with a slice of one of Dave’s yummy breads.
Yesterday the local library had a book sale. I love reading mysteries and other light reading on vacation. Then I leave the books in the condo for others to read. I’m all set for our next vacation!
As I mentioned, when gardening season starts my art takes a back seat. However, I still think about it and even work a bit on projects. Here is my design wall with one of the projects I have worked on and will be completing soon.
Oh, I also took a Zoom class a couple weeks ago and want to show you that project soon.
Hope you are having a fun and creative weekend. Thanks for dropping by.
Good morning – I too stop my indoor creative projects once the snow melts here in NH (for the most part). However – this year..my gardening has been thwarted by a broken wrist! Phooey. I am enjoying looking at your irises and thinking that I need to add. more to my garden (in August – I should be able to resume my gardening fun). Do you get your irises from friends? Or do you order them from somewhere? Thanks for the garden bed posts – fun to read!
All that hard work in the garden has paid off again! Your irises are sooooo beautiful! I may need to do some transplants of my own this year… but mine will never get the wonderful care yours do. Thank you for sharing yours!
Judy, Thanks.
Liz, At the beginning I had over 30 different ones that were here already when we bought the house 16 years ago. I gave a lot away and were given some. In the past several years, as I mentioned on the last post, I bought many from Schreiners. But love also getting them from friends. I also still give a lot of them away to locals. Broken wrist? OMG! Hope it heals fast so you can get back to playing! Thanks for dropping by.