This week's progress report

I continue to keep myself busy with work in my garden, avoiding the daily news feed.  I haven't focused on any one project in particular but rather tackled one small job after another.  The first involved sowing seeds and planting Anemone corms in the cutting garden, as well as planting Dutch Iris and daffodil bulbs in the back garden but I've no photos to share.  However, while planting bulbs, I noticed that the creeping thyme was over-running the flagstone path in the back garden so I trimmed that back. I cleared an area of the garden on the south side of the house for the tree daisy (Olearia albida), a New Zealand native I hope, in time, will do an acceptable job screening out views of the street and a neighbor's home.  That required cutting back succulents, digging out lots and lots of stone fragments, and supplementing the rock-hard soil.  Whenever I embark on any task involving extensive digging in my garden, I'm reminded of the fact that our neighborhood was built on what was a rock quarry back in the 1940s.

The tree daisy, purchased by mail order from Annie's about a month ago, is already a little over a foot tall and I hope it'll continue to beef up.  It's supposed to reach 11 feet in height and 6 feet in width.

I took down the sunshades that line the interior of the lath (shade) house during the hot summer months.  This is another time-consuming exercise.  Every plant has to be removed from the shelves before each piece of screening can be removed.

I used the opportunity to neaten up each plant before returning it to its place.  All the shelves were swept clean of the cherry laurel berries the rats stockpile behind the plants in the dead of night.

I evicted a poorly-performing fuchsia and stole its pot for a recently purchased Begonia gehrtii 'Comet', with its wonderful puckered leaves

Yesterday, I decided it was time to remove one of the 'Blue Flame' Agaves that was encroaching on its neighbors.  In this case, I took "before" shots to illustrate the problem.

The mother plant produced pups and careened over on its side as it increased in size

Among other things, it was overwhelming one of the Agave americana mediopicta 'Alba'

 Here are the after shots:

After pulling out some of the mother plant's dead leaves, I was able to saw through the trunk that connected it to the pups

Hopefully the smaller variegated Agave will now be able to right itself.  The 'Blue Flame' Agave I removed was so heavy I had to get my husband's help just to chuck it in the green bin.  If you've never grown an agave, you'd be surprised at just how heavy these plants can be.

I've continued to work on the sloped area adjacent to the lath house.  I finally got the remaining stone in place to stabilize the slope for planting.  I dug out still more of the bulbous asparagus fern roots that riddle this area (and many others in my garden) and supplemented the hard-packed sandy soil.  I'm still debating what to plant there and it may take me some time to finalize my choices.

At present, I've selected two Lomandra 'Platinum Beauty' to join another already there (just outside the photo's frame on the right).  Most of the other plants will be succulents but I'd like to throw in a few softer notes as well.

That's a wrap on my project updates.  Sunday is Garden Bloggers' Bloom Day so I'll be back then with my monthly bloom report (assuming that whatever has happened to Blogger's edit function is fixed by then).  There's a lot less out there than there was a month ago but, in my climate, there's always something.

All material © 2012-2020 by Kris Peterson for Late to the Garden Party