Why I Oughta...

Fall Planting 2023 will go down as a big moment in our garden.  That is...as long as everything that I'm putting in makes it through the Winter.  I'm getting to this stuff pretty late in the growing season, so I a little bit of hesitancy in proclaiming that all of these will make it.  Last year, with the huge mass of Autumn Ferns that I planted late and didn't come back have scarred me a bit .  That fear didn't stop me from adding three more new (to me) plants on the same trip to The Growing Place.  I was wandering around the grass area and came across these small quart-sized grasses you see above.  Short in nature.  Nice seed heads.  I pulled out the plant tag and see this below from Hocus Pocus Groundcovers:  Sesleria 'Greenlee Hybrid' - Greenlee's Moor Grass. Thanks to the Front Porch bed exploration from earlier this year , I was somewhat familar with some Seslerias and ended up buying and planting a number of Seslaria Autumnalis from Northwind .  They&

Fall planting continues with a few more plants that required me to 'step out' a little bit from my gardening comfort zone with another flowering perennial.  Yesterday, I shared the three dark-foliage, flowering Midnight Masquerade Pentsemons that I put IB2DWS - extended and talked about how I was drawn to them because of the dark foliage, but bought them based on Roy Diblik's "Appropriate Plant List" .  'Midnight Masquerade' is an improved habit of a few varieties that are included on Roy's list, so I had confidence in adding them to our garden.   I was walking the nursery tables at The Growing Place during their 50% off end-of-the-season sale and found a few things that I've decided to add to the garden. The first one was the Cardoon that I posted about earlier this week.  I noted that I wasn't sure it was going to be hardy for our zone, but my plan is to 'mulch it in' pretty hard with biosolids and leaves and hope for the best. The s

Today, September 23rd is the first, official day of Fall.  And I'm also seeing the first signs of foliage turning seasonal red with the clump of three Little Henry Sweetspires out front showing red at the tips.  See below for a photo showing this set of shrubs (it really is one shrub at this point, right?)  Supplementing this shrub - with groundcover and/or layered plantings should be something I consider for 2024 as this area has been left as-is since the day we moved in.