The Eggporeum

Around here, things get built as the need arises. Consequently, every year brings another project - starting with Glory Be, the root cellar, then The Livery woodshed, Mercantile power shack, and now The Eggporeum (you guessed it - a chicken house). It looks like a little western town, on purpose...

Things are getting a little desperate now as I have six chicks hatched in the incubator, and some more still to go. The cute little fuzzballs need more room already.

We're on the downhill slide to getting it all finished, and it's going to be so adorable! I'm hoping HH feels like doing some more on it after he finishes with his dayjob and we can get the chicks installed in their new home. Still to be done - porch (very important!) - the pole lying down is one of the supports - and the chicken door so they can access the outdoor run still to be built.

I'd like to get all the construction phase done before the Bantams get in their new home, as they don't like noisy machines and banging hammers.

Seeds, Sedum and Semps.

I've been busy, even while the weather was taking a break and giving us some rain. I received my order of 36 named varieties of Sempervivum (hens and chicks), 30 varieties of lost label varieties, and a few new (to me) Sedum varieties for my collection. Here's a fun idea for something that usually ends up in the landfill - pizza pan satelite dishes that no longer fill the requirements. They're shallow metal which can be pierced by bashing a nail into it a few times for drainage holes, and voila! - a perfect dish garden for succulents of every description. All this one needs is some small shale to provide drainage around the crown of the Sempervivum.


I've got this one somewhat precariously balanced on a tree stump for that rustic look...

and here are the 36 varieties of Sempervivum newly potted and happy in their new home. This is one mail order company that I can wholeheartedly recommend - Cavendish Perennials in Ontario - here's the website address http://www3.sympatico.ca/semps/catalogue.html

(and yes, that is old carpet reincarnated as groundcover!)

This is the other order received in the mail recently - lots of different tender succulent seeds...I'm waiting on tenterhooks for them to germinate!

The best policy...

...is Honesty. A while ago I posted Seed Order Catastrophes, about my initial problems with a certain seed company which is widely advertised with pay-per-click ads by Google. That's not the problem. The problem is that I ordered a small order of seeds to try and it took over two months to receive my order. Finally, I got the few packages, and proceeded to plant them in the garden, and the beans and other things sprouted and grew. No problem with that either. The problem is that they offered a promotional gimmick of free shipping, which they promptly billed to my credit card along with the cost of the order, and it showed up under a different name, giving me a heart palpitation. They refuse to answer the phone, it always rings busy day and night, and they have ignored my many attempts to contact them via email. You would think that they could hire one extra person to deal with the complaints, but I guess they're too busy laughing all the way to the bank. I can honestly say that if I ran my business like that, I'd be out of business very quickly.

Here's Honesty, botanically known as Lunaria for the appearance of the moonshaped seed pods, shown at the top of this post. Love the white form, it also has a pale mauve flowered form.

June heat wave

It's hard to imagine how it was a few months ago - cold, rainy, miserable - we're two weeks into a stretch of warm, sunny summer-like weather, with only a few glitches in the way of showers predicted for Saturday. I'm lovin' it - and so are the beans, tomatoes and peppers.

Re-bar archways smothered in Clematis macropetala, grown from seed collected from a late friends garden...memories are bittersweet...

For some reason, there are lots of pink blooms in the garden now - lilacs in a gorgeous magenta, which unfortunately don't have the heady, powdery scent you remember from childhood...

...but this plant does - Daphne cneorum, pronounced 'nee-or-um' with a silent 'c' (yes, I know, very strange, but that's Latin for ya!). The scent is reminiscent of White Shoulders perfume.

Phlox subulata 'Candy Stripe', along with it's reversion to a straight pink form, pretty none-the-less. No wonder this month is for weddings, all the plants are so romantic!

Xeria

This a the xeric part of the garden - in fact, all parts except the vegetable garden are xeric. I water the newly planted or transplanted, then put them on ignore. This is a garden that I renovated last spring to make more room for veggies, and I crammed in all the plants very tightly, mulched with compost, and voila!

From the front there are miniature yellow Iris, rue with it's great blue foliage, Allium (ornamental onion, and I think this one is yellow flowering) Salix 'Red Curls', Matricaria aurea (golden feverfew) Heuchera 'Chocolate Curls', lots of Sedum (of course!) Veronica 'Blue Fox' (again, of course!) Lychnis coronaria (blooms with eye popping hot pink blooms), a few daffodils (Jetfire), Spirea 'Little Princess', and rhubarb. Oh, and the odd self seeding Valerian which I leave for the beneficial insects, and Stachys lanata, the fuzzy lambs' ears. In the top picture you can see purple miniature Iris too.

The view from the garden above showing the skinny little amount of room I have for vegetables. Amazing how much you can cram into a small space...

I'm glad I have the opportunity to experiment this way (forced into it, more likely!). When you only have limited water, ie: whatever falls from the sky or ends up in the shallow well which also does laundry, showers and other frivolous things it's a challenge. I've resorted to watering the potatoes (on the left of the picture)with a very ingenious system of siphon and soaker hose using the stagnant pond water. There are advantages to gardening on a slope...

The addictions are getting worse!

Okay, I'm not crazy, honest! I just like to build stuff, and here's something I've wanted for a long time - this is going to be The Eggporeum. I'm picturing something out of a western ghost town, with old doors and windows, maybe some rusty stuff hanging off it...

You can just call me the human backhoe, because all of this was dug out by hand, first by loosening the sandy soil with the mattock, then shovelling it into the wheelbarrow. Now I'm running out of places to use it - who would have thought there was that much soil in there?

And the flower of the day is Tulipa 'Ballerina' - not my favorite colour, but if you like scented flowers, this is a winner - imagine a freshly picked tangerine, still warm from the sun...heaven!

Never enough blue

Hyacinths - these smell so fabulous!

As lots of you have already guessed, I love the colour blue and always try and find more flowers with blue blooms...

Vinca minor 'Ralph Schugert'...

Pulmonaria...

Muscari...

And it's pretty obvious that I like weathered old wooden things and driftwood too!