we have been here spring summer and now fall come with me as we take a little
garden tour update of the front yard here at our
house stay tuned
hello friends welcome to gardening with creekside i am jenny
and today we are back here at the front of our house and we thought it would be
fun to give you a little bit of an early fall tour of
this space because you have seen this bed develop since
way back in the springtime if you will remember
we planted this bed with one vertigo grass
lots of diamond mountain euphorbia some supertunia bordeaux and then of course
the lemon coral was here from last year it is now we are well into september
and this is what the bed looks like now a little bit's changed since we were
first here in gosh what was that april may now when
we did this summer i don't know what to say about this
grass other than vertigo grass lives up to its name i
mean look at this i am five feet
two five foot three on a good day and vertigo grass will get says four to
eight feet tall so she's well past her four foot mark
and she is clearly on her way to the eight foot
this is one plant it started out as
just a nice gallon size grass this is from proven winters of course all these
are from proven winners it is the largest purple fountain grass
that they make nice big wide leaves on it
just gorgeous loves the sun now i will tell you
that this grass is the only thing in this bed
that is on a dripper because several years ago
when jerry ran irrigation for me for the front porch
i did have a pot on the on the corner of the house
and so we had a dripper run into that pot the pot is gone so i just took that
dripper and put it over here on the grass so it
has been getting water once a day from maybe 20 minutes a day
so clearly she is doing great the diamond mountain behind
us is just gorgeous i mean diamond mountain euphorbia remember
it is meant for the landscape or very large containers
it is doing really well i mean i spaced these out every 10 inches
just massive has gone up it's going out it is just
filling in gloriously i did just this week
pull out the bordeaux it was looking sad and honestly i think it was because
the grass was taking over the euphorbia was taken over so i only had this little
swatch right here and that's fine this does not bother me
that the bordeaux was gone because it still has
tons of interest right here and then of course remember the lemon coral
lemon coral is just a great we are north carolina zone 7b so technically for us
it is a perennial i planted this a year ago in the spring
so this is its second summer here and is doing great now i will tell you
this was yesterday when i was pulling out the bordeaux
and i don't know about you when you garden but you kind of get in your zone
right and you know what you're doing and you're in there so i was on my hands and
knees digging in here trying to find where the
bordeaux is so i can rip it out if you remember when jackson and i were
pruning the boxwoods remember we found our little friend mr
blackie actually he was a big mr blackie snake
and so he slithered under here so my whole brain is like focused on
oh well where's the snake you know just making sure that blackie is not in there
so i was so focused on that that i i didn't notice that um
miss charlotte right here so i'm down right here
well here is charlotte the writing spider
and my head was all up in her web and i'm coming out and then
she had bless her she had run up her web and gone back into vertigo
so i was like thank you charlotte for going up into vertigo and not down on
the to the top of my head because we love riding spiders they are
fantastic they are our friend they're not venomous they're massive
they're huge but if they bite you then it you know
it'll leave a mark so praise the lord charlotte went that
way she went the opposite direction i stand up and i see it and lo and
behold we have another one so not do we have one we have two charlotte's here in
this bed so that was quite fun let me remind you
what is in the back of this bed we have several of the
sweet olive trees sweet sweet olive trees
tea olive trees i always think we're in the south so i want to say like sweet
tea olive trees but it's not as sweet to
y'all a tree it's just a tea olive tree yeah so there we go i
always have to think for a minute because you know i have to put my
southern spin on it so tea olive trees are tl of tree slash
shrub they're called that because they are a very they can be a very large
shrub so we love the tea olives because they are evergreens yay and they have
just a great structure to them for us this will bring
some height to the bed even when you know the voracious
vertigo is not here what i really really love about the tea olives is
their small little delicate bloom that starts in the fall
and goes all through the winter into early early spring
it smells heavenly it is like this orange honeysuckle jasmine smell to it
the flowers may be small but the smell is
huge and you can smell them from a long distance away
that is why we have them right here at our porch because we are front porch
people and we love to sit on the porch and so
it's a great fragrance for us now speaking of front porch let's go to
the front porch because i don't think i've ever invited you to
come sit on my front porch with me so that's what we're going to do because
i have shown you some pictures of this before
but never have you really seen it so we are up here
on the porch and this is one of the aqua pots
so remember those aqua pots great self-watering containers
this one has done really well this is the baby brother shall we say of the
pot that's by the pergola so it is that same
beautiful majestic falling blue this is a shade
arrangement because on our front porch as you can see we have nice
deep porch this stays in the shade all day long except for maybe an hour or
two in the late afternoon because the sun sets in front of us
it does get some direct sun in those late afternoon hours so what do
i have in here i have an upright you so this upright
you was one of the first plants that you
could clearly tell love being in this aquapot because it
immediately put on new growth just tons of new
growth probably needs to be a little trimmed right now but she is just
growing like crazy of course the caladiums these great
caladiums from proven winners this is the tickle
me pink it's a great one the jet black sweet potato vine is my
trailer along with the terrinia terrenia is a
wonderful annual that will bring a lot of great color
to shade areas you can put it in a pot and it will trail
or you can put it in the ground i have it just on the other side we've talked
about this several times in that shade garden that i have it
underneath the hydrangea so it'll be in great in the landscape
and it'll be a spreader or you can put it in a container or a
hanging basket to trail so just lots of good color and
texture here i'm loving this one it has been
fantastic another plant that i am really excited
about have been really just blown away with is this
white wonder caladium so this is just in a
traditional pot it's not an aqua pot and you'll notice that i went
ahead and put a saucer underneath it to hold the water so that way i don't
have to water it every single day water it well that saucer will hold some
water helps kind of prolong my watering in between
it this white wonder has just got gorgeous color to it
love both of these caladiums will be sun or shade
so it doesn't matter where you put them sun shade
in between they will thrive caladiums are fantastic
for our southern climate because they love it hot and
humid so they love those humid nights they do fantastic in fact they actually
thrive in the humidity here so again yay for something that actually
thrives in our heat and humidity there is another
aquapot that we have down here on the end
and it has some caladiums in it also and it has an angel wing begonia so
we're kind of continuing with the whole blue theme
and the different caladiums this one of course i should have looked at my
tags before i got on here this is scarlett
flame scarlet flame caladium doing really well just another great so
if you are looking for foliage and interest
but low maintenance with no bugs then you cannot go wrong with caladiums
so the thing about caladiums though is they do not
like to have any kind of cool weather they are definitely a
hot weather plant now speaking of hot weather
you may be going jenny what is wrong with your yard
it looks terrible i know it does but like i tell my kids sometimes you got to
make it look bad to make it look good so that's what we're doing we have got
some invasive bermuda grass wire grass i don't know
what it is it's just junk grass we have fescue that is not
fescue so it has been sprayed the yard has been
sprayed as you were walking through here you might see some funky looking colors
um that is all of the weeds in the yard that do not belong here we've talked
about that we're gonna do a grass video this is part of that grass series so i'm
just letting you know why our grass looks funky right now also
speaking of looking a little funky just the other week last week i think we
did we planted the hibiscus the french vanillas of course
what you know as soon as i said oh we're getting tons
of rain and it's nice and whatever well it turned
it well it was hot and it stopped raining
they're fine they've been getting water we've been watering them
so this is just to show you that if you have a perennial or a shrub as long as
you're keeping it well watered remember your main concern is the roots are my
roots nice and healthy and happy yes they are but that's just some stress
on the plant they're fine last place that we're talking about here
again we have been here before um i wanted to show you though again the
supertenuous kind of petered out in that late heat of the summer i pulled
them out you would never know that they were here
because the truth of the pink gumfreena is in all her glory right now
she is in just in mass just growing and happy um the butterflies have been all
over her we're getting to be dusk so the butterflies are going to bed so
they're not here right now but it is just doing great the purple
fountain grass is doing fantastic the crepe myrtles are
blooming the azaleas have started to put on some
new flowers but we just love i mean look at this
this is the cherry mocha just it's this bed kind of turned into a
pink bed i didn't really plan it that way
i mean i guess i should say oh yes i totally planned it i didn't but that's
all right so the cherry mocha this is remember is
a crepe myrtle shrub not a tree is doing great the azaleas
are doing wonderful putting on their pink blooms
and then of course the gumfrina is doing amazing too and
interestingly enough look at this i'll show you this
so when i came in here remember those were hanging baskets
and i just cut them back look at sweet thing
she's trying she says jenny i'm still here
so we'll just let her be and see how she does maybe she'll come back and be
glorious it'd be fantastic you never give up on a
plant you know that's what i say just let them be anyway hope you all have
enjoyed this little tour of our front yard
y'all have a fantastic day if you've not already subscribed to gardening with
creekside please do so we would love to have you part of our family
you all have a great day see you next time bye