The Big Stuff Is Done......

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Now is time to do the details and let the garden ride into the rest of the season. Between taking nasal swabs, doing quick test analyses in the lab and recently administering shots I had doubts about getting the garden started at all this year but 20 minutes here and an hour there every day I actually made good progress. I decided to pot only Nasturtium this year since it is a very undemanding plant which will flower its heart out until early November. What follows is my garden as it is now all photos were taken 5/19/21. I will post each photo with comment after it …in a somewhat random order……

This is a young Green Frog atop a spitter in my lotus pond.

In the foreground is a good dense patch of Monarda which will top off at 6ft. Once they commence to flower, the hummingbirds will arrive…perfect timing

This is another spitter sitting in my Jacuzzi pond .

My frog pond complete with frogs on the Lilly Pads.

One of my Clematis coming into full bloom enveloping the fairy statue.

One of my garden fountains. All water features in my cottage style garden are solar powered- some have battery backup so they keep on running when a cloud passes by or the sun goes down. The ponds, though, have heavy duty electric pumps which do a good job of chopping up any debris that gets through their strainers to minimize maintenance.

My stone dog trying to dig his way under the gate entrance to my Victorian garden. My cottage garden has three sections …full sun with a footpath of red mulch. A medium sun section in the form of a garden island and a shade garden section which is explored by a footpath of black mulch. Both paths join in the back of the garden and become a stone path leading to my art shack.

This is my lotus pond. I have removed the resident lotus which went by the name “ the emporer’s concubine “ this lotus after many years had filled the pond with stagnating roots and tubers. The removal of which was not easy. Next year I will get a nice young lotus to start all over again. Do you know that the lotus flower bulb can produce heat higher that the ambient temperature around it?

My fish Grotto with a fairy sitting atop it cooling her feet in the waterfall. Beyond that you can see another solar powered fountain.

What you see here is a pond septic tank that I designed. Water is pumped up from the fish grotto to this pond above it. The solids from the fish settle to the bottom and clear siltless water runs out of this pond to a stream which feeds back into the pond. This settled muck is then removed and spread in the garden as fertilizer.

These photos show a new fountain water feature which I am creating. The container once held the lotus which I had mentioned removed from my lotus pond.

These photos show the full sun section of the garden with its footpath of red mulch. You can see that the potted nasturtiums are progressing nicely.

Look closely and you can see a preying mantis egg case.

A flower cart full of nasturtiums and a wildflower bed on the rise.

A sundial at the edge of the Monarda patch 12 noon, time for lunch. Underneath the sundial is my electrical junction box which powers my pumps and aerators.

In this first of three photos you can see yellow water iris coming into bloom. The other photos show my spawning fish under my newly added water hyacinth which in another few weeks will grow at a tremendous rate.

Another view of my fish grotto. About 4 years ago I had about 50 fish in that pond and in one night they were all removed by a mink. The fish you see here were 3 inch goldfish when I added 6 to the pond to start over again.

The above are views of my shade garden. I will do another blog of these area once they are in full bloom.

And so this is the END!:)

• 20 May, 2021
• 6 likes

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