Successes of the Gardening Year

It is time to take stock of the successes and failures of gardening year 2010. 

Annuals
The winners are: Zinnias. Even though the first growth was eaten by rabbits the zinnias made a nice comeback and are clear favorites with insects. Whether they're cabbage, eastern tiger swallowtail, black swallowtail, or monarch butterflies, or bumblebees, they make a bee line (pun intended) to the zinnias and ignore every other annual on our flower island.

Perennials
It's a tie between common milkweed/butterfly weed and Joe-pye weed. Besides the fact that milkweeds are the only host plant for monarch butterfly larvae, they are also very popular with insects. During their bloom they were literally covered with flying objects all day long.
Our Joe-pye weed (a cultivar named 'Little Joe') has grown much taller than last year. It is, in fact, taller than me. It enjoys a long blooming season and is a great draw for insects. And it doesn't look like a weed at all.

Failures of the gardening year

The biggest "failure" of our gardening year was our inability to find a two-tiered bird fountain. It was supposed to be the focal point of our second native garden. We looked locally and online and came up "empty." Everything we saw was either too small or the water would be too deep for birds to stand in. A bird bath should not be deeper than two inches and nothing passed the test. We finally bought a pretty bird bath and a water wiggler. It was not very popular, though, until we hung up our bird feeders. I guess water alone was not enough of a magnet for birds.
We also purchased an arbor and placed it at the entrance to our native garden. We had images of trumpet honeysuckle climbing up the sides and luring hummingbirds with their sweet smell. Alas, we could not find trumpet honeysuckle anywhere. We hope to have better luck next year.
We also expanded our vegetable area and planted tomatoes and paprika. That proved to be too much temptation for our resident groundhog (actually, he resides under our neighbor's barn, but finds more food in our backyard). Our plan for next year is therefore to put up a fence to protect tender plants from wildlife since we spend a small fortune on repellants.
Fences are on our list for next year, but overall we're happy with the way our backyard has turned out this year. Considering that we haven't had much rain this summer and fall we're lucky that we only had to water our new serviceberry and the annuals, of course.