Favorite garden channels

One garden feature I've added is a couple "channels" around a brick paver patio where I've removed a course of bricks and planted stuff in the channel it creates. Above I did last year. I took the bricks out and added a row of violets which were in another part of the garden and getting invasive. That's another benefit of planting in a small confined space like this -- no unmanageable spreading. The blue violets happen to go well with the blue-ish outdoor carpet. The flowers won't last long, but the bushty green leaves soften the patio edges quite nicely.

Another channel I've been watching is the one around my raised-bed vegetable potager. It is planted with strawberries. I think the variety of strawberries I have here are kinda' big for the space. They're sort of hard to see in this photo below, but they're more sparse, than bushy, like the violets and don't "mound" as nicely. They are directly beneath a knee-high dwarf apple tree espalier that I'm training to become a living "fence" around the potager garden - an idea I stole from Monet's garden in Giverny.


I usually mulch the strawberries because you can see too much earth around them. This year though, I may take river pebbles, paint them red with green tops and seed "dots" to look like strawberries, to use as mulch. It'll be a hit of much-needed color, hide the ground around them, and supposedly keeps birds away from them (after they try a few rock-hard strawberries). We do get lots of strawberries from the plants - it's just a race to get to them before the squirrels and bunnies do.