Gardening feeds my soul. The act of seeing something grow fills me with joy, the feel of wind (and rain since I live in the PNW) on my face relaxes me, using my limbs and body to move and create is a pleasure for me! Being in the garden started with the physical acts of gardening. But soon it took a root in my soul, it changed the way I see the world. I learnt to see the seasons change, and the way the web of the natural world is woven together. I learnt that there are many more things beyond our control than within it. I see the joy in sowing seeds (real and metaphorical) and watching them grow.
I have been growing Primrose Wanda for over a decade. I started with one small plug and now I have many which forms a border in my front flower bed and dotted throughout my garden. The deep purple with yellow centered flowers form tidy mounds with contrasting green foliage. Exceptionally hardy, and quite a sight in the early spring garden. Primroses are meant to be grown in part shade to full shade parts of the yard. However mine are in the sunniest parts of the garden and has been thriving likely due to our relatively cooler summer temperatures in the PNW area. The plant foliage depreciate in the heat of the summer. Plants spread by creeping rhizomes to form small clumps.I propagate these plants by dividing the clumps after the blooms are over in late spring.
This month is the busiest time in the garden. The spring flowers are starting to bloom, perennials waking up from their winter slumber and most of all seed starting for summer annuals and vegetables. The weather has been mostly mild and reached a high of 70F two days this month and did not dip below 40F. I feel spring is when my garden looks its best and I try to make sure that the clutter is removed and I “juzz” up the garden for the spring show.
The garden has lots of flowers this time of the year. Every day some new spring flowering bulbs start blooming – hyacinths and daffodils are already glorious, but the Red Devon Daffodils which are the late blooming variety are just starting to bloom. I just love primrose “Wanda” which I have been growing for many years now. It forms a lovely border around my front flower bed. I also divide them and it is now beautifully flowering in other parts of my garden. The camellia tree has exploded with stunning flowers and the two Japanese Plum trees are also so full of flowers. The hellebores are still looking beautiful – I feel they are the longest blooming plants! The Red Currants (Ribes Sanguineum) are starting to flower and I can’t wait for the hummingbirds to start visiting her! That truly makes my day!
An interesting anecdote about one of my trees. A gardening friend had given me a small tree which was 12″ tall 6 years ago when she had given to me saying that it was a seedling of a plum tree. I planted the then tiny tree and it grew tall every year but did nothing else. It is now approximately 20 feet tall but was not producing any flowers or fruits. I was growing frustrated with this tree and thought I will remove it if there are no flowers or fruits this year. Well, guess what – this one has beautiful flowers now!! I asked the local gardening group and they identified it as an American plum. How exciting is that!! I am looking forward to observing what the tree does in the coming months and years. Hopefully I will get plums soon!
I wanted to increase the depth of the raised veggie bed from 2″ to 6″. Keshav helped me with this and now I am happy that the veggie bed is 6″ deeper. I filled this bed with raised bed mix and sowed peas and beets so far. I also sowed 6 peas in the barrel.
March is when I sow most seeds that I want to start indoors and so the number of seedlings I have to take care of indoors increases. I am always amazed that dahlia seeds germinate so fast!! 3 days after sowing, the seeds germinate and start growing!
Garden Chores this month:
Planted ranunculus and anemones in the front flower bed after pre-sprouting. They are still very small but growing well.
Started applying mulch after cleaning the dahlia bed.
Sowed dahlia seeds indoors which are now growing nicely under grow lights
Snapdragons, swiss chards, and beets seedlings are growing well too.
Tomato seedlings look so big and strong!
Highlights of the garden in March are captured in this video:
We rolled into February with hope for warmer weather and a pile of gardening chores. But first, it was so exciting to see the Iris Reticulata start to bloom as soon as the new month began!
Hellebore blooms are still going strong! Its amazing how long these lasts. I already cleaned up the older leaves, and the flowers look much better now – but still not as “flashy” as I would like. A little confession – though I appreciate the early blooms and the long lasting flowers, I am not sure that I love the hellebores too much. They remain very close to the ground and seem to disappear into the surroundings unless I peer close to them – even though I have 4 of them in my backyard. . They are expensive plants, so planting en masse is not an option for a thrifty gardener like me. I am on the look out for a very early blooming, deep shade plant that will lift the winter spirit.
The crocuses have started blooming too! These are very attractive to rabbits, so I truly treasure the few that manages to bloom in the garden. The ones that I planted in pots are strangely still not blooming. There are a few daffodils starting to bloom but I am waiting for the main show. My favorite pink camellia has started to flower but then again, the full display is eagerly awaited. Same with Primrose Wanda – I overlook this hardy, beautiful primrose but it adds the pop of color just at the right time. I have them as a border in my front yard and also all around the garden.
On the house plant front, the Thanksgiving cactus is flowering again! I missed the flush of bloom during Thanksgiving time as I was vacationing in India, so I am thrilled to see some flowers now. The African Violets I bought last month are still in flower. So happy to see the long life of these beautiful flowers. I forced some forsythia branches to bloom indoors. I love the bright yellow flowers this time of the year which are also very appropriate for Saraswati Puja. If you want to know the process I use to force branches indoors, you can review my post on this.
The tomato seeds (Beefsteak variety) I sowed on 1/21 have germinated and doing well. They even grew tall enough and I repotted them into bigger pots. However, the pepper seeds (Hot Portugal variety) did not germinate. They seeds were very old and I think they were not viable.
Garden chores completed this month:
Cleaned up the two front yards.
The flower beds in the front yard now has nice, crisp edging – thanks to Anselmo who helped me with that.
Hydrangeas and roses pruned.
Hydrangeas fertilized.
Started the pre-sprouting process for Ranunculus and Anemones.
Sowed Swiss Chards seeds indoors on 2/6. Only one out of 6 germinated. I think I am wasting my time on the old seeds.
Spinach seeds sowed indoors on 2/6. No germination on this at all. I will try growing them as micro greens before discarding the seeds.
Sowed Apple Blossom Snapdragon seeds indoors on 2/27.
A short video encapsulating the February Garden is below:
This month exposes the stark reality of the garden. The clutter, the weeds and the lack of structure in the garden. Amidst all of these, I found a couple of the hellebores blooming! I also noticed that one hellebore that I planted in the front yard is not there anymore. I never lost a hellebore before and so I am really surprised and at a loss for what could be the reason.
Just as my indoor space, I don’t like clutter in the garden at all. This month I can clearly see that I have accumulated a lot of pots, planters, and knickknacks in the garden. I am keeping a mental note of getting rid of these things as much as I can. The temperature is quite low for me to venture out too much these days – it might also be because I am not sure what to discard. While I enjoy the randomness of the cottage garden, I still like clean lines. This month I stepped into the garden after exactly two and half months and the first thing I noticed is that the garden is looking extremely unruly with the debris from last growing season. I have not done any fall cleanup last year. Over the years I learnt how some garden debris is beneficial for insects and worms. However I don’t like how the garden looks with all the dried leaves, and debris strewn around the garden. So I started cleaning up the garden this month.
During a quick walk around in the front yard I saw that the daffodils planted in the previous year’s are coming up. The muscari (grape hyacinths) and ranunculus (planted last year) have come up strongly as well. These got a little beaten up during the cold front that hit us mid January (lowest temperature where we are was 14F). I hope these recover and bloom. The plants that are still looking good apart from the boxwoods, camellia and cypress are the yucca, the potted lavender and surprisingly the Erysimum (Bowles Mauve). Some of the snapdragons are still standing tall. I love snapdragons so much!!
I am never satisfied with the amount of spring flowering bulbs I plant. I planted quite a few daffodils, muscari in the front yard and tulips in pots in October last year. Since I was away the last two months of last year, I asked a friend to buy me some discounted bulbs. I started the year with planting a few daffodils, crocuses and Iris Reticulata in pots on 1st January. At the same time, I also planted 4 purple sensation alliums in the front yard. Planting so late will be an experiment for me this year. Looking forward to seeing how the late planted bulbs do.
This is the fourth year since I started winter sowing. I grow at least a few plants this way each year. This year I sowed White Coneflower (sourced for the first time from Amazon) and Nigella seeds on 2024-01-09. The process is so simple and for the right seeds, the results have been great for me. If you want to know more about the process, check out the post I had written earlier.
January is a month when the itch to garden and see some color gets very real. And this is the time when a potted, forced flowering bulb display truly comes to the rescue. So of course I couldn’t resist the gorgeous pink hyacinth flowers from Trader Joe’s. I also bought myself a beautiful bi-colored African Violet which I was looking for.
January Garden Chore list that I checked off:
Began the general garden clean up including grooming the Hellebore leaves.
Weeding. Of course it will continue through out the year
Winter sowed white coneflower and nigella on 1/9.
Started tomatoes and broccoli seeds on 01/21. The tomato seeds already germinated on 01/28.
Expanded the dahlia bed (yet again!) by ~1 foot. It is a no till bed with cardboards underneath. So it was a low effort job!
You can watch a short tour of my garden this month in the video below:
Hosta’s are beautiful. The various textures, colors of the foliage is marvelous! And hence, they are by themselves are able to provide a unique visual interest. The first hosta I grew was given to me by a colleague in Microsoft and soon it became an obsession. I have hosta’s in different part of my yards, but there is a small bed in the north side of the house which is completely dedicated to hostas. And it is a favorite spot of mine. This bed also has the first hydrangea I ever grew, a Pieris JaponicaI, a Japanese Maple and ferns. I could have done more grooming to this garden bed, but even with the weeds and dead fern leaves, this garden always brings me a lot of joy!
I will have to divide the big yellow variegated hosta since it outgrew its space. I want to put a solid colored one here so that the colors blend well together. Maybe I will add astilbe’s too. I am continuing to collect more hosta’s and adding them to the shaded west side of the house. Can’t wait for that part of the yard to take shape.
It has been a strange gardening season this year. The spring and early summer has been so mild and very very wet. Slugs and snails have been having a feast. But as always nature steps in and there are beauties to enjoy in the garden. I am so happy with the two dahlias that are currently blooming – Crazy Love and Kelsey Anne Joy. Both of them are new to my garden this year. Crazy Love is in excellent health but Kelsey Anne Joy is very slug/snail damaged. The dahlias in pots are doing a lot better than those in ground. A new learning for me is to always start new dahlias in pots to prevent slugs from decimating them. My precious Shirley Temple peony is also blooming for the first time this year. It was in a pot last year and I did not get much blooms. I planted it in ground in September 2021. It is beautiful. The two white roses (David Austin Winchester Cathedral and Iceberg) are lovely as always.
Happy New Year to all. Wishing everyone peace, love and a joyful 2022.
No other flower heralds the holiday season as much as the Amaryllis. I am not ashamed to admit that I have a fascination for these beauties! My day gets happier the day these blooms. But Amaryllises are expensive bulbs. It’s hard for me to discard them after they bloom and justify the cost of buying them every year. At the same time, they are so gorgeous that I can’t imagine not having Amaryllis. With a little bit of care, we can have the same bulbs bloom year after year.
I made a video earlier on how to plant the newly bought bulbs after they bloom. You can watch it here:
In the video below, I show you how these plants bloom after a period of dormancy.
Hope these videos are helpful to you. If you are growing Amaryllis and have any tips to share, please add them in the comment below.
A simple piece of decor can jazz up any doors or walls and make it festive and all ready for the holidays. I usually make wreaths for the holiday season but this year I wanted to try something new. I loved how the holiday swag turned out. Let me know if which one you prefer for the season- a wreath or a swag?
I collect hydrangea flower heads and dry them at the end of the season each year. I display them as bouquets or make wreaths out of them. I created a short video to demonstrate how I make the wreath. I hope you will also try making this beautiful wreath.
July is when the garden is in its prime. Though this is also the time when the heat of the summer soars, my lawn turns brown and I lose my patience with constantly watering the garden. PNW goes through a dry spell during the summer just when we need the rain the most.
I get most excited about the vegetables I harvest this time of the year. This year, I harvested garlic, peas, beans, lettuce, Swiss Chards and potatoes so far. I am definitely going to focus on growing more garlic. So satisfying and easy to grow them. The new (second) Plum tree bore a couple of perfect shaped yellow juicy plums this year which I harvested in July. The other plum tree which bears dark purple plums has lots of fruits which are yet to ripen. The birds have been enjoying these plums – hoping they leave a few for us to taste. I look forward to a day when the tree bears enough fruits for the birds and us to share.
I am also starting to think ahead and plan for what I want to plant for Fall. I know that this year, I will be sowing carrots and peas for some fall crop.
I captured the highlights of my July garden in the video. The audio quality is not what I expected. I hope to do better the next time. Let me know what you think. Happy Gardening!
simple urban living 