This Juvenile European Starling has landed on our Miniature English Garden Collage

This looks like a nice house to move into. Landscaped front yard, with a nice view. Even the outdoor furniture comes with it! Now if I could just find the entrance hole.

Where is the entrance hole? It is not in front and it is not on the side, where is it?

Sure beats me! Nice house and not way to enter it to move in. What where they thinking when they built it!

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Garden Accent Heaven hosted residents from Fairwinds  Brighton Court retirement community who came to visit Linda’s Serenity Garden on Monday July 25th. The ladies had a enjoyable time walking through the garden and asking about the various flowers and other plants.

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Cold weather protection.

When you live in the Pacific Northwest and this spring has been as cold and wet as last year, what is a gardener to do?

My winter reading of all those garden supply catalogs has paid off!  Under that cover are egg plants, Sweet Basil,  cucumbers, and zucchini squash, all plants that like hot weather.  The row cover raises the temperature 5 to 10 degrees during the day and keeps the plants warmer at night as well.  One more tactical move was to lay “green mulch”  down before planting which also keeps the ground warmer at night and during the day.

Bob cut PVC pipe the right height, stuck them in the ground, and the tension against the sides of the raised bed is perfect.   All I did was cover the hoops with row cover material.  When the plants bloom, I will need to remove the cover so the bees can do their thing!

I do not have to deal with too many insects so I was not concerned

Another variation of cold weather protection.

about a really snug fitting cover without holes.  I used medium pieces of wood to weight down the edges.  Did you see the old fashioned cloths pin hooks to keep the wind from blowing off the cover?  Pretty clever, huh!

Both the green mulch and the row cover were purchased from Growers Supply catalog.

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Clivia Lillie from Africa, bring inside for winter.

I absolutely love flowers!  I have them everywhere.  Which translates in to “I have to have a way to say no” to all the beauty available in catalogs and at nurseries.  I had to set some parameters for myself.

I have a fairly small yard so only the smallest dwarf versions of shrubs can be considered. Being more diligent in purchasing plants that fit my light conditions was another given.  I needed to control my successes and failures better.  When buying perennials in season, most plants are $10.00 to $25.00 and that is for the more common ones. Some budget controls are in order.

No matter how much I might long for all the flowers in the catalog, I narrowed my selection of plants to blooms and seeds that attract birds, especially hummers, bees and butterflies.  I have selected plants that bloom at different periods during the summer to keep a food supply for the hummers. If the bloom has a fragrance it is more likely to find residency in my yard.

I try to reserve some space for winter interest with texture variations, height, or being an evergreen plant.

My mother had many iris so I have to have them, violating all my parameters.  And then there are the lilies with so many colors, blooming periods and varied heights.  Needless to say, I have several Oriental Lillies for their heady fragrance and long lasting blooms.  I planted a couple more this spring.  After all, they were on sale!

When I garden, I make my own rules and then bend them just a bit here and there when my resistance is low.  Mostly, every gardener needs to enjoy each and every plant.

Row of Day Lillies along front walk way, continuous blooms all summer.

Asiatic Lillies.

Asiatic lillies.

Asiatic lillies.

Tiger Lillies

Tiger Lillies.

Fragrant Nicotiana placed by the back door, started from seed.

Highly fragant Star Gazer Oriental Lillie.

Tall pink blooms are Bee Balm, simply loved by bees and hummers.

Asiatic Lillie

Iris

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Easter Egg Radishes I grew this spring.

for obvious reasons. I purchased all of my seed this year from Territorial Seed Company. This was my first attempt to grow radishes and they are really good.    As you can also see, I just planted them in the early spring in between some flowers, just to utilize some bare space.  I will remember this technique next spring!

My radishes ready to be harvested.

My preference is to grate my radishes in to my salad.  That makes their flavor blend in and provide an overall hot and spicy flavor.

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The roof piece was certainly not a part for a bird bath, so I dug deeper in to

I dug deeper in to the well packed box to find the house portion. What a delightful gift!

the well packed box to find the house portion.  What a delightful gift!

With the installation of the drip water system and the resulting delays, we finally came up with a plan and location to feature the English Cottage Garden.  At last Bob has completed the platform construction before he leaves for his three week trip to Pennsylvania and Ontario. And at last, I have the vegetables and flowers planted and I can take a Sunday drive to my favorite nursery Flower World.  I really love the variety of plants they have, the healthy condition of the plants,  the friendly attitude that permeates the staff, the information booth that is always staffed with a knowledgeable  consultant, and their prices are the best!

Check out my pics for ideas about what you can do!

Such a lovely gift to be enjoyed for many years!  I will keep you posted as the seasons change!

You will likely recognize some of the succulent plants which are very low maintenance and really great ground covers.  The names of the ones I know are:

Couple of varieties of  Hens and Chicks;

Stonecrop Sedum called Tricolor with striking foliage complementing soft pink flowers;

Sedum Seboldii October Daphne with blue green arching stems gracing this hardy deciduous sedum and pink flowers forming in late summer;

Erysimum kotschyanum Creeping Wallflower, a dwarf mat forming rock garden plant with small bright yellow fragrant flowers;

Woolly Thyme, an herb with tiny silver-gray leaves and rose-pink flowers for rock gardens and paving stones.

Soleirolia soleirolii Baby Tears, in chartreuse and green, spreads easily, needs to be contained.

I opened my Christmas present expecting to find a bird bath and instead I found a roof!

I began by placing the miniature garden tools, pots and furniture around the cottage.

Details I added to the front of my cottage.

Next I began to put my pots of ground cover and succlents in place and moved them about until I had a pleasing arrangement.

I planted all of my plants and then added decorative rocks and pices of petrified wood.

Once I had all the plants and little miniature details in place the cottage looked good but seemed to be missing something?

I went to the pet store and purchased some large aquarium rocks and made a path of stepping stones which was the final detail needed to bring my miniature garden cottage to life.

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Heated Bird Baths in Linda's Serenity Garden

scraping the frost off our car windows each morning. Those cold winter nights also freeze over the shallow sources of water that our feathered friends need. Birds need to have shallow sources of water not only to drink but also to clean themselves. In Linda’s Serenity Garden we have two heated bird baths to keep fresh water available to our backyard songbirds all winter wrong. We have one Allied Metal Stand Heated Bird Bath. Inside of the bowl Linda has 3 decorative rocks that give the birds a place to access the water from. We keep about 2″ of water in the bowl year round.

On the ground we have a Farm Innovators Ground Heated Bird Bath. This bird bath sits on the ground and holds about 1 gallon of water. We have seen the ground feeding birds jump into it to drink and clean their feathers. Also squirrels, possums and raccoons have also been seen drinking from this ground bird bath. With these two heated bird baths we have fresh clean water available for our feathered friends year round.

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Need is the mother of invention and we needed to find something to do with this old patio chair. Bob had the idea of turning it into a planter. We found a pot that would fit inside the chair frame. Bob had a some small cut off pieces of  2″x4″ treated lumber from building the fence. These where put on the ground and the pot set on top of them. Linda filled the pot with some gravel in the bottom for drainage and a mixture of potting soil and 1/3 compost, then planted the pot with some flowers We now had a new garden accent for the cost of a new pot! The cost of the pot was a lot less then the $20.00 fee at the transfer station.

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Once the trees where removed we now had great sun down the south side of the house for the first time since we lived here, but the yard was now open to the one next door which did not set the flower garden that is our back yard off very good. Linda wanted a fence built to draw the eye back to here Serenity Garden.

I first built a short 10 foot fence from the house wall to the walkway that would hide the propane tanks that where now in view since we had the shrubs removed along the side of the house when the trees where being removed.  Lining up the 6ft ceder fence boards here was easy. I put a 2″ X 4″ board on the ground, got it level and just put the fence fence boards on top of it. For the time being until I can build arbor I put a wrought iron arbor we purchased in the entry way.

Down the side of the property line where the trees had been removed we added garden composted soil to the ground which made the ground a bit higher. I wanted to keep the fence about 9″ above the ground so none of the soil would touch it and rot it’s boards. The ground also has a slope to the rear of the property so just laying a board on the ground was not an option.

Fence Jig

To line up my fence boards from the top I built a jig. I took a 2″ x 4″ board and screwed a 1″ X 8″ board on top of this. I was then able to sit this on top of the 2″X4″ treated board, put two nails in place to hold it and line up my fence boards from the top of the fence instead of the bottom. To give the fence some character I made a patten with the boards where I spaced the boards on both sides of the fence. The 1″ X8″ allowed me to work on both sides of the fence.

The fence was a two weekend project. The first weekend was a Sunday

Under construction with jig in place

afternoon putting the posts into the ground about 18″ deep and setting them with concrete. Since this is the Pacific Northwest and as soon as I got the fence posts in place and the concrete poured it just had to start to rain. We took 30 quart trash bags and used them to covered up the newly poured cement, throwing shovels of dirt on top of  them to hold them in place to let the concrete set up.  The following Saturday was spent actually constructing the fence.

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