Mid-Summer Gardening: A Check In

As promised, I am updating you all on the traveling home adventure of restoring my mother-in-law’s flower garden. I’ll be honest, I was skeptical that it would be successful. Lavender is very fussy and it was absurdly hot the day I did my heavy pruning. Both activities cause a LOT of stress on plants and they might just give up the ghost right then and there. If you haven’t seen the state of the garden before I got started, check out my first post here. Mid-summer gardening can be full of weed-pulling, so I braced myself for a boring visit.

At First Glance

I was so nervous when I pulled in. My spouse had been by the house a week or two earlier to mow and he said things “didn’t look dead” but that wasn’t a very helpful description.

The Bloody Cranes-bill (a type of geranium) was in full bloom and had already spread quite a lot since I was last in the garden. I hate to pull healthy plants, but I absolutely needed to in this case. I did grab some for myself to transport back home. You can see the before and after below of how much the geraniums had grown and spread. I took the right-hand photo from behind the retaining wall you see in the left-hand photo.

I was pleasantly surprised by the progress of the lavender. So much so, I did a little dance and cheer! Not only had they not died, I saw evidence of new growth and flowers starting to grow up from the shrub.

The shrubs were still wonky-shaped from years of competing for sunlight. My goal is to give them another haircut after all the new growth has been established and eventually remove all of the crooked part s of the plant. Eventually, these beauties will be back to fighting shape

Where I left Things

I didn’t have as much time to work in the garden this time around. I went through and did a quick weeding and clean-up. I snagged some peonies or my garden as well. I’m going to take a look in again sometime in early fall and get things ready for the winter.

To be continued…

As I mentioned, I plan to give it another clean up before winter. My hope is that it will be ready to be put to bed with minimal effort, since I can’t be sure when I will be back in later fall. Stay tuned!