May Tour Of My Shady Container Garden

Join me for a may tour of my shady container garden!

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#containergardening #shadegarden #rooftopgarden

hello everyone welcome to my garden, today I’m going to give you guys a quick tour of my container garden and show you how it looks at the end of May, give you some updates on the plants, show you what’s new… for those of you who are new to my channel, my terrace is Northeast facing, so it only gets a couple of hours of morning sunlight, but many parts of the balcony don’t receive any direct sunlight at all because they are either shaded by this wall or by other plants or by the privacy screen so it’s a mix of full shade and partial shade. And I garden in zone 8, we have cold winters and hot and humid summers. And this month the month of May was a little bit of a roller coaster weatherwise, cause first of all we had temperatures below freezing which is not normal for us our last frost date is usually the first week of April, so having frost in May is definitely not normal, and then the whole month was really rainy, I think we had like maybe four or five days without rain and all the other days it rained so it was a little bit tricky and on top of that we had strong winds so the mix of frost and wind and rain definitely wasn’t easy on plants and I lost some plants, some plants were badly damaged , but overall it looks pretty decent, so let me show you how it looks and why don’t we start with the back of the balcony first. okay so let’s start with the back of the balcony, which I call my shade garden, because this area does not receive any direct sunlight at all and it is by far my favorite area in the whole garden. And you know even though there is not a lot of flowers and like not a lot of color, I tried to incorporate as much texture as possible and include different shades of green to make this shade garden look a little bit more interesting. So up above all of these plants we have Japanese maple Acer ‘Orange Dream’ and I transferred it here to this full shade spot cause I’ve had troubles with it in the past it would scorch terribly in the sun even though my garden only receives morning sunlight, that morning sunlight was still too intense for this plant, so I transferred it here in the full shade and it seems to be doing a really really well. Below we have a whole bunch of perennials we have some hostas, Hosta Royal and Hosta Halcyon, and then a new addition that I planted just last month and I planted it as bare-roots. I really love the pattern on these leaves and look how much it’s grown just in these past couple of weeks and just a Brunnera, couple of ornamental grasses and Podophyllum ‘Spotty Dotty’ it’s this weird looking plant and not only the leaves look really weird and they are just so large and very thick but check this out when you lift the leaf look at those flowers don’t they look so unique and they’re actually pretty smelly like they don’t have a very uh beautiful fragrance and fun fact they are pollinated by flies flies are usually attracted by smelly things and one thing I wanted to add if you think that I don’t have a slug problem based on my hostas that look absolutely perfect you would be mistaken we are going to come back to this in a moment. As I move back a little bit you can see here I have a Tiarella such a lovely perennial for full shade, partial shade pollinators absolutely love it and then to add a little pop of color I have this Heuchera it is a Heuchera ‘Silver Gumdrop’ and it is supposed to be silver but because it’s growing in full shade without any direct sunlight the leaves are a little bit more purplish and I really love how shiny these leaves are and when you turn them the underside is kind of like a cherry color and then to contrast with all of this it has beautiful kind of flashy pink flowers and it doesn’t have a lot of flowers because I keep cutting them for my mini bouquets but the contrast is really beautiful between the these flashy pink flowers and purple leaves and then this cherry underside. Such a beautiful plant, but as I said if you were to grow it in slightly more sunny spot it will be more silver. And then I as I move back a little bit uh you can see my Clematis montana ‘Mayleen’ is now done blooming you could see its beautiful blooms in my last month’s tour in April and now it’s done blooming so I gave it a little bit of a haircut to promote branching out and you don’t need to prune this type of Clematis every year but I’ve had mine for like three years so I decided it would be a good idea to give it a little bit of a haircut to encourage it to Bbranch out as you can see it started to produce some new shoots so this way the base will be a little less bare than it is right now and I can expect more blooms next spring And on this side there is a Hydrangea macrophylla this one is called ‘Early Blue’ and although it bloomed blue at first I’ve had it for like six years it’s one of my oldest plants and I didn’t really care much about the color so I just let it do what it wanted and it bloomed pink obviously but since I’m weirdly attracted to pink flowers and all flowers in my garden seem to be pink I decided to change the color of this to something slightly more purplish or hopefully bluish and it’s a bit of a long process with potted hydrangeas, it’s not the same as turning hydrangeas blue when they are grown directly in ground but look at this some of these plants some of these flowers are actually purple already and I’ve seen a couple turning completely blue but it’s a little bit wilted I should I should water this hydrangea once I’m done with my tour. So this is how this area looks from this angle okay so let’s come back to that snails and slugs story for a moment. I have my new hydrangea here Hydrangea arborescens from the Bellaragazza series, this is a series of the smallest Hydrangea arborescense in the world they only grow 50 to 60 cm tall and wide which makes them perfect for balconies and container gardens and I planted it last fall so obviously I didn’t have high expectations for the season given that it’s its first season but it started to grow so beautifully it had a really lovely shape already and then what happened, first things first, this Japanese maple fell on top of it in the wind it broke one large branch and then a couple days later I come out here and I see that one of the branches is laying flat and it’s like completely wilted I pick it up and I found a whole bunch of slugs munching on it so my balcony slugs definitely stay away from my hostas but they do munch on my hydrangeas quite a lot so unfortunately I ended up with a little bit of a misshapen hydrangea this season but oh well it is what it is. I guess I should also point out my railing planters that I just planted about a week ago they don’t look like much we only have two Euphorbia ‘Diamond Frost’ in the center and then we have three Begonias that I grew from tubers and they are still very very small but these are absolutely stunning this is a Begonia Florance or Florence and they have those really lovely pink double flowers so I cannot wait for these plants to put on some growth and to finally start blooming. I think these planters will look really sweet once these Begonias are in full bloom. As I move forward I have a couple of mint plants on the floor this is not their final spot, it’s just I placed them here for the time being on the table here this little planter with Snapdragons I grew from seeds. Not much to show you yet but as we go into this part of the balcony there’s a couple of things I’m really excited to show you. I’m going to skip this little grouping here because there is not much happening at the moment so no point really talking about it but check this out my Rose Mary Delany is blooming and it’s very special because as I said my garden is in the shade but this Rose is said to tolerate as little as 4 to 5 hours of sunlight which I don’t think it gets 4 hours in this spot but it definitely gets 3 – 3,5 and so far so good look at this so many beautiful blooms and they smell absolutely amazing and there’s many more yet to open. So, so far so good. I mean it looks healthy it blooms we have a little bit of chlorosis going on under there but that’s okay. I mean it’s too soon to speak because I planted it um early this spring as a bare root so you know you need to give it a year two maybe even three before we can actually tell how it’s growing, but I mean judged by how much it’s grown and how beautifully it blooms already this season I think um I think it’s a success Okay now so let’s have a look at my bench and you guys I’m trying my best to free up this bench, it’s been terrible, i’ve been using it as a potting table instead of a bench but I’m getting better at it I’m cleaning it up I’m transferring plants into different parts of my garden but I just moved my ranunculus planter in here, I had it on the ground and it was kind of in the shade a little bit neglected but I transferred it here and look at those beautiful blooms. I planted a mix I forgot the name but it was kind of a mix of whites and peachy pinks and pinks in general and we have one rogue red ranunculus. okay I’m going to move back just for a second here to show you Clematis jackmanii is blooming and aren’t these flowers absolutely stunning look at the size of these flowers they are as large as my as the palm of my hand and such a beautiful color, the only regret that I have is something I didn’t take in consideration when picking this this Clematis I mean it’s a stunning plant many people have it in in their garden because it’s such a beautiful performer, but one thing is this Clematis is pretty dark like when I move back a little they look almost black these flowers, so I am not sure if I’m going to keep it…. because you know what I mean my garden is in the shade for most of the day and these flowers they are so dark that they tend to disappear like we can see flowers but we can’t really tell what’s the color. like they look almost black so I’m not sure if I’m going to keep it. I mean if I give it away to someone I’m going to wait until the end of the season when it’s dormant but it’s such a beautiful plant nonetheless. but perhaps a little bit too dark for my shady garden, so maybe I will pick a Clematis that has slightly lighter color, maybe some kind of lilac flowers lilac purple, but anyway check this out Lilium regale is absolutely massive. I kept it as a perennial from last year and it grew so tall this year and it’s covered with buds it should bloom in a couple of weeks and on this side let me give you an update on my Dahlias. I’m making a little experiment with Dahlias. Last year I managed to have some Dahlia flowers by placing a Dahlia pot on top of another pot so that they can catch as much morning sunlight as there is available and they actually managed to produce some flowers they remained very short like this but they actually produced some flowers so I’m giving a try to three different Dahlias this year these two are looking super good and super healthy the one at the back is a a little bit small but because it doesn’t receive a lot of sunlight so I need to find it a better spot but yeah so far so good. Woven Willow tree looking beautiful such a lovely addition to any container garden and so unique looking. All right so now let me give you a quick look on my veggie garden so in my shade veggie garden I grow two different blueberries we have a Brigitta Blue which is a blue blueberry and it has some blueberry on it these bushes are still quite young so they don’t have a lot of berries but Pink Lemonade actually has some decent amount of berries, my camera won’t focus on them, there we go, so quite a lot of berries on this pink lemonade and then I have some alpine strawberries and I have two bushes and two different varieties but they are kind of mixed so I have some red alpine strawberries and yellow alpine strawberries I’m not sure if I’m going to be able to show you because I just harvested them yesterday oh we have some actually check this out so these yellow alpine strawberries are called yellow wonder and they do excellent in the shade, because compared to regular strawberry which I also have here, I was so tempted when I saw this Tuscana strawberry in the nursery, they have these beautiful pink flowers and actually there’s one strawberry forming but regular strawberries need at least 5 hours of sunlight which they will never get on my balcony but we are giving it a try I placed it on the railing here so that it can catch as much morning sunlight as possible but alpine strawberries grow really well in the shade and especially that yellow Wonder variety they grow excellent in the shade and then other than that I have some well lettuce I keep harvesting it every day and it keeps growing like crazy and then I have some arugula, basil, chives, parsley and more arugula. so I have some plans for this veggieGarden because I would like to grow more edibles in the shade but at the same time you know my balcony is very narrow it’s only like 1,3m wide so you know the more pots you add well the less space you have to walk so I actually purchased something really cool that I’m going to show you in upcoming videos and I’m going to transform this space a little bit so that I can have more space but at the same time grow more edibles and last but not least Hydrangea this one is Hydrangea serrate ‘Blueberry Cheesecake’ here again it used to be purplish or bluish but then it turned completely pink but I’m trying to turn it back blue or or purple but you know with pot hydranges it takes some time and the fact that it’s grown in this large concrete pot this concrete pot is as as large as this it takes sometime there’s a lot of soil in here and I think I miscalculated that’s why the other one turned purple and this one not yet but anyway it’s blooming absolutely beautiful pollinators love it and it grew absolutely massive in this corner All right so that’s it this is how the balcony looks at the end of May thanks so much for joining me today for this tour I hope you guys have a great day and we will see each other in the next video bye