We were thrilled when spring came and every single one of our perennials came up! That year was a lot of planting, as I recall, as we added more perennials and filled in the holes with tons of annuals. It takes years for perennials to get to their full size.
We started a veggie garden, too, with mixed sucess. We can grow peas and tomatoes and lettuce with the best of them, but we've never had luck with spinach or carrots. Never - not one bit. I think our soil is too heavy for the carrots, but I have no idea on the spinach!
I'm not going to bore anyone by trying for a year-to-year summary of what we did, just give some impressions. Gardening takes practice, perserverance and luck. Sometimes a plant is great right where you first put it, other times you have to move it around, and still others you just give up. I've tried bee balm 2 or 3 times and it won't last more than a year. I'm giving it one more shot in a different place this year and we'll see if this native variety does any better. I hope it does - I love the stuff! On the other end of the spectrum, my blue false indigo is supposed to get about 3 feet high. Well, every summer I lop somewhere between 1-2 feet off the top to keep it at around 3 1/2 feet. Why does it grow so well? Not a ruddy clue. But that's OK.
With few exceptions, I don't baby my plants. They make it through the winter or they don't. I do cover my daisy every year - and it's paid me back and gotten huge and gorgeous. I cover new stuff to give it a bit of help for the first winter, and I cover stuff that gets enough sun during February that it might start to thaw once the sun melts any snow covering it.
Hmmm, what to write next? As the years have gone on, I've mostly stopped buying perennials from places like Gertens. I can't afford it. I get them from friends, or the Friends School Plant Sale. They're often tiny, but that way I can see if I like them without being out more than a few bucks if they don't work.
Oh, nice success story. Once we put in the big garden, we needed to do something along the west side of the garage. There had been some grass (of a sort) along there, but we could no longer get the mower there with the garden in. It's only 2-3 feet wide, plus it has a guy wire from the telephone pole in the middle of it. To top it all, it's in shade most of the day because of the neighbor's garage. What to do that would be really low work? We tried spotted dead nettle - a nice soft groudcover in spite of its name - and that worked for a while, but it kinda died out. We didn't want to spend a lot of money - again - on that. An old co-worker gave me some ferns and hostas, and I added hostas of my own and lilies of the valley. It took a few years, but it's now a lush bastion of mostly ferns. I clear the debris out once a year and pull some grass every once in a while, but mostly it takes care of itself. Yeah! Just what we were looking for.
Next: Forward several years.
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