Why I Oughta...

I found a six-pack of Ajuga 'Chocolate Chip' plugs at Home Depot in their 50% off Fall sale and grabbed the best-looking one of the bunch.  I've had mixed results with some of these six-packs.  Most of the time, they're great and the plants get established and take-off.  Other times, I've bought some other packs that didn't work at all.   I've planted Ajuga in the Fall before and have also had mixed results.  Some of them get established enough and come back in Spring.  Others don't.  Farmer's Almanac has October 11th as our first frost , so we're just a couple weeks away.  Eeeeek.  Time to get these into the ground. Here's the pack below.  Looks healthy: Over on the side of our house, we have an erosion problem.  Between a couple of downspout pop-ups, this area sees a lot of water movement.  I've been using this cobbled-together mix of bricks, stones and other blocks to try to slow things down.  Right behind it is wh...

More groundcover (or living mulch) is something I've been working-on for a couple of growing seasons.  This month, I put in six Ajuga 'Chocolate Chip' plugs in the [kitchen curved] bed in the backyard and six Ajuga 'Burgundy Glow' in the backyard near the colony of Hellebores on the northside .  This week, I put in six more Ajuga 'Chocolate Chip' plugs in the front of the Island Bed in our front yard down along the sidewalk.  This brings my 2026 groundcover planting total to 24. Here, below, is a look at the six new plugs that are to the left of the three existing ones that went in last year in August .   Here are the three existing groudcover plants last Fall .  One of the challenges down by the sidewalk is retaining the mulch, so I'm hoping these plugs will grow-in and provide a 'living mulch' mat that stretches the front of the bed along the sidewalk.  You can see the six new ones in this photo of the red coleus annuals: These weren't the...

Yesterday, I posted some photos showing how I used the "Lasagna Method" to smother some grass with cardboard and top-it with mulch to improve a foundation-adjacent garden bed on the side of our house.  The goal was to raise up the soil level, smother out grass and improve the area looks-wise.   But, that wasn't the only recent improvement that I completed over on that side of the house.  While I was using gravel and river rock to level-out the pizza oven site, I decided to take a couple of bags of the River Rock to put to work by the downspout surface drain outlet.   I've been wrasslin' with surface water on this side of my house for years - here's a post from 2020 where I talk about 'floating mulch' due to the downspout release .  Over the years, I've seen the area erode and this Spring, I've attempted to address it in a few ways.  First, by hauling over some of the excavated material from the pizza oven project to 'fill in' some low...