Hummingbird and Butterfly Gardening: Life in my garden today, 1 by konkreteblond

konkreteblond wrote:
Thank you all SO much! This was like having you all visit. It's fun to be able to show your babies to others who understand. I didn't want to bore everyone with a ton of pics but now I want to show you all everything! I still have my front bed and the side too.

The Queen Anne's Lace did come up from seed that I threw out in the fall. I had great success with this method so I will continue to just toss carefree. :) I had some confusion this spring when my QAL was coming up. I finally figured it out when everything started blooming. I had QAL, false QAL (pulled up now that I have the real one) and Poison Hemlock! (got rid of those too)

QAL is supposed to bloom the 2nd year but a lot of mine bloomed the first, which was also confusing. I cut most of them back this month and saw the there were also a lot of smaller plants underneath that didn't bloom. A few others bloomed more (in the pic) after I cut them back.

I do have a "mass of confusion" but I like it. And I do have a path of tiles thru it all but some of it is totally grown over but I'm working on that now. Later in the season I will have a ton of milkweed and zinnias that I leave in masses for the Monarchs. Most everything I have has either spread or just reseeded, which is why there appears to be groupings. (that certainly wasn't my doing)

The yellow Rudbeckia's are my favorite this year! They came up from some seed too. They have fuzzy leaves and I was not sure what they were going to be. I will definitely let them reseed.

In the back I usually have Hyacinth bean vines but this year I planted Black Eyed Susan vines and got a new Mexican Flame vine. They are all being shadowed by some of the larger stuff tho so it's taking them a while to grow. More cutting to be done today to help them. I have a purple passionvine and coral honeysuckle to the left of the pic on another fence.

Thanks for the encouragement! This is my front bed.
Paige