🍀 🥾🍀 March Backyard Garden Tour

[Music] [Music] well i've said it often enough whenever you go out into your garden have a pair of snips or pruners with you because you're never gonna you never know when you're gonna have to deadhead something and right now these baskets look absolutely glorious i planted them last fall but look at them now they're just really beautiful combinations stuart is not nodding his head a beautiful combination of edibles white pansies some kale that's about to flower i think they really look spectacular the hyacinths that i planted last fall though are about past their prime so i'm snipping away some of those blooms so let's do a walkabout on a saturday so that you can kind of see what's going on in my garden if you've got things that are coming up in your garden that are looking beautiful right now or about to pop please comment below let us know where you are from because it's so fun to contrast where my garden is in comparison to yours depending on our respective gardening zones so i've got my snips in hand and i've done a lot of cleanup this morning you guys i still need to do a lot more seed planting and work in the protege pruning but what i concentrated on today was taking out a bunch of dead plants now here's my philosophy on that um i talked before about the difficulty sometimes in knowing whether something is pretending dead or it's you're not sure it's dead or it's really dead and do you have the patience and not to wait or not well right now when stuff is starting to look really pretty i don't want to wait for that brown dead stuff to tell me whether it's alive or not the other reason i'm gonna and so that makes me think i'm just gonna go ahead and pull some of those out and put something else new in or this year i may not replace it with anything simply because i want to reduce maybe some of the container plantings i i have now i heard you just gasp last year i had so many but last year during the pandemic it was more of a hobby garden i don't have a greenhouse so i was experimenting with a lot of different things a lot of different plantings but this year i am going to have people back in my garden and so i want it to look more beautifully staged and i don't want things to be look too busy and too distracting so you'll see some empty pots here and it was no small amount of work to just pull out the dead stuff so i will touch base with you guys again to let you know what i have decided to put in these empty pots um urns hanging baskets and things but for right now they're just empty and that makes me feel a little bit more under control like i i've at least got a game plan because there's still a lot of other brown stuff now stuart if you can point up you can see that the redbud trees these are our eastern redbud trees they're native to oklahoma and i planted all of these as babies some of them maybe about 15 years ago and they really took a hit in the ice storm but they were still beautiful enough to create that ceiling effect that i wanted and pretty soon this is going to be just completely covered in those gorgeous pink blooms now if you've got guys have watched me for any length of time you know i'm always complaining about the power lines and a lot of you have commented well why don't you just bury the the power lines well that's really not an option this is a 1930s neighborhood in newer neighborhoods the power lines are buried but it would be horrifically expensive if not impossible to bury the power lines stewart if you could turn around i'm going to show you all my uglies now pretty soon that large power pole will be covered in green and you really won't see it but you can imagine the difficulty there would be in trying to bury all of those power lines so right now that's not a possibility and i just have to do what i can in a safe way and in a responsible way to obscure the power lines so there's the answer kind of to that question now i've started pruning some of these boxwood balls that have brown on them i've pruned them once and then obviously i'll prune them again to reduce the amount of brown the brown tips it's interesting to me the different micro climates that are just in my small my small garden and which things got really zapped and which ones did not but i'll keep doing that over the season by the end of the season most of these will be just fine now let's talk a little bit about one of my favorite spring bulbs luca gem look at these sweet little snowflake flowers are those not the dearest things they they kind of hang down in a bell-like fashion they remind me of dotted swiss they come back every year they are as sweet as can be and i've got a lot of them here's a clump here and stuart if you don't mind panning over to the clump by the bench and i've got clumps in the front and the backyard pretty much all over the place they're very very dear they make a sweet cut flower and they are what i like about them is their subtlety they're very innocent and demure they they're not in your face at all they don't scream at you they whisper at you and i love that about them um and speaking of screaming and whispering you guys have commented a lot and have told stewart that he needs to redo the animation that no more snowfall in in the introductory animation so he's gonna work on that aren't you stuart okay now let's talk hydrangeas this is a huge stand of hydrangeas and this is such a frequent problem you guys because they have these old dead looking canes and you really this time of year it is so helpful to know whether or not your hydrangeas bloom on new wood or they bloom on old wood so pretty much all of these on on this side a little bit further south all of these bloom on old wood so i am not going to cut them back in hopes that they will set out buds up the cane which takes a little bit longer time for them to reach to that point but i don't want to cut them off prematurely because that's where the flowers are if i cut the canes off i'm cutting away the flowers now these may very well have gotten zapped in that arctic blast that we had and if they did then in a few weeks i'll know that and then i can cut them down but if you've got hydrangeas in your garden and if you have a gardener that helps take care of things i've gotten so many heart sick emails from people because their yard worker or their wife or their husband has cut them back prematurely so you don't want to do that but you can see that at the base there's lots of new growth that's coming up so the plants are still alive hopefully at least some of them will bloom but that kind of remains to be seen now those that bloom on new wood over here this is an annabelle and this one here here's a perfect example stuart can you show see the green that's coming out of that tip that's what you don't want to cut off on those that bloom on old wood now this blooms on new wood right get that in the right place stewart this blooms on new wood so i can cut this back harder if i want to and it will bloom regardless of my pruning so it's always good to know what type of hydrangea you have there aren't in the nurseries right now there are fewer and fewer of the old-fashioned varieties most of them because of our wacky weather they're now selling the ones that bloom on new wood the southern living plant collection has some endless summer you've probably seen there are a number of different varieties it will tell you on the care tag um whether or not they will re-bloom and if and how to prune them so that's that's one thing there stuart if you can kind of look in the distance you can see all those sweet little snowflakes bowing their little heads their sweet little heads in the breeze over there above those sweet little heads is a smaller chinese snowball viburnum and pretty soon it will put out tiny little lime green blooms and those are the ones that we're used to seeing in flower arrangements and from the florist now to every bad thing i guess there's compensation in the garden so even though the trees took a hit and there won't be as many beautiful arching branches nevertheless now that will get more light and i anticipate that its bloom will be heavier and it will also reach a more mature size it will get a little bit larger so that is one positive side of the downside of the ice storm now come over here if you can stuart and i've got this area is getting ready to be cleaned up but see all of these sweet little hyacinths and i've got a number of spent daffodils in here i'm going to deadhead those and by the way once they're past their prime i i just leave them to brown i don't you know do any of this and braid them i just let them go they brown and then they'll come back next year all of these hyacinths that you see blooming in here started out like this and you've seen recently how i bought some of these at trader joe's and i enjoy them in the house because they smell wonderful but once they are spent then what i do is i just come and plant them out here in this in this garden and you can do that with small daffodils with these little daffodils and you can do it with hyacinths but it doesn't really work with tulips they just resent coming back so if you like me bought some of these to use inside the house because they were just too dear to resist then once they're done you can plant them in the ground and they come back pretty reliably and look here i did the same thing with some muscari or some grape hyacinths that i also bought in a pot and i just kind of plucked them out here and you can see that they came back too and they might naturalize a little bit they might not but it's it's i feel like i'm getting my money's worth out of them so let's move back out into the garden now and it's nobody out here but me the squirrels the bees and actually stewart's mom is here today too so if you hear leaf crunching in the background she's our audience hey susu so she's our audience today okay in previous years stuart if you would do a slow pan of the backyard in previous years there would be a solid green backdrop of nandina that now are nothing but brown canes typically nandina for me are evergreen but the winter was so hard that even though they're alive they very much turned brown and dead looking so this will be a good rejuvenation year so i'm just cutting some of them back some of them harder than others in no time at all they will flush out and that green backdrop will exist again but for right now it's a little bit barren but in some ways it's it's not a distraction and it gives me a little bit more clarity about what's in the foreground so that's that's kind of helpful all of these guys that you see here all this pretty funny stuff this is all larkspur that has gone to seed it does that very easily it will bloom in this spot and then once it's finished i'll let a little bit of it go to seed and then i'll pull it up this sweet little blooming thing right here is a nefarious little creature because i planted it uh let me think what is its name but i planted it thinking it would do just this and it did but it does just this um it really has turned into a thug and it self-seeds everywhere i saw it at the dallas uh botanical gardens it's maizus reptons that's the name mesus reptons and i saw it at the dallas botanical gardens and it was used beautifully but now i just think it it just kind of takes over and it has a tendency towards spider mite in the summer so actually now i'm trying to kill it out i planted it intentionally and now i'm trying to kill it out so in my garden it's one of those things i should not have planted the oak leaf hydrangeas in the back here look at this they're putting out this is maybe the most reliable blooming shrub you can plant in your garden it's already starting to put out that foamy green new foliage that is just simply beautiful and then it will put out those white really gorgeous pendulous blooms and this holly that's in here it needs a little bit of pruning the standard holly i pruned it up that way that was planted by the birds a number of years ago and i just let it i just let it grow and it gives me nice winter interest with all of these beautiful peeling branches of the oak leaf hydrangeas that surround it so now let's come back out this way i had two hollies in these pots flanking the office doors and they were beautiful and they were beautiful for years but this year they turned completely brown i could have waited to see if they would flush back out and put out new growth but i just decided i didn't want to wait that long so i think i'm going to put something else in here and i'm not exactly sure what but it will probably be something kind of upright and conical i'll show you that next time now be careful backing up stuart so i've taken all of my smaller boxwoods what i think of as my boxwood theater they were kind of under leafy clutter leafy mulch to help protect them through the winter cold and actually they came through i think with pretty pretty much flying colors i need to prune them and trim on them a little bit if you want to do the same i love the look of just boxwood in repetition in standard form or just in little ball form and if you want to get that same look then you can just let's see i got this at lowe's for 998 green mountain boxwood one of my favorite varieties this is almost in a ball shape form already and you could easily clip this into a topiary form so i'm still basically i'm in the process of removing all of the dead so that i can stage it the way i want it and start introducing color so all this area over here is is basically in a state of flux i'm getting ready to plant a dwarf bonfire peach in this urn here because this year my kind of thematic for 2021 is to have an edible landscape using as many edibles as i can and this viburnum is starting to to bud out behind it so it will be a pretty green backdrop for these pink flowers pink and white flowers when they come out i love they don't last long but i really love the flowers that come out in spring on fruit trees on shrubs on everything they're very delicate they're sweet they like i say they're they're ephemeral they don't last really long either a cold snap or the wind or the heat will get them but nevertheless it's that very transient nature that i think makes us love them even more so i've got to fill all of these pots and i will do that now a lot of you asked because you'd seen it in a previous video last time you saw these these were a really deep orange and deep red and this is a combination of golden barberry and orange rocket barberry the orange rocket is from the southern living plant collection i'm getting ready to cut these back some but look how sweet and delicate albeit a little prickly not real prickly but how sweet and delicate and look it matches my coat exactly this would be these little stems would be so sweet in a flower arrangement i might have to do that this weekend with what a thrifted find but these are just really really beautiful they are tough um some of you have asked are they invasive in in my area they are not invasive in my area at all there aren't a lot of things in oklahoma that are going to be invasive there's a few but not a lot of shrubs simply because it's so arid and dry here but for us these make a wonderful they're obviously deer uh deer repellent they um are deer resistant they are just they can really handle the heat and i love the kind of delicate appearance of them this time of year and back behind them i have all sorts of white wedding hydrangeas that are getting ready they're putting out leafy foliage now and then they will have huge white blooms later on so again more pots that i have to figure out what i'm gonna do with uh i'm starting to trim back now i think it's pretty safe in zone 7b to start pruning your evergreens so i'm definitely doing some of that there's more barberry over here it amazes me that we had a minus 13 degree practically a week of it and still things insect life survived and the most of the insect life i've seen so far has been the kind i don't want those little cabbage moths that are fluttering around everywhere this with julia will come out in gold and bloom in pink and stuart we need to remember to put up some images of what it looks like when they come into full bloom and then we cut back yesterday all of the backdrop of the nandinas and all of this stuff in the foreground is starting to come out so this is a wonderful this is a cotonester and it has this really pendulous quality about it i it's great if you are if you're gardening on a slope and you need something to prevent erosion and to kind of cascade down the slope this would be a wonderful solution to that problem so this is a cotonester and then there's some other things back in there i've got some big clumps of naked ladies that jut out their foliage in the spring and then they won't bloom until later in the summer when you've all but forgotten that they're even there and then pretty soon the most frequently commented plant in my garden is the chinese snowball viburnum and this is the absolute most beautiful focal point i can have from my kitchen window this will just be filled with lime green orbs that will then turn a gorgeous white and you can see the pollinators love it and it's really beautiful and i have limbed it up into a tree form it started out i've said this many times as an 11 shrub from lowe's and i pruned it up this way to look like a small tree and you can do that too it started out about that size and i would say this is now about 10 years old so one trick to get it big this quickly is i have a dedicated i don't know if you can see it but there's a dedicated dedicated sprinkler head right at the base of it so i provide it with drip irrigation so it gets reliable watering and then i also had lots of restoration work done on the fence we had to take down a section of the fence put the lattice work back up so all of those things needed to be done in the time of year when it would not infringe on any of the things that were blooming in the foreground so stuart if you want to look back towards the house you can see that's my kitchen window there and you can see that it's just a straight shot to this absolutely gorgeous viburnum normally by now there would already be lots of leaves even starting to spit out a few pink flowers on this climbing old blush rose but it had to start all over again after that freeze and so i've got a little bit of trimming that i need to do on this but i've got other projects going remember we're going to do our bucket brigade plantings here so i'm getting ready for that to shoot that here's a tip you guys if you want to fill up the bottom of a bucket or a container or whatever you know sometimes you've heard about using styrofoam peanuts or things like that i have found a brilliant solution are these corrugated egg containers i just leave the leave the eggshells in there put them at the bottom it breaks down over time i can put the dirt on top of that and i did put some drainage holes in those buckets so i'll talk about that when we work on that project i'm still waiting to see if this distillium is going to come out or not i'm not sure but i pulled out and pulled up as many things in the backyard or in the front yard as i did in the backyard so there's lots going on stuff is starting to happen folks let me know what's happening in your neck of the woods make sure to tell me what zone you garden in and by all means uh feel free to comment on anybody else's comments if they have a question if they garden in a zone that i don't garden in and you know the answer we're trying to build a helpful community here so you guys just respond to one another i so appreciate you guys answering each other's questions because i am just a pretend gardener i'm just an amateur i've been doing it for a long time but i like you just learn as i go and even though i've been doing it for 30 years i continue to learn more each year and a lot of it is from you so thanks for hanging out with me in my garden and i'll see you later again this weekend

Channel: Linda Vater

Views: 85,757

Keywords: potagerblog, Linda Vader, garden life, garden designer, garden landscape design, garden design, garden media, gardening, Linda Vater, southern gardening, thrifting, Garden Answer, boxwood, topiary, garden tour, evergreens, favorite plants, garden center, Oklahoma gardening, garden, lifestyle tips, garden lifestyle

Id: bq0pcXWtyrk

Length: 25min 39sec (1539 seconds)

Published: Sat Mar 20 2021