More gardening

I should never sit down with a clearance garden catalog. 

Thanks to Gilbert H. Wild's spring clearance sale, I've got $70 in plants sitting in my kitchen (because the$12 in butterfly weed (the "fancy" name for orange milkweed) is already in the ground.  Nine different irises, 3 dayliles, bleeding hearts, butterfly weed (asclepias) and one dahlia.  The box was delivered Thursday, and DH dug the new flowerbed today.  I'd planned on putting the iris and at least part of the bleeding hearts in front, but the front iris bed is too shady, so they're all going in back.  One bleeding heart may go out front with the jonquils, but I'm not sure it'll be wet or cool enough there.  At least two are going with the hostas out back, possibly all three. 

I need to find something that likes shade and looks pretty to go out front; the beds are mostly shady, but the front of the house looks so bland.  At least the native-perennial bed by the driveway is colorful.   That primrose is planning a coup, I know, and the coneflowers are all ready to bloom.  One coreopsis is already blooming, the other two are still thinking on it.  I plan to extend that bed down the rest of the driveway and put in more native/butterfly stuff.  Put one asclepias there, and plan to start some from seed to go there as well, if the primrose will back off.

True "garden" news: the first peas are blooming, but something's eaten about 1/3 of the plants, in spite of the pinwheel and yellow-marking-tape flags.  I hung a bar of soap in the garden tonight - it kept the deer away from the hostas last year, so hopefully it'll keep the rabbits away for a while.

Also - raccoons like bananas and apples, but not celery.  And possums are just flat-out ugly.  'Coons may be varmints, but at least they're not bad to look at.