Garden update!

My Purple Wave Petunias are dominating things early on this season, but so far, so good.



The Impatiens are now starting to come on pretty well. I put the first seventy two of the Impatiens out in late April when the long range, ten day weather forecasts were showing days in the seventies or higher, and night temps in the upper forties to fifties. Unfortunately those forecasts were wrong and a few of those nights dipped into the mid-thirties which dinged the Impatiens and those first plants are just now rebounding. 

That large green mound in the front of the screen is a Japanese Anemone that when bought twelve or so years ago was supposed to only grow twelve inches tall with two to three foot flower stalks. As you can see it grows a lot more than twelve inches tall. It's also nearly impossible to get rid of. I've dug it out multiple times, hit it with Roundup, weeded it out constantly and it still comes back. I've now largely conceded defeat and have opted to live with it. It's a very pretty plant even if it does try to take over the world.

For the first time since we added the porch I'm going with no hanging baskets. My old baskets were getting a bit brittle and several had come crashing down last summer, so I put pots on the railing instead and added vines (Thunbergia and Cardinal Climber) to climb up the posts and across the top to more or less form a curtain of green dotted with flowers. We'll have to see how that works, but so far, so good.

My back garden, which had been largely ignored for the last few years as I cared for my mother, is in the process of being reclaimed. The majority of the bad stuff is now gone and the perennials are doing well. It's still got a ways to go, but I'm back on top of it and things are looking good.