Well now, things are looking up in the rock garden area. I’ve been working a few hours a day on that area, and it’s starting to look really nice.
I also put in two small beds, against the house, for herb gardens. Since I’ve had no luck with other plants in that area, I used old horse bedding to fill a raised bed. It might be enough to kick start the plants, but this soil is so dead, from decades of being farmland, that it needs all the help it can get.
As you can see in the photo, the two hosta plants are looking good. They appreciated the new chip mulch. The strawberry plants are alive, and that’s about all I can report. No runners, no flowers. There were larkspur in the spring, and little hyacinths, they all went dormant by July. I’ve got one chamomile plant blooming industiously.
I’ve weeded that area for two years in a row. I dug out two huge clumps of pampas grass in 2022. They were semi-circles of live grass around a center of dead grass. It took all that summer to get it all out. But I got the weeds, mint and grass out of the garden bed and kept puttering in it ever since.
This year, I was able to get wood chips, so I filled the bed with wood chip mulch to keep the weeds down. We’ve got a large number of stepping stones stacked in the garden, and I’ve started putting them down. So there’s a path from the porch to the rock garden.
The dogs love the rock garden, it is shady and cooler than the lawn. Trouble likes to lay in the chips, and nose around the rocks like he’s hunting. Our new pup jumps around the stones, scratching and digging little holes, though her favorite activity is chasing chickens.
This flock of chickens is 18 hens and a Buff rooster. The hens came from an egg farm and have no fear of predators. So in this case, a pup who chases them is a good thing. The pup will teach them to run to the rooster for safety, and he will learn to defend the flock.
I don’t like to let the hens out of their pen, but we’ve got too many slugs in the flower beds, so the hens need to get out enough to clear the yard of slugs.
