Just got back from a long work trip and found myself with some rare free time and decided to wrap up the mulch on the last flower bed I added.  It had been a couple weeks or more since the last time i had been over on that side of the house and right away I noticed some changes.  First off the big Japanese Silver Grass I planted to hide the electric meter looks pretty rough, dead even.

Here’s what it looked like when I planted it.

Here’s what it looked like today.

No, that’s not Rod Stewart’s hair piece, that’s the same grass. Looking a little peaked today are we?  So the big question is… is this grass dead or dormant?  If there are any green thumbs out there, I’d love to hear your opinion on this one!

The bad news here is the other grasses look OK.  Why is that bad?  Because that means this one is probably dead.  The good news is the nursery where i purchased this grass has a one year money back guarantee.  I think I’ll be taking advantage of that policy, unless someone advises me otherwise.  May be lazy and wait until the spring anyway though.  TBD.

This past month we’ve had a lot of rain.  Despite my earlier effort to install the downspout extenders, I’ve still gotten some run off, albeit a minor amount.  The front edge of the flower bed has a good amount of sand from all the rain.  So, once the mulch is in place I would expect the rain to move the mulch as well.  I may have to add a small extension piece to the current extender.  Here’s a shot of the run off.

One of the bright spots in this bed has been this tall fringe flower.  It’s been turning some leaves red and then dropping them. Looks beautiful.

It’s also been producing a few flowers.

Now onto the mulching.  If you’re interested in learning how to edge and mulch a flower bed, check out this post.

For now, I’m just going to leave this downspout trowel in place.  Next spring, I’ll extend it and rock it out.

All done.  Immediately after I took these photos, I removed the tags from the plants.  I like to procrastinate with those.

My transplants look pretty decent as well.  If you recall, I moved two crimson pygmies that were in rough shape over behind the fringe flower.  They were originally in the front of the house early this past summer before I had installed a drip irrigation system.  They didn’t do so well so they were relegated to the plant cemetery.  The plant cemetery is the small area behind the shed that is nearly in shade all day.  Consequently, a couple plants I’ve had back there in pots have sprung back to life.  Except, they’re evil now.

Before I moved this one here, it had purple leaves, not the green shown here and it looked bare.  I think these will pull through nicely.  I also moved a pygmy over to the side of the shed.  This one is still in critical condition.  However, the plant I moved from the shed is thriving along the side in the new bed.

So that’s it for new plants this year.  We’re very happy with how the flower beds came out.  Next year I’d like to add a few more plants to each bed and try to increase the depth and play with the height some.  Not bad for a first try though.  I think I’ve had my fill of mulch for a while too.  Next year I’ll probably just have a lawn cutting service freshen up the beds with a couple inches of mulch rather than me do it.

Anyone still doing yard work or are you all done for the season?

Ever have one of those weekends where you plan to do a couple simple, well planned chores and despite all your efforts, you don’t finish either one?  Well, I had one of those weekends.  I planned to start and finish two projects, the first one, which I’m writing about in this post is the flower bed on the OTHER side of the house.  The garage side of the house, I finished here.  The second project is a bed crib side table for our baby.  I’ll write about that project in a day or two.  The flower bed is all done except for the fabric, mulch and drip nozzles, but I’ve done a few posts on the stuff already (here, here and here), so I’ll just stick to the meat and potatoes and show you the grasses and shrubs we picked.

Here’s what I started with…

Lisa and I did the trick with the garden hose to get the basic flower bed layout down.  I wanted to have the new bed flow seamlessly into the side.  I had originally planted that Japanese Silver Grass there to try to hide the electric meter and the landscape lighting transformer, but it hasn’t held up too well.  The other couple shrubs there were simply placeholders since at the time, I had an excess of plants, but a shortage of places to put them.

Once the flower bed was edged, it looked like this…

At this point, I was ready to install the plants.  But, then there was an incident with a snake.  Between me and the shed, I ran into a 3 foot long black snake.  The snake was chilling in the grass with it’s head up and it’s forked tongue darting into the air.  I’m pretty sure (not really sure at all actually) the snake was a Queen Snake due to it’s coloration.

So after throwing a garden hose at the garden snake, it slithered away into the high weeds that border our property.  Crisis averted.

Now back to the shrubs.

Lisa and I wanted to put a tall plant at the widest point of the flower bed to give some depth and height to the side of the house.  The easiest way to do this would be to throw a tree there, but we weren’t really interested in a tree.  Something about the long term worry about the size of the tree and the foundation.  So this is what we did instead…

That tall plant there is a Razzleberri Fringe Flower and it’s not a tree, it’s a shrub.  It’s been groomed to look like a tree through regular pruning.  It’s tied to a stake to keep it straight, which it will need for another few years.  I also replaced the grass with a more full, healthier version and relegated the other grass towards the end of the yard near the downspout.  The small shrubs in front of the fringe flower are Norway Spruce.

Not done yet…

I have a nice full shrub to the left of the fringe flower, which was there to begin with and I wanted another one to balance the bed out, so I had to rob Peter to pay Paul and took one from the side of the shed.  The photo above shows it planted on the right of the flower.  I also added two crimson pygmies behind it that I had pulled from the front of the yard a while back.  They weren’t holding up well to the summer heat and the direct sun, especially since I hadn’t yet put in the drip irrigation system.  They did alright back in their pots.  Right now they look pretty bare, but I’m hoping a north facing flower bed and regular watering will perk them back up.

So how was your weekend?  Did you get done everything you wanted to?