Last Year's Accomplishments

When I started this blog, I wrote a piece on what we started with. This was just a quick summary about what the lawn was like when we purchased our home. Today, I'd like to take a moment to reflect on our accomplishments from last year and touch on some lessons learned.

Before purchasing the house, just after we had gone to see it for the first time, I started sketching out the many ideas I had about what I could do with the yard. Shortly after moving in, sometime in mid-April, I began digging into the sunny corner in the back, removing the sod, and extending the existing flower bed. I had started some seed indoors and by late April, I had some Blue Lupine seedlings in the house. I decided it was time to plant, so I brought my seedlings out with some seed for Purple Coneflower, Black-Eyed Susan, False Indigo, Sky-Blue Aster, and Butterfly Milkweed. In May we had frost almost everyday for the first two weeks. I had planted too early.

I ended up purchasing a number of plugs from Kopke's Greenhouse to replace the plants which I had lost. Our flower bed was full of Little Blue Stem, Purple Coneflower, Black-Eyed Susans, Prairie Coneflower, Blue Lupine, False Indigo, and Butterfly Milkweed. Unfortunately, I didn't put up any fencing. The Lupines and Indigo were chewed down to the ground regularly, and the rabbits even appeared to have tried eating the Butterfly Milkweed.

By Mid-June, I was feeling rather dispirited with the flower garden, so I turned my attention to shrubs. I decided that the shady corner needed the most work. In the morning, it is largely shaded out by our neighbor's Sugar Maple, and for part of the afternoon, it's shaded by another neighbor's Oak. We set up the compost pile here and planted two Highbush Cranberries and a Pagoda Dogwood. These shrubs took right away and have been great additions to the yard. In fact, they stood up to a wave of Japanese Beetles.

By July, we finally had some blooms in the flower garden. In particular, the Prairie Coneflower was spreading like a wildfire. I decided it was time to add some shrubs to the sunny corner and planted two Red Chokeberries and two Saskatoon Serviceberries. While purchasing the shrubs, I stumbled onto some discounted Big Blue Stems, Obedient Plant, and New York Aster. The flower bed needed to be extended again. Unfortunately, once again the rabbits took over. They chewed down the Chokeberries and Serviceberries as well as the Asters. I ended up putting fencing around the bushes.

By August, the Black Eyed-Susans and Purple Coneflowers had bloomed, and some of the False Indigo started to make a comeback, however it never got taller than 4 inches or so. The Butterfly Milkweed flowered, and a handful of Lupines remained. Fall came, and only the Chokeberries fruited. While there was a certain element of disappointment to the year, I was quite excited that anything had flowered at all. One wintery day during January, I noticed Dark-Eyed Juncos in the garden picking at the remains of Black-Eyed Susans and Big Blue Stem, and it was then that I knew my experiment had been successful.

Today, we had our first Robin in the yard, and with Spring just around the corner I anxiously await the return of the plants. I'm curious to see which plants will return, assuming that some which I have written off will in fact return. But before they start popping up, I still have some work to do. I'll discuss that on Friday.