8.

Sharing the garden

Sally and Bekka have a large place to patrol...and the layout is such they get to run through my garden...

sweatshirt bumpersticker...It is What it Is

I am extremely fortunate neither are diggers..most of the time.

Sally is a white English Pointer

Bekka is a liver ticked German Shorthair

They used to be bird hunting dogs, back in the day.

They are nine now and have other jobs.

Sally has bee patrol. She HATES them. She has a thin coat and has been nipped by many a bee. In the summer she hangs around the lavender and Veronica bushes, so intent that she ignores calls to dinner.

Bekka...BadBabyBekka...My beloved Bekka

has lizard patrol.

Unfortunately the lizards dive for the rocks around the pond and other places, and Bekka starts digging...she doesn't dig much...just paws, but she has knocked so many of the rocks back in the pond I have to keep it surrounded by a little fence.

The dogs love everything I do in the garden...sniff at all the new plants... ...sometimes move the new plants a few feet...inspect the contents of the wheelbarrow coming and going...and mostly are pretty good dogs.

Sally on bee patrol




Bekka taking a drink from the fish pond nursery. This is where I keep the overflow of pond plants. They are too expensive for me to toss.



Another picture of Bekka just because I love her. I wrote about her about nine or ten years ago and it was published in the Courier...one of those Reader Writes columns...I'm sure you remember it...haha. She is impulsive and in your face if she wants something, ...will not be ignored....eats everything in one gulp. She's like a pony in the house, wants back out as soon as she get in... whereas Sally is neat and quiet as a cat in the house. Jack says I love Bekka because she is just like me...hmmmm. I am not like a pony in the house.

7.

crazy lady?

The oddest thing is happening. I planted a row of Stella d'Oro daylilies.

(I digress) genus: Hemerocallis

now don't go thinking the latin is boring..

hemera is "day" and kallos is "beauty"

The golden beauty of the day

Anyway, a couple of years later they needed dividing so I dug them up and managed to get 14 new plants. I planted them in my new garden along the edges of the paths. Now they are blooming for the first time and they

and not golden beauties of the day!

They are deep, vivid, orangy red and on very long stems.

How could this be! You probably think I bought new lilies and simply forgot...but fourteen? I never buy fourteen of anything except maybe grapes. It just isn't how I shop. I am totally flumoxed, and must stop writing and get a grip.

My original Stella d'Oro border

The new, but gorgeous mystery lily

6.
Rosettes and babies

There was an old woman who lived in a shoe
Had so many chickies she spread them all over her garden

Don't throw away broken pots. Partially bury them and plant a display around them.



Girls gone wild.
They don't usually go to seed in such a dramatic way.
Click on picture to enlarge

Hen and Chickens..

other names Live Forever-Houseleek-Old man and woman

Family: Crassulaceae..(crass-you-LAY-see-ah)

Genus: Sempervivum..(sem-per-VEE-vum)

Species: Tectorum...(tek-TOR-um)

evergreen perennials

When you see sempervivum tacked on a plant it is Latin for always living and means the plant is evergreen, perennial and hardy.

tectorum means roof

The story goes that hen and chicks were planted on roofs to

prevent lightning?

prevent thatched roofs from catching fire?

Probably the later, if any of it is true, because with moisture filled leaves they would be fireproof.

Hen and Chicks were my first plant to grow as a child. Gramma Lamb had them growing along side her little house in North Bonneville, Washington before the Bonneville Dam put the town underwater and they had to build a new one.
She was not my grandmother...everyone in the tiny town called her that, and I knew nothing of her family. Oddly, manymany years and miles later I found myself related to her by marriage...but she was long gone by then.

Hen and Chicks grow as a succulent rosette...the hen...surrounded by her little pea size chicks. Cut or break the chicks off and poke them dirt and they grow. Every few years a rosette will bloom...I've not seen a definite time line but once they bloom, they die. You can let the bloom go to seed and collect the seeds if you have nothing better to do....no blogs to maintain...no books to read...no cats to draw...

We have lived in many houses and one had whole beds of Hen and Chicks thickly matted. I loved them and when we moved I took a goodly strip of them and planted them alongside the new house. One day while I was gone we had a man with a bulldozer come to do some repair work and he ran his dingdong machine back and forth over my plants. Hen and Chicks are tough but even they have limits.

5.

Angelina Stonecrop

After the pond was finished I had tons of time so I decided to start adding a garden around the edges. We live in a clearing in the woods. The soil is acid and very poor. I am a new gardener and an old lady and I knew right off I could not handle a compost pile...I had neither the strength nor the patience to treat it properly.

I add JoGro, a locally made compost, and potting soil and fertilizer and figure by the time I'm a hundred and ten the ground will be great.

I want easy care plants.

One of the first plants I added was for the rocks in front of the pond. There were several tiers of rocks and I wanted a teeny rock garden.

Angelina Stonecrop

a

stonecrop/sedum/succulant

stone crop, also called the hen and chickens family

sedums are part of this family

succulants are plants that originated in arid climates. They are juicy, fleshy plants that store water in their leaves, compact growing to save moisture.

Angelina is a butter yellow, easy growing, spreading sedum

perennial.

good drainage, partial to full sun

They are tolerant of poor soil, drought, new gardeners and careless ones.

cascades easily

4.

yes, that's my shadow

Every day I went out and lined more rocks around the edges.

They slid down

I'd build them up

slid down

build up

slid down

I'd look out the window at this seemingly unsolvable mess and say to my self, "two rocks...I'll just place two solid rocks...If I do two solid rocks a day, some day it will be finished."

I quit taking pictures

When the rock sides were as stable as they ever would be I added some embellishments.

I planted three sprawling juniper bushes whose duty it was to spread over nearby imperfections.

I added some flat cement tiles where pots could sit.

I added some water plants...left them in their pots so they wouldn't spread and root in the pond itself.

And finally I added five small goldfish.

3.

aagghhhh....cookie time again

I had to decide how to cover the ugly edges...thought of manymany things and tried a few. Finally I settled on river rocks. From the river. Is that legal? After many sneaky trips I saw some people brazenly loading their pickup in front of godandall. I stopped and talked to them and they said, "oh yeah, nothing wrong with taking some rocks".

hmmmmm

where do you draw the line?

when the river changes course?

I struggled with my conscience and my dark side won.

What is written in this blog

stays in this blog.

I forgot to say that I designed this pond to have one end deep enough to winter the fish in our relatively mild Southern Oregon winters .. and I wanted a shallow end for frog and dragonfly eggs. I'd never do that again.

fish eat frog and dragonfly eggs

You can tell this was well thought out.

sweatshirt bumper sticker......I learn as I go

2.

well, it needs a little tweaking...

I had no idea I was going to be faced with gathered, pleated edges...

wurra wurra said Winnie The Pooh...

what to do what to do.

What was I thinking? That it would magically mold itself perfectly to the rough dug walls?

Well, the first thing to do is have a cookie and think.

1.

It all started when I wanted a fishpond in the back yard, so I dug a hole.

This was going to be my own project. It would have nothing I couldn't do myself. So there goes any fancy wiring or water setups....hose only.

We are on a well

No city water for my fish

Next I had to look for lining. I had to Google to even get started...had no idea what was available or recommended. Then trips around our little town to see who sold what at what price. I am not crazy about shopping or making decisions so this took me days and days.

Finally I found a tough, reliable lining sold by the yard at Chet's in Grants Pass...right under my nose. It was wide enough...(and that was just a lucky happening since I had already dug the hole....I must be a natural at this) and more importantly it was of the right weight and flexible enough for me to handle all by myself.

Bought it...trundled it home...rolled it out over the hole and tamped it in.

I bought some pond gravel, washed it, and layered it across the bottom.

AND filled it with the hose!

EXCITEMENT!

MY FISHPOND!