A Test

Oct29

I ran a little test here over the last few weeks, but before getting into that let’s just enjoy the 28 minutes of sun which coincided with the weekend and matched the glow of the final color on the dogwoods (Cornus florida).

hydrangea paniculata limelight fall color

The neighborhood dogwood trees are down to their final autumnal glow after first russeting up in September.

Actually (and as usual) these photos are from earlier in the week when nicer weather prevailed and we were able to enjoy some sunny and perhaps too-warm weather for the few minutes when I wasn’t stuck at work. It’s only now that I’m getting around to celebrating the glowing colors of this past week as I sit inside again, not due to work but due to the typical weekend rainy weather which is feeding the swap again with even more moisture. Whatever though, the plants carry on and I don’t remember the Hydrangea paniculatas ever showing so much pink before… and I’m contemplating maybe adding one more, something which is nice and late and intentionally turns pink each year. The ‘Vanilla Strawberry’ I gave to my mother in law could be a match, but it’s a little earlier than I’d like and because of that might go brown before the season wraps up.

Hydrangea by the street, also brighter than ever.

Speaking of the season wrapping up I just looked at the ten day, and it looks like frost might finally be on the way. We’ve had a mild October again, but it looks like November will come in with a light frost at least, and clear the way for tulip planting and final cleanups.

Aster laevis ‘Raydon’s Favorite?’ (Smooth Aster) is my best aster. It tolerates drought, blooms late, blooms long, and requires no work other than a chopping in half in June. It’s a star of the late autumn border.

Frost won’t be the worst thing. The garden starts to look uncomfortable once the leaves start falling and everything goes to sleep, but the marigolds are still going strong. A good frost moves everything along and puts the lingering things out of their misery while reminding the gardener that there’s a due date approaching for his project, and things need to wrap up before a solid freeze locks everything down.

I still haven’t found the perfect spot for this salvia, possibly a form of Salvia splendens van houttei, but it seems to enjoy a bit of shade to grow best around here. Cuttings have been taken again regardless and it always makes a nice show under the lights… even if it looks a bit cramped in there.

I guess this gardener is ok with an early November first frost. Tender things are mostly indoors and now just a few heavy pots remain to be considered. Having a few extra weeks to bring in pots two or three at a time is so much less stressful than running around the night before an early frost and making the hard decisions all at once.

The delphinum is a lingerer. From a decrepit, summer-weary husk a few perfect flowers are up and open. Had the gardener trimmed it down a few weeks ago, the husk might have been cheerier, but I’ll take this.

The downside to a lingering autumn is that the number of plants saved goes up with each frost-free week. Oh well. Have faith in me that I’m quite capable of killing things off with neglect during the winter 😉

The lingering autumn and on and off gloomy skies have the evening primrose (Oenothera biennis) open all day. It’s a lovely weed which fits in well with the verbena.

Besides the annual ‘to save or not to save’ questions there’s also the ever-too-long ongoing dirt moving projects. I’ve reached the point where backyard fill has reached the meadow, and I’m into the phase where fill is being graded down to the level of the meadow, and basically that means I’ve filled in as much as I wanted to and there’s an end in sight for this back part of the yard.

There’s almost enough level ground so that I can run a grass path from the house all the way back to the berm. That was an important thing back in the day, but as I look at it now I’m not sure why… maybe it was more work than it was worth…

If the back part of the yard is leveled and almost done, does that mean the hill of construction fill in the middle of the yard is gone? Haha, of course not! There’s still a nice bit sitting in the middle of the yard, just waiting for a poor soul to dig it all up and wheelbarrow it to other far reaches of the garden. The last few tons of dirt and rock are destined for the side of the yard, to level out along the fence and around the coldframe area, and hopefully provide a nice spot for the homeless camellia seedlings.

There’s only a little bit of the mountain left. We are almost at the two year mark for when the digging first began, and I am hoping for less strenuous days ahead.

So besides impending frost and ongoing earthmoving there’s still the small matter of a test. I really did have a point in that title and it refers to new lighting ambitions for the always expanding winter garden. We are going LED and moving on from the fluorescent shop lights which have served their time.

The product. Four foot LED shoplights from Harbor Freight. On sale for $43 but I see they’re up to $54 again, and that’s not in the budget for additional sets….

It seems like everyone has an opinion on using LED lights for raising plants, and I blame the basement growers of ‘medicinal’ crops for all this info and interest. There’s the science of specific wavelengths for the efficiency of photosynthesis but then there’s an avalanche of weakly proven theories on what’s best for what kind of growth and how ideal certain setups are and and and…. I tried to follow along but after numerous attempts came to the conclusion that LED lights specifically for plants were far outside my budget, plus many were a pinkish sort of light, and even with the current mania for Barbie and pink, I was not down with that. I finally stumbled across someone with some growing experience who stated that general LEDs, although they don’t emit light at the wavelengths specifically matching the preferred wavelengths for chlorophyll peak efficiency, emit light which is good enough for the range, and with that in mind just get something bright enough. So that’s what I did. The price and brightness were there but my confidence wasn’t, so I decided that a simple test might be a good idea before full commitment.

Corn, arugula, and calendula seedlings grown under LED (left) and fluorescent (right). If anything the LED seedlings look better, if not at least they’re on par with results from the old system.

The test was a few pots with corn, arugula, and calendula seedlings sown and grown completely under the two light sources. It was an experimental setup which would make a real scientist cringe, but conditions were mostly similar for both lights and they were just a few feet apart in my garage workshop but not close enough to overlap. Without making too much of the results it looks like the LED worked just fine in growing the seedlings. The corn was indifferent but the arugula and calendula actually seemed to grow faster and more strongly than the Fluorescent plants. I’d show the calendula but of course a slug found the pot and trimmed them back to the size of the other pot before said slug was dispatched. I guess I shall consider that when analyzing my experimental error.

Snowdrops? Yes! It’s that time of year again and Galanthus bursanus is leading the way. Please ignore the slug damage, I first blamed rabbits but when all the rest of the blooms disappeared with near surgical precision I think the bunnies are innocent for once and slugs are the true culprits.

That’s the first of what will surely become too many photos of snowdrops, but I’m sure you knew that. There should be more, but in addition to slugs hitchhiking their way into the winter garden they’ve been extremely active in the garden and have mowed down more than their share of the earliest of the autumn flowering snowdrops. Snowdrops in the fall is a new thing for me, I never thought is could be an option this far North, but with every winter less enthusiastic than the last it’s becoming a possibility. I just have to figure out how to grow them. They survive, but there’s still something (other than slug attacks) which doesn’t let them grow as well as the others already here. Don’t you worry though, rather than discouraged I’m even more enthusiastic about them and just keep trying them in new spots until they find something to their liking!

Hopefully we all find something to our liking. Have a great week!

Feeding the Soil

Oct15

So yeah, another day lost to endless rain… I actually cleaned the kitchen and cooked some food for the fam instead of escaping to the garden. Nothing healthy was cooked, I’m a maestro with the deep fryer, but for a gloomy and gray, chilly day it seemed appropriate. Now it’s 9pm and after several apathetic attempts at a blog post throughout the day, I suppose a firmer tone should be set and anything should be posted. Photos were taken yesterday for just this purpose, so maybe something good can come of a day with no garden time.

Allium thunbergii ‘Ozawa’ has finally opened. Although I’m the only one to notice so far, I’ve been checking him each day waiting for just this moment and that’s exciting.

The biggest news is that after years of no Allium thunbergii, I’m suddenly basking in the joy of four separate plantings. One of them really doesn’t count. It’s the miserable patch of seedlings which I’ve been nursing along for at least seven years, and has only bloomed once in all that time. I don’t want to talk about it. I do want to gush on about the two I picked up at a NARGS plant sale, and then the one which showed up a few weeks later when a friend was nice enough to send me a division as well. From a thunbergii desert to a garden flooded with October blooming alliums was more than I could hope for, and now in their second year here I’m quite pleased. My friend sent the cultivar ‘Ozawa’ and the other two are maybe a straight species form, and the white ‘Album’, and all three are putting on a great show.

The small white Allium thunbergii album with another A. thunbergii which was just labeled ‘pink’. These two are showing off just inches away from another patch which rarely flowers… It’s hard admitting that one of your babies is a little ‘lacking’.

Now before I start mulling over the idea that an early fall-blooming snowdrop would complement these alliums wonderfully, lets check off the last of the colchicums. In this garden the long-blooming, double white C. autumnale ‘Alboplenum’ finishes off the season, and this late favorite now comes up in a couple spots around the yard. It should be a couple more, but the colchicum transplanting steam has cooled off, and it looks like these are going to have to wait until next summer to get a little more space and maybe a little more sun elsewhere.

Colchicum autumnale alboplenum looking slightly sparse and tired, but still giving a decent show under a dwarf white pine. I always like how the falling needles blanket the ground for the colchicum, but the dry shade doesn’t always please the colchicum.

The steam on a few projects has cooled down, and maybe that’s where the rain is coming from, but the focus is now turned to embracing the new wheelbarrow and moving dirt again. Pickaxe a few square feet, shovel them out, wheel them back, repeat… and then go sit down for a couple minutes. No sense in wearing yourself out, and absolutely no reason that a gardener should be working so hard as to sweat in mid October.

One of the rest seats faces the end of the front border. Things are beginning to wind down, but as long as frost holds off there’s still plenty of color.

As I’ve probably mentioned way too many times, this garden isn’t built on the deep, fertile soils of a lush river valley, it’s just a few inches of topsoil skimming the top of construction fill, which sits just above rocks and bedrock… and then if you keep going coal mines will be the only other excitement down there. Roots do not go deep, and I’m always trying to improve on that, even if it’s in ways which often do more than they should to avoid anything which seems like real work, or even worse, sound like they could be costly.

At least the newly seeded lawn has been enjoying all the rain. This area was completely dug up and bulldozed and I’m counting on mulches like lawn clippings to bring life back and re-create some topsoil.

Sifting out rocks, double digging beds, working in amendments and soil conditioners, and buying in ‘topsoil’ are all great ideas, and I love seeing other gardeners do it and then watch as their spades slice through a delicious chocolate cake soil to plant things, but there’s about a zero chance that will ever happen here. Here my main method of attack is (1)dump organic matter on top and (2)wait for the worms and other creatures to work it into the soil, and (3)grow lots of things. Growing things have roots, and the roots work through the soil, and when they die they leave a path and organic matter… so let me alter that and say (3)grow lots of things and then kill them but leave the roots there. You can probably guess I’m not one to worry about removing stumps, and pulling things up and getting all the roots? Also not a priority.

Of course some roots have to come out, but wherever I can I try to smother weeds with a layer of mulch first. Lately lawn clippings have been my mulch of choice, and from snowdrops to daylilies to boxwoods, they’re all getting a nice inch or two.

The lawn alone doesn’t give enough clippings, so this is when the meadow gets a scalping as well. All the rain has it pretty lush so hopefully it’s more clippings than weed seeds, but even a few weeds are worth it.

A cleaned out bed is easier to mulch, so chopping back has started and where better to throw the spent stalks and fading foliage than on the lawn? It all gets mowed up and thrown back onto a bed elsewhere and all that organic matter stays around the plants which produced it. Things doesn’t look 100% fancy, but is so much easier than hauling it to the compost. It’s only the hellebores which don’t get their own shredded foliage returned to the same bed, and phlox stems also go elsewhere. These are the only plants which give me any kind of build-up of disease concerns. Everything stays in the garden, it just moves to a different part with other plant species.

Isodon effusus, formerly rabdosia, formerly plectranthus, is flopping all over the snowdrop bed and in full bloom. It’s impossible to photograph, and the name is impossible to remember, but it does bring in some excellent color, even better when the red maples begin dropping their leaves alongside the blue.

Golly does the rain have me chatty. I’m moving dirt, building soil, and the only other thing I still want to mention is power washing. The spotted lanternfly is into its third year here and is about as bad as last. They’re mostly annoying with their clumsy hopping and bumbling flight, but their honeydew pee is beyond annoying and enters irritating. The sweet pee is gross, but the black mold it grows is disgusting. The black mold is the reason you haven’t had to endure endless succulent wall photos, since most of my succulents are blackened by the drizzle they get under the aspens. Pretty much anything around the bases of trees is sticky and black, and of course the white birches don’t show well either when they’re dripping with pee and mold.

Hopefully a November once-over with the power washer will clean this gunk off.

According to most Lanternfly information I should be stomping and spraying and controlling the beasts as best I can, but I’m not. When the mold started getting bad I briefly considered pulling out the shop vac and making a brush attachment to sweep the trees clean, but you can guess where that ended up. Cracking open a beverage, pulling up a lawn chair, and vacuuming up a wasp nest is fun, but running the vacuum up and down trees for the lanternflies seem like work, so no thanks. I’ll take this first hit in stride and hope it balances itself out similar to the Asian ladybugs, Japanese beetles, stinkbugs… hmmmm there’s quite a menu of invasive pests which have come this way over the years…

Spotted lanternflies beginning to lay eggs at the base of the tree, alongside the blackened foliage of a peony.

Let’s leave off on a good note… as the patter of rain on the roof has picked up yet again…

Each fall I keep wanting to transplant a few of these hardy garden chrysanthemum seedlings to more spots around the garden and each spring my attention is elsewhere. Today this double orange is my favorite. I should collect seeds when they’re done and play that game again 😉

So that’s a post, for better or worse. I hope if anything it entertained, and I also hope that your Sunday is sunny and enjoyable!

Summer Blinks

Sep22

For a minute it was summer and then not. Our warm weather has faded and we’re getting a taste of autumn, with chilly nights and dewy mornings, and temperatures which make a gardener think about what’s to come.

The bulldozer path to the back of the house is fading away as new lawn sprouts and the new daylily border fills in. A purple mound of Lespedeza ‘Gibraltar’ fits in nicely with the pink and purple theme.

What’s to come? Snowdrop season of course, but not until a thousand things get done and a million plants move indoors, and a billion weeds get pulled.

I went to a snowdrop gala in March and of course ended up with a daylily, in this case ‘September Sol’, off the sales bench of Matthew Bricker. It does indeed come into bloom during September and brings a nice shine to the purple verbena masses.

So those are the good intentions, and hopefully they still amount to something because although I need more hardscape in the garden, I don’t want my paths to be paved with the good intentions which never became. Walking down that path would not make for a nice garden tour and I’d rather just stick to gravel if that’s the case.

The new grass path behind the potager is officially over-run with verbena bonariensis. I think this is far nicer than lawn would ever be so obviously I’ll wait until November at least before running the mower through.

Perhaps it’s obvious, but thankfully this will be a brief post rather than the usual babbling on about all kinds of unrelated topics. These photos were taken last week, and I hate to not remember these last joys of summer just because I was too distracted by other nonsense to get a post up. So come February hopefully a thrown-together post from a lush September will at least be better than nothing.

The potager has officially gone to seed. We’re down to a few rotting vegetables and the flowers have completely taken over.

For obvious reasons my garden never reaches the well-tended, beautifully curated stage which many of my friends’ gardens become at this time of year. There are no clumps of shapely mums and vignettes of asters and ornamental grasses, instead it’s a weedy wave of viny tangles and seedy remains… and it really suits my tastes 🙂

The ferny tendrils of cypress vine (Ipomoea quamoclit) go from soft and innocent to smothering within days if the heat and humidity are there for it.

Or perhaps it’s possible I’ve convinced myself over the years that this is how I like my garden to look by September. There’s just no time for immaculate care when thoughts are turning to the bulbs which need planting and the cuttings which need taking, things end up getting neglected, and for the sake of the gardener’s sanity it’s better to just think all is as it should be.

This year the ‘Terrace’ was almost tame in how many pots ended up there. A summer of dirt-moving has a way of dampening the urge to pot up hundreds of cuttings…

So with everything going according to plan maybe a few considerations towards the future are in order. Lots of things should come in for the winter… but there’s only so much room…

Fuschia ‘Gartenmeister Bonstedt’ does very well in the cool winter garden but needs to be watched for spider mites. Blue Streptocarpella will also come in, and is carefree if kept on the dry side.

Going around the garden and making a plan for it all is a terrible idea. Better to start small and ignore the scope of it all until a sudden cold night forces your hand. Nothing like going around with a flashlight on a 33F night and making on the spot decisions about what you can and can’t live without. The desire to lug in a 100 pound pot filled with sharp agave foliage drops quickly when your fingertips are numb and your pajamas are soaked.

Maybe the passion flower ‘Kew Gardens’ deserves one more year. The flowers seem to only open in the evenings and I often miss them, but they are pretty cool, and I always have a weak spot for vines.

Coleus cuttings in water will be first, and then maybe I’ll drag a few caladium pots in closer to the house so they can dry off a bit. Maybe. Some lantana cuttings is another option. Eventually…

For all the effort some things get, it’s often a stray seed or corm in some leftover potting soil which does best. A handful of Bessera elegans corms were carefully potted up and then promptly rotted. Here a stray corm in some re-used potting soil is thriving.

Bah, it’s still the middle of September, there’s plenty of time. Let me just enjoy the summer flowers while I can.

This ‘Sun Parasol’ “original dark red” mandevilla or whatever they’re called right now is surprisingly easy to overwinter. Cool spot, some light, easy on the watering, and it will even try to flower all winter… unlike others (do you hear me ‘Alice DuPont’?) who promptly drop all their leaves and go dormant…

Enjoying the lingering summer flowers is even better when you can enjoy a few colchicum blooms at the same time. This month I started an incentive program where the gardener gets to transplant a few colchicum on each day he reaches his to-do list targets. To-do list targets are obviously less fun than transplanting colchicums, and they include debris hauling, concrete setting, and the endlessly boring task of lawnmowing. I think it goes without saying that my teenage children are essentially worthless for everything on the to-do list…

The always fun, tesselated flowers of Colchicum x aggripinum. It’s a neat and long blooming smaller type and I wish I had as many as I used to, but one year they decided they didn’t love it here anymore so far I’ve been unsuccessful in winning them back over.

Here’s just one un-glamorous view of the colchicum progress. The no-rocks rockgarden along the house is becoming a rocky colchicum bed, and before each new clump gets moved and planted the truck ruts need digging and loosening, and the rocks which were dumped in the ruts so the trucks could make more ruts, needed prying out and hauling off. Just to be clear, this is the reward part and not part of the to-do list, so having this fun has been a slightly drawn out process.

After division and some compost I’m expecting great things from ‘Nancy Lindsay’ and her friends. I hope to get the whole bed mulched this autumn, and maybe in the spring add a few sedum and thyme starts to fill in the bed while the colchicum go dormant.

The colchicum project seemed much more innocent when the first bulbs were getting their new spots, and it still seemed fun after the second and third clumps, but today while replanting ‘Spartacus’ a little tinge of concern came over the gardener. There appears to be a colchicum collection developing. For years I’ve been adding one or two, just to see how they compare, and as you know one or two little bulbs really don’t amount to much, but one day they do… assuming (and this takes me out on a limb) they don’t die, and apparently enough haven’t. Maybe a more honest confession would be excitement rather than concern, but let me just say next autumn should be colchi-rific and that’s a good thing, not a medical condition.

Hope your September days are full of good things and you enjoy the weekend!

Fast Forward

Aug30

I’m not quite sure what happened to August, but I just looked at a calendar and it’s practically over. I like August, and I’m not thrilled at all with this time warp.

January has the same number of days, and January never seems to fly by as quickly… even though the days are so much shorter… so maybe some weird time continuum thing is what happened. Or maybe it’s a simpler explanation like ‘time flies when you’re having fun’. Maybe not out-all-night, the-neighbors-called-the-police fun, more like stretching morning coffee time on the porch or going in the pool before bed just because you can fun, but it’s still fun and I feel like these days are numbered.

By June nearly all the Rudbeckia triloba ‘Prairie Glow’ in the front border was dried up and dead, but in July and August a steady lifeline of rainstorms pulled them through. I’m happy for that, they look great now.

Maybe August flew by because the pressure here really eases off in late summer. Things are either done or they’re not and there’s much less to worry or even care about. With ample rain things here look good, and most days I just wander about admiring plants like rudbeckias and hydrangeas. The Hydrangea paniculatas are at their peak now, and they’re always kinda awesome.

This lacier hydrangea was just buzzing with all the bumble bees and wasps, but even a Monarch butterfly stopped by for a drink.

In my opinion you can’t go wrong with one of these late season hydrangeas. They’re hardy and always bloom here (unlike their blue cousins) and all they ask from me is a late winter pruning to thin out the stems and keep them from getting too out of hand.

A strong pruning in spring keeps the ones on the edge from getting too big, the ones further back are allowed a bit more freedom.

All these hydrangeas are either H. paniculata ‘Limelight’ or seedlings from her. The seedlings have been remarkably nice, and I might try another batch just to have more of them since why not? They’re all a little different and I enjoy the variations along the street border. They’re all a little greenish to start, and I actually moved out my one pinkish ‘Vanilla Strawberry’ because it seemed too white and then too pink alongside all the limey tones.

Seedlings of Hydrangea ‘Limelight’ carrying the front border through August.

I don’t think I’m kidding anyone when I talk about setting color themes and working out an organized display in this garden. The history of this place is closer to planting whatever is at hand in whatever space is open and hope that something works out well. I guess for late August these hydrangeas worked out well.

Cannas and Verbena bonariensis also work well. The cannas were rudely dumped here and the verbena came up on its own. Actually only the yucca on the left was planted here on purpose, and even that was a rescue from the trash. Not bad, but I did weed out a bunch of less lovely things as well.

The rest of this post is just heres and theres and updates. Less is more, right? And based on how little I’ve been posting lately maybe it’s better to just get anything up rather than some overly wordy thing which gets tedious after a while, plus I’d like to get to bed early so that’s another incentive for brevity 🙂

Dahlia ‘Matthew Allen’ amongst the pokeweed.

The stones are all “organized” along the slope and the grass seed is sprouting. Finally it looks less like a excavating playground and more like a spot which just needs a little foundation work and a nice bed along the house with anything other than crabgrass.

As usual the potager is a mess of overgrown vegetables and aggressive vines. Of course I like it, but I’ll have to confess that it only took two years for the 100% vegetable beds to turn into 25% vegetable beds plus bulbs, tree seedlings, shrub cuttings, small transplants, phlox beds, daylily beds…. a bare patch of soil is rarely planted to lettuce, coleus cuttings and canna seedlings are much more likely.

At least the lawn is mowed. Studies show that any disaster garden looks 78% better with a mowed and edged lawn area.

Beans and a few diseased tomatoes are the only legitimate vegetables still growing here. Now if I could only motivate myself to pick them.

Of course any decent potager has a few Lycoris in it. This ‘magic lily’ from a mixed batch of Lycoris bulbs has produced some nicely colored blooms. I’m guessing it’s a form of Lycoris sprengeri and I’m guessing it will now take three years off from blooming, just because…

A weedy vegetable garden is one thing, but a weedy waste area is an even better thing. Here’s an Instagram-ready photo of the lovely waste area which is now filled with blooming canola, sunflowers, and a new lawn infested with Verbena bonariensis seedlings. It’s an interesting place, and while I stopped mowing the newly seeded section of lawn so the Verbena can grow into a purple mass of flowers, it’s the cannola patch which demands the most attention. Hundred of honeybees (and a few others) make this corner of the yard buzz on a still afternoon. I can’t believe how many there are.

The ‘waste area’ where all the construction fill was dumped and leveled. It’s a weed factory and probably my favorite part of the yard right now.

I’m still on the fence as to whether or not the birds will appreciate the cannola seed as much as the bees appreciate the flowers. There will be plenty, but as of today I haven’t seen a single seed pod attacked for its contents. That’s in stark contrast to the millet seed which is beginning to ripen in the shadow of the cannola. Chipping sparrows and song sparrows attack the seedheads, and there are always a few in the area to entertain me.

Millet seed heads beginning to ripen.

Besides an area of the yard dubbed ‘the waste area’ my garden also boast a slice of Savannah this summer. ‘The Old South’ is where all the hanging pots of Dichondra ‘Silver Falls’ ended up, and my boring old pink dogwood has been elevated to the role of sprawling live oak with the Dichondra playing tendrils of Spanish moss weeping down from the branches. I’m entirely amazed with myself and smile at it every time I pass, even if the local review is closer to a polite ‘I don’t understand why’.

It grows like a weed, and probably is a weed in warmer climates, but here Dichondra ‘Silver Falls’ is just a nice little plant which eats up the endless rain and humidity and turns it into curtains of gray.

Surprisingly the gardener has yet to smack his head on one of the hanging pots, and still smiles when he weaves through the pseudo-moss, not really moss but pseudo-bromeliad veil.

There are even a few nice surprise weeds (spotted widows tears, Tinantia pringlei) in the pots of intentionally planted weeds.

I’m just excited to think how much more this will develop over the next month, and of course this winter I’ll foolishly try and winter them all over and see how much bigger and thicker they can get next year. Obviously I’ll need more caladiums underneath and honestly I think a few Boston ferns would only add to the effect. Maybe I can wire the ferns onto the dogwood trunk and tuck a few more into the branch crooks and bends. My whole next year can revolve around this silly idea and I’m sure sitting inside this winter stewing on it will only help 😉

No one really says anything about the tree but I’m pretty sure they all think it’s amazing. If only I could find one of those ‘Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil’ statues to complete the theme. That would probably be much more tasteful than trying to re-create some marble mausoleum or deep South cemetery vibe on my front lawn.

In the meantime as this design concept matures, I’ve gone ahead and given two more crape myrtles a chance at life (but more likely death) in this garden. This will be attempt four, and usually three is a respectable place to stop, but I’m gambling on science and planting for an increasingly warm climate here. I saw crape myrtles (Lagerstroemia) in bloom all over Long Island on my last visit, and it’s only been a few decades since they would regularly freeze to the ground or outright die over winter in my parent’s garden. Not to be greedy, but I’d like a large tree in purple and one in a bright cherry or red, and I’ll be on the lookout for a cheap starter to experiment with. In the meantime the ones I’ve added are two dwarf forms which should easily sprout from the roots and bloom even when frozen to the ground. From tiny plants this spring, they’re both forming buds and blooming this summer.

From the Barista series of dwarf crape myrtles, this small plant will hopefully develop into a mound of dark foliage studded with brilliant blooms.

So there it is. The closest I came to a vacation this summer, a trip to fake-Savannah with it’s fake moss and a little token Mc Crape myrtle. I hope to do better next year, but in the meantime even the weediest waste areas of the garden are entertaining me at this time of year, and I’m hoping to ease into colchicum season without the usual whining about fall and autumnal gloom. It’s all good 🙂

Welcome August

Aug7

After a rough start to the year the garden is about where it’s usually at. I’m glad for that since in June it looked like a year of brown lawn and wilted flowers was ahead, but now things are mostly ok. I’d say totally ok, but when things dry out so much it takes a couple days straight of rain to really get into the soil, and in spite of frequent storms there are plenty of sloped and harder-soiled areas where things are back to wilting. Regardless, things look good enough and I’m happy with that.

The front border along the street is reveling in a full-summer show of perovskia and coneflowers, but sunflowers haven’t seeded in like they normally do. I blame the dry spring.

I’m also happy I put off planting annuals this spring. First of all there’s barely any room in the front border where I normally plant them, and second of all even with the rain here and there I’d still be watering them. One less job fits into my schedule perfectly!

I do like a woolly thistle (Cirsium eriophorum) here and there in the garden. Most visitors would accuse me of letting a weed grow, but I’m sure they’d understand when told it was planted here on purpose.

Maybe someone at some point said a dry summer would be the perfect time to ‘thin the flock’, create some space for mulch, spread some iris around, create a generally less cluttered and wild planting… but I think you know where that idea has landed.

Klasea bulgarica suffering along in a less-fertile and less-watered spot in the border than it would like, but it’s still a cool thing, even at five feet rather than seven.

It would be fun to complain endlessly about jobs not done and tasked shelved for the future, but let me first share a somewhat finished photo of the former construction road alongside the house. Something did get done this summer, and even with its lack of mulch (still hoping to get to that this fall), the emerging grass makes for a more inviting path than an uneven landscape of dumped concrete and roadside weeds.

I’m not sure anymore what the arc of stones was supposed to convey but it’s done and will likely stay this way for years, but at least the new grass makes sense, and will lead visitors up past the new daylily border, and allow them to oooh and ahhhh on their way to the daylily farm fields.

Since I think I heard someone ask why I wasn’t posting enough daylily photos, here are a few still in bloom this weekend. Late bloomers and rebloomers is how it is since the bulk of them wrapped up the show a week or two ago.

One of the nicest ones is this gift from my friend Paula. In theory I should divide it for the farm, but ‘Websters Pink Wonder’ might be something I need to hold on to for “evaluation” until I have a huge, huge, huge clump of it!

Also a gift, from another friend, is ‘Apricot Peace’. As other parts of the garden look a little worn out from the summer, this flower is as refreshing and delicious as any sun-riped summer fruit.

Since daylilies aren’t everyone’s cup of tea, here’s a break to look at the tropical garden. This end of the yard suffered through a lot of neglect as the gardener raced past this construction-ravaged part of the estate to go stick his head in the sand elsewhere, but after some time, rain, and lots of weeding, trimming, and rock-picking it’s at least less than a complete disaster. Actually it was Verbena bonariensis which saved the day. Its pollinator-filled haze of lavender-purple flowers covers up many of the sins of this season even if it does obscure the daylily flowers more than I’d like.

The tropical border. You may notice that the huge mound of yellow pokeweed (Phytolacca americana ‘Sunny Side Up’) is way to big for its space and way too much yellow, but I just don’t have the heart to trim it. You may also notice a lack of tropicals…

If I had to summarize for a sure-fire way of saving the late summer (full sun)garden, I’d say Verbena bonariensis, Hydrangea paniculata, and cannas. The three of them just ask for a little water and maybe some fertilizer, and BAM you’re a gardening rock star. Sadly I didn’t take a photo of the hydrangea this week, but how about this color from the cannas?

‘Cannanova Rose’, one of the newer seed strains of cannas, is disease free and flowers all summer and into fall if you just keep snapping off the seed pods. A plus for growing it in the North is the lack of canna roller caterpillars destroying the foliage, since they (and the cannas as well) can’t handle our winter cold.

What? More daylilies? You’ve got it.

‘Chama’ is a later daylily with a long season and big flowers. I’d say seek it out but with all the hundreds of other yellows out there I’m sure you could find something similar which is just as nice.

This Brookside Beauty seedling is not quite as average as a yellow. I picked it up this summer at my new favorite local daylily farm, Garrett Hill Daylilies, and maybe it’s too much of a lot of things but I’m quite happy with it.

It’s not all rippled edges and intense color. Here’s the more simple flower of a species daylily, Hemerocallis altissima (probably). Fragrant, tall, elegant, opens in the evening and then closes for the heat of the day, this daylily has a lot to offer as well.

Ok, let’s keep moving. The potager is beans, tomatoes and… daylilies now… I was fairly good for three years with my vegetables only policy (plus a few tulips), but that ship has left the pier. The beds are now filling with things like witch hazels and marigolds, cannas and phlox, and quite a few daylilies as well. It was a valiant fight but vegetables really are a lot of work, and the farm stand does it much, much better, so…. maybe we don’t need to grow our own cucumbers just in case we feel like eating a cucumber or twenty.

One of the few sunflowers to seed out this year… and a little short and small… but I’ll take it, as will the goldfinches I’m sure.

Right over the boxwood hedge of the potager is the stone wall which I went on and on about last year. It’s still there and it’s still the summer home for a few succulents, except for as hard as I tried there seem to be even more this summer. Someone will point out that I bought a few more .99 cent treasures on a summer plant trip, as well as a tiny box of cuttings and living stones last winter, but these aren’t even out there (they’re just too cool to put so far away), and all of these are just repots and divisions and cuttings. Someone needs to stop this ‘let me just take a few cuttings’ thing, just like the rabbits stopped the living stones thing. Had I known that the rabbits would consider the pots of living stones to be tasty little green jellybeans perfect for nibbling, I would have put them somewhere out of reach, but I didn’t and now they’re gone. Hmmmm, come to think of it my last living stone was the victim of a chipmunk attack. I guess they’re tasty little things and I should have known better.

Some of the old standbys which are apparently less tasty than living stones (Lithops).

So I guess I killed off the living stones through my own mistake. Actually the bunnies pulled a “propeller plant” off the wall and destroyed that, as well as a “lobster claw” which was also apparently too tasy to resist, so they’re not as cute and innocent as I like to think. Maybe I’ll just accept that and reconsider my succulent vetting process to include ‘easy to overwinter’, ‘thrives on neglect’, and ‘is not yummy for bunnies’ and move on. Trust me that any roadblock to the succulent collection growing is probably a good thing, especially when fall turns to winter and all those clay pots need lugging in.

Further down the wall. It doesn’t look too bad until you do a pot count, and it’s pretty much every last terracotta pot I own so another roadblock I set up is ‘no more terracotta pots’… unless it’s a really good sale… or they’re free… or it’s a really amazing pot…

Maybe you noticed the tiger lilies back past the succulent wall? They’re the double kind (Lilium lancifolium ‘Flore Pleno”) and I suppose I do like them in spite of their messiness, but what I don’t like is the arrival of those bright red lily beetles which eat more lily foliage than they should and produce entirely disgusting young who hide underneath a slimy, wet, bubble of poop as they also overeat their share of lily foliage. Because of the lily beetles I’m phasing out some of the clumps and trying to figure out which ones I can’t live without, and so far it’s the Asiatics, Martagon, and a few of the Regal lilies… only because they don’t handle late freezes well and have died back two of the last five years.

Lilium lancifolium ‘Flore Pleno’ spreading quite well in spite of the beetles and a good amount of shade.

Speaking of supporting more wildlife than I’d like, our ‘Liberty’ apple tree has set a decent crop of fruit this year and just about everyone seems to want a taste. When people ask questions like what to plant for wildlife I always think of things like apple trees, which seem to be under attack from every insect, disease, bird, mammal… it’s amazing they can survive from one year to the next. I wanted to try one though, and in an effort towards compromise chose a variety which was supposed to give the gardener “Freedom” from endless fussing and spraying. I guess nothing but bad taste will keep the animals away, but I think my photo does a good job at representing the cost of freedom.

Not spraying or putting in much effort at all does not produce the best foliage or fruit on an apple tree. How do they say it? Freedom does not come free? Definitely true in the case of this tree, but I think I’m fine with a handful of wormy apples to cut up and eaten outside versus bushels of fruit to deal with.

With an image of a diseased, nearly leafless apple tree I guess it’s not a stretch to go back behind the potager into the waste area. The grass which was seeded for new paths is coming up but only the weeds in the grass need mowing since for some reason the microgreens of the lawn are just one more thing which the rabbits cannot resist. They mow down the grass and leave the weeds. This isn’t how it was supposed to work but whatever, most of the weeds are Verbena seedlings and recent studies have shown there’s a 99.9% chance the gardener would rather have impassable paths of flowering verbena than neat grass.

Entering the waste space. Yeah that sunflower also came up where the path is supposed to be…

Change in plan is more the rule than the exception here, so besides grass paths turning into verbena fields you may recall there was a $3 box of canary seed thrown around back here in order to start a millet patch. Apparently what looked like millet wasn’t actually all millet and when some cabbagey stuff started growing I did some investigating and found out canola is also a seed birds will eat… and if anyone actually read the label they’d see canola right there after millet. So now there’s a millet and cannola patch in the waste space. Two fun facts I discovered about canola when I did my after-the-fact investigating were that 1. ‘Canola’ is short for ‘Canada oil, low acid’, a relatively recent Canadian plant creation of low acid rapeseed which became suitable for edible oil uses rather than industrial, and 2. Canola greens are much sought after by deer… which does not help at all as far as making my yard less-deer friendly.

The waste space has filled in quite quickly with weeds, canola, and millet, plus a bunch of barrow fulls of yard waste which were easier to dump here than on the compost pile. I guess it’s all about bringing life to the sterile fill, and sometimes life is messy.

So here I am talking about growing weeds intentionally again when I really should focus on my garden-rebuilding. Someday I’ll get it. Maybe. At least the waste area takes care of itself, which allows me to return to stone moving and construction repairs. Finally the pond area has been cleaned out, the path behind it returned to passable, and all those stones picked out of the earth-moving process are being put to use… for better or worse…

Shoddily stacked garbage stones line the arc of the curve which will take a grass path around the side of the new addition. I think it looks good enough and hopefully the freeze and thaws of winter don’t rip it apart before it has a chance to settle. More larger stones would have made it more weather-stable I think but you get what you get.

My fingertips are aching from all the stone grabbing and wedging and twisting and I’m glad to say the wall is as done as it’s going to get and only about ten stones remained as extras. These walls soak up a lot of rock so hopefully I have enough left for a few more questionably interesting constructions around the yard 😉

The back deck refuge from it all. I try to give the pots a little liquid feed once a week (and I never manage to keep to that schedule) but other than feeding, the drip lines and a timer take care of all the watering and leave me with nothing more to do than a little puttering when everything else seems like so much work.

I feel like I should be further along with everything but now that we’re into August I’m declaring a pause on projects and a rescheduling of fun. A few gardens have been visited, children have enjoyed day-trips, some lazy pool days are scheduled, and tomorrow myself and my plant squad (or more officially the Plant Posse… a possibly eye-rolling name given by a member’s daughter) are off for a day at Longwood. Severe weather alerts blanket our travel zone for the day but thoughts and prayers will guide us, and hopefully between the four of us the more reasonable will herd us out of the way of tornados, find shelter from strong winds, and a safe spot against hail, lightning , and thunder! Any day with the Posse is usually an adventure 😉

Hope you have a great week with an aggressive scheduling of fun!

Still Dull

Jul29

Here in the sorta mountains of Eastern Pennsylvania, summer has taken a turn for the wet. I always prefer wet to dry, but others are complaining about bad pool weather and an endless train of cloudy weather that seems to be tracking here. Honestly I’m not sure what they really want though, because yesterday when it was over 90F (33C) and humid they complained about the heat, so maybe they shouldn’t talk about their dream of moving to Florida.

Fortunately the garden doesn’t go on and on with complaints. A once-over to remove the browned stems and shriveled dreams of a dry spring and we’re back in business, with lush flowers and even lusher weeds.

The front border is at a summertime peak with the yellow lily ‘Conca d’Or’ taking center stage.

I will also try not to dwell on complaints. Summer is going too fast, not enough is getting done, and I don’t have enough space for my daylily farm, but at least I’ve finished clearing the dirt away from the side of the house.

All the dirt has been removed, now it’s on to doing something with all the stone, and then figuring out the grass path which will lead around the corner.

To celebrate this dirt moving milestone I decided to tackle the mass of concrete down by the street and finish cleaning up the front of the yard as well. It was as much fun as you can imagine. At first I thought I was overdoing it by bringing the jackhammer back, but when the concrete turned out to be a foot thick in spots I guess the pickaxe wouldn’t have been enough.

All the concrete has been broken up and the chunks are ready for hauling away. They’re bigger (and heavier) than the photo suggests…

Don’t let the pictures scare you. Last week I not only moved the concrete out of the way, I also graded the path, but in a few stones, seeded grass, and planted out a tray or two of coleus cuttings. It looks much nicer and I hope to share those photos as soon as I get out there and take them…

Enjoy the weekend! I’m hoping for enough of a break in the rain today to fit in a garden visit and a daylily farm trip with friends. I guess it’s not all work and no play in spite of what I like to pretend 😉

Of Waste Places

Jul9

I remember seeing an exciting new bird the second summer after moving here. It was an Indigo Bunting, and the all-blue plumage on a blackbird sized bird in the back of the yard was quite the sight in my young garden. Surely this was a sign that all kinds of wonderful new things would be showing up as the garden grew and developed, and not just people but also wildlife would appreciate my masterpiece. I rushed inside and grabbed my bird book (this would be 15 years ago when books and paper and such were still a thing), and when I found the entry for my new friend it was the phrase “of waste places” which really stood out. Waste places! It’s a good thing that wasn’t the day I named the gardens or this blog, because I’d probably reconsider or regret it some days, but it was a good reality check on my gardening ambitions.

The rains have returned and the lawn is again in need of mowing, but the borders are still sparse owing to the dry May and the resulting lack of self-sown treasures or motivated planting.

In the between years the garden has filled in more but I have yet to see a second bunting, and that’s a relief as far as creating a ‘waste place’, but somewhat sad since Indigo Buntings are quite cool. In hindsight when it happened they had just recently bulldozed down the woodland and shalebanks behind us for the industrial park, and I suspect the acres of weedy and seedy re-growth had more to do with luring in new birds, but to this day I sometimes look around and think ‘what a waste place’.

Maybe a waste place, but at least a boldly colored one with the bright red of crocosmia ‘Lucifer’.

Actually it’s not that bad since the rains came back. Things are growing again and since someone mentioned daylilies let me start with those 😉

Daylily ‘Brookside Sparkle’, a souvenir from one of last summer’s daylily farm visits, and so much better than a t-shirt.

The daylily farm is doing well but ten out of ten people have suggested that I make it bigger, even if the suggestion was more of a nod when I said I was planning to make it bigger… and it was more like one person and not ten, but statistically that’s 100% of the people surveyed and why bother doing customer research if you’re going to ignore it? To that end I have budgeted $60 to buy more daylilies this summer, and also as any wise investor will do I’ve taken inflation into consideration and will be willing to raise that limit to $75 if things go that way. Now I just have to pickaxe a few new planting beds.

I’m committing to no more heavy equipment in the yard and will finally level and plant this access area by the street. It needs to be lowered a few inches and dug up for compaction and rocks… and about 25 square feet of concrete I uncovered for which I’ll need to drag out the jackhammer again…

So dirt moving and daylilies. That seems to be the theme for 2023 and I hope you can see a little progress in the next few photos.

Along the side of the house the grade was brought down a few inches, leveled, rocks were dug and finally, now that it looks like rain might be a thing again, a grass path has been seeded between a new bed and the old cholchicum bed which runs alongside the house foundation. The daylily farm is visible on the right… isn’t it beautiful?

Nearly all the tons of soil alongside the new addition have been wheel-barrowed to the low spots behind the potager in the back of the yard. Many rocks have been uncovered, some barely movable but mostly small, and these will go into lining the path of grass which will be seeded and extend down to the back of the house. As you can see the house foundation is still waiting for the masonary fund to mature, and might have to wait a year or two especially if the daylily fund keeps taking precedence.

Excavation piles are finally gone, and you can again see through to the pond and potager. One last section of soil to move, and then it’s on to wall building, final grading, and then grass-path seeding. The area in front is the already-seeded path which runs alongside the house.

Seeing the garden slowly uncover has been a relief, and each new section replanted has been one less weedy mess to ignore on the daily garden tours, but the real excitement has been seeing the level areas beyond the potager grow wider and wider each week. There is grass coming up on the new paths and whenever I get a minute in my mind I’m planting and replanting the open sections of the new flatlands. One day it’s filled with pumpkins, the next it’s daylilies, then tulips, then daffodils, then a new greenhouse, then a snowdrop farm… I think you get the idea, but right now it’s sterile, rocky, dries-like-concrete fill and even in my most optimistic minute I know I don’t have the time or energy to do anything with it this year, so I’ve decided it’s going to be my new waste place.

To shade and hold a bit of moisture in the “soil” I’ve started throwing weeds down and any other trimmings and organic material that usually gets thrown in the compost. I’m letting weeds come up. I’ll probably let them go to seed and then regret it when I have even more weeds, but whatever. I’m hoping the birds and other wildlife will like it, and to help that along I picked up a $3 box of finch and canary seed from the petstore to throw around. It’s basically pure millet and I think the sparrows and doves will enjoy it if they mature into a seedy mess, and hopefully I don’t regret a millet field in the back of my yard…. and now with that in print I’m thinking I should have at least looked up what millet looks like or done any kind of research, but…

My better half asked what the plan is for this back area. I thought it better to say ‘I’m not sure’ rather than explain how it was to become a ‘waste place’.

So we will see where this ends up. The birds and rabbits seem quite pleased by the general weediness of the yard, and I’ve never seen quite the procession of baby rabbits coming out of the flower beds as I have this year, but there has been one uninvited guest who I do not appreciate.

Deer tracks in some of the freshly leveled soil of the back 40

There is a single deer who has begun to make a habit of visiting the garden. One deer who has walked through perhaps four times and I’m already nearly apoplectic over the damage and I can’t imaging people suffering through local deer herds in their neighborhood. I thought our visitor was a large doe with a fawn hidden nearby, but Friday afternoon showed it to be a he as the nubs of developing antlers were visible when chasing him out of the yard. Maybe I can convince one of my friends that begonias and geranium adds a special flavor to the sausage, and one of them will be willing to stake out my yard come November… assuming I can make it that long… but in the meantime a minefield of fencing seems to be entertaining him, even if not really slowing him down.

Something random. My first flower on this cobra lily (Aarisaema fargesii) and it has a cool way to it, but I still think it’s the tropical foliage that impressed me more.

Typical. He plants for wildlife and then gets upset when wildlife shows up. Maybe all the digging is going to my head, as well as the heat and humidity, so today’s day of rest is probably a good thing.

Hope you have a great week.

Before the Rain?

Jun27

Three weeks is a long time to go between posts, especially if you’re one of those bloggers who keeps saying they’re going to step it up this year with a flurry of uplifting, timely and engaging content that… I guess I say that every year… June is a busy time, and sometimes things get done and sometimes nothing gets done, and both take time. Time that you think you’ll have back in March, but when summer rolls around she always proves you wrong. Better to just move on and give the usual apology for ignoring many and hope that July will be different, which is usually not the case 😉

Let me again brag about the delphinium patch. In spite of the drought they came up well and now that they’re entering their most fragile state the forecast will obviously call for severe weather. This always happens. My fingers are crossed this week’s staking efforts will be enough to keep them safe.

So the last post on this blog was a depressing litany of drought, smoke, hopelessness, and most of that was accurate, but as any good gardener will do you assess and move on. Sometimes moving on means a big icecream and lots of pool time, but this June the weather was more campfires and sweatshirts so I was at a loss. Turns out cool weather and dry soil is an excellent combination for bulb digging, and if I can’t have a nice garden at least I can try for neat, so many bulbs are dug and much of the potager is an empty yet well-kept space, and most of the garden is in fact somewhat weed free and waiting. Waiting for the rain I guess, since nothing much happens when it’s dry.

I was seeing photos online of Crinum bulbispermum in bloom and mine was not, but now it is. Within days I went from calling it lazy to calling it amazing as three stalks came up on this one and two on the other. The season is short, but the flowers are worth it.

So I had a plan. Neat was in and after putting in the work I decided I loved the look even if the grass was browning and the perennials were yellowing and wilted. I even spent an afternoon weed wacking the berm which usually doesn’t happen until August, and honestly that looks much better as well.

A neat yet somewhat empty potager. A few tomatoes went in as well as beans, but no masses of self-sown flowers since the soil is too dry. There is a little color though, last fall larkspur seedlings filled in the edges of the tulip beds and are now putting on an awesome show.

As is always the case as soon as one thinks they have a handle on things, the path changes. This week the forecast is filled with rain and humidity. We’ve had rain over the weekend and cloud bursts here and there, but so far none of the amounts have lived up to expectations, and they’re still far short of what we need but they’re enough to bring weed sprouts up in the neat dust, and triple the size of the innocent weedlings which two days ago looked as if they were too small to bother with. I suspect even the lawn will need mowing again if the forecast holds up.

Clematis ‘Venosa Violacea’ has been getting some water and is completely worth the attention. Clematis are amazing and I’m worried about all the cute little ones I keep looking at and wanting 🙂

If this summer turns into a good-for-growing summer my earth moving projects might take a hit. So far cool weather and a few bug-free hours in the evening are revealing new planting areas up along the addition, and new level ground back behind the potager. It was a big day when the leveled areas were up where they were supposed to be and the first new paths were raked and seeded with grass. There’s suddenly hope that the garden will return to something more attractive than rubble piles and trip hazards and that’s a great thing.

The area behind the potager is where all the construction fill is moving to. It used to slope down to a low spot but is now mostly level, which is quite an accomplishment considering that the area around the white bucket was about three feet lower when I started this spring. The tan section going back to the berm, between the buckets, is where grass seed has been put down and it’s an extension of the path which runs through the potager.

All the dirt moving is a win-win scenario. As the back of the yard fills and levels off, the area surrounding the new addition is also coming back to a finished level. Soon I hope to put grass paths back in where concrete trucks once stood, and work something out with all the rock I’ve dug up. Give me another two weeks for this part of the garden and I promise a better scene, although I can’t make a similar promise for the foundation. It might be a year at least before the brick situation is figured out.

The area to the side of the house is almost fully graded and the plan is for the grass path continuing all the way down. I had been thinking of a sand path where all the weeds are coming up on the right of the picture, but I think it will also be grass again, so there will be two strips of grass leading down to the back.

Wow that all seems like a lot of work. I better wrap this post up before I start thinking too hard on what all needs to get done before I can do even more of the stuff which needs to get done. Fresh mulch would be nice. That would be even more of lots of work, and clearly not better than pool time, but at least it keeps me off the streets and out of the gym.

The deck plantings are one thing which is looking nice this year. The drip irrigation was set up earlier than ever and this has been my escape from the mess in the rest of the yard. Surprisingly most of this is from dried plants which came back to life once I drug them out of the garage. The large pot of pink and purple was supposed to be an overwintered rosemary, but calibrachoa seedlings took over and I don’t even care if the rosemary comes back or not. I found it very interesting that calibrachoa roots can survive more drought than rosemary, and from now on I might be throwing them in the garage as well to overwinter.

Thanks for making it this far. It’s still gray and gloomy outside, but I might brave the gloom and take a second coffee outside to see how things are going. It would be nice to get two more days worth of shoveling in before the the rain brings on an explosion of weeds and the lawn gets out of control, but as always it’s still better than snow and ice 😉

Have a great week!

The World is Burning

Jun9

Just to let you know, there’s nothing nice in this post. A few flowers, but mostly a miniseries of complaints and disappointments and all the bumps in the road which gardeners imagine won’t happen this year, but then happen. I guess the most obvious place to start is with the smoke. It was noticeable earlier in the week, eerily oppressive mid week, and then apocalyptically thick yesterday. The smell of smoke was everywhere, and I can only imagine how it’s like closer to the source. My thoughts go out to the firefighters and residents who are out of homes and in fear of their safety and wondering when they’ll get a reprieve.

About four in the afternoon, looking out beyond the berm towards the industrial park. Visibility is less than a mile.

Fortunately, although the woods are dry and a good wind has been blowing, local brushfires have been relatively quiet. About a week ago we had a half inch of rain, which was enough to take the most desperate edge off for a few plants, but of course it’s nothing close to what we need. I think for May this area came in as the driest May since 1901 and the soil is already taking on that deep-dry that usually doesn’t set in until August.

The front yard isn’t a desert (yet) but most of the lawn is crispy and I’m not even going to bother planting annuals. Maybe it’s a good year to open things up and create some mulch patches.

Earth moving is now on pause due to rock-hard conditions. It was hard enough working through the rocky-compacted-subsoil before, but once it dries to the concrete stage even I have second thoughts.

The weeds were thrilled with the brief shower we had and perked right up. It’s a sad year when you end up relying on crabgrass, mullein, and oxeye daisies for a garden high point.

Most of my plants know they’re somewhat on their own in the dry. I hate watering and only do it as triage to keep the most desperate treasures alive, and it takes a real dramatic shriveling, dry look to guilt me into attempting a save. Usually it’s just in time, but I’m afraid our one rain event tricked me into thinking I could take a couple days off. As a result there’s a good chance I lost two newer dogwoods, a couple struggling rhododendrons, a witch hazel or two, and a few seedling pots. I’m sad about it all but only really upset about the one dogwood. It was a special gift, can’t easily be replaced, and I suspect when the dust of this season clears it will bother me even more.

Maybe a just in time watering saved this witch hazel for another few days. Maybe. There are long, likely-dry, hot months ahead and I don’t expect this missed watering to be the last.

Dry weather is nothing new, even if it comes at a time of year which is normally the most perfect gardening time of the year, but this year it’s on top of one of the latest freezes ever, and the garden is still trying to move on from that. Browned new foliage is still trying to grow out on magnolias and willows, only to advance right into wilting stage due to the lack of water.

I was so excited to see flower buds all over the rambling rose ‘Wartburg’. Its clusters of pink roses should look nice with the first flowers of the clematis ‘Venosa Violacea’… until they didn’t… I only just realized that this whole side of the rose is more exposed and was likely more damaged by the cold. I’m seeing stunted roses on some of the other bushes and of course am hoping that next year they’re perfect again.

The freeze damage could also be worse, and up in the mountains it was. The beech forests were really hit hard, worse than I suspected even just a few days ago. Patches along the road are all browned and whole trees have their new foliage burnt. That’s annoying, but not really as bad as it looks. The trees will recover if not for the other thing going on. I’m seeing large swaths of beech forest infected by Beech Leaf Disease… much much more than last year and it looks severe on a few trees. Beech trees are a big part of the canopy in some areas and with a six to ten year fatality I’m not looking forward to adding stands of dead beech trunks to the dead ash trees from borers and the bleached oak skeletons from prior spongy moth (gypsy month) infestations. The forest needed a break, not a new pestilence.

Plants in waiting on the driveway. There’s a backlog in moving things out into the soil of the rock-hard garden and that’s probably a good thing, since they’re likely better off here. The amaryllis are definitely happy here!

Did I mention it’s also cold? Normally Canadian air brings bright blue skies and cooler weather, but it was in the 40’s the other morning and that’s terrible to have the week after you open the pool(which of course has a leak on top of everything else). I was digging tulips in a sweatshirt rather bathing suit and thats not normal.
See? I promised a post full of complaints, and I believe I’ve delivered. Everything seem to be going in the wrong direction without an end in sight, and I guess I should be more miserable but I’m not. Bulb trays have been built, tulip are being dug, and I’ve fallen back to the potager, daylily farm, and anything the drip irrigation lines can be hooked up to. The deck containers look nice, a few day lilies are sending up bloom scapes, and I spent twenty minutes this evening watching baby bunnies nibble weeds and chase each other around the lawn. Spring still has a few good things tucked up her sleeve and as long as I can putter in safety I’m grateful. All the best.

Behind on Everything

May14

Happy Mother’s Day! Here in the hill-like mountains of Eastern Pennsylvania the sun is out and there’s promise of another beautiful day, and I hope yours is as well. It’s been staying cooler and I’ve much enjoyed it, but the strong sun and a decent rain have everything sprouting and growing and of course have put me way behind where I should be. Right now it’s looking like a season of repairing the garden from construction rather than a season of getting everything planted and weeded, but we will see where the energy meter goes to. We’re currently at ‘moderate’ but sadly that means energy for painting and closet building with an occasional break to dig and move tons of dirt, and not weeding and planting, but at least the very last of the tulips are still in bloom… and the Motrin and Tylenol supply is well stocked 😉

The “broken” tulip “Insulinde” is still holding strong. I love it this year, even with a subtle dark and dusty look, the swirls and patterns can draw anyone’s attention.

Nearly all the tulips in the Potager are dead-headed and focused on fattening up bulbs for next year, and even if that sounds sad remember that this weirdo looks forward to digging the bulbs and seeing how well they bulked up. I’ve set some old wooden pallets and wire mesh aside and hope to throw a few bulb racks together for drying… so that’s one more super-important thing added to the to-do list.

Another tulip who’s coloring has been “broken” by virus is ‘Mabel’, an antique dating to 1856.

We will see if that happens. Iris season is coming, and the first of my favorites began to open yesterday and I forgot how fragrant some of them are. The scents of grape and lemon are drifting through parts of the garden, on top of the last of the wisteria and lilac aromas. It’s a nice break from the diesel exhaust and asphalt odors which you run into just down the street.

One last one. ‘Black and White’ goes back to at least 1920 and to me is somewhat similar to ‘Insulinde’, especially when the latter is short on its yellow base color.

Totally without scent, there’s one more cool thing to share this morning. A mystery seedling on the side of the house has revealed its identity when the poppy-like buds finally opened up into bright red blooms. For the past year I’ve been watching fuzzy foliage rosettes grow in this bone-dry, hard packed spot in full sun, and have suspected the gardener threw seeds of something odd here and forgot or didn’t even expect them to grow, but here they are.

The blackspot horned poppy, Glaucium corniculatum, is an European annual or biennial which is probably a weed most everywhere else, but here I’m pleased to see it. ‘Poor to moderate, dry soils’ describes its preferred growing conditions so it’s likely to seed around here… until we get a monsoon year and they all rot, devastating the gardener…

So I bring you more virused tulips and horned poppies this week. With all the beauty of spring I feel peonies and clematis would be more welcome but I’m sure Instagram is full of that, so maybe this is more refined? I doubt it, so thanks for reading anyway and I hope you have a wonderful week.

sorta like suburbia

more than you ever wanted to know about my garden

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