For a long time I'd had the idea that I wanted a little butterfly garden, and last summer I finally turned over some soil and bought some plants. We have a lemonbalm plant that is the last survivor of our former vegetable garden. (We gave up on vegetable gardening after the neighbors' house fire, which resulted in a lot of house fire waste in the spot where our vegetables used to grow. It did get cleaned up, but I was not able to get good answers about the impact of melted vinyl siding on soil safety.) We put in lobelia and milkweed next to the lemonbalm, and the lobelia came back this year. (Win some, lose some -- that's my gardening philosophy.)
This year I turned over more dirt, and we planted some fun stuff from our garden shop's pollinator-friendly section: catmint, and hyssop, and yarrow, and another milkweed plant.
We see butterflies there every day, along with all kinds of other pollinators. It's a delight. And it wasn't hard or expensive. I used to be intimidated by the idea of digging a new garden bed, but I find it pleasingly contemplative to get out there with the big spade. The earthworms do not find it to be a contemplative exercise, but you can't please all the earthworms all the time, just like Abraham Lincoln always said.
Pete was fascinated by the bumblebee he saw enjoying the hyssop flowers yesterday. If you click to enlarge you too can admire its fat orange pollen sacs!
Every year we deal with aggressive weeds in the narrow space between the back of the garage and the neighbor's fence. While I was at church this afternoon Pete waged a mighty battle: he went out there with a hand saw and dispatched the woodier transgressors, and put down a fresh layer of gravel. It looks so much better.
This morning we put our new perennials into the shady playhouse bed: two astilbe and one silvery brunnera. (I am writing these names down because otherwise I will forget them in a hot second.) Pete has a five-year plan in which every square foot of our property will eventually have herbs or flowers growing in it. I told him that we should have modest expectations for the playhouse bed, because the soil there is rockier than most of our soil. If the weeds didn't go bananas after we took the playhouse down, the new perennials might not go bananas either.
Pete's gardening motto might best be summed up as TO INFINITY AND BEYOND, which is a worthy motto. Toy Story would have been less interesting if Buzz Lightyear had been a "win some, lose some" kind of guy. We shall have to see whether these are TO INFINITY AND BEYOND perennials or "win some, lose some" perennials. I'll report back next year.
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