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| Harebell has been blooming all summer |
As I mentioned last time, I didn't expect to do more work on this area until fall - but I've anticipated fall by a few weeks.
After a hot dry August, the poppies and other wildflowers growing across the bottom of the hill were done, so I decided to go ahead and dig them all up. This bottom strip had mulch and other organic material piled up, but I had to dig under it to remove the old landscape fabric. Now it seems so flattened, but the hillside is back to it's normal gradual slope at the bottom leading into very steep at the top. I did this work last week before the rains, so I was coated in dust!
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| Looking northwest |
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| Looking southwest |
I planted three new coneflowers, two echinacea purpurea 'Pow Wow Wild Berry' and one echinacea 'Double Scoop Cranberry'. The sale section at local hardware stores is nice late in the summer!
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| Pow Wow Wild Berry coneflower |
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| Double Scoop Cranberry coneflower |
I also moved two penstemon that were below the hot lips salvia, one is a Rocky Mountain, the other was the unknown variety. They were getting buried under the lupine, which has grown much larger than I expected (and is now suffering from powdery mildew, but I think that's fairly normal for lupine here).
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| Enthusiastic lupine, done blooming now |
That leaves a lot of bare ground, but I'm waiting until I can get more meadow plants to see how far up the slope I want to plant them. I've been growing Oregon stonecrop offshoots in pots so some of those will end up here too.
Everything else is growing well and the raspberries have gone crazy, I'm picking a lot more than I expected for the first summer. They need wires, but first I have to drill holes for the fence posts. No pictures of the raspberries, apparently I forgot to take any on that side of the hill.
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| Red satin coreopsis |
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| Thrift |
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| Yarrow, reblooming |
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| Hot lips salvia has bloomed all summer |
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| Oregon stonecrop and wild strawberries |
I like how the rock stream is turning out, need to plant the lower section and then I want to extend it across the flat below the slope as plants instead of rocks. Maybe a stream of native lupines growing across the meadow that I'm working on plating down there (thus the plastic visible in some of these pictures).
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| Rock stream growing in |
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| New section of rock stream to plant |
The grapes above the slope are also growing wildly, they're providing quite a bit more shade than expected over the top of the slope. They'll be pruned more aggressively next year, and I have plans to re-do the grape trellis to move it slightly back from the slope.
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| Aggressive grapes visible on the right |
Now I just need to keep the weeds under control until some of my plants get bigger!
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