It’s a Gardener’s World
An introduction to my new garden blog
March 2, 2021
by Kate Forrest
“The more I garden the less I know, but the more pleasure I get from it.”
— Monty Don
Hello and welcome to my garden blog (title forthcoming). For those of you new to my site, my name is Kate and I’m a historical romance author and creative nonfiction essayist and I LOVE gardening. My husband and I moved to Williamsburg, Virginia in July 2019, where we bought our first home. We both originally hail from Western Pennsylvania, but have lived in New York, North Carolina, and across the pond in England, where we started our first small flower garden. Our love for gardening grew from there, but it wasn’t until we got our current property that we really had the opportunity to create a garden from scratch. We didn’t do much in the way of planting and landscaping in 2019, but this past year, in 2020, we got to work and we’ve been busy in the yard ever since. This blog aims to capture our successes and failures as we navigate the world of gardening and landscaping in the tidewater of Virginia. It will also include inspiration from gardens we’ve toured abroad and the wonderful gardens here at Colonial Williamsburg. Now let’s dive in and look at our property’s features.
Lantana bed in peak bloom September, 2020.
What is our property like?
We live in the City of Williamsburg, which puts us in USDA growing zones 7b and 8a. We own a quarter-acre lot on a hill-sloped property. Our front and one side yard face south-west, so we are lucky to have an area for full-sun plantings. Our back yard is mostly shaded, with thickly forested woods beyond our property that provides dappled light in the winter and spring months. In the summer, the back yard does get a few hours of afternoon and early evening sunlight. We do have twelve trees in our front yard, so those create a part-sun environment for about half of the property. We have not done a soil test yet (I will share when we do a pH test), but we have a mix of wonderfully rich soil that the previous homeowners added and the rest appears to be sandy, clay soil. What I love about our property is that we have the opportunity to grow both in sun and shade, so I think we will end up with (over the years) a wonderfully diverse collection of plants.
Our beds
Vegetable Garden
We have a raised bed on the southern side of our house which we used last year for about 50% vegetables (peas, tomatoes, cucumbers, carrots, lettuce, celery, onions, and sweet peppers) and 50% flowers (zinnias, lavender). This year, for 2021, it will be used almost exclusively for vegetables with some flowers mixed in to attract pollinators. I’ll refer to it as the “Vegetable Garden,” but know it is actually a large, raised bed. Our first priority, happening this Friday, is to get three cubic yards of topsoil and compost delivered to give our veggie bed a much needed top-off. We hope to raise the ground up six inches in our veggie patch to address some problem areas with poor drainage.
Lantana Bed
We also have a substantial full-sun bed directly off the front of our house. Last year, we removed two trees from that bed and all that remained was a boxwood bush, a vining rose, and hundreds of daffodil bulbs. Otherwise, it was a blank slate. Last spring, we cleared grass and removed about half the bulbs (which we redistributed throughout our yard in the autumn). We then began the trial-and-error process of seeing what would take. By summer’s end, we had a gorgeous, productive pollinator friendly flower bed anchored by three massive perennial Lantana plants (hence the bed’s name), five Lavender plants (Lavandula × intermedia ‘Phenomenal’), a knockout rose, and a vining rose, with a mix of marigolds, pentas, celosia (Cramer’s Burgundy), sunflowers, and more.
Redbud Bed
We also cut in the outline of a new bed—the “Redbud bed”—so named for the small weeping redbud tree that sits at its center. This bed is shaped like a wedge. We only planted on the perimeter of it last year, as we ran out of time to clear the bed completely before the summer heat and humidity made such work impossible. We plan to finish clearing it this spring and this year it will be used for annual plantings and bulbs.
Camelia Bed
In our back yard, we have a small bed that runs the length of our porch. Currently, it’s home to two pink camelias. We don’t have plans for adding to that bed at this time.
Apple Tree Bed
Finally, we have a part-sun bed under my office window off the front of our house that we haven’t done much with yet. The bed contains an overgrown apple tree, which we started to reshape last year, and a tall narrow evergreen tree. Otherwise, it’s a blank canvas and it is a bed we plan to fill this year with a mix of annuals, perennials and shrubs.
That is currently all we have for established beds. In addition to clearing the Redbud Bed, we may also add a boomerang shaped bed in the middle of our front yard to connect our dogwood to a few shrubs (that, regrettably, we’ve yet to identify). However, I feel like I already have an ambitious plan for this year, since we hope to tackle some serious planting projects in our back yard. There are only so many hours in the day and starting around the 4th of July, the heat and humidity become intolerable. Whatever we don’t finish by then, we’ll tackle in October, when its comfortable to work outside again.
Growing from seed
Last year was the first time in my life I grew something from a seed and it was truly one of the most rewarding experiences I’ve ever had. We’d planned to grow some things from seed before the pandemic, like zinnias, but other things stemmed from the pandemic and wanting to fill the time at home. Which led to mishaps growing honeydew and sweet peppers, but also a surprise success—a lemon tree. Well, it is still very much a young plant, but my husband planted a lemon seed last March and it is now a proper plant, covered in leaves and happily overwintering on a shelf over our kitchen sink.
Overall, our greatest success (in terms of quantity and quality) was growing zinnias from seed. Even though we messed up and started off with sun-starved leggy seedlings, at least thirty survived and went on to become magnificent plants that produced hundreds of blooms well into November. I was over-the-moon with how they’d performed and I hope to see a repeat of our success this year. So let’s talk about what’s next for the year ahead.
Goals for 2021
I don’t have a concrete plan in place as of yet, but I’ve got notes here and there and I’m always thinking about what needs done. I hope to create our seed planting schedule any day now (because I’m really overdue on preparing that). I do have a list of plants to purchase, with some bareroot plants already ordered and awaiting delivery in March. I also have a list of perennials, shrubs, and annuals I want to buy this spring and I’ll be sharing that information in forthcoming blogs. Essentially, we are looking to build on the foundations we created last year and expand on everything we’ve learned so far by, again, I hope repeating our successes and hopefully stumbling onto some new ones. Another thing I want to keep inching toward is having a four-season garden. Admittedly, we don’t spend much time outside December through February, but we are birders and we do want to create a hospitable habitat for our feathered friends year-round and also make sure we have offerings for pollinators late and early in the season when pickings are slim, so this year we’ll be looking to expand into things like berry bushes.
Neither my husband or I care for having a grassy lawn. In fact, if we only had grass to cover the walkways between flower beds, we’d be thrilled and that it is very much our long-term goal. I feel like that is something I’ve seen more commonly in England, where people use as much of their property as possible for planting. I find that approach is less common to see in America, but it does remind me of a house where we lived in Trumansburg, New York (near Ithaca in the Finger Lakes). It was this wonderful old historic home that sat on a side street in town, likely on a quarter to half an acre lot, and from the perimeter fence up to the house, it was like an overgrown jungle. But you could very clearly see that someone, at some point in time, had loved and cared for that space and it’s in prime, I am certain it was a beautiful oasis and a gem of a garden. But the yard’s state, when we last saw it, shows that gardening on such a scale is a constant labor of love and the maintenance can be extensive, so we are mindful of how much time, energy, and money we can commit to our space. We don’t want to get in over our heads, but at the same time, we really want to use this as an opportunity to try anything and everything. Essentially, we’re using our first home as a massive experiment to learn how to garden, landscape, and DIY.
Another hesitancy in expanding to the whole yard is the consideration for resale of our home. Since leaving graduate school, we haven’t stayed in one place for more than two years, so in the back of my head, I am always mindful to not do too much—to not invest that much—because we may be selling and moving on and I know most homeowners prefer low maintenance landscaping. A quarter acre landscaped garden would not be low maintenance, so it is something we are mindful of since I don’t think this will be our forever home, but I do hope we’ll stay here for at least five to ten years (if not longer) and really get to enjoy living somewhere that is green and growing nearly 11 months of the year.
What will this blog cover?
In truth, I don’t know how this will progress and evolve along with this year’s growing season. I plan to commit to a weekly blog entry (to be posted every Tuesday), with photos and videos to complement content as appropriate. I am a novice and I’ve got less than two years in the tidewater under my belt, but I’m happy to share my journey as my husband and I work to make our blank slate of a yard into a four-season garden. This will be a pollinator friendly garden and while I won’t claim it be organic gardening (since I haven’t done enough to know if I can keep to that), we avoid pesticides and chemicals for pest management as much as possible. We’ve used Sluggo (an iron phosphate pellet) for treating slugs last spring when our young plants were especially susceptible to their damage (though I should note Sluggo is approved for organic gardening). I prefer to create a healthy habitat that welcomes birds and beneficial insects to our garden to help manage the pests. I will talk about the ups and downs of managing garden pests using this approach.
I also plan to share the garden inspiration that sits on my doorstep at nearby Colonial Williamsburg. I feel so lucky to cut my gardening teeth in Williamsburg since I have dozens of beautiful flower and vegetable gardens to explore all year round. Spring is my favorite season in Virginia, so I want to make sure that I document and share all the wonderful blooms we get to enjoy here.
Finally, during the pandemic I developed the hobby of crafting. While I come from a talented family of crafters, quilters, and artists, I haven’t dabbled in crafting as an adult until now. I started this past fall by making ornaments and a landscape for my Christmas village. Now that spring is around the corner, I’ve set my sights on some crafting and painting projects for gardening, like sprucing up old planters, making planters from upcycled materials, and maybe even crafting some lawn ornaments. I’ll share those projects here as well.
As I discuss the beds in more detail, I promise to include practical information, like the square footage of each bed, so you know what we’re working with.
I’m excited to document and share our experiences for the 2021 growing season.
More to come next Tuesday, March 9th.
Thanks for reading!
~Kate