rosemary – every day's just like starting over

My poor little garden…it went all wonky while we were on our backpacking trip. The succulent with the pink flowers croaked completely, and two of my lavenders lost half of their plants.

I think the Hubs may have overwatered them while we were gone. It got very hot and he probably just thought he should douse all the plants every day, but the lavender and succulents don’t need that much water. I cut out all the dead stems from the lavender plants – the ones that are left on the French lavender actually have some new growth on them so I left them to see what would happen. And actually, last year the lavender plants did the same thing. I will definitely not water them much in the coming weeks so they can dry out and sort of get back to normal.

The rosemary and rosebush, however, both look very healthy and happy. I will be buying a new succulent plant this week for the top of the strawberry pot.

In the meantime, though, I will share with you this wonderful concrete statue I got at the estate sale last week!

My little bear – please ignore the dandelion farm.

Isn’t he adorable? He weighs about 300 pounds, ha. The Hubs says he will never move it again! I think Little Bear adds a lot to our patio area.

I’ll update again when I get the new succulent plant for the strawberry pot. The other succulents and the thyme plants are doing great in the pot, so I hope a new succulent will grow happily there.

At our house, the Hubs and the Girl are in charge of the vegetable garden, and the Hubs is in charge (very reluctantly) of doing most of the yard work, since I am allergic. My part is a container garden of herbs on a little corner of the patio. I can almost always remember to water my happy plants and for the past couple of years they have been growing pretty well. Today I got my new succulent plants put in, and they will be a nice addition to the space.

As mentioned in prior posts I decided to plant some succulents in a strawberry pot, and after cleaning and disinfecting the pot yesterday, today I got to work getting the plants in.

First I mixed two bags of Miracle Gro Cactus, Palm, and Citrus Mix and about 2/3 of a bag of Perlite together in the wheelbarrow. I started by filling the strawberry pot with about 2 inches of sand, hoping that will help with drainage since I don’t have any good gravel or pottery shards to put in the bottom. Then I used a red Solo cup to scoop the soil into the pot, because that was one of the few scoop-shaped thingies I had in the house.

As I went along, I pushed soil into the little “mini-pots” around the sides of the pot. When it was full, I planted the large, pink-flowering succulent in the top. This plant was just labeled “hen and chicks”, but it is quite different from the ones I usually think of as the hen and chick variety.

The flowering succulent in the top of the pot.

After planting the largest plant, I put thyme plants in two of the “mini-pots”. The rest of the hen and chick plants came last, and I squeezed them in the spaces as best I could. I am a little concerned because they were all sitting in very wet soil in the pots they came in from the store. And I hope they don’t fall out of their “mini-pots” before they take root! Below you can see the finished product, and how it looks with the rest of my garden.

My little garden – not much to look at but easy care and smells awesome

My silver Spanish lavender is a great bee-attractor right now, so I put a little bee waterer in the pink lavender plant in case the bees get thirsty. The bees living here in the Pacific Northwest are probably not having problems finding water right now, but this will be nice for them if it ever gets hot this summer. The other plants are a French lavender (lavender is my favorite!), a Tuscan Blue rosemary which I just repotted into a much bigger pot (I am anxiously waiting for it to do something spectacular), and a mini rosebush the Girl gave me for Mother’s Day last year. It is going great guns even though it was drowning all winter long! The Dr. Seuss-y plant with the pink pom-pom is a Dreamland Armeria. All the plants like full sun and don’t need a lot of water, and that works great for my little corner.

So, will the succulents survive and thrive? Stay tuned for later reports!