First Warm Day

It reached 70 today, and it felt like summer!  It was actually kind of humid, a little stormy feeling in the a.m., but then sunny, breezy and warm in the afternoon.

The sweetpeas indoors have sprouted.

Tasks today were all about clean up.  The whole Birch Garden is chopped back, everything.  And most of Meadow's Edge.  I just have to cut down the grasses there, and the grasses along the west walk.

Got a vole today in the electronic trap I placed along the front walk.  One down.

After cleaning up I decided to do something about the liriope that edges the back garden.  It doesn't do well with the maple roots and in full sun.  I bought so many to make a cascading line of mounded foliage at the front edge.  Nah.

The deer eat them to the ground, and the clumps they miss are awfully ratty by early spring.  If they had better soil, less competition, and didn't get so chomped, they'd be nice mounders.

Liriope 'Big Blue' - will it look this good in a pot?

My thought now is to take out some, and leave a few, interplanted among the sedum kamtschaticum, which is spreading and has really nice, ground hugging foliage.  But taking out a half dozen was a chore!  They are wound around the maple roots and had to be chopped out.

I put what I dug up in five low containers and if they mound over and cascade the way they should, they will cover the pot edges.  I can use them various ways... maybe plop them in the garden in their pots as foliage fillers.  They do have nice blue spiky blooms.

I just hope they do well in the containers now.

The gardens look so bad right now, but spring is coming.  I love the only green thing in Northern Exposure right now, the Pieris "Bisbee's Dwarf'.  It has such a dapper shape and clean shiny foliage.  That's what I think every time I look at it: it's so dapper!

3/18/11

And in just three weeks look at what it will look like: this was April 7th last year:

4/7/10