Odds and Ends

I spent some time yesterday and this morning pottering in the garden.

I'm really liking how this pot off the mudroom porch came out this year. The Rock and Blues salvia is really budded up, so it should show a lot more of the blue soon. I put an optical grass in the center front, but it's being swallowed by the alyssum.

 This pot is also looking nice, after sitting in a dormant state before I realized how much damage the ant colony had done. The plants are now growing.

Yesterday I transplanted the clethra shrub from the north porch garden to the new dragon garden. This is the fourth year I've had this shrub, and it actually looks worse than last year. It is so hard to grow things in the north bed. 

I ordered some little blue stem grass plugs to try in there. Supposedly it stays shorter in very dry soil. I also ordered some spotted monarda, and I was thinking of putting it in there as well, but I do wonder if it will get too tall? It would need to be near the front to get enough sun.

I watered a couple of pots yesterday as well --specifically the two with the sweet potato vines. Those really suck up the water!

Today I put the north drip on in the north garden for 1.45 hours. I did some deadheading, brought in another two Early Girl tomatoes (had the last two for breakfast before going out!), and laid a strip of cardboard and mulch along the area in front of the mudroom deck. We tried to straighten that area the last time we had Hertzog's mulch the area, but even though Rob had killed the grass, the guys just followed the old edge. I sprayed some round-up, laid down some thick cardboard from a double-walled box, and put down three bags of mulch. I've got a bag in reserve in case the cardboard starts to show.

Interestingly, I could only get two bags of hardwood shredded, so the other two bags (I can only fit four in my car) are brown dyed mulch. I don't like it at all --it's not shredded, so much bigger chunks. I'll definitely try to avoid that in the future!