Monsoon season has been going strong for nearly a month here in the high desert. In fact, I think we’ve had maybe 1 day without rain since early July. This is my fourth monsoon season here. It seems like we had more big storms in previous years--pounding rain, hail, and wall-shaking thunder that turns Fritz the Cowardly Greyhound into a quivering, foaming-at-the-mouth wreck. We’ve had some of that this year, but we’ve also had more cloudy-as-Portland-in-February days and more extended periods of lighter rain. On the upside: I haven’t had to water since early July, the garden is lush and healthy, and grasshoppers go into hiding when it rains. On the downside: I keep getting rained on when I try to plant or weed. On the whole, though, I’ll take it. Check out this tangled jungle of wonderfulness.
Pond and bog
I still have tons to do to clean up the pond site and landscape around the edges, but it’s starting to look less like an excavation and more like a water garden.
The shallow area on the right with all the plants in it is a bog filter. It has about 8” of pea gravel in it. Underneath is a PVC pipe with holes in it. The main pump pumps water into the PVC, so the water is pushed up through the gravel (kind of the reverse of an undergravel filter in an aquarium). The fish waste nourishes the plants, which feed on the nitrates that would otherwise bother the fish. Want one? Of course you do! Instructions are available from Nelson Water Gardens.
Ranuculus flammunla, a/k/a Small Creeping Spearwort. This was one of the first pond plants I bought, and it has thrived from day 1 in the bog.
The cute little lavender flower is a bloom on my water mint. I got some cuttings of water mint from a nursery in Las Vegas. Like most mint, it rooted easily in water (duh) and is happily spreading around the bog.
At the east end of the pond, I built a new bed. It’s not really part of the pond, just adjacent to it. Right now it’s a tangled mess. The weedy thing with the white flowers is horsetail milkweed, our (rather ugly) native milkweed. It volunteered there (and a bunch of other places in my yard), and I left it to lure in the monarch butterflies. We had a couple in the yard yesterday, but unfortunately I didn’t have a camera handy. The rest of the mess is Mexican Hat (Ratibida columnifera), one of our native wildflowers that I winter-sowed, plus a tomato plant, a lilac, portulaca, petunias, Gerbera daisies, and some winter-sown penstemons that should bloom next year.
Side cottage garden
Here’s most of the length of the side garden. Those round green things are the chrysanthemums I bought for $.50 each at Wal-Mart last fall. They were in 6” pots then. Almost all of them lived through the winter and look quite happy.
Fuji apple, tomato, mums, chair planter, and a few other things:
Chair planter with dianthus and society garlic in the pot and morning glory trying to take over the known universe:
Columbine:
Violas and pansies. They’ve been blooming since early spring and show no signs of slowing down. I got these at a buy-one-get-10-free sale (really!) late last fall at Home Depot and wintered them over in a warm-ish corner of my front porch.
An attention-loving petunia photobombing the alyssum:
Hollyhocks are slowing down a little but still pretty.
The rusty wrought iron kitty is now blue! Hubby painted it for me last night. I love how this shade of blue pops in the garden.
Echinacea, Shasta daisy, and a tomato. I tried using a piece of yard art in lieu of a tomato cage. So far so good, but I think that’s only because the tomato in question is still small.
Similar to the pic above, but in this one you can see the catmint as well. It’s in one of the dryest, most inhospitable parts of the bed, with lousy soil and a bench blocking morning sun. Yet it has been thriving for the last couple of years with almost no attention, and it’s pretty, and the bees love it. Yay for low-maintenance pollinator-attractors!
Front door cottage garden
Note for the uninitiated: In this case, “Cottage garden,” is a synonym for, “jumbled up mess created by a gardener who can’t design her way out of a wet paper bag.” I’m a proud member of the, “Stick it somewhere and see how it looks when it’s bigger,” school of garden design.
Jungle of tomatoes, mum, and what’s left of the gorgeous, frilly pink peony poppy I winter-sowed this year:
Welcome to the jungle. I do think the purple larkspur looks pretty growing through the tomatoes.
Black cherry tomatoes. I think they look like giant deadly nightshade berries (For you wiseasses in the crowd, yes, I know tomatoes *are* nightshade berries. Thankfully they aren’t deadly.) I love how these look on the vine. Hopefully they’ll taste as good as they look.
Look! A tomato that’s almost ripe! (A Sungold, to be specific.) And it isn’t even September! And it’s on the vine, not in a paper bag in my spare bedroom sometime after the first frost. Someone alert the media.
Container garden
The pansies, violas, snapdragons, and alyssum were all purchased last fall when Home Depot was clearing out their annuals for winter. This corner of my front porch is sheltered by the house on the south and east sides and stays at least a zone warmer than the rest of the garden. I threw a frost blanket over the whole area when nights got below the mid-20s. As you can see, they came through the winter just fine, and they’ve been blooming since about March.
Here’s a side view showing the succulents I got from Home Depot for free when they were being thrown out last summer. Home Depot rarely gives old plants away; I got lucky that day. These wintered over indoors.
I tried growing some tomatoes in containers this year, so I could put them up against the south wall of the house and (hopefully) actually get them to ripen. The 2 on the right have tomatoes on them and are doing well. The Brandywine on the left appears to have an issue.
The potager
Note for the uninitiated: “Potager,” is a French kitchen garden that combines vegetables, herbs, fruit, and flowers. I call mine a potager, because I have delusions of grandeur. In my defense, this garden was built just last fall and this spring and isn’t finished yet. I really do want to make it look like a (low-budget) potager, but that may take awhile. Right now it’s as jungle-like as the rest of my yard and infested with a number of large and occasionally interesting weeds. I’m thinking of nailing my, “Martha Stewart doesn’t live here” sign (yes, I really have one) to the top of the arbor at the entrance.
The red cabbage is ready to harvest. It’s about to become Asian slaw.
The bed on the left is supposed to contain winter squash, cantaloupe, bush beans, and sunflowers. The winter squash, cantaloupe, and sunflowers are there, but so is a huge volunteer Datura wrightii (a/k/a Jimson Weed or Sacred Datura). Let’s have a deadly poisonous plant growing among stuff we plan to eat. What could possibly go wrong? Yeah, I need to move it, but it has buds on it, and it’s going to look beautiful when it blooms. The bed on the right contains my fennel. The fennel I fantasized about eating in a nice salad with a lemon vinaigrette dressing. I love fennel. My whole family loves fennel. And there it is, tall and healthy. There’s just one problem: no bulbs. Nope. None. The seed packet says it’s a bulbing variety, but apparently the plants didn’t read the seed packet. Oh, well--at least the pollinators love it.
Here we have a bed of potatoes and bush beans, along with the one calendula I winter-sowed that actually germinated and grew. The beds next to the (badly-built, not fully-painted) fence contain Bright Lights chard that bolted, lettuce that bolted, a currant bush that the grasshoppers have been dining on, onions, cucumber, and a giant winter squash that appears to be trying to invade the neighborhood.
I’ll close with one final pic. This one is looking out toward the edge of the potager and the pasture. The M*A*S*H sign (you young’uns can Google it) was custom designed by my husband. It includes many of the places used on the sign in the TV show, plus several that have meaning for us: our hometowns, Hogwarts, Sheffield (for anyone new to dealing with me, I’m a diehard Def Leppard fan), and a few others. It used to be in what is now the middle of our pond, but we moved it. We’re just starting to landscape this area of the yard. It’s mostly weeds now, but that should change in a few years.
