Garden Blog #4 Guest Post by Nic Cormier 8/3/10

Planting continues in the new garden, and around the Museum. The Irises have been planted in the small bed beneath the welcome bulletin board along the path that leads to the Museum. We also obtained some Coreopsis (Tickseed) plants, planted at the entrance to the keyhole pathway, and Garden Phlox which I planted near the Cosmos and Penstemon. The new Red Bee Balm had been getting munched by the local woodchuck so Allison and I dug a small trench around the flowers and drove wooden stakes in along the trench. We then buried the bottom of the chicken wire in the trench and used carpenter staples to secure it to the stakes. This seems to be holding up fine for now but the next step would be to acquire some large rocks to place around the fence to prevent the woodchuck from being able to dig at all. Brian Valentine will be donating more Red Bee Balm to replace that which the woodchuck ate.

Erin found me an old bird house in Bob’s workshop a couple of weeks ago to use in the garden. So far all I’ve had time to do is to sand it down and clean it up a bit. The idea is to make it not only look nice but to make it sound enough to have soil and plants on its roof. To do this I will cut some pieces of wood to make a border around the roof about two or three inches high that will hold soil. In this border I will cut holes near the base so all excess water will drain out. Once that is all set we will erect it in the garden with squirrel shields and put the soil on it and plant some small plants like Thyme in the soil.

Right now there isn’t a whole lot else going on. The Cosmos are still flowering along with the Thistle, Marigolds, Garden Phlox, Pink Penstemon, Blue Lobelia, Dwarf Solomon’s Seal, Pink Turtlehead, Purple Coneflower and Dianthus (in the more shaded and weedy spots).

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