Carola's Alberta Garden 2019: New Additions

It's always exciting to add new additions to an existing flower bed!

We bought small Udo pear tree at the end of June at Home Hardware and we planted it next to the driveway near the telephone pole. We have an existing pear tree about 200 yards from there and it is always the first tree in the spring to sprout beautiful fragrant blossoms. It gets tiny hard green pears which don't amount to anything so I thought if we had a second pear tree to cross pollinate with it, maybe we would get some edible fruit??? It's too late for this year, but we'll see what happens next year. I hope they are not planted too far apart... it's worth a try!

Stack stone edging added around the long perennial bed

Chris decided to edge my long perennial bed with the same stack stones as 2 of my other large beds to delineate the border and to keep out the long grass roots that always seems to find their way in. He dug out a narrow trench of the clay soil and filled it in with gravel. Then he added a 1'by 4' inch board against the lawn to try and deter the lawn from encroaching. After that he put one layer of stones down around the long sides of the bed. (The steppingstone pathways are at either of the short sides.) It looks really nice! Then he added several bags of triple mix soil to top up the bed. Now I just need to go out and put the 2 bags of mulch on top of everything. :)

Maltese cross attracts hummingbirds

We planted new white peony shrub at the far end of that bed after removing a big clump of white daisies from there mixed with Jacob's Ladders that had all seeded themselves there. This peony was purchased at Wal Mart in Calgary and it had had 2 blossoms on it. I had Chris help me plant it in the hope that it would break my 'Peony Curse' so it would bloom again next summer.

White peony Elegans at the far end of my long bed/ along with a self seeded lily :)

(The peony diggings that I 'rescued' from shady parts of my wild bed and planted near the front of that bed have not bloomed yet. Neither has the one I put in my new triangular stack stone bed last summer, and not even the red peony that I had bought 3 years ago at PJ's Plantation! It's quite disheartening!

At least 2 of the existing peonies in our yard did bloom this summer, although one peony had only one flower on it since it gets so little sun now because of the big trees. Sadly, the hail storm that we had on July 18th cut the flower bud off its stem and it did not get to bloom at all. :(

Some kind of insect has been eating all the leaves off of the marigold that I had planted in my triangle bed. It leaves the blossoms behind but without leaves the marigolds are all dying! I bought a small rectangular pot of new marigolds at the same Calgary Wal Mart and they are still on the deck waiting to go into the garden.

Thank goodness I didn't have time to plant them sooner! We had a terrible hail storm with high winds on Wednesday (July 18) and it shredded a lot of my flowers and veggies. What a mess to come home to! I have cleaned up some of the plants but there is still work to do...

Luckily I had not plant out my new Morden Centennial rose bush yet at that point! The rose bush was in a pot with what seems to be a type of sawdust mixture and the water ran right through the pot so it needed to be watered often. Probably an indication that it was root bound... It had set a lot of buds on its long spindly branches and it had started blooming in the greenhouse. I finally did plant it at the end of July in my long perennial bed at the end closest to the house where it continues to bloom. :D

My new Peace rose is still in the greenhouse blooming its little heart out... The Peace rose has been regularly giving me beautiful, tall, long stemmed flowers. The buds start out yellow but they soon turn pink as the petals unfold. I have been cutting and bringing the flowers into the house.
The first Peace rose which I had brought in I had made the mistake of adding tap water to the vase. It turned the rose an ugly non-descript beige! I think it's due to the high alkalinity in our well water. (A similar strange color change happens to red wine.) Now I remember to use bottled water in the rose vases.

I also planted a German Catchfly perennial in my triangular bed (also known as Lychnis Viscaria Splendins). It looks like it will bloom soon, so we'll see if it looks as good as the tag. :)