Late Summer Garden Reset | Gardener in Love

Hello everyone! I hope you're all having a great week so far. I am alone today in the garden. Tyler is away with some friends and he's enjoying himself and I have been a little bit under the weather and I don't know about you guys but after I have been sick for any amount of time sort of cooped up in the house I feel as soon as I start feeling even a little bit better I have to get outside and just do something and this is the time of year in our garden. If you guys are familiar with gardening in the south you know that this time of year the garden just starts looking scruffy and what I mean by that is the leaves are starting to fall off of some trees the grass starts to look sort of gray and tired things start to sort of just change over and make that natural change but we sort of get a dip in temperatures and that's super nice but then we go right back up for weeks and weeks longer than most of the country and in that time the garden just starts looking really gray and tired and and sort of tattered and so the natural inclination is really to retreat from that to go inside and we've actually we've taken a few weeks off you guys know we went to the beach and we came back and we sort of started on fall projects which is the natural inclination that we would normally do let's just ignore the garden until it starts to feel a little bit better but most of the garden feels really really good still there's still lots of stuff in bloom and because we're getting that little tiny dip in temperatures a lot of our plants are bouncing back and giving us a second flush in bloom so there's a lot of projects to do around the garden of course because we have neglected it for a few weeks so today I figured I have a little bit of time and I feel a little bit better so I'm just going to go around the garden and get some things cut back get them cleaned up and just start making it feel rich and happy again fall is on the way and so I don't want to walk out here and sort of feel you know oh my gosh there's so many things that I have to do as soon as all the fall color starts if I get ahead of it now and I do all of these cleanup projects so when fall gets here and we really want to enjoy that shift in temperatures and spend more time in the garden and see all of our plants changing colors then I won't have to do all of that cleanup so I'm going to take you guys along today for each of these projects there's a lot to do and I'll just talk to you about each one of them as we do it there's a lot to get done so we'll see how far we can get okay so the first thing that I'm going to tackle is our planter box and we showed you guys this a few weeks ago in our garden tour and it was a little overgrown then but like overgrown in a pretty way now it's sort of overgrown in a way that just looks untaken care of unkempt you can see our tri-color potato vine is growing out into the walkway here and it's sort of taking over by like maybe two feet and if we let it go it will go all over our sofa and it'll just take over even though it's pretty I think it's something that I'm going to just take back by a few feet we still have a few weeks left before we switch this planter box over to fall color so I want to make sure that for the last few weeks of enjoying it that it's not looking just like a crazy mess so I will tell you that this potato vine is so interesting and I think that the white and the different colors are starting to show a little bit more now that the temperatures are sort of bouncing back and forth we're getting a little bit cooler at night still sort of jumping back up into like the high 80s and 90s during the day but at night we're getting some temperatures that are different and I think that this potato vine is really just loving it and sort of showing off different colors it's going right over these obelisks and it's sort of just trailed right down to the ground and I think it looks so pretty this euphorbia is also still taking off and there's a whole entire gardenia under underneath this one so I'm going to take it back just a little bit but I still want to leave enough color there I will also say that our superbena has sort of come into another bloom since that garden tour and then now it's sort of going out of bloom again and you can see these gardenia are super susceptible to spider mites and aphids and things like that and so I'm probably going to go ahead and take this back today and I probably won't pull it yet since I want to sort of get at least a few more weeks out of it and see if we can get it to bloom again but I think that it will still be really pretty from this angle the planter box looks really nice and it's really beautiful so all I'm really going to do is take it back so that each color each piece of foliage sort of has its own pocket and it's not sort of trailing down onto the ground you can see here this dark red potato vine is trailing out and sort of just about to go out into the walkway so any guests that we start to have over the next few weeks are going to sort of think wow this really looks like medusa like you guys aren't taking care of it so I'm going to grab our supplies and I'm going to get to cutting this back all right guys so I'm going to show you what I've done I probably got a little bit carried away on this side you can see just over here it's like I still left a little bit because I noticed that it's pretty late in the season and if I take it all it's just going to look like completely terrible but I did notice that we're getting all of this all the leaves that are sort of like decaying right on our deck and we just stained this deck not long ago and so what I'm going to do is come back and scrub those off of there but I really wanted to sort of get rid of any potential of that continuing you can see our deck is pretty dirty right now so it needs cleaned anyway but I don't really like those leaves decaying on the deck and just making a mess so I took more off of this side that I think I really had planned just so we could sort of take care of that but I did leave a lot on the other side because you just get this beautiful view whenever you walk into the gate I did take off anything that was sort of threatening our boxwoods that we have here because I don't want those to die sort of in total darkness but as you go down the line there's still plenty of beautiful foliage to get us through the rest of the summer which I would say is probably I don't know three or four weeks left of that and you can see one more view here it just looks so stunning and I don't know I didn't want Tyler to be upset that all this beautiful foliage was gone so we still have a few weeks left and we'll really enjoy it so the other thing that you saw me do was take all of the sort of extra growth off of this passionflower vine so this vine is in too much shade to actually bloom and I knew that that was going to happen whenever we picked this vine out for this spot every single year we have this beautiful trellis here and I think I want something beautiful and green and lush on it and it just does not get quite enough sun for big leafed sort of vines to grow and bloom but I love the leaves on the passionflower vine you can see they are just this huge sort of really interesting shape and they kind of look like Jurassic or something to me and I just really love the way that they look so I'm okay with it not actually flowering just because we get this beautiful lush green coverage and look our pelargoniums are blooming and our heuchera looks gorgeous in here in this beautiful main planter and these planters guys have been so good for us over here they are not self-watering but you guys I put these on drip a few weeks ago and they have gone crazy since we did that look these over here in this beautiful little sort of sitting area are just going insane and I'm not actually going to take any off of these because it just looks so so pretty I did take on this side we did have a potato vine that I went ahead and cut back because Bailey our beagle has been sort of rooting up under that and up under all of these vines here that we're growing out for some reason she loves to get under there and just sort of play and I'm sure it's like scratching her snout or something but anyway this stuff looks way better so the last thing that I did over here was take back this bum area so this is the solar eclipse boom area and this is one of the most talked about plants in our garden lately and we just love it now when I planted this here I did not really pay attention of course to the the sizing because it does get six to eight feet tall and wide and so eventually it's really just gonna cover everything in this corner and I think that's okay I'll probably transplant anything that is getting shrouded underneath it but it got out into the walkway a little more than I liking I really do love for things to sort of grace the walkway and just something that you kind of have to walk around just because it looks really lush but I don't want it to be too much and so that it makes it super awkward so I went ahead and took that back a little bit I am planning to take some cuttings of this before we hit winter I know that there are some friends that would like to try it and I would just like to root it in different parts of the garden and I think that that's possible so we'll come back later and do that I'm not going to do it just yet because we still have plenty of time all right so the next thing on our list before we move on from this area is our beautiful espalier diador cedar and we get so much enjoyment out of this year round it's an evergreen and this is the perfect spot for it we have our patio furniture right here and we really hang out here as much as we can during the season I honestly would love to install some heaters out here so that we can get out here in late fall and early winter when it's not too cold but this you guys saw me trim on this early in the season and sort of tie it up and this is how much it has grown sort of in just a few months and it's looking really really pretty but most of this growth that we see here is actually growing straight out and I'm actually just going to come back and clean it up I'm not going to worry about sort of tying this new growth up right now because it's all sort of resisting the way that everything else is growing so I do want to get it cleaned up a little bit because I will come back when it gets winter time and I will be putting christmas lights on this and so if it's too wild and too crazy it's way too hard to put christmas lights on so I'm gonna go ahead and take care of it now so that we can enjoy it clean sort of pretty pristine the rest of the season and then when winter gets here we'll be putting some pretty lights on it all right guys so I've got our diador cedar all cleaned up and it's looking much much better I really did just take most of the growth off that was sticking straight out and you guys could see I was sort of doing a hand test and I would just run my hand along each one of the limbs and any growth that was just not sort of going with the flow I went ahead and took that off and on this one side over here I will tell you this is growing almost to the end of our wire already and I cannot believe how much growth that is in no time we're sort of going to be to the end of this wall and it's going to be really really really pretty all right so you guys can tell that most of the rest of the garden is in direct sun right now and I'm not going to sort of chance it I haven't really been feeling good like I said and so I'm going to stay out of the direct sun I'm going to go inside enjoy the afternoon eat some lunch and then I'm going to come back here this evening when it's nice and shady and I can do all right so I'm back in the garden we have a bit of cloud cover now which is wonderful because there's a lot left to do and I'm hoping to get a lot of it done the next thing is our golden celebration roses now on our garden tour you guys saw Tyler telling us that this whole area there are three golden celebration roses back here and all three of them are just growing crazy and for a few years now I've been saying I think we need to take these out they're not in the right spot and we don't really have any anywhere else for them so I'm sure we'll rehome them but they must have heard us talking about them because a morning glory just completely took them over not even a pretty morning glory let me show you okay so if I were to try to tell you where the roses are underneath this mass of morning glories it would be really hard because they have completely covered them you can see they are climbing up the arborvitaes and just making a huge mess and morning glories are invasive here in North Carolina and this is specifically the species that is invasive this will just crawl all over your garden and take over all of your shrubs and and just sort of just like lay right over them and it has really taken these golden celebration roses down so these are usually growing way up high and they are sticking up and this morning glory has just weighed them down and so what I'm going to do today I think is probably end up cutting the roses back pretty far down so that I can just take the morning glory right off the top of them the golden celebration rose is one that does have pretty big thorns and so in order to sort of avoid a bunch of cuts I think what I'll end up doing is like I said just sort of cutting back the rose as far down as I can probably prepping them to take them out we don't have anything else planned for this space yet and so I don't want to take them out just yet but I think preparing them for that in the fall will be perfect and that way we can find something soon that will work here and get it planted so I am going to go get some heavy gloves and my shears and we're just going to sort of get after it okay so I've popped my felco gloves on and these are a little bit heavier than my normal gloves that I wear I usually wear the nitrile gloves and these are just a little bit more they have a heavier rubber on them and they're just a little bit thicker this is still cloth though so if these thorns do sort of like puncture that it's going to go right through to my hand felco does sell a pair of rose pruning gloves that have much longer sleeves and are just very thick so that the thorns don't affect you I unfortunately don't have a pair of those but I do have my felco pruning shears and I went ahead and picked my felco tree trimmers out because I figured these have longer handles and I can sort of stick them through there cut out cut back the rose without getting cut and hopefully get this morning glory out of here so I think I'm going to start by pulling the morning glory off the top as much as I can and then the rest of it I'll just prune the rose back and hopefully get rid of it all right guys so it is a new day last night it got dark and cloudy and I thought it was going to be a really nice rain and of course nothing happened it just made me stop doing my project and go inside but I'm back today I'm going to continue and finish this out I got our golden celebration roses all taken care of I actually had to take those almost all the way down to the ground but that area looks so much better without all those morning glories and it just looked like a overgrown like something you'd see on the side of the road and I couldn't handle it anymore those golden celebration roses are prepped to be dug out now probably in the next few weeks fall is a really really great time to plant roses because it's cooler and once you plant the roses they're not under a lot of stress having to sort of adapt to their environment and to the heat and so once we dig those up we'll give them away to a friend and they'll plant them and I'm sure they will survive roses are super hardy and there shouldn't be any issue but I did figure while I'm trimming roses there are some beautiful roses in the parterre garden they've all been blooming their heads off the last few weeks and it's been so nice to see and just walk through here and just see all the beauty but they are done with that now and I really do not like looking at spent rose blooms they kind of turn brown and gross looking if I leave them there I know those petals could fall off and they could form rose hips which are sometimes nice to look at but most of the varieties especially the David Austin ones that we have are not really known for forming really large rose hips I know fall is coming and so that would be really pretty because they usually turn orange but I'm going to trim them back and this is probably going to be the last trim of the year that we're going to do on these roses when it cools off I might get another flush of roses out of them and we can enjoy that and then if we get rose hips maybe I'll leave them but for now I just like it to look tidy and kept and pretty while we're still getting those fresh blooms so here we go all right so we've got our roses here in the parterre and they are still looking really really pretty we don't have much black spot or anything like that on them which I kind of expected having planted them and transplanted them in the really hot part of the summer you would really normally get some disease on them from them just having to adapt but we really didn't get a lot of that what I have noticed is that they are super sparse and when I take these down of course they'll put on some new growth and that'll sort of be a little bit more full but because we planted them when we did they really just focused on blooming and not putting out a bunch of fresh foliage when we come back in the spring we will take these almost all the way down to the ground and at that point we'll get all new growth for the next year and in the spring they'll all look really really full and beautiful of foliage and then the blooms on top of the foliage will look much prettier for now they're a little bit sparse but they have been really really nice to watch bloom and hopefully now when I trim them like I said we'll get an extra flush of blooms when it cools off a little bit here and that'll be so nice but one thing I did want to mention is and I'm sure we've told you guys this before but whenever I'm trimming roses I like to take basically where the spent bloom is and you typically go down to the first sort of branching that has five leaves and what you want to do is trim just above that branch in the direction that you want the branch to grow so if I've got this one here that's on this side I know that I typically don't want anything to branch towards the middle of the plant because that's going to create sort of a conglomeration of branching and that's not going to be good for airflow so what we typically do is always trim towards the outside of the rosebush and so what I'm going to do here because this has five leaves already I'm going to take it down a little bit farther just so that we get some nice branching and there's sort of that heavier stem to hold any new foliage that comes out so I'm going to take this down to here and so we've got this old spent bloom here and these are actually turning brown so they're not forming rose hips at all so I don't feel that bad about sort of cutting this all back and not seeing those rose hips so I'm going to get this one done and move on to the rest of them and then we're going to move on to our next project okay so the next thing on our list is these steps and ever since we put these steps in we have been so happy with this part of the garden obviously the parterre is beautiful but these steps added something that just feels so complete in the area and we're just so so happy with it we did have plans to come back through here and plant some ground cover something small maybe some creeping time or something creeping blue star something like that that would be really pretty in between each step and then that would bloom also what we got instead because we didn't do that in time is these lovely weeds and they have grown in super super thick and I'm not sure exactly what kind of weed this is but we do struggle with it in our garden and so I would love to leave this because they're so fluffy and it just looks so pretty in between each step but the longer I leave it the this particular weed will bloom the more it will spread the more they will come up so I'm going to take them all out and it's not going to look as pretty as it does now but we will come back in in the fall if I can find some sort of ground cover and we'll plant that then so I'm going to take care of this now okay so the last chore that I'm going to tackle is our espaliered crab apple and I know you can't really tell but there is an espaliered crab apple on this fence because it is so grown up and I will say if you guys are interested in espalier it is something that is really really beautiful and it's a great practice it looks stunning in the garden they just make great focal points but it is a lot of work so I will say this is probably the third or fourth time this season that I have had to come back and trim and I think it's just a fast grower I mean crab apples apples and pears and things like that might not be as quick as a crab apple but you can see it's been putting up these spikes and once we get those up you can't really see the beautiful structure of the actual tree trunk itself so I have to come back every now and then take these down and then we can see the beautiful shape of the espalier so I'm gonna do that and then we're gonna wrap this up all right guys so I've got our crab apple all trimmed up and it looks so much nicer and I have to tell you the thing that I love about this most other than of course that beautiful candelabra shape that you can see once it's trimmed fresh is actually seeing our crab apples and we got so many crab apples this year and in just a few weeks they are going to turn orange and they're going to look so beautiful for some fall interest and I cannot wait for it you guys can tell it is not cool yet in North Carolina it's probably about 90 degrees and the sweat is still pouring so I'm going to wrap this up and be done for today I'm so happy with just the fall garden and the way it's coming together I know that it seems like a trudge to the end and like we're never going to get there but it's been such a beautiful year for us it's been such a beautiful summer of projects and I hope that this sort of encouraged you to get out in the garden and enjoy the garden it's still beautiful there's still things to be done before we get to fall and before we start that cleanup so if you guys stuck around this long I know that it was a lot of projects so thank you so much for watching and be sure that you subscribe to our channel so you can get all of our gardening content all season long until then from our garden to yours we'll see you soon bye guys