The first summer we were at this house, I had planted some of the flowers I had started from seed at the previous house before moving. On the front porch, I had quite a few petunias, a coneflower I’d started from seed, plus sweet potato vines I’d planted, and a moss rose that was given as a gift that year. Every time they got to looking good, something would come along and eat them.
I finally started setting out a trail camera to find out what it was because whatever it was, it had to come up on the porch to eat some of the stuff it went after. I had originally thought a deer, but not on the porch…. and then a rabbit, but one of the containers was pretty tall for a rabbit.
It was a groundhog. I had never seen a groundhog in person before, so I had to Google what animal was similar in appearance to a beaver. 😂 I never had many petunias bloom in the front porch planters because it turns out, petunias and sweet potato vines are two of their favorite things. I started calling this groundhog Bucky, and he lived under our front porch. In April 2020, Bucky turned out to be a Becky when she emerged one day with her babies.
Turns out, groundhogs also love coreopsis, mums, petunias, pansies, violas, sweet potato vines, coneflowers, marigolds, verbena, moss roses, Livingstone daisies, and pentas. Those are the ones I can remember off the top of my head.
Becky made herself comfortable, and I do admit, it was cute watching her and the babies. I even made an Instagram account for her (it has been deleted since).
In March 2021, I decided to make a little flower bed for her with her favorite things planted in it, at the end of the porch where one of her 3 in and out spots were for underneath the porch.
She promptly started munching in it. I started with pansies, coreopsis, and a garden mum and later added petunias and sweet potato vines.
In May, I added stepping stones to make it look cute.
And had a little wooden sign made for her little garden!
But, as you might suspect, Becky and her babies didn’t stop with their little personal garden. In June, looking out my bedroom window to see one of the babies eating on my just-about-to-flower pentas, it was the final straw. Since moving to this house, gardening in general had been quite challenging, and the groundhogs had to go. They had already been eating my marigolds (aren’t those supposed to be pest-resistant????), and I was tired of not being able to enjoy my flowers I worked so hard to grow. They are also destructive diggers, and having them right there at the house (with underground internet cables and power lines) was risky. And so Becky and her 3 babies were humanely trapped and relocated to a giant field of kudzu in June 2021.
I have kept the name “Becky’s Garden” because it had stuck by that point. I had to evict a couple more groundhogs the next year or two that tried to move in, and in 2022, I finally blocked off the 3 access points with hardware cloth.
We had a dang armadillo that would come almost every night and wake us up with its digging. Our porch was so low to the ground, it would fling the rocks up, and they would hit the porch. This hardware cloth solved that problem as well.
Last year, I planted it out with ageratum, caladiums, impatiens, rudbeckia, salvia, and scabiosa.
And things did great!
This year, it was a hot mess at the end of May.
Becky’s Garden didn’t get planted out this year (life…), and I finally ended up spraying everything in this bed to kill weeds. I have always had a problem each year with the weeds trying to take over in this bed, one being creeping charlie that that is hard to pull out completely. At the end of last month, I cleaned up any remaining weeds, tossed the mum (it wasn’t doing well the past 2 years), and planted a clematis I had purchased on clearance at Lowe’s. Before planting, I cut it down to almost soil level. You can’t even see it in this picture in front of the trellis.
I snapped this picture this morning.
The clematis is already past the top of the trellis, so I may need to get a taller trellis.
And the WEEDS! Ugh! Do they ever stop?! My plant ID app says most of these are chickweed seedlings.
I am covering it with cardboard until I plant out my fall seedlings that will grow and bloom in early spring.
At the time of writing this post, there are only 2 things planted in Becky’s Garden.
- Clematis – Boulevard Cezanne
- Balloon Flower (Platycodon) – Fuji Blue