Seedlings have been planted up. I’m having kind of a meh year with seed starting. I tried to start delphinium, and failed. I suspect I should have treated them like I did the columbine seed and stratified them first. So I’ll try that next year. It was brand new seed, so I don’t think that was the issue.
The peppers all sprouted, but some of the other things were a little less successful, like the Swiss chard. I did raise the temperature on the heat mats this year – I’d been doing 70 and put it up to 75, so that might be a factor. Gem marigolds also contain to be very meh.
Fortunately, there are plenty of garden centers in the area, so I’ll have options to supplement.
I spent a good chunk of this morning cleaning up the back bed, and the fence line back to the back corner. The fence is new as of last summer. I knew it would probably change once our original neighbor sold the house, and I’m glad they chose a short fence. It shouldn’t impact my light at all.
They did pull out the native sunflowers that were in their back corner. We still had them along our side of the fence last year (BF left them since there’s a decent gap at the bottom of the fence towards the back of the property, and they shielded that.) We’ll probably weed whack them this year – something else can go in the back corner to mask the gap.
I did do this a little earlier than normal, so I raked all the leaves that were along the fence line and dumped them as mulch in that back bed. I’m hoping that’ll be a little better for anything that might have been bedded for the winter in those leaves.
We’re having a landscaping crew in during the week to clear up some of the yard’s problem areas, so the above are before pictures.
I’m going to have them pull the magnolia – we have no immediate plans for something else to do there instead, but it would cost more to get them to come back to do it later, and it’s just not a tree that I want to keep. It’s only nice for about one week a year, and it blooms so inconsistently over the plant that I can’t really say that it’s all that nice. So that’s going.
I’m a little bummed about the shrubbery beside the driveway, as I’m going to have to let that lie fallow for probably the whole summer to be able to keep out sprouts. They’re going to have to pull the native dogwood that the fireflies love. Fortunately, I can buy that specific species from the Audubon’s native plant program, so I will replace that. I should have room to add one more native shrub as well, and I have a couple ideas for that.
We also need to decide what to replace those front shrubs with. They are nice for privacy for those two front bedrooms, and the birds love them. But it’s also fairly shady there. So we’ll have to see what ends up there.