More Garden Construction

I woke up thinking about that frog-pond. So, well, I started digging. Now we have a frog-pond.

The little sapling in the picture is a witchhazel. Across the tiny pond from the big rock is a pile of displaced decaying organic matter, which I topped with moss and a mushroom-covered chunk of old tree. I also attempted t transplant a few skunk cabbages into it, but I suspect they won’t take well to being dug up. Most of the displaced skunk cabbage I just hacked out of the muck and chucked farther into the woods. I hate to kill it, but there is no shortage of it here, and when the rest grows in around this little puddle it’s going to look like tropical dinosaur land from this rock!

I moved many buckets of the thick black muck to a couple of locations along my path, to form beds for a few plants I ordered. Last week on a whim I ordered three American bittersweet vines, to provide berries for the birds; a mountain laurel, a couple of mayflowers, and a couple of trilliums – all pretty natives. Now I have a place to put them!

I also ordered ramp seeds from Ramp Farm. Ramps are a native onion, reportedly similar to leeks. The photo of the sign at Ramp Farm shows a cluster of ramps and jack-in-the-pulpit. Since jack-in-the-pulpit already seems to find our shady spaces delightful, I’m guessing ramps will grow here well, too. The only drawback: it takes a warm season, followed by a cold season, to get ramps to germinate from seed, and after that it’ll still be a couple of years before they can be harvested. And even then I’ll want to leave most of them in the ground to let them form a sustainable colony.

Chris has correctly called me a plant addict.