I did a few years ago because animals, primarily those rat-bastard raccoons, robbed me blind. 
I had people suggest this and suggest that but, if you have to turn your garden into a Super Max, it isn’t worth it.
Flower bed updates here:
10+ years in this house, and we’ve pretty much got our gardens where we want them - namely low maintenance. Late last year we had the outline of our rear lawn reworked, reducing the lawn. In doing so, we moved some perennials around. Most seem to have handled it fine. The epimedium, lady’s mantle, and hellebore didn’t seem to take it too well. We removed a serviceberry that was in a wrong spot, and some hemlocks that just weren’t thriving. Replaced them with some junipers and oakleaf hydrangeas - all wf which are budding vigorously.
For my birthday last Nov, my wife surprised me by planting 90 daffodil bulbs in 3 drifts. They came up nicely, tho squirrels snipped of many of the flower stalks.
This spring we split an old climbing rose that had been in my daughter’s yard and planted a section in our yard. It was originally in the yard of the house I grew up in, so it is at least 70 years old. Neat to be able to have and share something so old with such memories.
Other than that, we’re just tweaking. Got some trillium and sedum from my daughter. Trying to figure out what - if anything - to do with one back corner of the yard, where water pools and stands after very heavy rains. It has drowned out just about everything we’ve tried except for a witch hazel bush. Last fall we tossed some daylilies back there. They seem to be coming up OK. Just a really tough area to get anything to thrive.
Mostly, the spring seems to be slow in coming. But I keep reminding myself that I always feel that way in March-April in the Chicago area. The micro-climate of our lot always seems to be slower than many/most of our neighbors.
I find that grass invades everything.
But I’m planting some creeping thyme in the dry sunny area where i have trouble growing grass.
Ooh, is it time to plant peas? I should go get some peas, parsley, and pansies.
I planted some nice clematis last year that were cut down by rabbits. I belatedly put up some hardware cloth to protect it, and it’s sprouting nicely now, so I’m hopeful it will be successful this year. I also ordered a new hazel nut bush, which will probably arrive soon. I don’t expect any nuts, what with squirrels and shade, but they are attractive hedge bushes.
We have a number of big planters already, and most of those are plastic – nice looking plastic, to be sure. I really like the look of both unglazed terra cotta and wood, so I’m going to advocate that we fill the rest of the space with those. We don’t get real cold here so frozen pots aren’t something I’m going to worry about. I’m more concerned about getting ones that are too big to move once they’re filled with soil. I also like the whisky barrel planters but my wife does not, and she gets the final say in all of this. Those would be permanent, of course.
I really wish I had taken pics yesterday because we kind of sort of have raised beds already – the ones on either side of the driveway. Those flower beds have a low brick wall separating the flower beds from the driveway and the foundation of the house, which makes up the other side of the flower bed, is tall enough that we could put a few inches of dirt in and make it a proper flower bed. However my wife is really married to the idea of a container garden (I think it’s because containers are easier to maintain for her as they’re taller) so that’s what we’ll do. I like the idea too, I just want to have enough pots that it really fills the space and gives it a cottage garden look. I’m going to have to do some drainage work in that space so the gutters aren’t draining directly into the flower bed but that’s not really a big deal.
I’ll try to take some pics and post them this weekend.
Boxwood is nice, but grows VERY slowly. And i thought it was pricey. I’ve had good luck with daylillies in the treelawn. They are tough as nails. I interplant them with daffodils. I need to add new daffodils every few years, but the daylillies just keep going strong. The border looks great in the spring and early summer, but does get ratty in the fall, despite some late blooming lilies.
Soil temperature over 45ºF 3" to 4" down at around 8 in the morning, and likely to stay that way for a while. Which we hit here on Tuesday; and the top of raised beds barely dry enough to work in by afternoon.
After which, here at least, the next deluge. It hasn’t rained all that much on any one day, but it’s been raining since Wednesday, and seems likely not to stop till next week (and may not stop for very long then.)
You might also try some old-fashioned daffodils. Somewhere around 40 or 50 years ago, before I got here, somebody threw daffodil bulbs away – in the fashion of old farmers throwing vegetable matter away: that is, out in the fields. They naturalized in several chronically wet spots and are still going strong.
Our friends’ farm has peas in the farm store for sale already. They have a few greenhouses. Peas are their first vegetable for sale each spring. I buy them and share with Rocco (our parrot).
Two years ago we planted a curly willow in a very wet spot and it is thriving.
But you are south of me. Thorny Locust and I have similar climates. She might be a tad cooler.
Interesting. The daffodils in my dry back yard keep increasing, and the ones in my wet treelawn seem to be killed by drowning and freezing. But maybe that’s not what weakens them. Maybe its just competition with the day lillies or something.
Willows really like wet areas, but are larger than what I envisioned Disdale wanted.
Some of the southern blueberries like bogs, they can probably handle your wet area. They need acid soil, or at least, soil very high in organic matter, though. There are some irises that like to be wet, too. (But not all of them, check.)
Around here, I see a lot of boxwoods who get severe winter scorch, and others that get hit hard by a virus. Whatever you do, don’t carve them into tortured geometric shapes!
Also, not to worry overmuch about trends, but around here, EVERYONE has boxwoods out front. We’ve got one row of 5, but if I were replacing them, I’d think about something different.
Yeah - I was thinking about some flag iris. Or some of the ornamental milkweeds. It is wet AND heavy shade. Then, in between rains, it dries out. A really tough spot that I’m not going to worry overmuch. We’re planting heavily in front of it - a pretty neat collection of hosta - with the hopes that that directs views away from that corner. The witchhazel and hackberry there are thriving.
The house I grew up in had boxwoods circling the back yard, and I really liked the look. In the midcentury suburban neighborhood I now live in almost everyone has junipers, which I despise. Only one neighbor a street over has boxwoods and they give their yard a much tidier look. They take some maintenance, for sure, but that’s ok. I certainly wouldn’t want to trim them into any weird shapes. Someone on my drive to work has a row of boxwoods in their front yard and they’ve sculpted each one into a weird cone shape with a narrow base. I don’t know what they were going for but the end result is what look like a row of 3 foot tall buttplugs. In our yard a simple row hedge look will be quite sufficient.
I like St. John’s Wort but my wife doesn’t. So that isn’t going to happen unfortunately.
There is a variegated boxwood that would look very nice in the yard. Hmm. Decisions…
We actually finished the job. That was a ton of stone we moved.
It might also depend on the particular daffodils. Mine are the very old-fashioned kind. After I’d moved some of them into another wet spot and they’d taken off with enthusiasm, I read that daffodils are supposed to want dry feet; but these apparently hadn’t read that book.
I bought a mix of daffodils a couple of decades ago, and planted them in the treelawn. A few years later, I marked a couple of my favorites, and dug them up in the fall, and planted them in the back yard. I have a LOT of those two types in the back yard, now. The front treelawn still has a mix, but I buy new daffodils every 10 years or so, as they gradually decrease. I’m planning to buy more this year. They weren’t especially fancy cultivars, although I don’t know the age (or the names) of the individual cultivars, it just came as a variety pack.
Except for crocuses, which I guess are delicious, I’ve had pretty good luck with bulbs. I have a huge drift of little blue scylla under the forsythia, (which started out just scattered bulbs) and a lot of …hmm, I forget its name, but it’s a spring ephemeral that has pretty white simple flowers and deeply cut vaguely round leaves, that grows from underground runners. And a lot of epimedia, which isn’t a bulb, but has some similarities.
I’ve been planting seeds like crazy this last month; so far I have:
Broad (fava) beans, shallots, peas, radishes, Florence fennel, lamb’s lettuce, rainbow chard, lettuce, 4 varieties of tomato (Marmande, Tigerella, Golden Sunrise, Gardener’s Delight), courgettes (zucchini) in both green and yellow varieties, cape gooseberries and scotch bonnet peppers.
I’ve also planted okahijiki (Japanese ‘land seaweed’), but it has not germinated yet. I’m going to grow watercress (I’ve got a solar powered pond pump and I plan to make a little artificial watercourse where the pump will make a sort of trickling stream). I have to plant my potatoes (second earlies) tomorrow, and it won’t be very long until the runner beans can go in.
Oh, and if I can find space, I’m also going to plant butternut squashes and luffas.
Outside of the vegetable patch, I am growing a fruiting hedge - so far, I have planted it with:
Haskap (Russian edible honeysuckle)
A dwarf black mulberry
Saskatoon berry
Gooseberry
Tayberry
Loquat (I don’t expect this to fruit here, but it’s a nice plant)
Pineapple Guava (Feijoa)
There are also elderberries in this fruiting hedge, but they are wild and got there on their own.
I also have a ‘funberry’ (Rubus illecebrosus - a type of raspberry/bramble) to go into this fruiting hedge, but it’s too small to plant out at the moment.
I have no idea of the names of mine; and only a very broad range of their original dates. I moved here in 1987; and the man I bought the place from told me that they’d been growing near the house, but that somebody (maybe his wife? I don’t remember, and she’d died a couple of years previously) had gotten tired of having them there, or maybe tired of taking care of flowerbeds, and they’d dug them up and thrown the bulbs out in the fields. But I don’t know when they threw them out, or when somebody in that family first got them So these daffodils arrived here sometime prior to, say, 1985; and presumably after 1894, as that seems to have been when the house was built.
Saskatoon is a small tree, not a shrub or hedge material, where i live.