A Year in the Garden

2019 was a busy year, I started working, we traveled, and we settled into the garden.  We grew a lot from seed and small starter plants got huge with the the power of miracle grow.  Its our garden's drug of choice.  Forgive these photos, they are the only two I took from the same angle..

BEFORE                                   AFTER

The garden in 2018 when I first moved here was a minor wreck, after all the work Matt had done in the house I was excited to turn this into more of an outdoor room/ extension of our living space.

I moved this pallet of tiles by hand...twice, before it was finally taken away by someone who wanted them for their own garden.  We also had a few loads of ruble and renovation mess to haul away before the work could start.  

We dug out a drainage ditch so water wouldn't sit against the house, and built two mini retaining walls.  These photos don't truly illustrate how dry and dirty and dusty the garden was.  With nothing growing here the soil just dried up and blew around like dust. I know that sounds crazy but the summer of 2018 was a very hot and dry one here in England.  In fact I'm almost certain that it did not rain here from the day I moved here until the night of our wedding almost 8 weeks later.   

The grass was laid about a week before our wedding, so when my family came to see the house I wouldn't let them walk on it.  The Flamingos were a surprise gift we came home too after our wedding, we adore them and named them Monty and Don in honor of our favorite gardener.  The first bit of planting was done because the installers were a little short on grass and I had to cover up that bare dirt some how. The best thing I bought early on was the little red tree in the middle called a Smoke Bush.  The Smoke Bush has really fantastic purple and red leaves which are hydrophobic, so water beads up on them like little jewels. I'll get a photo at some point.

Fall of 2018 I planted about 100 spring bulbs, and they put on a spectacular show starting February 2019.  (Currently in Feb 2020 I'm hoping they'll come back, but they seem later than last year.)

In Spring of 2019 we began carving out the rest of the garden beds, and starting seeds both for here and the allotment.  We also picked up several large Terra-cotta pots to sit in the gravel trench against the house.  I propped them up on bricks and blocks, to make the garden feel taller on that side. 

Matt bought a nifty climate controlled seed propagator I highly recommend.  We had mixed success with our timing, but for the most part it was positive.  We didn't grow everything from seed, but enough to be proud of and fill in the gaps between the things we purchased.  

We got the most bang for our buck from buying dried Dahlia roots, the Lemon-Ice put out huge dinner plate sized flowers!  I also bought a gorgeous climbing rose which you can see against the brick wall.  I'm hoping to train it up and over the wall this year.

I had to have Black-Eyed-Susans (Rudbeckia) as they are the Maryland state flower.  I grew them from seed and they were my little piece of home in the garden.  To be honest I'm not sure they ever looked so good back in MD! 

Drying onions from the allotment on the grass in the summer sun!  About July is when the garden started to feel a bit jungly, which we loved.  We went through a lot of plant feed, and things just kept blooming.  We would feed the pots every week and the garden about every other week. 

The Garden made me feel so refreshed every time I went out into it even though there was always a lot to do.  One mistake I made last summer was not staking and tying things up before they started to lean.  The annuals especially got so big so quickly they were flopping all over the place, but we'll be better prepared in 2020. 

 

I'd never grown a garden like this before, and it honestly was a lot of work, but it exceeded my expectations as a lush floral escape.  There were two major differences I found from trying to grow a flower garden in Maryland.   First we didn't have to worry about deer coming in and eating everything and second it was a small enclosed space.  I think both can be considered positives, the lack of deer obviously so, but the smaller enclosed space, is a limiting factor so we really pushed for WOW in the space we do have. 

In 2020 our goal is to improve on this design as things get bigger.  We've promised not to buy any more plants.  We will only grow from seeds and cuttings this year.  (We'll see, it can be hard to resist a new flower!)

-Nikki