Garden Tour: The Pond
A few years ago we put in a small garden pond. We’d been wanting a water feature for quite a while. When my parents put in a larger pond, they passed their small pond along to us. Mr Chiots dug the hole, we added water and fish, planted a few plants, and we had a pond garden.
Now that this garden has been around for a few years, it’s starting to look really nice. Our fish have sized up and are actually a good size. We don’t feed them or anything, they get enough food with what grows in the pond.
This little pond provides valuable wildlife habitat in our garden. We’ve had toads use it for breeding, birds use it for drinking, and we now have a few water insects as well. It also provides a nice watering hole for the Chiots and the outdoor cats.
The pond is located in a part of the garden that gets afternoon shade. It’s overshadowed slightly by a mature dogwood tree. It’s surrounded by goatsbeard, Japanese Hakone grass, hosts, various low growing sedum, peppermint, creeping thyme, and a boxwood. I also have a beautiful waterlily that blooms during the early summer.
The pond has proven to be a valuable addition to our garden. Since we put it in we have noticed an even greater number of insects and animals in the garden, particularly amphibians. I’d highly recommend adding a small water feature to your garden.
Do you have a water feature in your garden?
Chiot’s Run Garden Tour
The Middle Garden
The Side Garden
The Front Hillside Garden
Mr Chiot’s Mailbox Garden
Garden Tour: The Front Garden
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The Organic Lawn
Just like the rest of my gardens, the lawn here at Chiot’s Run is organic. It doesn’t require much care, mowing a few times a month and a top dressing of chicken manure twice a season. Other than that, it’s left to fend for itself. I’d describe the lawn as “a mixed herbal lawn”. Whatever grows is allowed to stay.
The lawn area has shrunk by at least half since we moved in. It was replaced with food and seed producing plants. We’ll never be without a little spot of lawn though, I really love the look and I think if you allow mixed herbs and wildflowers to grow it does add a beneficial habitat to your garden.
As a result, I can count about 15-20 different species of plants; different grasses, white Dutch clover, plantain (both tall and short), creeping charlie, wild violets, and a few other various species of “herbs”. The lawn is also full of insects of all shapes and sizes, crickets, grasshoppers, beetles, ants, spiders, moths, and many other things that creep, crawl, hop, burrow, and slither.
To some of my neighbors, this would be a travesty. They’d douse their lawns with chemicals to get rid of weeds, kill bugs, and to make the remaining finely bladed grass lush and green. Organic lawns really are healthier, the mix of plants provides an ecosystem all it’s own. My lawn is teeming with life, even after this summer’s drought. My neighbor’s perfectly sprayed carpet of green on the other hand, is mostly dead. This was their lawn last week:
This was my lawn last week:
So what can you do to help your lawn and go organic?
- overseed with some white dutch clover
- allow herbs and other plants to grow
- add rock dusts according to your soil type, like gypsum, etc.
- use natural fertilizers like chicken manure, bone meal and blood meal
- top dress with compost or other organic matter
The proof is in the pudding when it comes to tough summers like this one. My lawn was lush and green most of the summer. A few varieties of grass and other plants went dormant, but other ones kept going strong. Because I don’t add chemicals, the soil gets better each year and thus the lawn looks better and better each and every year, even when there’s a drought.
Do you have any area of the garden dedicated to a lawn?
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Garden Tour: The Front Foundation Garden
The front foundation garden was the first area I started to tackle when we moved here 10 years ago. It was planted with things that wouldn’t have survived in that bed. The rhododendrons in that bed were given to my parents and I replaced them with a few plants, most of which are long since gone.
I started by adding lots of chicken manure, leaf mold and compost for several years. Then I dig out all the big rocks and added more humus. After a few years, I decided it was time to plant a few things. This garden has evolved over time, just like my skills as a gardener. If I was starting this bed from scratch I’d do things a little differently.
Overall, I really like this flowerbed, it contains a mix of things that bloom throughout the seasons. Lots of spring flowering bulbs from February through April. It’s filled with peonies, hollyhocks, hydrangeas, catmint and other flowering beauties during the summer. In the fall there’s a beautiful ‘Pinky Winky’ hydrangea and a few balloon flowers that hang on for a last showing of color. It could use an evergreen shrub or two (like a boxwood) to give it a little more structure in the winter.
There are also lots of edibles; chives, fennel, asparagus, kale, blueberries, tomatoes, squash, cabbage and whatever other edibles I can tuck into empty spots.
My favorite time to view this flowerbed is in lat June when the ‘Annabelle’ hydrangea is at it’s best. There’s just something so wonderful about this original garden. It’s the first garden I started working on 10 years ago and it shows.
How old is your oldest garden?
Chiot’s Run Garden Tour
The Middle Garden
The Side Garden
The Front Hillside Garden
Mr Chiot’s Mailbox Garden
Garden Tour: The Front Garden
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Sweet Autumn
I’ve proclaimed my love of the ‘Sweet Autumn’ clematis before. It’s a winning vine in my garden. Much tougher and more resilient than many other clematises. There are a few of them growing throughout the gardens, trained on fences, up trees and hopefully, one up one of the front porch posts.
A few years ago, I planted one on my front hillside. The plan was to to eventually put in a nice archway in a break in the boxwood hedge, but that plan never materialized. As a result, the vine now happily scrambles up a small dogwood tree nearby.
I’m especially loving these vines this year because they’ve come through the drought with flying colors. One of my largest vines grows in the gravel driveway (yes it was planted there by previous owners) and has never been watered. Amazingly, it’s lush and covered with flowers this fall.
My front hillside suffered tremendously with the drought of this past summer (I blogged about Cutting my Losses over on the Your Day Blog last month). The clematis I planted up there a few years ago is providing some much needed beauty in an otherwise stark landscape.
In the future I may use this clematis as a ground cover as well. It’s so robust and lush it would be perfect for hard to cover areas. It also provides a much needed source of food for the honeybees at this time of year when not a lot of other things are blooming. My vines are always swarming with happily foraging bees.
What’s your favorite tough plant?
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Whispers of Fall
Last week I noticed a leaf falling from the tree above me. Then I spotted some yellow out of the corner of my eye. When we were driving around Cincinnati this past weekend, the smell of fallen leaves filled the air in the park. Everywhere you look you hear whispers of fall.
The tulip trees are the first ones to signal the change in seasons. Their leaves start collecting in the gutters and by the doors long before the other leaves start to turn. Soon after the sassafrass trees start changing, the dogwood trees will come soon as well.
On Sunday, I realized there were already enough leaves on the ground to consider raking. I can’t believe that fall is almost here!
Has fall arrived in your garden yet?
