Two Sedum spurium 'Voodoo' - IB2DWs - October 2023

#17 on my 2023 to-do list was to 'keep going with groundcover' and that's something that I've done in little pockets all season-long.  The idea of 'living mulch' along with the ability to buy LESS wood mulch is quite attractive to me.  Not to mention the increased competition with weeds, the 'reduction of footcandles' (as Roy Diblik puts it) and the filling in spaces.  There's, frankly, a lot of reasons to like groundcover.   Last year, I added 20-or-so groundcover plants including some Ajuga and Carex.

This year, I've looked at how well the Ajuga 'Chocolate Chip' has done and posted about my groundcover progress for 2023.  Earlier this Summer -in early August - I ran a subtotal of my groundcover plantings for the 2023 season.  At that time, I totaled 30 new groundcover plants and plugs for 2023:

1 Epimedium warleyense - Orange Queen Epimedium

3 Spine Tingler Epimedium

14 Ajuga Chocolate Chip

6 Ajuga Bronze Beauty

3 Carex Montana

3 divided and transplanted Angelina Sedum 

Since then, I've recently divided some Everillo sedges (with center rot), creating four new plants - pushing my groundcover total for 2023 up to 34.

Which brings me to some new (to me) plants that I found at the end-of-season sale at The Growing Place and brought home.   I've had a lot of luck with Angelina Sedum and have divided and spread it out to various places in our garden.  And, I posted about how I've learned a bit up at Northwind about a few of their sedums earlier this year.  So, I was drawn back to the sedum section at TGP and found a couple of interesting ones that I ended up buying.  I'll start with the first one;  Voodoo sedum.  Or Voodoo Stonecrop.  Or...Sedum spurium 'Voodoo'.  This groundcover plant jumps out on the nursery table with its deep red foliage.  This is how Monrovia describes Voodoo:

Rich, deep mahogany-red leaves and glowing rosy-red flowers provide bold, contrasting color. Drought tolerant and easy care groundcover. A great choice for rock gardens, low borders, or as a container accent. Evergreen in mildest climates. Zone 3-9.

I've used that gif before, but it feels like I can't use it enough when someone describes a plants foliage as 'mahogany'.  

TGP had them marked at five bucks.  With their 50% off sale, I bought two for five.

In the current IB2DWs-planted bed, I have a bunch of lime green/chartreuse plants - All Gold Hakonechloa grasses and a golden Creeping Jenny.  There's some darker greens, but this area needed some contrasting reds.   So, I yanked back/out a bunch of the Creeping Jenny and nestled these two quart-sized sedum plants in the bed.  See below for their location.  This is about the most full-sun you can get in our garden and the IB2DWs section is notoriously 'hard to grow' as it gets little water (compared to the lawn and porch beds).  So, sedum felt like a natural fit here:

Takes the 2023 groundcover total up to 36.  Not to bad and certainly enough to check-the-box on my 2023 to-do list item.  

Of note, this isn't the last thing going in this bed - there's more to come this week.