Chronicles of the Long Shot Farm

This year, I am digging up as many of the geraniums as I can fit onto two large tables in the barn and I will let them overwinter there.  So far, I dug out about 50 plants, carefully getting as many roots as possible.  Each plant is trimmed back so that only a few stems with leaves remain, and then placed in a flowerpot with potting soil.  Our barn will be rather cold, but I hope they will make it.  I have kept potted geraniums in my cellar before (which also gets rather cold), but it has very little light and I ended up with very spindly looking plants.  I also tried shaking off all the soil from the plant and placing them in brown paper bags to overwinter in the cellar – letting the plant go completely dormant.  Some of those actually do come back to life, if I remember to plant them early enough. I found that keeping potted geraniums in a cool spot with light seems to work best for me.

Well, it’s not much progress… but I took some time this evening while everyone was at the movies, to work some more on my stone wall.  This wall is eventually supposed to be the border between the backyard and the blackberry patch – without being too obtrusive.  I build up a small section from the picket fence to where the walkway starts.  On the other side of the walkway is the spot where Duff and I had started the stone wall last summer.   I put my hibiscus trees on each side of the walkway, and planted one of the small cedar kind of bushes that were originally planted around the house when we bought it.  I had already started making a shady border in front of  the “pretend” stone wall last year, with all my transplanted hostas from the old house, a couple of ferns, bleeding hearts and some lily of the valley plants.  This week I added some more plants:

• 1 purplish rhododendron
• 2 dark pink azaleas
• several purple coral bells
• a transplanted hellebore (which made three separate plants)
• a flat of white and purple impatiens

Jeff helped earlier in the week to pull out one last stubborn tree root (with Zach’s tractor), so there is no more barrier to continuing the stone wall building project – except finding the extra time.  Also weeded the flower beds alongside the house, where the lilies started blooming.

We think this tree is a Japanese Dogwood – not 100% sure – but is is beautiful when it blooms.  Right now the air is heavy with the scents from honeysuckle and locust tree blossoms, and everything is so lush and green from all the rain we had.