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| My un-Shaker garden this morning. |
As
promised a couple of months ago, here is a report on the second un-Shaker
garden. I’m really not much of a flower gardener, but I knew I wanted more pollinators
for my vegetables (an appropriate Shaker sentiment). In May 2017, I pulled up
the sod along the southern edge of my vegetable garden, laid in some good soil,
and planted a mixed pack of annual and perennial seeds. Being an analytical weirdo
sometimes, several months earlier, I had sorted the pack of seeds by type and started
samples of each to see what would grow. So, I had some seedling started to
plant along with the random scattering of seeds.
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| The brand new flower bed in 2017. |
By
July, it was a lovely mess of flowers of all different colors.
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| July 2017 |
And
it was bringing in pollinators too!
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| Butterfly! |
Each
spring, I have tried to weed around the perennials and have scattered in a new
packet of mixed seeds.
This
April, I cuffed the flower bed around again and it is still going strong. The Sweet
William seems to particularly like it there.
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| Garden post-cuffing, April 2020 |
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| Sweet William |
There
is one pink echinacea that has been struggling in the bed for the last few
years. Our resident deer will swing by periodically and nip off most of the
leaves. But it is still trying and I hope to see it blossom this year again.
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| They eat my plants but I love them anyway! |
