by Melody on May 22, 2019

Ahh, the wedding is over – I can relax now! I'm going to tell you about the wedding experience... but in a little while... disaster struck (sigh). Happy things first.

As soon as my daughter's wedding was over I could turn my focus more fully onto my own little projects and I found a couple of new ones that have been consuming all of my time. First off – I really hated how the back entrance to my house was making my flower garden look. I did a lot of work camouflaging the chain link fence and planting everything but I still had this horrible plywood mess in full and disturbing view.



Again – the house is not mine; so rather than rip the porch off – I had to come up with a different solution. First I put a big pot in front of it with a banana plant that would grow really big and hide it. But A.) I am really impatient (and the back porch was staring at me) and B.) I found an old wooden door leaning against the side of the garage, and I thought what if.......

So I painted the door to match my bamboo post fence, added a couple of shelf brackets to put a window-box on, and bolted the door onto the side of the porch that faces my flower garden. I planted the window-box with "Bounce" impatiens, which are said to be great in shade or sun and downy-mildew resistant, trailing Lophospermum "Compact Rose", and silver dichondra. So here is my back porch now – not perfect, but I think it is greatly improved.



Once the window-box fills in I will post some more pictures. I have not tried the Bounce series of impatiens before and I am anxious to see how they perform. The garden is starting to fill in and I am very happy with it so far. By the way – the colored glass bottles on the fence posts are part of my attempted solar lighting project.



Now for the second project: I wrote in an earlier post that I wanted to trial grafted tomatoes this year – and now I have them! I bought a grafted Brandywine and a grafted Pineapple tomato and I bought a "regular" un-grafted plant of both those varieties also. I will grow them side by side in containers this summer. Grafted tomatoes are not really designed for container growing as they have a very vigorous root system – but I planted them in very large 13 gallon containers (as I also did with the un-grafted) and after they are growing well I plan on placing those containers into "muck-buckets" without drainage holes to conserve the water.

The black 13 gallon containers should get the tomatoes off to a good start because they will soak up the heat. I also can move them around (with help) to find available sunlight – the lack of a good bright spot in my yard is what prompted my decision to go with a container vegetable garden. I will keep you posted on how well (and if!) this works out for me as well as how the grafted and un-grafted tomatoes perform and produce. Here is a picture of my young veggie garden.



While I was out in the yard scoping out what was growing and not growing I stumbled into a great new project: I am making a secret garden for my granddaughters! The little bit of yard to the side of the garage was totally ignored by me because it was filled with old tree limbs and at least two feet of leaves and debris – but I started poking around (found that old door!!) and then I thought that it is such an out of the way and unnoticed little bit of land – a person (or two very young ones) could easily hide-away back there.

So I cleaned it all out this evening and have a planting plan in the works. This area gets some pretty good afternoon sun in the very back corner so I am going to plant bright zinnias, celosias, lambs-ears (kids love to touch them) and curly parsley, as well as a tomato plant for the girls to take care of. A friend is going to give me a small table and chairs for the girls and I am going to give them a scavenger hunt to help them find their secret garden. Here are the before pictures of the area (after I cleaned it up!) and since I have a three day weekend coming up I am hoping to have some after pictures next week.





Now for the wedding – my daughter was beautiful! My two oldest granddaughters were absolutely perfect flower girls – but most of my flowers, the pallet and the pots, were damaged in transit. My mother, very graciously, came up the evening before and we loaded all the planters in her truck and covered them securely with a tarpaulin, but in the last few miles of the two hour trip her spare tire broke free of its strap, bounced up, and landed squarely in the middle of the tarpaulin; everything was crushed and broken. I was so disappointed and I felt so miserably bad.

We salvaged what we could and decorated the wedding as best we could, but it was a far cry from what I had planned and worked towards. The wedding bouquet, thankfully, was inside my car and survived the trip but everything else was damaged. I ended up giving it all away to my daughter and her husband and some of the guests. All the planters will "come back" and be beautiful; they just weren't for the wedding. I know that someday we will tell this story and laugh – just not yet.

Here is a picture of the bouquet my daughter carried. It turned out much lovelier than I ever expected; asparagus fern, sea holly, wood fern, Dianthus Green Ball, heuchera blooms, eucalyptus, astilbe blooms, ribbon grass, and calla lilies. I wrapped the stems with hosta leaves and tied it with twine right before she walked down the aisle.



Okay – that's it for now! I promised I'd write about container colors this post and I promise I will do that this weekend on my mini-vacation!!