Not Going to Garden Until Next Year...

Yeah. I'm still not going to vegetable garden until next year, but...

Photo from here.

I planted two peonies today. Above, "peche," and below "Bowl of Beauty." Neither are the peonies I planted last year in Lexington, but that can be fixed easily. Both are very pretty and both were locally available. People have amazing peonies here.

Photo from here, taken at the 2003 Chelsea Garden Show. You'd be surprised how hard it was to find a nice image of this flower.

In addition to peonies, today I planted two berry bushes. On was a boysenberry plant, the other something called nectarberry. It's a variety of blackberry, but very large (1.5 inches by 1 inch!) and with few seeds. The nursery was out of raspberries, but since my neighbor's raspberries are planted along our shared fence and they're scrambling over into our yard (as they do), I'm not worried about that.

Not yet planted but soon to be in the ground are two blueberries. Yes, blueberries. I can hardly wait.

Last, I planted a bunch of small lemon thyme plants and more pansies. I lovelovelove pansies and they're marked down here. So I got a bunch the other day and a bunch more today and they're providing pretty bursts of color in front. I still have to find small shrubs for the front bed, but there's no hurry.

So I'm still waiting to veggie garden. My side yard needs raised beds for sure, and that means acquiring untreated boards, screwing them together, laying down some lasagna, getting soil, setting O-rings, bending in the PVC pipe to hold up landscape fabric, re-doing the irrigation heads so they provide spot watering, etc. etc. etc. This year is the time for anything that needs a couple of seasons to settle in - fruit trees (shhh!), berries, and other border shrubs, perennials, stuff like that. Next spring we can worry about veggies.