Tour Day

Tomorrow morning we will be hosting our first garden tour of the season.  Everything is (almost) done and we have a few pre-dawn hours scheduled just to walk through and double-check the gardens.

This evening we were hosts at the pre-tour wine & cheese "Meet and Greet the Gardeners".  We raised enough money to buy 750 flower bulbs for the townsfolk with our advance ticket sales.  It was the best year ever for advance sales.

When we got home - dreading the amount of work that still needed to be done, we found that one of the guys who helps my DH with the heavy jobs around our bucolic manor had come over and top mulched over 1,500 square feet of the beds.  It's a hands-on labor intensive job.  Since the plants are mature, it's even more difficult.

To properly top mulch a bed, you have give it a good deep root soaking.  This is the water that the mulch will hold in while it keeps the plants cool.  Once you water the beds, you cannot step in them or else the soil gets too compressed and you kill plant roots.  Also, the soil gets a little muddy - especially since we have a high clay soil here, so if you touch the soil, it sticks to you like glue.

Then you can start putting down the mulch.  You have to do this by casting the mulch out 1 handful at a time - casting as if you're spreading chicken feed (like in the movies) - so the mulch goes underneath the leaves of the plants and not on the leaves of the plants.  If you hit a leaf, you have to shake or rinse it off.  Every single leaf has to be clean on tour day.  Usually when you're hand casting mulch, you're also carrying your bucket of mulch - it weighs between 50-75 pounds.

Once the centers of the beds are done, you have to edge them with mulch.  This doubles the layer of mulch surrounding the beds.  It helps keep the water from running out of the beds and it also makes the eye think that there is a thicker layer of mulch than there really is.  It looks fluffy.

Normally when you buy bags of mulch at the store, you will put down between 2-4 inches of mulch.  We only put down a 1-inch layer.

And that's where the horse comes in.

We use an aged arabian stallion bedding mixture that has been aged for 5 years for our mulch.  It contains the hay and such that they use for bedding in the stalls plus that "special gift" that the horses add to the bedding.  We pick up 4 yards of it in the pickup and put it in strategically located pikes around the property.

So to sum it up - while we were at a cocktail party, this nice man came over and hauled about 2,000 pounds of composted horse droppings onto garden beds that would cover 1/2 a football field.

What a nice guy!

Garden Tour

Saturday is the local garden tour.  We've spent a lot of time working on our garden to get it ready for the tour - weeding, mulching, pruning, primping.  We've advertised everywhere we could think of - newspapers, television, radio, blogs, websites.  We hung up posters, passed out cards, chatted with hundreds of people.  We've gotten sponsors and volunteers.  Hopefully this little charity garden tour will get a great turn-out.

Some of the gardens are on huge multi-million dollar estates.  They have rolling hills, exotic coy ponds, famous owners, professional gardeners.

Ours is an historic daylily garden.  Today the lilies are in bloom.  I keep going out to count the buds, hoping the deer will stay away just one more day so there will be flowers when the tour comes through.

Some of the gardens have been featured in national garden magazines.  Their owners spend hundreds of hours hunting down the perfect plants, carrying them up steep hills and nestling them into that tiny space where they'll make a big impact.

A few are national garden conservancy treasures.  Historic properties with mature gardens where even the weeds are "real plants".

Just looking at pictures of the gardens doesn't really do them justice.  You don't get the sense of scale of the gigantic boulders that were moved into place on the top of a mountain to create a naturally filtered freshwater mini lake.

Or the place where tiny terraces have been carved into a hillside/cliff to create small cozy gardens around every turn.

It's really the vistas overlooking the valley with the mountains framing the view that "make" most of the gardens.  All of the flowers, shrubs, streams and bushes are simply a garnish for what mother nature has given already.

So if you're in town, stop by and see the tour!

Strawberry Candy

The gardens at our bucolic manor feature historic daylilies.  Initially, I was not a big fan of daylilies.  I always associated them with funeral flowers - sort of depressing.

But now - after seeing thousands of daylilies both in person and photos - I've changed my mind.  I really like them!  The blooms come in all shapes and colors, and they start blooming in May and don't stop until October.   Some of them even bloom twice (early, then late).

The best part about them, though, is the foliage.  I think it look almost like an ornamental grass - so it's a great border plant.  And you can plant it on top of your bulbs.  The daylily hides the bulb foliage as it dies back which makes for less weeding. (And you know how I feel about weeding!)

This daylily, Strawberry Candy, is the most popular daylily in the northeast.  It's more pink in real life than the picture shows - it sort of glows pink.  And it's a small flower - 2 1/2-inches.  But it is delicate and it contrasts really well with its' foliage, so it stands out even from across the yard.

This is the first time that it has bloomed for us.  We get the plants when they are small so they can grow a good root system before they start producing flowers.  I think it makes for a stronger plant in the long run.

Strawberry Candy - delicious daylily eye candy for our garden!

What is a Weed?

According to Google, a weed is a wild plant growing where it is not wanted and in competition with cultivated plants.

According to my mother, a weed is a plant that is growing where you don't want it to grow.

According to my DH, a weed is an evil plant that must be destroyed at all costs.

But my personal favorite is from quotegarden by Doug Larson.  A weed is a plant that has mastered every survival skill except for learning how to grow in rows.

One of the gardens on our tour has amazing weeds - they are actually cultivated plants (coral bells and lady's mantle) that pop up everywhere in his garden.  They grow so thickly, there is no room for crab grass or dandelions to sneak their little seeds into the ground.

Of course, his garden is almost 40 years old and ours is only 5 years old, so there's a better base of cultivated plants at his place.

So, while my garden grows, I guess I'm stuck with weeding for now.

I wonder if the tour would appreciate a concrete garden???

Let's Play!

The best thing about a dog is - when you are bone tired and the work isn't done and you're feeling just down in the dumps about it, there she is full of love and sweetness.

My DH and I put in 15 hours today, but there's much more to do.  We were both tired and achy when we finally came in from the gardens.  Of course, the first thing we did was complain about our aches and pains - and the first thing our pup did was go fetch a toy so we could play!

She always puts things in perspective for us.  Even when she was a tiny little 7 month old aussie, before her eyes changed colors, she always had that little smile and a happy attitude.  It's like she's saying 'it's okay - come play with me and it will be even better!'

She such a happy pup - and it's contagious!  After a few rounds of keep-away, we felt much better.

What a good girl!

Challenge!

It's less than a week until the first garden tour, so naturally with so much spare time on my hands (not!) I accepted a gardening challenge from my friends.  An entire truck full of plants!

I'm so excited to add them into the gardens - the cannas alone are worth the effort.  But then there are trays of full sun, shade and vegetables as well.

When I got them home, my DH just stood and looked at them - then he looked at me - and then back at the plants.  I told him - challenge!  Then he just shook his head, rubbed his brow and sighed.

You see, I bring home the plants, but he's the one who has to carry, dig and water them.

Maybe I'll step up and help out - it's the right thing to do.

Party Parade

Even when we have an outdoor party, it seems as though everyone hangs out in the "kitchen" - it must be the close proximity to the food.

Our friends all came by to eat, drink and chat before the parade.  It didn't seem to be a "last minute party" at all.  Somehow it all came together.

The parade is the big star of the party.  How can you not cheer on your friends and neighbors marching by your front door?  The kids were spectacular in their colonial outfits and they really played their hearts out as they marched by.

The real stars were the Fire Departments.  For them, it's a competition - who puts on the best show.  For us, it's a chance to say thank you.

Thank you!