This weekend has been perfect for some garden work–some sun, some clouds, some rain.

I spent four days up at the cabin in Tonasket.  We had wind and sun and then a bit of a snow storm, so it gave me ample time to do some garden planning and even calendar some dates for growing and planting.

For this year, I plan to work on getting the grass out of the orchard garden and preparing it for planting perennials next spring.  I also plan to rework the Douglas fir bed, removing the weedy plants and replacing them with more structure and more special shrubs and perennials.

Yesterday, I cleaned out the bed that holds the Beauty Plum and the espaliered Asian pear against the east-facing fence in the orchard garden.

This bed is troubled by three nasty weeds:  a creeping grass that gets in from the lawn, buttercups and the insidious bindweed.  I spent the day pulling and turning under buttercups.

I was wondering how it is possible that plants that evolved in other places seem so much better adapted to our area than native plants that evolved here?  For example, how is it that the blackberries, scotch broom, buttercups, dandelions and mulleins have made themselves so very at home here?

The bed is so badly infested with all of these weeds–the only recourse will be to put down landscape cloth and mulch.  That has become my plan for this entire garden to kill both weeds and grass.  I will cover everything this spring with landscape cloth and then cover with a fertile soil amendment and cover that with a bark mulch.

Here is what the buttercups looked like–they apparently grew all winter long: 

I was able to do a temporary clean up and plant 48 wallflowers in this bed, along with three of the Clematis columbiana that I grew from seed two years ago.

You can see the plum and Asian pear trees along the fence, with a bleeding heart blooming and the remainder of a hellebore in the background.  Closer to the camera, there is a penstemon and three groups of Amaryllis belladonna–the two bigger ones are pink and the third is white.  And none of them has ever bloomed.  The wallflowers are planted all around them.

Here are the little wallflowers with the white Amaryllis.  These are English wallflowers and should add a big burst of color in early summer.

Here is the Asian pear–from Raintree.  It has quite a few flowers, but there were no bees around it.  I took a paintbrush to it today, but in the rain, I doubt if it did much good.  I will hope for more natural pollinizing in the coming week or so.

Here is the bleeding heart that came from sister Cate’s garden last year.  It is doing well.  Another gold-leaved form is doing less well–but it might just be a late starter.

I cleaned up the streptocarpus in the greenhouse yesterday, as well.  There are about a dozen of them that are already growing strong thanks to all the sunny days heating up the greenhouse.  Normally, I would top dress them, but for now I just cleaned off old leaves and flower stems and fertilized them with a shot of compost tea.  I’ll give them topdressing a bit later in the season.

Today I planted seeds in the tray that was emptied when I planted out the wallflowers.  The seeds were cucumbers, Oenothera pallida, zinnias, nemesia, fireweed, and eupatorium.  I also planted four 4″ pots with bachelor buttons seeds, which should be ready to plant out in the garden in six weeks or so.

Many of the other seeds are already growing and they aren’t getting enough light on the floor of the greenhouse.  I need to relocate some of the winter growing bulbs on the sunny side of the greenhouse and replace them with the seedling trays–I will work on that next weekend.

The greenhouse is full of color right now, especially the Clivia miniata hybrids that are coming into flower.  Here are some photos of the ones opened already:

 There are slight variations among all the flowers that you can see if you look closely. 

Another flower I can count on in the greenhouse is my favorite Pelargonium (geranium)–Pelargonium papilionaceum.

This large shrub blooms around the same time as the Clivia plants and provides an interesting contrast in the greenhouse.

Each flower is gloriously intricate, and the orange pollen sets them off perfectly.  They will set seeds and the seeds do grow–I’ve had some start on purpose and on accident in greenhouse pots.  The flower season is about a month, but they continue to be showy because of their size and large leaves that smell great when brushed against or crushed.

A few more greenhouse bloomers on the first day of spring:

Pleione formosana has one huge orchid flower on a diminutive plant.  I’m excited that it is blooming, as it didn’t last year, despite prodigious growth.

Here is a seedling of Freesia laxa blooming still in its seed pot.  This is a great color improvement over the other, redder version I have (from Edelweiss at the NW Flower and Garden Show.  These are supposedly borderline hardy, so I will try moving some outside this spring.

The pitcher plant flowers are rising rapidly–can’t wait to see what they look like!

Below are some photos of the little rhododendron I have in a pot in the driveway.  It struggled somehow to keep its flowers opened and clean, but they are stunning when they do open, and there are more coming.  I need to move this beauty into the ground.

While at the cabin, I determined to rework the circle bed around the Douglas fir tree in the front yard.  To that end, today I removed all of one species of hardy geranium that had taken the concept of thug to a level even the buttercups would envy.  I had planted them on purpose in this bed, as they are attractive, especially in spring when they first leaf out and when the pink flowers open.  Not only do they spread by rhizomes, but they seed themselves EVERYWHERE.  So, they have to go.  I pulled them from the Douglas fir bed today and will eradicate them from other areas in the coming weeks.  I am not naïve enough to believe that this battle is won.  It is unlikely that I’ve gotten every rhizome and there are thousands of seeds just waiting their chance, but I consider it a start.  If I’m diligent, I should be able to keep them out of the yard from now on.

Here is the overly zealous geranium–possibly maculatum?  It has fresh leaves now, but fades quickly when things dry out and its propensity for proliferation has made it enemy number one in 2015.

Here is the bed after I cleared all the rogue geraniums out.  Lots of room for new plants!

Fortunately, the soil under the huge Douglas fir tree is dry and light, so it wasn’t too terrible pulling 2000 or so geranium plants.

And here is the huge pile of casualties, and this does not include the full yard waste container!