Tulips are perfect for lavish banks of color! Thank you, commentor Sonora:
4/30/23
Not my garden, but a spectacular day outside of Amsterdam.
Late blooming tulips due to colder spring temperatures, but perfect for our vacation.
Another item checked off the bucket list!
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What’s going on in your garden(s), this week?
OzarkHillbilly
Ticks, ticks, and more ticks but no tocs.
VeniceRiley
Roses roses budding. Budlia growing a lot. Lots of flowers, pink, blue, white. Climbing plants going gangbusters
satby
Beautiful, just beautiful! Looks like a great trip Sonora, thanks for sharing!
At the market yesterday a new vendor, a greenhouse, brought some flats of annuals including two of the three colors of petunias I had started that failed, and at $10.88 a flat!! So my planned hanging baskets are going up today. I have a few more plants to get into pots in the ground, some composted manure to put on the beds and rose pots, and then the heavy clear out of the invasive tree of heaven saplings resumes. But that will be tomorrow. The cannas I already planted last week are already sending up shoots.
satby
Oh, and I need one more 50′ hose to reach all the way around my house to water. It’s dry as toast here and I’m hand watering in front, which is dozens of trips back and forth.
evodevo
@OzarkHillbilly: Yep…same here in KY.
I brought back some of those fringey petal tulips from Amsterdam when we were there 20 years ago.. lasted here for years, with minimal care (I have a brown thumb lol)…
Quinerly
Beautiful pictures.
Here at 6700 ft this past week, I put in more English and French lavender….Great sale at Lowe’s. I now have an entire area in the side yard by the new patio devoted to lavender. Grows well here. SW exposure and requires little water.
Added some Autumn Sage to the little pollinator garden in the newly revamped same side yard (JoJo’s exclusive dog park).
Started an area of Blanket Flowers (Gaillardia) and an area of Coneflowers in the main backyard.
Added more Ice Plants around the koi pond and to the rock garden in the side yard.
Dug out more gravel and moved it to my “gravel mound” in order to layout more flagstones.
Built 3 berms for ornamental grasses.
Some weeding this AM and to town for lunch and a walk through at Santa Fe Bot Garden
Have great Sunday!
Quinerly
@satby:
Love those Flexzilla hoses. Good price on Amazon.
JPL
Lovely pictures
NotMax
Take it away, Mr. Khaury. A one and and a two….
;)
Kristine
Beautiful photos! Thank you for sharing.
Most everything is growing here in NE Illinois. Largest native columbine exploded and some smaller ones that grew from the seeds of an older plant are either blooming or setting up for next year. Irises are opening. Shade garden has exploded. Unfortunately we’ve slipped back into the “abnormally dry” drought category. No significant rain for the last week and none expected through the coming week. That will hit the ferns and astilbes hard and dammit they look so good.
NotMax
@OzarkHillbilly
Obvious you’re in need of a Tock.
:)
mrmoshpotato
Good morning to you, your bones, and your gardens!
RevRick
Our purple irises were glorious this year, but are faded and gone, our azalea is quickly fading, our peonies are blooming abundantly, and our roses are beginning to blossom.
Meanwhile, I have two Zoom meetings this week. One is for our church Conference’s Racial Justice Task Force, and the other is for my continuing education. Then my wife and I head to Ardmore for our granddaughter’s choral recital, and we’ll be staying there for Wednesday and Thursday nights to be with her, because her dad will be working late, and our daughter has to go to Harrisburg for her two-day continuing education.
Gvg
Mom’s ancestry is Dutch and we did that Holland bulb tour many years ago. I enjoyed it. Mom persists in growing tulips, in Florida. Spends much money buying them each year early and prechilling them in garage mini fridges. Dad can afford it it but I really do not get into that. I love the tulips grown so well where they are happy but don’t think it’s worth it to put this much effort into inferior shows. Mom grows many tropical that her norther sister can’t with much less effort but has to also try and grow a large number of tulips. Now she is failing and has to use a walker but she is still buying tulip bulbs. It’s getting frustrating. I help but my arthritis is painful at times. It’s also painful to her that she can’t really safely travel on garden tours anymore.
Beautiful weather this weekend, much less hot than usual. Lots of things blooming because the summer rains have started. I am collecting seed from spring bloomers. Sunflowers and rudbeckias have started and coreopsis continue so it’s yellow season. Yesterday I took advantage of the cooler weather to spray for mites and tea scale and such. Just a lite horticultural oil on the undersides of the leaves of camellias and citrus to head off problems later. Downside is that now I can cut down my dying citrus tree. The oil was to keep any bugs on it from spreading the greening to the other tree if possible. Sad but required. No point in keeping a plague carrying tree.
mrmoshpotato
@satby:
Well, butter up some of the flowers, and put jelly on the others.
satby
@Quinerly: ok, thanks! I bought 2 steel hoses last year but I can’t seem to find them this year, for the yard anyway. I got so sick of the vinyl hoses kinking.
Geo Wilcox
Back when my husband was flying international commercial as a pilot, he brought me back hundreds of tulips from Amsterdam. I planted a huge bulb garden in a triangle shape in the back yard. The first year they were gorgeous. Then it stopped getting cold enough for them to over winter. No way was I going to buy a new fridge, dig up all those bulbs and over winter them in my house. I let the whole thing go and now all that is in there are some daffodils and other bulbs I cannot remember the name of. Every once in a while a single tulip will crop up but never flower.
kalakal
Finally got some rain! About 3 days in a row, pulled a lot of stuff back from death’s door. Looking at edging for the beds. I need a lot as the “soil” is sand and the garden needs some definition. It’s an informal garden so something natural looking, haven’t seen anything that grabs me yet
I love Keukenhof, my parents used to live in Leiden about 3 miles from there. The other place I used to love to visit was Madurodam ( not a garden but paradise for a little kid) , must go back to both next time I’m there
Madurodam
Mousebumples
Beautiful flowers! My daffodils and tulips are just about done, but I bought a hose splitter at Jung’s yesterday for watering transplanted firs.
Still evaluating possible composting options. Mr. Mouse has been putting stuff in a brown paper bag and then burying it, which doesn’t seem ideal. He’s reluctant to spend $ on a turning compost anything, but could probably be persuaded. Any recommendations?
Alternatively, I used to do vermicomposting (pre-kids), so I could try to get that going again…
Quinerly
@satby:
Hoses are kinda personal. These are not terribly heavy and don’t kink. Easy to maneuver. You may think differently. Can always return.
mrmoshpotato
@Quinerly:
Nominated.
TerryC
Planting trees all spring, so far, has now turned into watering and mowing. (I don’t grow annuals) Mowing is a treat because I love to do it and because everything is SO beautiful out. Autumn Olive, Virburnum, Black Locust, and Paw Paw are all blooming right now – the locust and olive are permeating the air with intense floral scents.
And mowing is a very big job as we have two miles of disc golf fairways (two 18-hole courses) plus we have planted in total 16,000 trees in the past ten years, just over 500 this year, including Nutall Oak, Norway Spruce, Bald Cypress, Paw Paw, and Mulberry. Thus a lot of that mowing is in *circles*!
No rain in sight so we are also watering using the tractor mostly. I have 1,600 feet of hose which I may pull out soon if this continues.
Quinerly
@mrmoshpotato: 😈
oldgold
@satby:
It is dry here, too!
How dry is it in the Twilight Hardy Zone, well, the local Fish Wrapper is reporting the two political parties have stopped throwing mud at one another. Even more shocking, it is reporting that the local NRA chapter has agreed to the regulation of squirt guns! More incredible, in the church news section, there are reports the Catholics are praying for Jesus to turn wine back into water and the Baptists are issuing rain checks for baptisms.
Until it rains my plan for sowing my 5000 pounds of Glechoma hederacea are on hold.
O. Felix Culpa
@Quinerly: Whatever you do, do NOT plant Russian sage in the ground. Like mint or bamboo, it will take over and spread everywhere. If it’s a plant you like (I don’t, but it does thrive easily in the high desert environment), use containers only.
ETA: I love ice plants. However, so do rabbits. They eat them like candy. Tasty desert dessert treats for the critters. Ask me how I know. ;-)
StringOnAStick
@O. Felix Culpa: Agreed on Russian sage, plus it looks awful in the winter.
This is my first real veggie garden here and since it’s a 90 day growing season, tempting the frost god is necessary. Between various single plant greenhouses and strategic bedsheet deployment, the Juliet tomato is extremely vigorous, the pole beans are 3′ tall and I see hints of flowers just starting to be visible. The severe prune of the neglected blueberries appears to have worked with stimulating new growth but there will be fewer though much larger fruit this year. I think the new Triple Crown raspberry might set fruit this year. Loving having drip irrigation everywhere in the property and a separate zone for the veggie garden with shrubler emitters. 5 stars, would recommend!
Wapiti
Garden is doing great this year. Rhododendron finally bloomed. Lots of California poppies.
My brother gifted me bunch of iris bulbs/rhizomes, and they really popped this year – a bed split between white and black irises. I hope to shift some of these to the front yard come autumn; to get them out of their temporary home and let other enjoy the contrasts. I had forgotten the black bulbs and they got really desiccated before planting, and I think they mostly just recovered last year.
Quinerly
@O. Felix Culpa:
I’m corraling lots of Russian Sage here. The Ice Plants are in the back. Dog side and around the pond. No bunnies last year and this year. I put out a bunny buffet out front mixed in in the cactus gardens with some clearance hens and chick’s last Fall. The test ones were eaten in less than 36 hours. Cheryl Rofer warned me. Put the rest in the back. Thriving.
I’m not opposed to the Russian Sage and Cat Mint that is here. Definitely would never buy Russian Sage and start it though. The Autumn Sage is compact. Stays put. Blooms red twice a year.
satby
@oldgold: 💖
Hildebrand
We were just there – the Keukenhof is really the most beautiful of gardens. Of course, and on a completely not flower related note, the pomme frites stand makes the best frites in the world. So good!
Anonymous
Ok, confession time. Shrooms were legal in the Netherlands until 2007 (or maybe just decriminalized, point is you could buy them easily in stores). And some friends of mine and I used to have an annual ritual in the 90s of doing shrooms at Keukenhof and…it really is the best place in the world to do them! (I am way to old for something like that these days). So I have some very good and intense memories of the place