A bit of garden porn
Some of my potted plants on the deck. I've got my kitchen herbs, my mini-bog, the random reseeding flowers from the window box that fell into the green pot and a thus unplanted pot.
I didn't make any sense to me to put the herbs that I use the most all the way down in the backyard, so I broke up this half rotted whiskey barrel and planted it with my rosemary bush, chives and thyme. I added the strawberries this year because I impluse bought them and they're supposed to do good in a container. Nowhere else to put them. Oops. Interesting, the thyme was varigated when I bought it. All of the new growth this year is completely green.
My mini bog. A couple of different kinds of pitcher plants that are just starting to take off. The tallest spike on the right is a good foot tall if not more.
Murky water garden! I bought some mini cattails today and stirred up the substrate pretty badly, as you can tell. I have cattails, horsetail reed, corkscrew rush and lizard tail as the emergent plants in the outer ring. I've also thrown aquarium odds and ends in there so there's amazon frogbit floating and there are a number of submerged plants you can't see. In that ring I have a school of bloodfin tetras to eat the mosquito larvae that would show up otherwise. They're from the southern end of South America and put up with much lower temperatures than most tropical fish. I made the mistake of putting guppies out too early this year and a late, unexpected frost killed them all off. :( The tetras should be just fine. All of the native fish I have outside were fine after the frost. Middle ring/blue container has water lilies, amazon frogbit and some fundulus species killifish that I don't know what it is and never see. But again, they eat the bugs so it's all good.
My project for the day was to get the paths through the clay in the backyard sorted a bit. I didn't have a lot of slate, so I decided to move it from it's orginial location as the central path over to the bit between the pond and the raised bed. I've got some sort of Steppable that's a shade plant and I can't for the life of me remember what I bought. I got it like four hours ago! I'm hoping that will fill in nicely between the stones. The wood is left over from a rotting raised bed we pulled down. It's still sturdy enough to work as a boardwalk so I decided to use that in the center.
I'm really happy with how the pond and bog plants have taken off this year. I was worried about the ferns coming up this year but they're just coming along beautifully. In the window boxes in the pond, I have yellow irises, pickeral weed, marsh marigold, monkey flower, some pennywort that may or may not be doing anything and cardinal flower. The submerged plants are lilies and pennywort. I'm really suprised at how hardly the monkey flower is. That was green late into winter and then even after the pond froze on the top, the plants under the ice were green all winter. I actually thought it was a weed until it started blooming today.
And finally, my succulent hanging baskets. I never remember to water these because of their location, so I decided to throw succulents in there this year. I've got a variety of stuff from the $3 cactuses at Lowes. It'll all have to come in for the winter since none of the plants will take a freeze, but they should be fine for the rest of the year.
