Continued from the previous page: more scenes from early summer to winter, critter visitors, and a new project to reduce erosion on the cheap!

Our daylilies begin blooming mid- to late May and continue through July, with some varieties in flower earlier and some later. The bed keeps getting larger as I divide more and more of the plants in the fall. They are one of the easiest perennials to grow in our climate and require very little care.

Stella de Oro (gold) and Jolyeve Nichole (salmon pink)

Jolyeve Nichole

     
Stella de Oro (L) and Ruby Spider

Multiple colors blooming at the end of June

    
Ming Toy (L) and Pardon Me  (similar but not shown is Chicago Apache)

Can't locate the tag for this one . . . possibly Camden Queen

Stormy Sky

Our five hydrangeas outdid themselves this year, especially the large shrub at the edge of the woods that gets the most sun. They bloom in June and July:

 

        
Flower color at peak in June (L) and in late July (R)

I cut back the branches of our eight Lantana bushes during the winter and they send up green shoots in April or May. Soon they begin flowering and they get bigger and bigger throughout the summer. This bed covered an area about 20 x 20 feet this summer and the larger shrubs were over six feet tall. They are usually hardy in our climate, although they could die off if we get colder than average temperatures.

We have three colors, shown below, and they all attract butterflies, moths, and bees. (I'll show butterfly photos in the "critter" section of this page, below.) The multi-colored Miss Huff variety has gotten quite large over the years. Mary Ann and Chapel Hill are shorter varieties. Blooms last from May to September.

Full growth of the lantanas in August; three Chapel Hill (yellow) are in the front,
five large Miss Huff behind, and one purple Mary Ann not visible in this photo.

Mary Ann has purple and yellow flowers; Miss Huff is in the background.

Miss Huff has a riot of bright colors -- yellow, orange, red, purple

Chapel Hill has pale yellow flowers with darker yellow centers.

I call our Cleome plants "serendipitous" because their seeds blew in from someone else's yard several years ago. I was very curious when I saw a few plants come up one spring with leaves that looked like marijuana. I knew it probably wasn't that, but I didn't identify the plants as Cleome until they bloomed.

I love them and I've let them multiply rather freely in several places in the back yard. They bloom all summer. I share seeds with friends in the fall and let more plants self-seed for the next year.

 

Colors include lavender, pink, or all white.

Autumn is colorful in our yard, too, with some flowers extending into winter.

Lantanas and cleome continue blooming into September. Several bearded iris colors bloom again in the fall. This type of viburnum (I can't find the tag for it) bloomed this year in early January and again in March:

Knockout and Drift roses and Encore azaleas will bloom until the first hard frost, which usually comes sometime in December or January.

Another bright flower in November and December is the Yuletide camelia:

 

 

The Mathotinia camelia was loaded with buds in January this year, and continued blooming until March. Last year most of the buds fell off, so we were very happy with it this year:

 

In autumn many of our trees and shrubs have very colorful leaves, including the burning bushes and two kinds of Japanese maples. Here Holly stands next to one of the large burning bushes in early November before it reached peak color:

We love this Viridis Japanese maple in the back yard:

 

Berries on several of our trees and shrubs also provide some bright winter color, including a large Nandina, holly, and both kinds of viburnum.

We haven't had much snow since we moved here in 2017 but in mid-January, 2022 we got a dusting of snow for the dogs to enjoy for a little while:

It didn't last long.

CRITTERS WHO VISIT OUR YARD

Peachtree City attracts a lot of wildlife because a quarter of the land mass is green (trees, shrubs, flowers, grass, and other plants) or blue (lakes, ponds, streams, wetlands). We often see deer, geese, ducks, herons, owls, hawks, and numerous other animals on our walks.

Visitors to our yard include many kinds of songbirds and hummingbirds (even a heron one time!), rabbits, squirrels, chipmunks, raccoons, snakes, armadillos, turtles, frogs, little lizards, bees, butterflies, grasshoppers, other insects, and probably more I'm forgetting.

We more often see armadillos on our walks on the network of cart paths in town than in our yard but we definitely see evidence of them in our back yard most mornings because they root around in the mulch and dirt, looking for grubs. This is one I saw while walking one of the dogs:

Although our tall wooden fence in the back yard doesn't prevent armadillos from burrowing under, it does keep our city's numerous white-tail deer from jumping over. However, they like to forage on the roses and azaleas in the unfenced front yard. The only deterrents we use are chicken wire on the ground and barking dogs when Holly and Casey spot them from inside the house.

Deer are so used to humans and dogs in our neighborhood, however, that they don't have a lot of fear and just kind of look at us blankly if the dogs bark or we go outside to shoo them away.

This spring a rare piebald fawn was born nearby and we got to enjoy it on our daily walks. It was a topic of conversation in our neighborhood. Unfortunately, someone hit and killed it on another residential street one night when it was just a few months old.

It's fun in the spring to see the new fawns on their wobbly legs. Some of the moms have two or three babies.

Snake sightings in our yard and neighborhgood are less common, thankfully, but we know they are out there! Occasionally I'll find non-venomous snakes like this one in the mulch, under a pot on the patio, or (the worst) in a bale of pine straw I'm spreading around:

That one was a couple feet long. Most are smaller. I'm not real fond of snakes, especially after Jim got bitten by a rattler in 2006 while we were trail running in the Bighorn Mountains of Wyoming.

I don't usually feel the urge to kill non-venomous snakes, though, even if they surprise me. As Jim once said (prior to getting bitten), "Snakes gotta eat, too." That was after I saw one swallowing some baby mice next to a creek.

Spiders, on the other hand . . . I'm even less fond of those.

In recent years we've had a few of these large, interesting orb-weavers build webs in the lantanas, knock-out roses, or burning bushes. It was fun initially to watch them rebuild their webs every morning, "writing" the distinctive zig-zag in the middle of the huge webs. I started eliminating them, however, when I saw butterflies and moths ensnared:

We value our pollinators! I scared the spider off, freed those butterflies from the sticky web, and killed the spider when (s)he came back. Ditto for its relatives.

We get a lot of butterflies, moths, and bees in those lantanas. I enjoy watching them feed and flit about:

 

 

A YEAR-LONG EROSION CONTROL PROJECT

Shortly before we moved in five years ago, the former homeowners had forty large trees removed from our back yard. They put in a nice lawn with zoyzia grass but left a large swath of ground on the back and sides bare, with only a few trees and shrubs remaining. We've had trouble with erosion in that area ever since, despite spending several thousand dollars on more trees, shrubs, groundcovers,  and mulch.

Our back yard slopes from side to side and well as down from the house and up a little bit to the back fence. There is a ~160-foot "dry creek" where water flows downhill. We have lost several inches of topsoil since moving in and our efforts to retain the soil weren't working.

In January we had a local landscaper from the company that Pike Nursery uses come out to give us advice and an estimate on professionally installing weed-barrier fabric and river rocks in the "dry creek." His $6,900 bid was a no-go but we took his advice to lay the pine straw thicker (4-5").

That's 100 bales of nice, long pine needles, folks! We had it delivered
from South Georgia in January and I spread every bit of it myself.

That was Step 1 in our plan.

Step 2 was trying to repair a broken plastic French drain running down from the lawn through the mulched area and back uphill (!) and under the fence, where water was supposed to drain into a ditch running behind the houses on our street. Water doesn't run uphill very well on its own, so you can understand why the plastic pipe was cracked in several places.

Despite Holly's help and replacing/reconnecting the broken sections, we aren't sure the French drain really works.

The landscape guy also suggested that we mow down the liriope edging in the winter when it turns brown. We didn't know that would make it more lush when it grew back in the spring. It really did!

And that gave me a bright idea for how to reduce the erosion in the dry creek.

Liriope spreads pretty fast. I planted a mere twelve sprigs of it between the grass and bare dirt back in 2017 and in the next four years I was able to transplant clumps of it along the entire curve of the grass in the back yard. In fact, it was starting to invade the daylilies and lantanas by 2022 and I knew I needed to dig up those parts.

You can see the liriope right next to the grass in the next photo :

I figured, why not transplant it in the whole length of the dry creek?? Wouldn't that help reduce erosion and also prevent having to relocate the pine straw mulch every time we got a soaking rain?

So Step 3 was carried out throughout this year, about one hour at a time. It was hard work for me to dig up clumps from the thick stands of liriope, dig nicely-spaced holes in the low spots, plant the clumps, and keep them watered when it was dry.

I put the liriope clumps across the entire back yard, all ~160 feet of it, except where the Chameleon AKA Rainbow groundcover is planted. (The liriope stays mostly green all winter while the Chameleon plants die back.)

This view of the liriope transplants is near the higher (west) side of the yard.
The thick clump of groundcover in the background is chameleon AKA rainbow plants.

Above and below:  chameleon AKA rainbow plant, which also multiplies very fast but is a
but is a perennial, so it doesn't do much erosion control in the winter.

I kept planting the liriope gradually throughout the spring and summer on the other side of the chameleon plants, over the French drain, between the large lantana bushes, and toward the fence on the lower end of the yard.

After a major downpour with several inches of rain in August, I saw how well the liriope and pine straw were holding up in some areas and where I needed to add more of both:

 

I transplanted more liriope in those washed-out areas later that month and in the fall so they'd get established before winter. I'll re-evaluate how effectively this solution is reducing erosion as the plants fill out next year and continue adding more clumps as needed.

We're pleased with the results, especially all the money we saved by using plants we already had and doing the labor myself.

Next entry: part 1 about some of our volunteer activities

Happy trails,

Sue
"Runtrails & Company" - Sue Norwood, Jim O'Neil, Casey-Girl, Holly-Holly, & Dapper Don

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© 2022 Sue Norwood and Jim O'Neil