Perfect Timing

I moved into my new house in February this year. As soon as I was unpacked, I started working on the gardens.

I had the pond removed, an irrigation system installed, the side sidewalk removed, and a new front sidewalk installed. I brought in about 100 pieces of concrete edging, new sod where the old side sidewalk was, and countless bags of topsoil, rose soil, and mulch. By the way, I swear by Living Earth Rose Soil and Houston Mulch, in case you were wondering.

The front yard

I enlarged the tiny front flowerbed.

My house was built in 1885, so I went with antique brick for the new sidewalk.

The Old Pond

First the pond had to be removed. There is also a small pool in the back yard, and two water features were overwhelming to take care of. The pond is gone and the fish have been given a new home.

The act of removing the pond was a fiasco. The people that I paid to do it only made it look like it was removed. After a good rain I found out that I still had a pond. My Dad spent many back breaking hours busting up the concrete that was at the bottom of the pond so that I could have a regular garden instead of a water garden.

The Side Yard

This sidewalk was in an odd and never used place, so it had to go!

I planted a Brown Turkey fig in the small garden by the fence, I am planning to espalier it.

Looking at the side yard from the opposite perspective

The Vegetable Bed

The yard was sodded in November 2012, but wasn’t really cared for so the grass hadn’t rooted well by the time I built this cinder block bed in April. Usually I use the newspaper method to build my beds (laying down newspaper, wetting it, then covering it with dirt, which will kill the grass), but it was pretty easy to pull the grass up inside this new bed. I filled it with about 8 bags of Black Cow cow manure and garden soil mix from the dirt yard.

I guess that was a great combination, as you can probably tell from the picture below. My tomato plants are outgrowing their cages and I’m harvesting tomatoes every day right now.

All of the gardens (including the vegetable garden) are watered with drip irrigation and the grass is watered with pop-up sprinklers. So, why perfect timing, you ask?

Well, because it’s time for the annual Garden Bloggers Fling (in San Francisco this year) and it’s reaching 100 degrees here in Houston these days. With the plants, most of them started from my old garden, in the ground and my upcoming travels, I won’t have to worry so much about watering. I have to say, that if you have the opportunity to put in an irrigation system before planting your beds, that’s the way to go. I did the opposite at my previous house, only after years of moving around a sprinkler on Saturday mornings.

I’m very excited to have this much accomplished in my first 5 months of living here. My next project is one of the “hell strips” in front of the house. Can’t wait…

May Garden Bloggers Bloom Day

Well, let’s see what’s blooming in my yard this month…

The smell of the jasmine is heavenly.

The desert rose is the only one that's staying in its pot.
The yellow on the left is butterfly weed.

mmm, the plumeria smell great too!

Maybe, I'll get some pomegranates this year.

This shrimp plant is called Lemon Sorbet.

Coreopsis Mercury Rising

I think I'll finally be able to start planting in a couple of weeks. I've spent the last few months building beds, and lining up people to install a new sidewalk and sprinkler system. I'm a few weeks behind schedule, but that has been ok since we have had an extended spring this year. However, summer has finally hit Houston, I think the high today is 93.

Thanks for stopping by to see what's blooming in my garden. For more Garden Blogger's Bloom Day posts, visit Carol at May Dreams Gardens.

Shangri La Macro Monday

These are some of the photos I took at Shangri La Botanic Gardens in Orange, TX last weekend.

A Visit to Shangri La

East of Houston, in a town called Orange, lies Shangri La. It was created by H.J. Lutcher Stark in 1937. Shangri La was H.J.’s vision turned reality. While he was overseeing Shangri La, he would open it to the public during the spring blooming season. There were countless spring days when the garden received thousands of visitors.

After a devastating ice storm in 1958, the gardens were abandoned. Nearly 50 years later, they were rejuvenated by the Stark foundation and re-opened to the public, but this time year-round.

Two of the water gardens were packed with perennials.

This is the entrance to the children's garden.
Definitely not just for kids.

Unusual to see this many different columbines growing in these parts.

I'm always on the lookout for bottle trees.

They had some great vegetable beds and bird mansions.

 

 

Getting closer to the bird blind.

 

Thousands of Great Egrets were visiting.

The Stark family made their fortune in the lumber business and grew it with the oil and financial industries. The home of H.J. Lutcher Stark’s parents is still standing and is in pristine condition with all of the original furnishings (as things went out of style his mom would send them to a warehouse for storage, luckily she was a bit of a pack rat.) The only family to ever live in the house is the Starks. However, the house was not saved by H.J. Lutcher, but instead his wife Nelda. He was ambivalent towards its preservation, thank goodness Nelda had the foresight to save it.






The interior of the house was a sight to behold. Literally, I could have spent an hour in each room of the 14,000 square foot house. It was gorgeous. But, you’ll have to go there to see it for yourself. Unfortunately they do not allow photography.

The gardens were beautiful this time of year, but I bet they would also be stunning in the spring when the 41 varieties of azaleas are blooming.