Garden Maintenance after Damaging Storms & Extreme Heat + Planting More Hydrangeas!

Good morning, friends. How's everyone doing today? Grace and I are out here in the garden and we're going to put in an hour and a half of garden maintenance. I decided to try something different. I just turned my camera on and didn't stop recording for an hour and a half. And so you're going to see some real life garden maintenance over the course of 90 minutes out in a very hot and humid Pennsylvania garden. So have you been having this crazy heat wave of where you live? We have been in the 100s for about two weeks. And the last two days, we had a really crazy destructive storms come through. And I'll show you some of the damage from neighboring trees that came down onto our property over the last few days. And so because of the heat, the humidity and the storms, I haven't been out in the garden for probably about two weeks. And so we have lots of garden maintenance to catch up on. And sometimes that can feel really overwhelming. Do you feel like that this time of year? I rarely feel like this in the spring or early summer. But once we have midsummer when the heat and humidity is high, the mosquitoes are here. And as you can see, the grass has perished yet again. Sometimes I really have to push myself to get back out there, clean things up. But you know, at the end of the day, I'll always feel better that I accomplished something out in the garden, even if I was sweating like crazy and getting bitten all over my face while I accomplished it. So let's go ahead and get this garden cleaned up together. This might be one of many videos where we just do a lot of garden maintenance together. But that's what this time of year is really all about, maintaining the garden. So what I've been doing so far is just removing any damaged leaves. Most of these leaves have brown due to the extreme heat that we've had. But this hosta that I'm working on pruning back now has actually started to turn brown because when I planted it over here, it was in part to almost full shade because there was a tree canopy nearby. But time has passed, that tree has come down. And now this area is getting a little bit too much sun for this hosta. So for this year, I'm just pruning the damaged leaves back. And you're also seeing some Japanese beetle damage on the leaves. But I think next year we will have to move this hosta because what was once a part shade to shade area is now basically full sun. Moving over to the hydrangea room, and here comes Grace to say hello and check on us. Let's go ahead and deadhead some rose lilies together. I think we're coming to the end of our lily season. And I'm going to be sharing with you in this video why I have decided to eliminate a lot of the lilies in the driveway garden. So now let's turn our attention to the hydrangea room. We'll pull some weeds here in the corner to get started. And then we'll head into the hydrangea room and clean up some of the bearded irises. We had those beautiful concertina irises in bloom in late May. They're all done. And I cleaned up all of the dead foliage. I'm taking the stems all the way to the ground. And then I'm cutting the leaves back by about a half. I normally wait until September to do this job, but it's so wet over here in the hydrangea room. And the air flow in this garden is quite poor. So I'm going to go ahead and do this job a little bit earlier this year. And the bearded irises will be totally fine with this cut back in late July. Now the great thing about a big garden maintenance day means you have a big wheelbarrow full of green material to add to your compost pile. And I just love composting, don't you? I'm kind of a lazy composter. I just throw everything in a big heap and then wait a few years for it to break down. But there's something really wonderful about taking from the garden and watching it turn from garden waste into garden gold. So I added this incredible hydrangea into the garden in very early spring. And it did not take to that heat wave well. So I'm just going to prune off all the bloom heads. I'm cutting right above a node. And I think we have enough time left in the growing season that we should see at least one more flush of blooms. This Dara plant was on its way out. It had gone to seed. And so before throwing it in the compost pile, I just sprinkled the seed around the garden by shaking the plant where I want it to grow next year. Now let's head into the raised bed garden. And if I'm being completely honest with you, I'm very embarrassed to show you how weedy the raised beds have become. But you know what? I'm going to give myself some grace. I'm going to give myself some time and I'm just going to clean it up gradually day by day. I think it's important too, if you don't really like a gardening job and it's a big job, divide it into sections. So today I'm just going to tackle three raised beds and then I'm going to call it a day and come back out here tomorrow for another hour and a half and tackle another three until the job is done. But sometimes the weeds get out of control. That's okay, it happens. I'm ready to take back these raised beds and I'm still undecided on where I want to plant the floret zinnias. I contemplated planting them right in front of the library, but since zinnias always get powdery mildew in our area, I'm not sure I want them front and center in this garden. Or I'm not sure if I want to have to flip this garden again come late September. Let me know what you think. Should we put them over here or should we put them over in the sunflower bed that we're about to work on? Thankfully, not all of the raised beds have become a complete weedy mess. And in the two beds on the corners where I have a lot of vegetables, things are looking pretty nice. You can see I have a mix of herbs. I have some basil there, boughs of Ireland, and we also have cherry tomatoes, regular tomatoes, peppers, and cucumbers. And so on these corner beds, it's nicer because I mainly just have the grass growing along the sides of the beds. So I was really thankful to kind of get a break from the heavy weeding that happens in those two central beds that I keep flipping over and over again throughout the growing season. So we're about to head over to my bed of sunflowers and I'll overlay some footage of the bird wreaths that I like to make and sell at my flower stand. So these are the Pro Cut Orange sunflowers. I don't think I'll grow this sunflower again. I didn't love it as a cut flower, but I'm utilizing it as a seed head. So this is what I want the sunflower to look like when I'm harvesting it to make our bird sunflower seed wreaths to sell around Christmas time. After dumping the compost, I checked my phone and we were 50 minutes into our garden maintenance day. And at this point, I needed to make a bouquet for my husband to take to work for one of his friends. And I am so incredibly thankful to my loyal customers because they are really getting me through this hot season. I am setting up the flower stand, but not as often as normal. On a normal year, I would be set up every single Saturday, but some of these Saturdays have been a hundred degrees. And so instead of setting up the flower stand on days when it's that hot, I've been selling only by custom order and by request. Now that my husband's off to work, we'll go ahead and move over to the driveway garden. Now I have a new plan for the driveway garden and I have decided to make a significant investment in this garden so that it's low maintenance for me moving forward. Over the years, I have unintentionally made this a very high maintenance garden. It is jam packed, full of bulbs, so many bulbs successions in this garden and so many lily successions that there almost isn't room for anything else. And once all the bulbs are done, and once we hit mid July, we're left with a lot of bare earth that then gets covered in weeds. And then once we hit early spring next year, it becomes a weeding nightmare. Now we're on a corner lot and this is the front corner of the property. This is also the area that's a bus stop. My flower stand is a bus stop. So I have to shut it during the school season four times every single day. But all that to say, I would rather just look at this garden and enjoy it from afar versus be working in this garden nonstop during the growing season. So I've sketched out a plan. It involves lots of hydrangeas in all shapes and sizes and varieties. And today we're going to be planting three little quick fire hydrangeas. I have, I believe, five of these in the garden and I love them. The tag says they get three to five feet tall and wide. And I have one little quick fire in the hydrangea room that I think is about four or five years old. And then behind me, I have three little quick fires that are a year old. And I would say they're all about three and a half to four feet tall and wide, which is a little bit strange because here in my South Central Pennsylvania garden, hydrangeas tend to get bigger than what the tag says. But I just love these shrubs and this is the middle layer of the garden. So here we are pulling out some lily successions. I believe these are the summer wine Asiatic lilies from Longfield Gardens. I do really like these lilies, but once I started growing Royal Sunset, which blooms at about the same time, maybe a week to a week and a half later, I prefer those blooms and I noticed that they sell better. So that's why I feel okay. I've gotten my money's worth out of those summer wine Asiatic lilies. And I'm just gonna keep on keeping on with both the Royal Sunset lilies and the Kaveri that we added this past year. Sometimes people ask me about how much these garden projects cost. And I am more than happy to share that information with you. So these three little quick fire hydrangeas cost me $90.59. Hydrangeas tend to be about 30 to $40 in our area. Generally at the Amish nurseries, they're $30. At an English nursery, they're more like 40. And so I'll be shopping at both kinds of nurseries and supporting as many different nurseries as I can as we work on this renovation together. But friends, 90 minutes out in the garden doing maintenance has passed. And I'm excited that we got so much accomplished in just a short amount of time today. I wanna wish you a wonderful day out there in your gardens and I'll see you sometime soon. Bye friends.