Plants Blooming for the Second Time
The last few weeks have gone in a whirl with a combination of entertaining family from abroad as well as friends within BC and looking after my grandsons. Now it is time to sit back and reassess the garden. August gardening chores mainly include dead heading flowers that have bloomed and pruning back shrubs and rose bushes and any other plants that look a little straggly. I continue to fertilize the hanging baskets and containers; they certainly add a splash of colour to the garden.
This year has certainly been a more challenging one gardening wise. Even with spraying the peach tree to prevent leaf curl, some of the peaches have white blotchy patches which we have slowly been removing and we are making good use of the unblemished ones. Meanwhile in the vegetable garden we attempted to grow carrots from seed twice but only had two plants come up. With the excessive heat this year a lot of the August flowering perennials have already bloomed so there is not as much colour in the flower beds as there normally would be at this time of the year. On the plus side though I have a number of plants including several rose bushes that are blooming for a second time which is always a bonus and the grape vines on the arbour are looking healthy.
I am already planning to revamp the bed under the pine tree. It has a lot of spring colour with the pale pink rose bush, alliums, daffodils and low growing aubretia as well as shasta daisies, but now there is very little colour and the bed most definitely needs a boost. One of the downsides to planting under a tree, especially a pine tree, is it robs the garden bed of water so I will need to plant dry loving plants such as lavender, perovskia (Russian sage) and maybe some ornamental grass. I will also look out for late flowering perennials, such as asters, chrysanthemums, heleniums, the tall growing perennial sunflower and sedums (particularly Autumn Joy) to add more colour. Later in the season too, I will start to divide up the perennials that have grown a little too large and move the divisions to other beds in the garden.
