Shade Garden

April 22nd

It is still cold and rainy but the shade garden needs some attention.  The shade garden has tripled in size since it was first planted so every year they split their hosta plants and fill in the empty spaces.  Hostas are big, beautiful, and very hearty plants.  Hostas generally have large green leaves but some exotic varieties will be red, blue, and dark purple. We started by marking the places to put the new hostas and then dug up the old ones; we dug up about 6 plants split them and replanted them, we would have done more but the ground was still frozen in some areas. We will split more hostas when the ground warms up more, hopefully soon!  We found a cluster of puffball mushrooms, it was pretty exciting for me as I considered becoming a mycologist early in my college career (I also wanted to become a bush pilot in Alaska for a while).  Puffballs are basidiomycota which is a big word that means it's a mushroom that reproduces using spores.

Billions of spores

covered in spores

The holes in the top of these puffballs means they are mature and have already released quite a few spores, I would assume there will be more puffballs in the shade garden next year. 

John started raking up some of the leaf litter and pine needles and cutting back some of the vines while I followed him with shovel loads of wood chips.  I sprinkled the wood chips around the shade garden to act as fertilizer.  The wood chips do an excellent job of holding moisture and as the wood decomposes it fertilizes the ground.  Think of a tree falling over in the forest, it slowly decomposes and makes new soil, the wood chips are like hundreds of tiny trees.  Wood chips soak up a lot of nitrogen as they decompose which is why you would not use it to fertilize vegetables, but since the wood chips are just sitting on top of the dirt in the shade garden it will be okay plus the wood chips provide a nice accent to the garden.