The Gardens at HOMS

Wow! I did not realize it has been almost a year since writing our last post. A lot has happened in the past year! Our family has finally relocated permanently to Pennsdale. We will still split our time between Pennsylvania and Colorado, just in the reverse!

As this is the first year that we will be here full time we have spent the last few weeks cleaning out weeds and learning about all the beautiful perennial flowers and plants we have as well as relocating and looking forward to adding to the gardens as we get through the year and fully catalog everything.

Man, do things grow fast and full here, which is so different than our Colorado property! We had a good number of hostas and after they had been growing for about 2 weeks, we dug them up and split them to form a mirrored edge on the south side of the smokehouse to connect the smokehouse/sunroom gardens. We were able to get about 30 splits from the existing plants and are very happy with the way it turned out. We also moved a rose bush (which was shocked from the move as expected) and cut down all of the tree shoots from black walnut and sumac. We brought in 4 cu. yards of black mulch from Two Guys Mowing Services, LLC to finish the gardens and hopefully control the weed growth.

I have separated the gardens - the sunroom garden, smokehouse garden, the bird bath garden, the front of the house and the back of the house. The sunroom garden is three tiers with stone walls and a flagstone path to the smokehouse entrance. We are in process of relocating the perennials under the Ohio Buckeye trees at the parking area on Village and will seed those gardens later and return them to their grass state. They were simply too overgrown and full of weeds to reasonably maintain. Sophia and I planted annual flowers for added color in our front porch pots and the sectioned off garden area next to the sunroom flagstone patio. We will eventually expand to cleaning up the east side along Worthington and adding some color to that entrance.

I use an app recommended by my mom called Picture This. With the paid subscription (about $40 a year) for this easy-to-use app, you can create your own gardens, log the plants (and weeds if you want!) and learn everything you need to know about the plants - from care to diagnosing bugs or unhealthy plants to splitting, moving, and what kind of animals, birds, and bugs they attract. Also, if they are toxic to animals which is important to us since we have pets. Full disclosure - we were not compensated for this recommendation.

Here is a list of the plants in the Gardens at HOMS that we have identified so far:

Bird Bath Garden:

Purple Coneflower

Rattlesnake Master

Wild Daffodil

Frassen's Catnip

Dider's Tulip

Front of House Gardens:

Armenian Grape Hyacinth

Wild Pansy

Spanish Bluebell

Bigleaf Hydrangea