This week I began this year’s gardening in earnest, and this seemed like the perfect time to start a new gardening blog. My current garden has two very different conditions, the only major similarity between the two being that both are sloped, ending in a retaining wall. The front garden has extremely rocky soil that is very poor in general and poor at retaining moisture in particular. It is also quite a windy site and, being by a major road, it gets a lot of pollution. It gets sun in the morning and from mid-afternoon on. There is a street tree beside it that casts dappled shade over parts of it during midday. The back yard is riddled with tree roots, many extremely close to the surface, and thus the soil tends to be dry and competition from the roots can kill plants. The amount and time of sunlight varies a lot depending on exactly where you are in the back yard, but all of the areas get partial sun to full shade. Surprisingly (at least to me), the soil is naturally fairly sandy in a lot of areas of the back yard despite the detritus constantly being dropped by this yard’s and neighboring yards’ trees (mostly maples and oaks). The soil in the front garden is fairly alkaline, owed at least in part to leaching from the concrete retaining wall. The soil in back tends more towards acid.
Last year, my first year gardening in this yard, I grew a mixture of annuals and perennials in the front garden, and tried to do as much xeriscaping as I could. Some of the plants were herbs. I also grew vegetables in it, focusing on beans – garden beans, runner beans, and cowpeas. In the back, I grew a mixture of perennials and annuals, focusing partially on woodland and meadow’s-edge/forest-edge native plants, on the premise that they would do better with root competition than the average partial- to full-shade plant. I didn’t grow as much in the way of crops and herbs in the soil, focusing on alpine strawberries and bronze fennel*. I also grew numerous plants in pots in the back, including tomato plants donated by friends (they were volunteer tomatoes, mostly cherry tomatoes) and a number of tender plants that I have wintered over indoors (especially zonal geraniums/Perlagonium/scented geraniums), which I have a fairly inexplicable fascination with).
*[In past gardens, bronze fennel - an absolute wasp magnet, one of the best predatory wasp magnets I've ever grown - has grown better in full to close-to-full sun conditions, but in the slim amount of information I could find last spring on growing in windy conditions, someone recommended that one absolutely NOT grow bronze fennel on windy sites. I grew a second one in the front garden to test this, and it turned out to be correct; the bronze fennel in the back garden grew lushly and well, while the one in front was stunted and tended to topple over.]
As you may already know, sun-loving plants tend to be butterfly and bee magnets. I planted the front garden partially with this in mind. Unfortunately the windy site meant that it was generally too much for butterflies to take; even when they tried, they often gave up and flew on. The front garden has been a magnet for other invertebrates, though, especially bees, wasps, flies, spiders, and slugs. The back garden’s many trees, bird bath, areas of grass, etc. have made it fairly hospitable to birds, and I regularly see bird visitors. I also get invertebrates back there, but the tall grass bordering the garden areas tends to make it harder to spot many of them.
I hope to see you back here again. Cheers!
