Putting it mildly, 2005 was not a very good year for my bog garden.
For starters, we had a heavy rain near the end of winter that turned
to a heavy, wet, snowfall. Because there was no wind to speak of, the
mesh netting that I used for the fencing collected a large amount of
snow. Because I only used 3/4" nailboard for structure, the resulting
weight of the wet snow caused it to collapse.
I intended to fix this as soon as possible once I got the pine needles
off of the bog, but I got very busy with other projects. When you have
a daughter who plays rep baseball, it takes a tremendous amount of your
time, especially when she suddenly develops a work ethic and wants to
practice every day that she doesn't have a game or practice with her
team. Of course, we as parents put our kids first.
The end result for the bog garden is that the birds would up taking
almost all of the moss in the garden, removing in the process, virtually
all of my sundews and the multitude of seed that was dropped there from
the year before. Most upsetting was the promise of a huge colony of
D. linearis, as all of my plants that had been in the bog for a couple
of years had flowered profusely and set a huge quantity of seed. Grrrrrrr.
Once this destruction started taking place, I had to get going on a
new structure, so I built one where panels of the fence would be removable,
making access to the bog easier and in the winter, the whole netting
structure could be stored away, leaving only the supports behind. With
limited time available, it took a bit of time to get things built, so
the rodents had a field day digging around in the bog. I didn't lose
anything, as the critters weren't looking to eat the plants, but it
was a pain replanting them.
Finally, I got the new structure in place and everything was safe and
sound again, so the plants continued their growth and recovered very
nicely.
I am sorry for the lack of pictures this year, but I was too PO'd in
the beginning of the season to even want to take any pics, and then
got very busy afterward.
Things should be back to normal in 2006.
