A Year of Afternoon Gardens - May

First month without snow!! We dug out most of the orange day lilies from the front garden to make room for a wider variety of plants. Perhaps not surprisingly, we didn't start any seeds under lights as we planned. Our hearts and heads are too full of Hazel Nina, and the soon-to-arrive Campbell Walker! So, we'll buy plants and place them in the garden to bring more color to that spot. You may see some holes in the left garden. Yesterday we dug up a few day lilies and put some in the old vegetable garden beds, and brought some down to Margaret, adding to a bunch we gave her a few years ago. We'll fill in the holes, cover with cocoa shell mulch, and let the flowers have some breathing space. This is a bed filled with many different colored day lilies that bloom over the summer.

We have also made a decision about the vegetable garden. We are turning it into a flower garden except for garlic, lettuce, and yellow beans. Everything else we can buy at weekly farmers' markets, or at our local co-op store, or at farm stands. When we first moved up here 41 years ago, there was no source of organic food anywhere. There were a few farm stands, but no farmers' markets. And now, we can buy anything we want - both local and organic - so that we really do not need to keep up a vegetable garden. We've already turned two of the boxes into peony beds, and will fill the others as the spring goes on. I'm really quite excited about this. We've spent a lot of years working a vegetable garden, and I look forward to simply enjoying the flowers, and getting all our food without having to do any work. It comes at a good time in our lives when we are older, and want to spend more time with the grandchildren.

Just around the corner from the patio,

We dug out all the day lilies because they were shaded too much by the maple tree. They had been in there since Tom put in the patio, just a few months before I began writing the blog.

They grew and were beautiful but all the flowers tilted their faces toward the fence, as you see in this picture from August 2006. Again, some went to Margaret, and others are in the former vegetable garden. We're thinking we might move the prolific phlox which are on the other side of the fence into that spot.

And speaking of the fence, the sweet little picket fence has been up since 1999, and it looks its age. Instead of another picket, Tom has a scheme for a fence similar to this picture I found on Pinterest.

It will be cheaper to buy and easier to build. The plan is to do one section at a time. We'll put some chicken wire along the bottom to keep Sadie and any future Windy Poplars puppies from getting out. The thought is to have it go all the way out to the wood pile and then connect with the electric pasture fence. Tom is so happy to have retirement time to do all these things.