End of the Month View: One More Path...

Pergola Garden with our new pea gravel walk this week.

Our new Pergola Garden (so called for the invisible pergola... see it on the plan) was in need of some major changes with the walks in order to accommodate my new gardens. In July, I posted photos of this garden with just the hedges in place. We had a friend volunteer to come over and show my husband how to manually remove the sidewalks by using sledge hammers and wood jacks, which worked like a charm. Amazingly, he removed the long curve from the large yew bushes in a week... see below to compare.

Mow Those Leaves!

My husband mulching leaves our in the woodland.

For all of those gardeners who have wondered, "What can I do with all of my leaves besides send them to the landfill or municipality?"

It should be obvious that it is the leaf litter in the forest that helps to supports growth of shade plants. But less known is that there is also a lot of new research that shows how leaves also benefit you lawn. For more explanation of this method, see my old post on mowing your leaves in fall.

Havenwood ~ GBBD October 2014

Native asters, Doellingeria umbellata, flowering away at our new garden this autumn.

Welcome to my new garden in Pennsylvania, zone 5 for the autumn!

I have been hard at work this year to put in many new garden area according to my garden master plan (see it here). Before getting to bulb planting yesterday, I took a walk around to capture some of the little fall flowers that are already blooming away here at Havenwood...

Projects Around Havenwood

Filling in the lily pond for the year...

Autumn is in full swing in Pennsylvania... the last of my children's soccer games are on this Saturday, the leaves are all looking a bit less green and more yellow, there is an urgent need to get some garden pots washed and stacked before snow is here, and we have had our first light frost so the counter is stacked high with green tomatoes and tiny watermelon that might be worth a bite or two.

Bulbs are going in at a terrific rate around here, with 100 per day as my goal. We had 2,500 on our order this year, as I am excited to get many different varieties naturalizing around Havenwood. Only the tulips will remain to be planted after today, which need to wait until the ground temperatures become lower (after a hard frost) to discourage early growth before spring. I did chose many of the varieties that I posted on my How to Chose a Tulip Combination post.