The honeysuckle blooms are fading and I’m sad that their amazing fragrance will be gone until next year!

A pretty copper colored rose from my garden. But the real question is what do May flower bring?

PILGRIMS! har har har!

Right now my roses are starting to bloom, my cherry tree is full of green fruit, the clematises are starting to flower, and my Siberian Irises are exploding with amazing purple flowers.

Now if I could just get my veggie garden and cutting gardens started. This weekend!

I purchased an APS starting kit from Gardeners Supply as well as a grow light and heating mat from Amazon. I started enough seeds for both my and my sister’s gardens just a few days ago and today I saw my cucumbers and broccoli have already germinated!

I’m planning on adding a few beds for a cutting garden. I have all the seeds ordered now I just need to figure out how many I need to start! I already hit up home depot for more peat pots.

First off, yesterday my Mom and I went to Atlock Flower Farm in Somerset. If you like Coleus or Sedums or unusual plants it’s definitely a place to visit. While we were there it was pouring rain so we just hit a couple of the greenhouses.

We are planning to go back when the weather is better. They claim to have 120 varieties of coleus. I love coleus! I finally found the trailing one that I love. There is a townhouse on willow terrace (the locksmith one) that always has tons of this coleus. I used to steal some and root it.

If you visit Atlock look for the sign for the Sod Farm – it’s the same entrance. We missed their signs the first time we drove by.

Next up is a photo of the pond that I’ve been reworking. The liriope needs to grow more and the tree debris stop and it will be ready to go. And we need a fish.

The left side is mostly pots because we need to access the pump/filter behind it for maintenance. Everything on the right side is perennial.

What else? Ok here is the Japanese water basin I made out of hypertufa. I’m using a solar powered pump for it. The ferns are doing very well. I divided the hostas last fall and they need to fill in more.

Here is our baby dwarf Japanese Maple. It’s a Jerry Schwarz Maple that should only grow to about 4′. Right now it’s about a foot tall and adorable!

Lastly are some Viola photos. I love violas. The orange ones were kind of dead looking when I bought them but I loved the color. Now they are doing even better than the normal purple ones that were very healthy when I planted them.

More photos in the flickr gallery.

My mom brought home a big puddingstone rock for the pond. After hauling the big rock out..which is incredibly heavy. I had to do some fiddling but I got the new stone to work.

It was supposed to rain on sunday, but when I got up the weather report said it would be sunny and 73°. Vanessa called me to ask if I wanted her to come help, moments after I had decided not to call her yet because it was still early. We made plans for her to come lunchtime and I went out to get hypertufa making supplies, some planters, and maybe some plants.

The first thing Vanessa & I did was foam the waterfall. A lot of water was falling behind the rocks – so you use this special expanding foam to fill in the cracks. I learned from the last time I used this and got us both rubber gloves. That takes some time to expand and cure, so we started on the hypertufa projects. I wanted a water basin for the japanese garden and a trough for a fountain in the front garden ( or dooryard . We mixed up some tufa using 1 part portland cement: 1.5 parts peat moss : 1.5 parts sand. For the water basin I put a small bowl upside down in a large plastic bucket and stuck a 1″ pvc pipe in the middle. We packed the hypertufa around the pipe and bowl. That was pretty easy.

For the trough I had brought out a plastic bin. We changed up the recipe for this to mix the sand up with 1/2 perlite. It took us about 3 tries to get this to work. We abandoned the bin and instead I built a quick wooden form and we packed the tufa inside.  We wrapped them up in plastic bags to start curing. I bought way too much portland cement and the bags weigh 94lbs! I want to make more but I figured we should see how these turn out first. I will unmold and do some sculpting on them when I get home today.

After that we did some more planting. I bought a bunch of bright colored perennial flowers at Home Depot. The waterfall looked good so we could finally plant the beds I put around it. I had bought a Mountain Atlas Daisy and a purple Salvia for that and they worked great. We also tucked some of the Mountain Pinks that we got for $1 in there. I placed the LED lights in the pond too.

When my dad came home we mounted the bamboo trellis and I planted the clematis on the far side. I had a climbing honeysuckle already planted.

I am quite happy with what we got accomplished and it’s only the first weekend in may! I wasn’t even in NJ until the beginning of June last year.