Progress despite the rain

We made much progress today on our gardening chores. Although temps have been cool and we've received 2 inches of rain since Wednesday, the garden is growing and greening, the backyard this week looked like a travel pic of Ireland, it was so green. The flowering crab is about to bloom and is as usual, breathtakingly beautiful, the pear won't be far behind in blooming.

Our morning started with a visit to the Bowdoinham Library Plant Sale. It is a great sale, one of the best, well organized and there is better horticultural information available at the sale than at many nurseries. We came home with quite a haul; I unfortunately didn't find the Pagoda Dogwoods until it was too late, but we did purchase: 2 good sized hemlocks, a gold flame spirea, a larch, a yellow-twig dogwood, and some perennials --lovage, sedum, sweet woodruff, and an ostrich fern. With predicted rain leading to postponed yard sales, we elected to head home and garden, and we got nearly everything planted and more as the rain held off.

With considerable assistance from our hungry hens, we moved our three Gold Mop false cypress shrubs (part of a before-chickens plan to create a hedge in the far back), planted all the woody plants from the sale, fertilized various other shrubs with Holly Tone, and moved a number of herbaceous perennials to the grape arbor bed and it's companion bed across the path. Remaining on the list generated last week:

• Add compost and turn over vegetable garden
• Fertilize and weed perennial beds (3 of 7 left to do)
• Turn over working compost pile (when finished bin is empty)
• Prime the barn wall above the hosta bed
• Transplant perennials to grape arbor bed --still to go, Lamb's Ear

We planted 2 of the Gold Mops in the Holly bed, and the third at the end of the driveway in front of the arborvitae hedge. I love the way it looks there against the dark green arborvitae. The larch replaced one of the Mops' spot in the back, where we'll be able to see it from the house when it gets a bit bigger. The hemlocks were added to the hedge we started last year.

We also added some catmint to the arbor bed, removed from the driveway bed of Russian Sage. I replaced the catmint with a division of one of the sages and planted another in the arbor bed, too. It is starting to look like a garden.