Doesn't it make you a little nervous to plant at this time of year? It does me... but I put in three Russian sage plants, promising to keep watering.

I tied a few rose cane shoots into horizontal positions on trellises to try and get more flowers as the canes develop. I deadheaded and divided an upright campanula to share with a friend, and I found it hard to get my fork under its feet to divide it! It must be spreading just under the soil I guess.

I also built a patio with the help of five friends and my husband.

YES! It does make me a bit nervous to plant at this time of year, but I still do it now and then, especially with such a barren landscape as I've got currently. I'll definitely keep an eye on it and water carefully. I'm a big proponent of "fall is for planting" but sometimes I fall off the wagon. :)

Your patio sounds really nice. What is it made from?

Thanks for the reply.
Take care,
Grant

I cut more canes from my clump of bamboo and used the bottom 6' to tie up some tomato plants, then used the top with leaves and side branches in my new rose protection scheme against deer, where I surround the skimpy chewed up rose with three bamboo tops then wire the tops running wire around and wrapping each bamboo stem in turn, moving up each round to end 5' or more off the ground. I will have to wait to see if this will work. 4' tall welded wire circles work great but take a lot of money to do all the beds and plants on 2 acres, so I'm looking for some low cost way to do the job.

Despite my weed problems with existing beds, I'm also in process of converting more lawn, presently covered with grass clippings to kill the grass, to a bed with a couple of Japanese maple trees, assorted bulbs, and I am considering some dense groundcover to keep from ending up with another weeding problem, like Kinnickinnick, which I think the bulbs could come up through. I sympathize with your bare ground. I made the mistake of buying some Heuchera last spring which were supposed to go into my new garden (as yet undeveloped) and ended up losing 3 to the 100 degree heat spells because I didn't move them into shade and water them enough.:-( I hope your plants make it. I'm making plans to plant stuff out in September-October and finish planning where things will go. I would like to have some little seating area, maybe with a stone surface, and some paths.

Your anti-deer technique sounds really interesting. Any pics? Let us know how it works. I used to homestead on 40 acres near Mt. Rainer and had all sorts of trouble with deer and elk. I fully support reducing lawn to increase planting beds--yours sound great.

I did rip out some truly heinous long-neglected hybrid tea roses a few weeks ago. They had been grown in deep shade for a decade and were just an embarassment. I'll replant with some hybrid rugosas and other types this autumn, winter and spring. I did plant a butterfly rose (Rosa mutabilis) from a small container this weekend. Love those crazy color-changing blooms and dark foliage. Mine is from Fremont Gardens here in Seattle not Wayside, but the link from Wayside has a pic for those who are curious.

I'm keeping an eye on watering. This initial summer burst of planting should be a one time thing (yeah, right) since I'm new to this current garden.

Anyone else care to share what gardening you did this past weekend? Sometimes it's fun to just chat about activities etc.

Take care,
Grant

Here is a link that might be useful: Butterfly rose

I did a fair amount of watering, fertilzed 40 brugmansias, finally attached aluminum conduit under the eave of my porch roof and hung 9 fuchsia baskets, picked a 14" English cucumber and a few Sun Sugar tomatoes, deadheaded umpteen spent flowers from dahlias & numerous other plants, collected seeds from salvias and kniphofias & took cuttings from S. 'Hot Lips', started a big cleaning project on my back porch which has been my gardening "catch all", took a number of garden pics & probably spent too much time chatting on the brugmansia forum I moderate. Where DOES the time go?! Ask me about all the things I DIDN'T get done!

Grant, how are you feeling about your move from the rural life? Lots of times I've wished I was going the other way!Hope you're taking "before" and "in progress" pics of your gardens to share one of these days.

Patrick

Being in the business, I work most weekends and even my days off from my regular job tend to get filled up with appointments for my personal business. Gardening at any time of year tends to be pretty hit or miss for me - I get to it when I can and seasonal considerations tend to be ignored for the most part, in favor of the "do it when you have the time" philosophy.

Right now, maintenance is the biggie - just keeping things watered and weeded is about all I can manage. On days when I can squeeze out more than just a couple of hours, pruning and deadheading occupy my time. I mulched last winter with a very good compost and boy, did the plants appreciate that! I was rewarded with rather remarkable jungle-like growth that now needs some serious taming and editing. And as I work through areas of my garden now, I am planning for more extensive changes later, when the weather cools and my time frees.

And while I love working as a professional in this gardening business, I envy those of you who get to approach it as an enjoyable pastime rather than a business and have the time to spend puttering around on a regular basis. While I don't lack the opportunity to mess about with plants, they are not often my plants in my garden and I do miss that very much.

Like Grant, I've been doing a lot of planting. I used to be pretty regular on this forum but the last couple of years have been too busy. HarleyMan and I have been flipping houses so each year I've moved my whole garden. We were in most houses less than a year. We did well financially on these and have finally bought a house that we are madly in love with and bought as our home, not for investment, quick turnaround and profit. I have been planting all summer as I brought 300 plants from my previous gardens but before I could begin planting I had to do major cleanup and preparation on a long-neglected garden. Ive kinda become an expert at garden moving. I've planted through the hottest days and rarely lose a plant. I keep the plants that are in nursery containers shaded (except for extreme heat lovers) as the black plastic just heats up and cooks the roots. Before planting I plunge the plant into a bucket of water to make sure the rootball is thoroughly saturated and I fill and soak the planting hole. Lastly, as I plant I use a mud slurry to make sure there are no air pockets around the roots and then mulch well. Also, I try not to disturb the roots much unless it's rootbound. And, of course, try to remember to keep everything well-watered til it settles in. I planted right through the hottest weather using this method. If a plant looks wilty, I also will improvise a bit of shade for it when it first goes in the ground. I haven't been able to spend time puttering in the garden in years, but I'm looking forward to doing that next summer !

Oh my, I feel quite unproductive now. ;-) After work on Friday, I drove down to the southeast side of Mt. Rainier and didn't return home until Sunday evening. We had a big race (250 drivers) with entrants from all over the place. I took pictures all day, both days, and am still in the process of posting them. The garden will have a few more additions this year, depending on my energy level and if my foot cooperates (recovering from surgery).

Ripped out those @#$%ing 'health kick' tomatoes that added disease-prone insult to cardboard-tasting injury. Transplanted some 'nero toscano' kale seedlings into that space. Pulled up the last of the pea vines and transplanted romaine lettuce seedlings into that space. Planted out my sprouting broccoli seedlings (purple sprouting and 'Rudolph' varieties). Harvested eggplant, tomatoes, bell peppers, broccoli, romano beans, carrots, beets, and zucchini.
Attempted to beat a wisteria vine into submission with pruning shears and twine, but gave up. Deadheaded spent roses, daylilies, and hostas, whacked off the hollyhocks that had blown over, cut glads for bouquets, accidentally stripped the bark off a nice viburnum tinus with my string trimmer :(

Fun to hear what everyone has been up to. I sure love these long summer days when I get get gardening in before and after work. Love it!

Patrick, I'm really glad I switched from the rural life to city life. I'm glad I experienced both so that I know which one suits me best. I definitely prefer all that the city can provide, and I like the idea of a smaller piece of land to work on. I guess I don't have the self-restraint to manage the larger property, so having something smaller forces me to have boundaries, literally and figuratively, in the garden.

Sorry about the viburnum Molly. That's a bummer. I've been cutting a ton of glads and dahlias too. Nice blood red water lily dahlias and peach with orange throat glads. I love they do obnoxious things to each other's colors in a vase. Ladyh, I'm glad I'm not the only one carting plants from garden to garden. I'm glad you and your plants found a long-term home.

Scarlett I hope your foot cooperates--having a bum hoof makes digging big holes a real chore, and gardengal, I'm sure your garden is loving that compost and the maintenance you're giving it.

Happy gardening all,
Grant

Take care,
Grant, fixated on the latest Wayside catalog delivered this week.

Rosa x odorata 'Mutabilis' actually, a China rose horticulturally but a Tea rose botanically. On a warm wall in UK it has behaved as a climber, growing tall. Watch out for mosaic infected stock, otherwise a real good doer for the most part--one of those roses that is a landscape shrub here, not requiring coddling.

Weeds and watering are the keywords for summer in PNW. Have taken cut, leafless bamboo and poked it into the ground in a circle around deer magnets, angled outward to form a bristling effect. May actually work, haven't tried it enough to form an assessment.

I have a big clump of P. nuda now and have started using it more to tie up tomatoes and now I'm trying it as deer barriers. I also have planted a couple of kinds of timber bamboo and can't wait until I have some really big poles to do more with. I'm disappointed about the strength of the P. nuda canes over time though, they seem to be pretty weak the second season. I hope timber bamboo is stronger. I just got a digital camera and need to learn how to reduce the file size and find a website to put photos on so I can do links. Like Ron says, I am mostly supposed to be weeding and watering and harvesting fruit/vegetables now but have been spending a lot of time trying to thwart the deer. I also wish I could figure out how to protect nut trees from squirrels. I did bait my Hav-a-hart trap so maybe I will get one. I also found that they don't know to go after peach-almond cross nuts, which have a really hard shell as well, so I'm finally getting some nuts. The squirrels get my hazelnuts, walnuts, and heartnuts. :-( I now have 3 peach-almonds and may get another one and forget the other nuts. I also keep meaning to trap all of them but don't.

In contrast, I've observed eastern gray squirrels scampering across a wide street to get at a fruiting hybrid almond tree in a row of mostly treeless houses (where they would seem to have been exposing themselves to a risky situation).

Good news on the hybrid nuts. I've seen those in catalogs for years but have never tried them (horticulturally or culinarily). Do they taste good?

Ron, you're right about the Butterfly rose being a good performer here. I've grown one at each Seattle garden I've owned. The first one I planted 15 years ago in my first garden is now easily ten feet tall and wide and just covered with blooms, despite the obvious long-term neglect of the current owner (who bought the place from me ten years ago). Yes, I still occasionally stalk "my" old gardens in town. My current one is very small, but flowering nicely and has the wonderful deep purple-bronze new foliage that I like.

Happy gardening,
Grant

Not very encouraging news on the almonds, Ron. As I said, it may just be a matter of the squirrels not knowing they are edible. I am going to try to keep them picked immediately when they ripen and hopefully they won't find out. The nuts are very hard to crack, the first year the pits were small, but the flavor is that intense almond flavor rare in regular almonds. And they do flower pink in spring with no peach leaf curl. That makes them more ornamental than my other nut trees, though the Turkish Tree Hazels are very unusual trees.

Patrick, I have my first Brugsmania. It was 6" tall when I got it and now is 3' in a gallon and to my surprise is getting a bloom. I thought it had to be huge to bloom. I should probably move it up to a bigger pot. Do they always get huge in half-whiskey barrel size pots or can they be kept smaller?

Watering and weeding and deadheading...Took up both Sat and Sun. Also transplanted some ferns and hostas into a window box on north side of my garden shed. Sat in my swing for a while chatting with a neighbor, just enjoying the wonderful weather.

Harleylady, I, too, always soak any potted plant I'm going to put in the ground and I never lose any, even in really hot weather. I'm always amazed to see the garden 'experts' on tv transplanting dry plants.

Daphne
Tacoma

Reports here sure vary on the hybrid almonds, there is of course more than one almond tree sold as a hybrid almond but the predominant one, 'Hall's Hardy' does not have a consistent profile just by itself. Supposedly its partly-peach-pit-nuts are bitter and must be processed, yet I have eaten raw ones from more than one tree acquired as this cultivar and found them quite agreeable.

Raintree Nursery, Morton, WA may have the biggest living specimen I have seen myself. The one the squirrels were going for has since died. In 1993 it measured 29 ft. by 3 ft. 10. in. (crown height by stem circumference). It was assumed to be 'Hall's Hardy' but not verified. Another, curiously tightly double-flowered tree seen in Seattle, probably not much good for nuts was 30 ft. by 5 ft. 10 in. in 1992. Both examples were recorded by Van Pelt, CHAMPION TREES OF WASHINGTON STATE (Washington, 1996). The second one may no longer exist either, as I do not see it mentioned in Jacobson, TREES OF SEATTLE - SECOND EDITION (2006).

Interesting, Ron. I like the pink spring bloom. I have Hall's and another one I believe is Titan from Raintree. My third tree is a little removed and didn't set nuts so I wonder if it needs a tree closer for pollination. But it is the youngest. I'm really impressed that they don't get peach leaf curl as it is the bane of my peach trees' existence or lack thereof. #2 and #3 are about to fade away like #1. Indian Free doesn't actually seem bothered by PLC but dies off on the ground end so the live foliage gets higher and higher. I'm giving up on peaches as well as cherries and plums, and going for the mulberries. I'm strictly no-spray so plants either make it or don't in my garden.

Stone fruits in general best on warm, sunny sites with good air and soil drainage. Near the top of a south-facing hill, with no larger trees casting big shadows over the planting site would probably be about perfect for most.

Grant, thanks for asking about my patio back on the 14th. It's of random-shaped stone on top of quarter-minus crushed rock. Really it was not heavy enough work to require 7 people, so we finished fast and spent the afternoon BBQing. :-)

Next I plan to put in some boulders along the foot of a slope and am completely daunted by 1) delivery price from Marenakos and alternatively 2) how to move them to my site from curbside if I am able to borrow a truck and trailer and 3) how many rocks this hypothetical trailer could haul anyway. Has anyone done DIY projects with one- and two-man rocks? How didja move the things?

Fran

I generally let someone else mess about with the transport and siting of heavy materials, but being the scrounger I am, I did take advantage of acquiring part of a rock wall that was being dismantled for new construction. The guys doing the clearing and site prep very kindly loaded the 7 boulders into the bed of my old 3/4 ton pick up for me, but I had to unload them and move them into place :-) Rolling them out of the pick up was relatively easy with a long pry bar - it required the borrowing of a heavy duty ball cart from my nursery (used for moving large trees) to schlepp them into place. A few extra sets of hands attached to some beefy muscle finalized placement.

This worked OK for the placement of a few decorative 1-man boulders here and there. 2-man rocks might have been a different story and using either of them to build a wall would have been out of the question without heavy machinery.

FWIW, Marenakos is considered rather upscale in the rock world - have you investigated possibly less expensive sources? American Stone in Smokey Point, Alpine Rockeries in Woodinville, perhaps even Lakeview Stone in the U district (although I suspect they are on par with Marenakos).

Another potential deer strategy is stringing monofilament ("fishing") line between your bamboo stakes. This was suggested to me - the claim is that the deer don't like being touched by something they can't see.

I did this around a rugosa hedge planted in a high-exposure area and thought it worked really well. But I now believe that "our" deer just don't like rugosas. Oh well - it might still be worth a try.

As bboy says - watering and weeding. Last weekend was dedicated to the fight to reclaim large portions of the yard from blackberries and other nasty berry vines, nettles, baby alders and maples. I think the berry vines that creep along the ground are actually worse than the big octopus canes. After two years of this I am making visible progress.

Meanwhile the majority of the yard around the house is still a construction zone. Dirt work is supposed to be accomplished in the next couple of weeks. I can't wait! Roses - Teasing Georgia, Coquette des Blanches, Souvenier de la Malmaison and Rose-Marie are on standby waiting for their new homes. A couple of Madame Alfred Carriere's are waiting for their trellis/privacy screen to be built. And there's still a few dug up before construction began waiting to go back into the ground.

This past weekend I finished the new patio by filling the cracks between the stones with extra crushed rock. I like to sit on a low seat in the garden, so I made mini-benches with extra stone slabs and inexpensive pavers stacked 2 deep to hold them up. This made a decent-looking, easily disassembled low garden seat. I'm looking forward to planting around the patio and/or in containers for it.

Gardengal48, thanks so much for the tips on sources. Lakeview and Marenakos prices are similar for stone but LV is way cheaper to deliver within Seattle; had not heard of the other two you mentioned so I'll check them.

The last couple days I went after 7 webworm nests, some really high in trees. One was too high so we taped a knife with projections onto a sailboat mast and my DH climbed up the ladder and rotated the knife in the last one I couldn't get, and pulled a bunch of webworms down. Yeah! Hopefully there won't be so many next year. One year before I hunted them aggressively and didn't have any more for several years until last year when there was a high nest and I didn't go after it.:-(

I wouldn't mind a small stone patio in my next garden area I'm developing. What do you do to set up for placing the stone? Do you use any weed barrier? Excavate the depth of the stone?

There are lots of good books on building patios. Basically we excavated 2" deeper than the thickness of the stone, leveled it as much as possible and tamped it. Then put in weed cloth and edging (plastic benderboard with stakes). Fill in with 2" of crushed rock, level and tamp, put the stones on, fill the cracks with more crushed rock.

Leveling the original excavation reasonably well is the hard part.

The past 2 weekends we have spent re-building 4 beds with nursery stone and moving in a load of gravel for walkways. I had never been real happy with the way they looked, but I really like it now. Actually most of the summer our backyard has been under construction-rebuilding the fence, moving the pond, moving the arbor, moving plants, etc. Sunday took a trip to Flower World to "just look". A car full of plants later had me planting on Monday. Lots of watering. Chasing Mr. Mole. Moved a Rose of Sharon bush (that was fun).

That's about it.