Jon's Home Blog » Planting Beds

Painting and Yardwork in 92 degree heat

JonC — Sat, 10 Jul 2010 02:13:10 +0000

Wow, today was a scorcher once again, it’s been pretty warm out lately but that didn’t stop work from proceeding on painting the house and doing some yard work.

Fridays are half day for me and it feels like we worked all day on some of these projects. We’ve been slowly scraping and priming the back side of the house. The paint on the house is not that old but was not applied very well and it’s starting to peel and chip, additionally there are cracks between the slats of the wood. I’m sure the house could use a nice vinyl siding job or something, but paint and caulk are much cheaper for now.

A while ago I scraped, caulked and primed the lower 8 feet of the wall which you can see in the picture and today we scraped another section and began to caulk any gaps and cracks between the siding. Tomorrow I’m going to try go get further up the wall, then caulk it and we’ll put some more primer on.

I’m using a bonding primer from Valspar and it works pretty good. It’s very thick and covers up spots, wood grain and stains very well.

Bryn started scraping out the planting beds today as well and managed to strike and ants nest in the process and got swarmed. Ah natures aerators and largest annoyance in the yard. At least for now they’re staying mostly in the yard! Once the planter is all cleared out of the weeds and such we’re going to put some landscape fabric down and to try and prevent weeds from taking root. then insert a few flowering plants before mulching. Colorful flowers are nice but they’re so high maintenance to keep the weeds and such out of the area it seems like more trouble than it’s maybe worth.

Repainting the house

Some New Flowers Popped Up – They are Platycodon Grandiflorus

JonC — Wed, 08 Jul 2009 03:54:31 +0000

Some new flowers have popped up in the yard, they’re pretty neat looking and purplish in color with dark bluish veins through the petals. The flower has 5 points and the petals are all one piece, not individual petals. The middle of the flower is white with a blue bulb at the tip. I managed to catch these flowers while mid-bloom, so some of them are still closed, and their shape is also pretty interesting when closed. They look like a puffed up 5 sided star. Apparently they usually bloom with 5 ‘petals’ but for some reason oen of them has 7 points.

After doing some searching I’ve found that these flowers are a ‘Balloon Flower’ or ‘ Chinese/Japanese Bellflower’ or more specifically Platycodon grandiflorus, they come in a varietty of colors. There are a lot more buds on these plants and I’m hoping that they will all bloom, it will look really nice.

Budding Plant with Ants Identified

JonC — Mon, 25 May 2009 17:09:20 +0000

I did a bit more searching to find out what the plant in the below picture is as I have a couple of them in the front planter. According to the info I could find they are called Peonies and the ants just like the sugar and stuff that comes off the buds. I’m not sure how long it will be before these bloom, but the flowers are supposed to look pretty great.

These plants only have a few blooms each, but I guess as they get older and if they’re fed properly they will get more blooms. The front planter is quite crowded with many types of plants so we may try to transplant them over into mom’s planter once the season is through. The leaves drop and the stems need trimming each year. They’re also very hungry plants, and I think with the crowding they’ll just choke the current planter out. Plant density is HIGH with about 6 or 7 different things growing in there. Though I must say when the snow finally melted this year, there was nothing left on top of the planter and all this growth just came through. I’ll probably leave a major portion of the stem and try to get as much of the root ball as possible.

I also want to renovate the planter and make it ‘right’ after we put in the new concrete sidewalk in front of the house and do some work on the front porch.

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Cleaning out Flower Beds

JonC — Mon, 20 Apr 2009 03:26:25 +0000

The planting beds were in serious need of help. They had both been overgrown with weeds, moss and other things. We raked them both out and picked out rocks, etc. They will probably need to be weeded in a week or two though since you never get everything with just a rake. The narrow and long planting bed is going to be for herbs and veggies so we wanted to avoid putting in to many chemicals to kill things. The round shaped one is the stuff I’m growing for Mom so she can follow along with things at the house and have a part in it

This planter area is going to be used for herbs and veggies.

This planter is going to be used for Mom's surprise.

Another angle of Mom's Planter aka 'Mom's Sunshine Garden'