December 28, 2021

I've got a blank space, baby…

Pond with fountain
In Coastal Virginia, gardeners enjoy 247 frost-free days. Even in late November, it feels like Autumn is just beginning.

After 15 months without a kitchen or a garden, we followed our bliss and bought a little place with this lake view. In under a half hour, we can be at our pick of beaches. 

My new garden space is right off the kitchen, so of course I need a potager. And it needs to be a pollinator garden that feeds hummingbirds, since I can't put honeybees in the backyard. (We're looking for an outyard or community apiary.) With a frost-free growing season of 247 days, I want to grow just about everything.

The only limit I have is that my space is restricted to a skinny mini border garden, so I have to be pretty selective. Already mentally exhausted from buying a condo and moving again during the pandemic; sleeping on an air mattress for two weeks before our hurry-the-promo-code-is-expiring selected bed arrived; hurriedly picking a washer and dryer before the Black Friday deal ended, I'm feeling a bit daunted. Now paralyzed just by the color choices we have for painting our new home, going native with a blank slate feels like an impossible task. So as much as I relished crafting my Colorado garden, I am seriously considering taking an easy no-brainer route here in Virginia.

What do you think about Native Wildflower Nursery's grab bags? Bare-root notwithstanding, the "Wildflower Garden" (100 wildflowers comprised of 4-5 perennial varieties, $140) looks pretty ideal to me—although I actually might not have enough room even using containers on the porch. The condo association says I can only have four pots, or just two if they're 20" pots. Crazy, huh!?

SPONSORED POST: In exchange for displaying the NWN logo and link to their website, Native Wildflowers Nursery will be giving me some ferns and spring ephemerals.

3 comments:

Don said...

For some reason, you posts don't come up anymore in Feedly, but I was just tooling around and came across this post. Congrats on your new place. Since it's going to be below 0 at night this week, I'm a bit envious of your 247 frost free days. ;-) Sounds like your space is limited, so perhaps the Wildflower garden is overkill? Lots of herbs would be good for the neighborhood bees and can do well in pots. Honeysuckle for the hummers - do you have room for a trellis? Put up a native bee block for the local pollinators (see link on my Bee Resources page). We are just getting some tree pollen coming in, so spring is starting! Looking forward to seeing your garden progress!

HB said...
This comment has been removed by the author.
backyardbee said...

Thanks for the congrats, @Don! I'd've been totally happy to cram in flower overkill rather than the fern overkill the nursery sent. 🐝 As for Feedly, I don't know why there are three but the best feed URL for my blog is https://feeds.feedburner.com/backyardbeehiveblog 😕
Stay warm, friend, and keep writing those fantastic blog posts over at https://buddhaandthebees.net/

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