Garden Cleanup and Painting the Front Porch! 🤩

Hi everyone, Janie here, welcome back to my garden. So we, although the sun's out and it looks really beautiful, we're having another very cold day. It is already about noon and we are topping out at 50 degrees. So my front porch project that I have been waiting to finish with painting the trim and painting the patio is going to have to be put on hold for another day and I am getting super antsy about it. I even had a dream about it last night that I finished it and it looked so good, but I don't want to mess it up and you're not supposed to paint when you're 50 degrees and below and so we're basically 50 degrees and below. Tomorrow it's supposed to get up to 60 degrees Fahrenheit, so it's on my plan. My plan is to finish that tomorrow crossing my fingers, but I figured I would get out here anyway because it really is a beautiful day. I just have to point out, look at my Chinese pistachio tree. Let me go over there and show you guys. So the colder night temps we've been having, last night we got down to 36 degrees. The tree, my Chinese pistachio tree, is obviously loving it. It's loving its life right now and the cold is making it turn this gorgeous fiery shade of red. I don't even think it's coming across on the camera as much as it is in real life. It is so incredibly beautiful. I am just absolutely in love with this tree and I have a baby one in the front yard that's turning two. So this one we planted just last fall, so it's definitely a lot, I mean it's a lot smaller than the other one, but eventually I hope it'll be the same size as the other one and it's so pretty and I just have to show you. Look at the red of the Chinese pistachio with the purple of the plain the blue salvia. Isn't that gorgeous? There's a better view of it. Sometimes I wish I was a photographer and like knew how to take really good photos because what I see is so beautiful and I wish I could take really really gorgeous photos and show them to you guys. Maybe one day I'll learn I'll learn some real photography but it's just so pretty. All right so I don't have any specific plans for today other than just doing generalized cleanup. This year is a very interesting cleanup year for me because I'm trying to leave as many annuals as I possibly can until until they're basically their last breath and so you can see here I have my Super Junior Bordeaux and my Super Junior Mini Vista Yellow that normally I would go ahead and I would pull these but I really want them to overwinter. I want to see if I can overwinter them. I am in zone 9b so I am completely borderline on all of these annuals and I've heard from a lot of you that you guys have overwintered your Super Juniors really successfully so I want to try them but I do want to kind of clean it up a little bit because you can see like especially this Mini Vista Yellow is completely completely covering my pathway so I think today I might want to kind of cut this back and clean it up a little bit. I'm not going to cut it back too far because I want to protect this plant from the cold but like I said we like we got down to 36 degrees last night and it's still looking okay. The Augusta Lavender Heliotrope looks beautiful absolutely beautiful. I mean look at it over here oh my goodness it looks so it looks great so like it's really funny I'm just I'm not going to be cleaning a ton of stuff up. I'm definitely not going to be cutting back my Russian Sage because you don't want to cut that back until January and then if you look over here you can see the Plain the Blue Salvia still looks good as well um so I think what I think what I'm going to do is I'm going to kind of just clean some of this overgrown stuff up and then as you can see we've been working on our rock border and we actually have the guys that come and help us out a little bit with like the heavy lifting stuff they actually came and they placed rocks all along the border but I need to kind of like shape it a little bit and and tamp it down and wash it off so I might do that a little bit today as well just kind of clean up the rock border because they mostly just did the hard work of just placing all the rocks there which I appreciate so much but like you can see over here I think it's I think it's a little too thick I don't know I we took out we took out the Lavender River that was here and all the White Vinca was that was there um so it looks a lot cleaner now but it's also like I just feel like it needs something um I don't know but whatever what I plan to do today is just to kind of clean up the rock and um and wash it off and all that kind of stuff because it's really dirty as well so anyway oh and then I have some things that succumb to the cold right so these are the Suncredible sunflowers they're done I'm gonna pull those and then um I have another uh volunteer sunflower over there I need to pull that as well so just kind of generalize clean up look at my yarrow you guys oh my goodness what is going on plants it was 36 degrees last night look at how island by the pathway I think it looks really good just kind of cleaned everything up cut some of the Supertunias back cut some of the Shasta Daisies back that looks really nice and neat and clean there was a couple of the Supertunias that look completely dead so I pulled them over there but a lot of them they still have really good foliage and even a little bit of color on them so I figure I might as well just leave them and enjoy the color and the greenery while I still have it right I mean I can always come back later this winter and pull them if they completely die back so anyway I think it looks really good just kind of cut everything back trimmed it along the edging over here in the Supervena Raspberry I am having such a trouble with nutsedge this weed right here and I've talked to this talked about this before this is not a weed that you want to come in and you want to pull because if you do that you leave the little uh nut or rhizome in the ground and it will sprout even more so I have to actually go in there and dig each piece out it's such a pain I I don't even want to deal with it today I was looking at it and I'm like I don't I don't want to bother with that today today's not a nutsedge pulling type of day so anyway but the rest of it is looking really good nice and clean and ready for the winter season and I will keep you all updated on how it looks as the winter goes on so I think I'll move over here by the gazebo right now like I said I have some of these incredible sunflowers I need to pull look at my Echium isn't that beautiful what a gorgeous plant oh my goodness uh but I have there's a lot of weeds in here I gotta pull some of the weeds the Euphorbia is still looking good so I will leave that there but a lot of this Supertunia Bordeaux is done so I'm gonna pull that out oh my goodness my Supervena has completely covered my Ginkgo wow okay I'll have to kind of clean that up a little bit but I do want to kind of clean a lot of this out because I am going to be planting 500 red tulips around the gazebo which I think is going to be so pretty so I have to be able to get to the ground to plant them which means I need to clean some of this out of there I think looks really good and getting some of the old annuals that were past their prime I think looks really good as well and I did want to work on the rocks kind of spread them out a little bit get them placed and rinse them off but I really don't want to deal with water right now you know dealing with with water it's just a little too cold for that doesn't sound like much fun but you can see how dusty and brown these rocks are and then compare that to these over here that have been cleaned off and they look a lot better so once I get them all cleaned off and placed properly I think that they're gonna look great now as you can see I have taken my jacket off when I was working I think moving around and being in the sunlight made it warm enough but I did just check my weather app and it's 57 degrees right now and it's supposed to be over 50 until after sunset so I think I'm gonna try and get some painting done right now well well well how good does this look now don't get me wrong it's not perfect it's not what eventually I want this area to look like I definitely don't want the gray I definitely don't want painted cement I definitely want maybe like a deck or different stairs or steps or something like that but for now this pan of paint was 30 bucks right like this is a great great change for 30 bucks and a couple hours worth of my time Monty is so upset that I'm not letting him outside you can't come out bud you can't come out not for a couple hours he's he's so upset anyway so this looks great and the trim looks great it was definitely the temperature that was have I was having a hard time I could not get it to look good uh and now that it's just a little bit warmer it's like night and day so this looks fantastic I am super happy with it now I just got to clean up I'm gonna let it dry overnight and then tomorrow I'll be able to take the painter's tape off the trim and then get my planters where they belong I'm super excited I hope you enjoyed this and I hope you all have a chance to get in your garden today you