Thursday 20 April 2017

Garden Update ~ Tulips, Trillium, Trout Lilies, and Trees

More blooms from the ever evolving yard! Today’s flowers celebrate the letter “T,” and represent just a small smattering of bee and butterfly delight. Yes, some hungry pollinators have already found our yard. In addition to the wild trillium I saved from a destroyed woods a few years ago, we’ve also got trout lilies from the same woods, along with still massive amounts of dandelions, plantain and wild violet, courtesy of Nature herself. I thought I’d share some of today’s more stunning displays:

IMG_0977

Behind those peachy beauties, you can see the later blooming magenta yarrow, which has become its own tough competitor in the colorful riot to dominate this permaculture haven. I leave some of the “heal-all” with purple flowers because the bees love it so much, but my goodness, it loves to spread! Fortunately, the heat kills it off in late Spring and early Summer. The garden angel keeps an eye on the last round of tulips, which should bloom in another week or so. Alliums and irises will follow those.

IMG_0978

These mysterious white tulips arrived without name via the squirrel relocation program. They’ve settled in well next to the grape hyacinths, more yarrow, and long awaited peonies. Hopefully, we’ll get some blooms from those bushes this year!

IMG_0979

Meanwhile, these peony-style ruffled tulips make me smile:

FullSizeRender

Trillium and trout lilies continue on the north side of our house, getting their slight supply of sun in early morning before the ferns pop up.

IMG_0981

I love these rescued plants, which also included Jack in the Pulpit and a very delicate pink flower whose name I’ve never learned. Not to be outdone, many of the fruit trees and bushes are already in full blossom. Below, you can see our North Star cherry and three-way Asian pear, with a bed of garlic growing in the background.

IMG_0983

The yellow daffodils surrounding the trees died back just as the dandelions decided to assert their claim. It’s definitely a pollinator’s paradise. All the additional blooms have transformed yards that used to make me cry in embarrassed and sad frustration into an ever changing palette of colors, form and taste.

The abundance continues to overwhelm a little bit, but in a good way. All those chives at the base of the trees made a mighty tasty vegan chive pesto, which we enjoyed over pasta two nights in a row. I loosely adapted Kevin Lee Jacobs’ recipe, using nutritional yeast instead of parmesan. he rhubarb you see to the far left middle of the photo formed the base of a delicious rhubarb salsa, coupled with Egyptian walking onions and last summer’s frozen Poblano peppers:

FullSizeRender

For the rhubarb salsa, I just mixed and matched about six different recipes to taste — fresh rhubarb, chopped poblano’s (or whatever hot pepper you have on hand), chopped Egyptian walking onions, since they’re marching all over the garden beds, apple cider vinegar, chipotle pepper powder, a smidge of raw honey, and just a dusting of ground cumin.

This salsa means rhubarb makes the cut — quite literally a root cutting — to transplant into the new yard. I’m currently making my way through all the perennial veggies and unusual fruits growing now or frozen last year, so that I can decide which must repeat in the new yard, and which can stay here as their living experiment.

Details on our new place will eventually find their way onto the blog. For now, suffice to say, the yard presents the opposite challenge these yards did. Here, I had a blank slate, and anything I did would be an incredible improvement over the status quo. The new place is already beautifully landscaped for year round color and has some planting limitations built into the yard. Instead of filling everything from scratch just to inject a little beauty into a weedy, dry, compacted landscape, this new process involves careful observation, selection, very deliberate hardscaping, and perhaps some substitution. More Zen than Bollywood. More formal than wild.

All good things in their proper season … I’ve had some leads on people who might be interested in these properties. Meanwhile, we wander through the blooms and harvest the bounty I planted years ago. May your life blossom as abundantly as our yard!

 

 




source https://laurabruno.wordpress.com/2017/04/20/garden-update-tulips-trillium-trout-lilies-and-trees/

No comments:

Post a Comment