The flowers look great! The weather here has been awful since early May. Unfortunately none of my plants are suited for a temperate rainforest, so nothing is doing well. I’m afraid this year is going to be disappointing for the second year in a row. We’ll see.
Yeah. Weather here has been a write-off too. This year I’ve just focused on cooking herbs hanging off the deck railing. Expanded a bit this year to include a few I normally don’t grow, like bay leaf and tarragon.
Yeah, my main gardens are a wash, too. I have lots of pots of starts that are still in their little pot, hanging in for dear life. The stuff I did plant in the veggie patch got overrun with weeds and are choked out. I am managing to keep my herbs on the kitchen level deck thriving but everything else is too much effort now. I pulled weeds along the driveway and put straw around my strawberries this morning. I'm totally spent.
Below is my yard almost exactly two years ago. The first step in getting to where we are was the french drain, and getting the property where it would handle these spring storms or hurricanes. You can see the trench I was in the middle of digging. My raised beds also have a perforated, filter-covered pipe under the lowest of the sections. It comes out under the deck and flows about 10 feet to the main french drain. They drain well in the storms, when it may dump an inch of rain in an hour. Yet, they hold enough moisture for the times the rains don't come. Before I fixed my drainage issues, it was hit or miss if any plants would live, and grass seed would just be washed away. Those exact same plants in the first pick, they looked like garbage two years ago. We get the same storms, but the plants and lawn aren't taking near the beating they used to, because the drain catches it and sends it to the ditch out front.
For perennial things like this, do you just cut them all the way back in the fall and keep the pots inside, or do you just leave them out all winter and hope they bounce back in the spring?
Perennial means it will come back in that environment through winter. Various plants have different growth zones, so check that your zone is within that particular perennials zone. I saw some wonderful pollinator plants in SoCal that are perennials... But not in my zone. They would die in the winter. In theory I could bring them Inside or something to baby them in the extreme temps but thats a lot of effort that I'm not interested in. I leave my pots outside. I also don't do tidy gardening where everything gets cut back in the fall/end of the growing season. By leaving excess foliage and branches in place, plants are naturally insulated and fare much better in bouncing back. It also helps your pollinators have places to hide. Thyme gets a little woody and can be slow to come back at first but gains momentum. The baby plants have gotten huge compared to the mother plant. I'm interested to see what they do next spring after a winter.
Two neighbor's to the north and one to the south, and us, all have our maximum allowed number of reefer plants. The neighbors directly north don't live here full time, but we just take care of their plants for them.
This was just some random seed that was tossed in a pot. I have 7-8 good seeds that maybe I'll plant next year.