Leave the Leaves?

Oct20

Autumn has its moments but without a few rainy days and minus the cooler temperatures I’m at a loss. We could use some rain. The lingering annuals and a bunch of perennials, and even some shrubs, are wilting now and between you and me I’m almost hoping for a strong frost to come along and put things out of their misery rather than spend the next few weeks hoping for some last-minute miracle to come along and renew the decaying garden. I was also warm yesterday when I was out doing something in the sun, and flirted with breaking a sweat… which is totally inappropriate for this season of briskness and cozy jackets.

A form of the native aromatic aster, I think this one is ‘Raydon’s Favorite’, should be in every garden. It outblooms most chrysanthemums and is a late season pollinator magnet. Here a final bloom of the rose ‘Rosarium Uetersen’ adds a nice dash of coral pink.

Fair warning that this gardener rarely has a kind word to share about the autumn season, so don’t worry that my disgust and lack of interest in the yard means I’m struggling with some kind of seasonal trauma that I’m barely surviving, because that’s not the case. I’ve been busy and motivated, just not in the garden. Garage cleanouts, painting, puttering, and life in general are moving along nicely and I don’t really mind that the daily garden tour has turned into a ten minute walk of ‘meh’.

October colors in the front border. Okay, but kinda boring to be honest.

It’s been somewhat warm and the forecast promises warmer for the next few days, but I did notice a few things have been touched by frost. Coleus mostly. Cuttings were saved a few weeks ago and are doing fine, as well as all the other tender goodies which were dragged inside before the cold, and for some reason this year it didn’t seem like nearly as much work as other years. Many things are in the new basement area and apparently having enough space for your plants goes a long, long way in making the indoor migration less painful. As a way of celebrating I stopped by a greenhouse clearance sale last week and bought four new plants and that of course is not a problem at all since I stayed under fifteen dollars and I’m sure many people have purchased just one single orchid and then stopped.

I love euphorbia ‘Ascot Rainbow’ and hope it can survive the winter in this pot. Normally they are borderline hardy here, but maybe if I drag the pot under the protection of the front porch it will stand a chance.

So upon review it sounds like I’m just waiting for winter to come and wipe the outside garden’s slate clean and that might be a fairly accurate assessment. Year round gardening works for some people but I like a nice winter break, a season and a time to reflect, and maybe a pause in the battle to regroup. Some things look messy now and I like that I can tidy them up once at this time of year and have it stay that way rather than face a new field of weeds the week after I pull them all.

The potager two days before frost singed the awesomeness of the banana. Bringing other things in was a breeze, but digging and lugging this beast in?… remains to be seen.

A clean slate in autumn and ‘leave the leaves’ doesn’t necessarily play well together since my impression of the ‘leave the leaves’ movement is that one should leave all the decay of autumn in place until June or whenever of next year just in case a bee or lightning bug chooses to overwinter in that twig or under that leaf. It’s not a bad reminder that a tornado of leafblowers and a lawn crew which trundles off every last bit of fallen foliage is only leaving a barren wasteland of exposed soil, but it shouldn’t shame you into staring at a drift of leaves against your back door and a depressing flowerbed full of scarecrow twigs all winter. Do what you want. It’s your garden and as a gardener you’ve probably already thought about how your garden fits in with the natural world and how happy you’ve been to find it swarming with birds and insects and wildlife in general. Shame should be reserved for the desolate weed-free lawns of a golf course or the monotonous mono-plantings of some dull homeowner association. If you needed it I give you permission to trim back the dead things which offend you and remove the leaves which have become too much. Your garden will still be a refuge.

The last blooms of clematis ‘venosa violacea’ are as pretty as the first and are probably more numerous since I gave the vine a little trim after its first flush of flowers. A friend said trim it back completely in July, but I wasn’t that brave.

So that’s a lot of tough talk from someone who is likely to never have an immaculate garden to begin with. Other homeowners are complaining about a few leaves blowing into their yard and sullying their pristine turf while I’m usually wishing for a windy day to dump everything here. Most will stay where they fall but at some point a mower bag full of their chopped brothers will be spread on top. It’s a rare day when a twig or stem ends up in the trash and these days there’s not even much going to the compost pile since I tend to tuck pulled weeds and such into the depths of the borders. It may not be ideal from the perspective of the every leaf is sacred crowd, but even after a run through the mower for the sake of neatness and then a toss back onto the beds these processed leftovers still serve plenty of good.

Frost asters galore in the weedier parts of the garden. These have a decent winter structure so will stay even after death…

Mid October. Meh. If the weather were different and I cared more there would be a cleanup in progress but this year I’m not there yet and the mess is fine. You look at your own mess though and feel free to clean up whatever you want and know that I’ll have your back, and in the meantime have a great week!

Everything

Oct7

It was the driest of times, it was the wettest of times, it was the age of motivation, it was the age of laziness, it was the epoch of brilliance, it was the epoch of more dumb ideas… it was just about everything and as usual you’ve got to take the good with the worse, so when the light was nice this week I got some photos, and now as rain and gray rule the day I’m posting.

The summer annuals are fading fast. Even a week of non-fall-crisp air didn’t convince them summer had returned.

Something about a tropical weather system escaping the tropics and taking a trip to Canada (which we couldn’t work in this year, so good for the storm) has us pulling in cold northern air with a swirl of tropic downpours, and I’m not thrilled to see cold and wet arrive for a holiday weekend. This comes after an overly-warm week also gave an excuse to stay inside, so as you could guess the pace of work is close to an all-time low.

The succulents are starting to migrate into the winter garden to spend the next few months under lights. It looks so innocent at first but by the time the last pots need to be crammed in here….

Other than the usual excuses I have brand new ones to add to my list, both of which caught me off guard! Last Saturday, overly enthusiastic sandwich chewing left me with a nice bite to the tongue… nice enough that I didn’t eat for two days and was barely able to speak when Monday rolled around… and then an achy knee on Sunday turned into a limp and pain which only ramped up through the week as the mouth began to get better. What a mess. Fortunately I work with a nice group of kids this year, who reassured me it’s not my fault, it’s just that I’m so old and this was bound to happen sooner than later as I pick up speed on the downhill side of life.

In July all the hanging baskets of dichondra ‘Silver Falls’ were going to be overwintered and come back even stronger for 2024. In October… well that’s a lot of baskets to overwinter…

So maybe the rain is a blessing. I can slow the pace, rest up a little, maybe help clean inside??? -hahahaha, just kidding- there are a billion things to clean up in the garage and the winter garden is starting to fill up, and today is an excellent day to sort and put away the dozens of empty pots (which will likely fill again this winter), and make sure there is ample potting soil etc for the upcoming months.

Before being sidelined for injuries, the daylily farm was tended and replanted for 2024. Sometimes it looks big, other times it just looks like a silly example of why I need adult supervision, but in either case it should look nice in bloom.

So some progress is happening as far as preparing for colder months, but I was most pleased to get the daylily farm in order. I still have this delusion people would come if I opened the garden for a weekend or two, and I also have this idea that everyone would be super-nice and just as excited about plants as the farmer is…. until I have my doubts… Then all of a sudden I’m wasting day after day wondering why no one is interested in a daylily or two, and I’m either making pity-sales to friends, or fielding ‘can you do better on the prices’ questions from someone who pulls up in an Escalade. I guess it can’t be any worse than the garage sales we used to have, where a day in the driveway maybe cleared 10 or 12 glasses or purses or whatnot out of the basement.

Whatever happens, at least this side of the house looks somewhat presentable again. New beds have been made, lawn has returned, and if you can ignore all the clutter, it almost looks garden-ish.

Even if the farm never works out, there’s still all that amazingness in the back yard. Overgrown potagers, weedy and unmulched beds, and waste areas where weeds are actively going to seed highlight the garden once you pass beyond the curb appeal of the front yard. I would swear that 90% of garden advice for maintaining a beautiful Eden of your own includes the statement ‘make sure you get your weeds before they go to seed’, and when I look around that’s all I see. “Wildflowers” going to seed, grass going to seed, perennials and annuals going to seed, it’s all a seedy mess and if it weren’t for the constant back and forth of birds and other wildlife coming in and out of the yard I’d have reached for the string trimmer weeks ago. I’ll accept the curse of future weeds in order to enjoy this. One of the few apps on my phone is the ‘Merlin Bird ID’ from Cornell Labs, and what it does is pick up the bird sounds around you and runs a list of what species are calling. Last Saturday morning I cracked open the back window and let it run for about ten minutes and it tallied up 21 different species of birds in the yard. Birds are migrating through this month, and I see them in and out of the weeds, picking up their breakfast and now I have an idea of who is all there. Just in the LBB group alone (Little Brown Birds) I have Song Sparrows, Chipping Sparrows, White-throated Sparrows, Field Sparrows, Lincoln’s Sparrows, and Swamp Sparrows. Trust me that if left to my own, I’d barely recognize one of them, and even then I would have doubts!

Weedy asters (or whatever they have been renamed as) filling in wherever they can.

‘Hopi Red Dye’ amaranth alongside a bunch of other things blooming and seeding around the potager.

‘Happy Flame’ dahlia looking excellent for the shorted days and cooler temperatures. The orange marigolds are still going strong!

The afternoon light on ‘Limelight’ is always a treat, especially this year when ample rain and cooler weather have brought on a pink flush rather than the usual end of summer tan.

Obviously I’m a few weeks too late in doing anything about the weeds, and that was never the plan anyway, but there are still plenty of other things to keep in mind. If my knee and the weather cooperates, there are still a few colchicums in need of moving so that’s always a fun little project. The colchicum have been nice this year, and I’m glad their flowers have brought me through the doldrums of September into the season of fall foliage and chrysanthemums.

A bunch of colchicum, an un-named kind from a friend which I call ‘Frau Becker’ because that’s a much better story than calling them ‘Probably The Giant’.

The colchicums are still holding their own and a few of the fall snowdrops are beginning to peek out. As would be expected, the most promising one, even though it’s a half cm sprout in the middle of a thicket inside a jungle, has been found, singled out and nipped off by a bunny or bird. I would complain, but after years of this I’d be a little self conscious when the same people politely offer the same good advice of covering the sprouts when I first see them… so instead let’s just visit the waste area of the garden again.

The waste area from the side where its weediness shows off best. More ‘Hopi Red Dye’ and a plethora of lambs quarters going to seed. The birds love the lambs quarters but I always see it and think back to my allergy tests and how this weed showed up as a top culprit. Hmmm. Maybe not the wisest thing to leave…

Regardless of what is happening with the hard-core weeds, the verbena bonariensis taking over the lawn is still on the list of too-pretty to say a single bad thing about. I was hoping this would pull in hordes of migrating Monarch butterflies as they pass through on their way to Mexico, but so far it’s only been dribs and drabs. On a few occasions there have been three or four, but sadly never the dozens of years past.

A green nicotina is also a welcome weed. This flower is the favorite of any hummingbirds which happen to pass through on their way South.

I’ll leave off on the October project. Assuming my students are wrong and my injuries aren’t really the beginning of the end, the next thing on my Summer of Labor list will be a return to earth-moving. There’s still a mound of excavated rock and dirt behind the new addition, and surprisingly the plan has always been to tackle this in October/November once the weather cools and the ground is wet and soft again. Also surprising was a special treat which showed up and will hopefully make the job much more enjoyable. Here’s the background to that…

What do you want for Christmas? “a new wheelbarrow but I guess these new work slacks are nice too”

What do you want for your birthday? “a new wheelbarrow but I guess all these socks and a sweater are nice too”

What do you want for Father’s day? “a new wheelbarrow but I guess going out to the restaurant the kids love is nice too”

Random weekend when a hardware store closes? “A new wheelbarrow!!? How did you know!?”

A waste area in the middle of the back yard? I guess it isn’t the most aesthetic development of this spot, but I have enjoyed the progression of weedy flowers which have moved in. Right now frost asters dominate with a forest of white, and I’ll feel slightly guilty ripping them out to level the area again.

Even in my decrepit state I am still a rich man.

Have a great 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!

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.

A Week of Flowers-Day 5

Dec4

I’m taking it easy on day five of Cathy’s Week of Flowers celebration. I guess I don’t party like I used to. Today with a single photo I’m celebrating the heat of late July and the entire month of August, and the hot red flowers of Lobelia cardinalis. This moisture loving North American native plant finally settled in just off the back porch in a somewhat shaded and often damp corner of the house. While the cardinal flowers are in bloom, hummingbirds run a near constant turf war with guards and hit and runs and and the constant chatter of chases and aerial combat. A gardener who sits nearby to enjoy the shelter and shade is guaranteed a face-to-face barrage of insults from some tiny hovering pint-sized fighter pilot. Hummingbirds seem so tiny and cute, but in reality they’re little flying honey badgers.

Cardinal flower filling the end of the shade garden.

Hope you are enjoying your weekend, it’s a beautifully sunny morning here and although it’s also on the cold side, the rest of the week looks tolerable… and by tolerable I mean good shipping weather for a little box of succulents…

Merry Christmas to me!

Well that Sure Escalated…

Aug2

Sometimes I’m stubborn and set in my ways, determined to make something work and prove I’m right. Other times I can turn on dot, easily distracted and influenced, and just one idea can derail an entire plan. About three weeks ago I went to a daylily farm, and even talked to a daylily breeder. I bought one. I went to another farm. suddenly I found myself going back to the first farm and getting a few more and now suddenly I like daylilies. Hmmmm… did not see that coming…

Some Brookside daylilies which have been added to the garden. It’s nice to have something green in the yard.

My mother might point out that at one point, maybe thirty years ago, someone planted dozens of daylilies alongside the garage and some of those clumps still remain today, but that was a long time ago. I thought we were past that.

The front border still looking a bit fried. Recent rains have greened up some of the lawn weeds, but only the rose of Sharon (Hibiscus syriacus) looks completely unbothered by the dry weather.

I guess not. Plenty of good people like daylilies, so what’s the harm in adding a few? With the garden still a depressing shade of sun-faded khaki anything which can shrug off the dry heat can only be a good thing.

Purple gomphrena and angelonia don’t mind the heat, but do need regular watering to keep this fresh and bright. I think it’s worth it.

No one even noticed a few new daylilies, but they did notice the water bill jumping up last month. I admitted that maybe it was the garden causing this, but also pointed out the garden-fresh vegetables were surely worth it. Fifty dollars for a couple zucchini and some lettuce, thankfully there was no cost to benefits analysis done to double check my logic.

Regular watering helped stave off the worst of the baking in this end of the front border, but even without watering I suspect ‘Blue Yonder’ agapanthus would still look unbothered. I’m so glad the bulldozer missed this one, although my seedlings and several other things in this bed were lost.

Triage by watering hose was saving a few things but fortunately I went and scheduled a camping trip for last week, and this brought in a nice storm which actually soaked in a little.

Cestrum is remarkably easy from seed and only grew faster in the heat. At first I was underwhelmed by the small lemony flowers of the first seedling (in my hand), but a couple weeks later, other seedlings began to open up larger orange flowers, similar to their ‘Orange Peel’ mother, and it was all good.

A nice soak, cooler temperatures, and then another surprise shower this past weekend have made all the difference in the garden. No more wilted plants making me feel guilty at every turn and the lawn even has a green haze to it, although it will still be a while before I need to fire up the lawnmower again. I think this just-in-time rain will also help the little tree frog tadpoles immensely. They’re just starting to sprout legs and leave the pond, and I don’t think venturing out into a desert would have been the best thing for my little babies.

There’s a big range to the tadpoles with some already out and about, others well into leg-growing, and a couple still just fat little polliwogs.

I’ve been coming across baby tree frogs in a few spots around the garden. Unlike the gray adults, the babies are a bright green with a dark mask around their eyes.

Baby gray tree frogs (Hyla versicolor) have a leafy green color while the adults take on more of a bark/lichen gray color.

My fingers are crossed that a good number of them make it.

Even the frogs like the new daylilies.

New daylilies, baby frogs, and a decent rain. It’s not perfect but it’s a good position to be in for the first week of August, and as long as no one asks how the construction is going I think it’s still better than a cold day in January.

Have a great week!

Some Like it Hot

Jul13

I have to confess, I find white to be a little boring. Much of that has to do with all the white vinyl fences and railing and trim which abounds in my part of town, and the competition it provides to any white flower which tries to do its own thing in my yard, but it’s also probably too tasteful for me. Anyway, my garden is also mostly full sun, and unless it’s the moon shining down, white can become a glare, and any other colors cooled by white into pastels are also lost to the sun. Hot colors on the other hand, can put up a fight. Bright reds and golds, yellows and hot pinks, intense purples… these are the colors I love to see when I look out upon a yard baking in the afternoon sun, preferably from the other side of a window… comfortably cooled by air conditioning.

‘Lucifer’ crocosmia is red. Very red. A you-can’t-ignore red. I think I need a few other crocosmias…

Today it was mostly hot, but it was absolutely humid and sometimes that’s worse. I cut the grass, was drenched in sweat, but not much else happened and I was fine with leaving it at that.

I finally like the front foundation beds. The ‘Tiger Eyes’ sumac is probably too chartreuse and too weedy for a respectable foundation planting but blue spruce and blue fescue are definitely suburbia approved.

Even with the heat and humidity I did try and get the last of the weeding done. That sounds good but of course I’ve already got to re-visit the weeds in the beds where I first started, and the rains aren’t slowing anything down other than the gardener.

One of the few daylilies I have, a yellow spider daylily who’s name I can’t think of right now. I think spiders and the more simple singles are my favorites, the ruffly explosions of color with ridges and teeth are more a curiosity to me than anything I need to grow.

A slow gardener shouldn’t surprise anyone, and this one’s about ready to stop completely, call it a year and just sit back to watch things rather than try and exert any more control. We’ll see.

I’m always happy to see a few Gloriosa daisies (Rudbeckia hirta) pop up. The surprise ones always do much better than any I try to plant on purpose, and they always put themselves amongst good companions, Verbena bonariensis and Lychnis coronaria in this case.

Actually with vacation season approaching the sitting back part will be even easier, and that’s usually when all control is lost.

Pulled weeds on the lawn, not as effective as I’d like sheets on the blueberries, and Rudbeckia maxima three days away from flopping. For all my talk about weeding and control, this is the reality.

The local wildlife seems to enjoy the messiness and I’m happy to see that, even if it means more and more baby bunnies eating the coreopsis while I watch. Actually I was also enjoying watching all the bird activity until I realized it was the blueberries and gooseberries which were entertaining them. I guess my netting problems are still not even close to being foolproof but no matter, who wants to pick all those delicious berries anyway?

On the down side the birds seem to really enjoy retiring to the bath apres dinner, so the pond is always a mess of splashing and berry vomit and whatever else comes out the other end so it’s not nearly as nice as some of the other amazing garden ponds I’ve seen. Maybe someday a (clean) mountain creek plus koi pond will grace this garden but right now I’m absolutely thrilled with the dirty little sump which I call the pond, because in spite of the duckweed and murk I have something far better than koi. I have tadpoles. Finally. Since building it I’ve been hoping “The Pond” would bring in a couple frogs or toads and this year in spite of a healthy population of mosquito devouring aquatic water beetles, eggs have survived and now tadpoles are sprouting legs. I love it and in moments like this I realize what a nerd I am.

The pond. Probably the first part of the garden I check each day.

So I’m way off the ‘hot’ theme but whatever. Let’s just wander out front again to see some of the amazing cardoon (Cynara cardunculus) which are just days from flowering. These are much cooler than they are hot and each day I have to touch them just to verify again how solid and spiny they are. I like them and I bet when they go to seed the goldfinches will also like them… even if these artichoke relatives are a little bigger than their usual thistle meals.

Cardoons just about to flower, with a conveniently placed ‘Royal Purple’ smokebush (Cotinus) backdrop.

If the goldfinches like thistle seed then the cyclamen must be making the ants happy. Cyclamen purpurascens are showing up all around the base of our ant-infested cherry tree and I suspect the ants take the seeds in, nibble off the sugary coating, and then discard the seeds down the sides of the tree. Works for me, I would have never considered planting them in such a dark, rooty location.

Cyclamen purpurascens ringing the base of the weeping cherry. They’re just starting their summer bloom season and soon a few new leaves should be up as well.

Back to the hot theme. I’m not sure if I mentioned, but 2021 is the year of the caladium, and a five pound box of tubers from Caladiumbulbs4less (quite the subtle company name) have been potted up and are just loving the semi-tropical weather. I love them almost as much as the tadpoles, and when the tadpoles sprout their legs and hop off to new frontiers at least I’ll have my caladiums.

The driveway nursery is full of excitement as the mixed bulbs come up and show their colors. I spend way too much time examining every new leaf, but someone’s got to.

In case you’re wondering, five pounds of mixed caladiums is much more than this garden needs, but just about right for what this garden wants. 87 corms would be a pretty good guess of how many caladiums were planted, but I’m sure to actually repeatedly count them would be a little obsessive. Obsessive would also be ordering mixed bulbs but then potting them all up individually so that later on you can plant all the similar forms together… and then running individual drip lines to all of them. Amazing how obsessive can easily co-exist with lazy as long as you buy enough drip emitters, but it has to be done since cool weather and drying-out are the biggest dangers to an excellent 2021 caladiumfest.

Another heat and humidity lover, Alocasia ‘Dark Star’ is starting to put weight on again after a really lean winter.

I’m sure you’ll hear way too much about the year of the caladium so I’ll end it here, but I do enjoy seeing them revel in the warmer weather and nearly daily thunderstorms so I could really go on and on if I had to. In any case it sure beats a drought.

Have a great week, hot or not.

February

Feb24

So much for keeping to a regular schedule of blog posts this year. January was off to a good start, but then it got cold and snowy, and I don’t do well when cold and snow separate me from my plants… unless of course it’s to hit a tropical beach or indulgent ski resort… but we all know how that’s been going this year.

Biscuit the Yorkie loves the snow, especially when the foot or so of compacted old snow is covered with a couple inches of delicious new snow.

So February has been a nothing month. Nothing much gets done, there’s not much moving (other than for food), and no one seems to care. We just watch the snow storms roll through and vaguely consider the damage that heaps of snow and ice are doing to the roof, and wonder just how big an icicle needs to be before it rips the gutter off.

Ice dams edge the entire roof. Snow is piled high, it gets wet as the up-roof sections melt a bit, and then freezes to form a solid 10 inch wall of ice atop the gutter. Of course with the gutter blocked the next melt will just run off the edge forming (in this case tiny) icicles.

Sunday actually lived up to its name, with a clear sky and almost above freezing temperatures I made my first trek into the yard in about three weeks. There really wasn’t anything to see (anything good that is) but I did dig out one of buckets covering snowdrops and was thrilled to see them also enjoying the bright change in weather.

Galanthus ‘Three Ships’ still looking great, assuming I’m willing to trudge out and dig her up each time I visit.

Although many will complain about the snow, you won’t hear me gripe about it until March when we get hit by some nasty blizzard or Nor’easter which crushes all the new sprouts and ruins all the earliest spring flowers. Fortunately this year, in spite of a warm January, most everything was still far enough back that all this cold has done is make it wait. When it melts I expect a grand explosion of spring, and that’s always exciting.

A foot or two of compacted snow isn’t all good things. The rabbits can’t get to their food and end up eating just about anything which makes it above the snow line.

Maybe that spring explosion will be enough to save the leafless hollies and camellias, and skeletal spruces which I just bought and planted… thinking they would be just fine and out of reach in the raised beds of the potager… I fenced a bunch of things back in December, but in the past these have been safe, so obviously why would I over do it?

winter sunset

Even with all the clamor over snow and bitter cold and an arctic vortex or two, reality says this winter is still warmer than average, with only seven or eight nights actually below average, and not by much. Even the most impaired statistician will tell you that for an average to be average about half the temps will be above and half below… give or take a few extremes… and we are far from that even if it sure seems like a winter out of the ‘olden’ days.

A quick flashback to my garden journals of the ’80s tells me that we are actually about right in line with the spring of ’87. That might sound reassuring, but these are actually from when I lived on Long Island, which is now considered a balmy zone 7, so… we are actually way ahead.

Reading a thermometer and checking a weather report really only take at most five minutes, so it’s been a struggle to fill the rest of the weekend with nothingness. Even the winter garden is boring me so in a valiant attempt to beat the stupor I checked up on any drip irrigation fittings I might need. Yes I need to order more, maybe 100 1/2 gph emitters will be enough for all the caladium bulbs I ordered. Yes, I need to pot them up individually so that I can separate all the colors and then arrange them and rearrange them through the summer. Yes, I know that’s excessive.

Drip irrigation fittings and parts. For all of ten minutes I considered a post on the subject, but then… the stupor again descended.

One thing I have managed this winter is reading. Three new books top the pile, and they’re all excellent. ‘Some Snowdrops’ is a beautiful dreambook of how I imagine snowdrop season will be like, ‘A Year at Brandywine Cottage’ gets me excited about every plant and every season (and unfortunately every recipe has me wandering into the kitchen hungry), and ‘Colchicum’ has me doubting every label in my little colchicum bed.

Winter reading for the gardener.

A little wandering, a little dreaming, a little reading, that’s actually a pretty banner weekend (or more honestly, month) for me. Even in mid February the sun already seems March strong, and I don’t think I’m the only one thinking that. The best thing I noticed on Sunday was that birdsong is back, and in spite of the snow, birds were vociferously carving up the neighborhood into new territories for spring.

… until Monday, and another six inches of snow…

So it’s not spring yet, but things are looking up. Tomorrow will be warm, Thursday will be warmer. It will take a while for the snow and ice to melt, so I’ve got a few more days to be lazy, but the next few days look promising!

Snow can wear you out.

Have a great week!

General Seediness

Sep26

The humidity and heat are gone, only to be replaced by on again off again sunshine alongside a repeating dose of rain. Yay. I won’t even try and convince myself summer is holding on. The calendar says fall and I guess the garden is saying it as well this year.

The potager is now an overgrown seedy mess of lingering flowers and floppy overgrowth.

We had company for a week and then I had the pleasure of entertaining a head cold for the following weekend, so if the general decay of the season wasn’t enough then the two weeks of neglect probably did the trick. A few things did happen though, so I guess any attempt by the gardener to keep his head above water is a plus.

The hedge was trimmed. As usual I love it, and of course it’s inspired me to edge and mulch as well.

Before I get too rushed in putting this post out, I suppose some mention of this years budget ambitions should be noted. Weeding was becoming torture so a few bags of mulch were purchased. I find mulching to be slightly addicting so the first load was followed by another, and then another. All said approximately $44 dollars of very cheap and questionably dyed hardwood mulch was purchased, and to be honest I feel really good about my broken resolve.

A weeded, edged and mulched snowdrop bed. Grass clippings cover the interior, purchased mulch rings the edge. The left side is still a work in progress…

While mulching I came across a few colchicum corms and remembered offering extras to some friends last fall. As it is with these things a quick online search for proper names and spellings led me to distraction and also to a few coveted colchicums which I’d been hoping to get elsewhere. For just $63 and a mouse click I didn’t have to worry about elsewhere anymore.

A good example of general neglect. Colchicum ‘Nancy Lindsay’ bravely flowering over a carpet of weedy sedum and other sprouting nasties.

While I’m baring my plant buying soul (with the exception of snowdrop purchases of course) I might as well admit that general colchicum excitement led me to a second purchase, this time from Daffodils and More. I have sworn off new daffodils this fall, but obviously the “More” part was a problem, and in this case it amounted to $65 more.

Nice pink highlights on ‘Limelight’ hydrangea this fall. They may be floppy from all the rain, but at least they’re not heat blasted and brown.

I haven’t been entirely innocent in the plant department either. Most of the summer passed far too quickly to spend time at the nursery, but my foggy memory does recall going over on a gift certificate (the amount of which does NOT count) by about $38 and then returning a few days later to spend another $18. Those plants may or may not have all been planted, but I have to say it would be stupid to buy them and HAVE to have them and then let them sit next to the garage for weeks unplanted.

Each fall I’m fascinated by the variety of mum seedlings which have arisen from the double red ‘Mammoth’ mum towards the back. Each spring I forget about mums and never get around to separating these out.

If I do admit to neglecting full price purchases on the driveway for weeks, I probably shouldn’t suggest that I went back for a 40% off sale and spent another $49. Just in case that happened though I’m going to add it to this year’s tally and not mention that more pots have joined the driveway crew.

The overflowing tropical border. The Seven Sons Tree (Heptacodium) is in full bloom and has put on quite some height over the last few years.

Speaking of pots I bought a nice ceramic one on clearance for $15. Like everything else I didn’t need it but maybe I will, so better to just bring it home.

The Monarchs have surprised me with an early appearance. They’re enjoying the flowers of the Seven Sons Tree, you can almost make out the namesake flower buds which have a number one son bud surrounded by six more sons.

That might be it on budget confessions. Over the last few weeks I’ve probably forgotten a few receipts here and there, but in my opinion a quickly fading memory is one of the greatest benefits of the aging process. Perhaps in hindsight writing it all down wan’t the best thought out of plans. Better to throw in a distraction such as one of my fantastically edited cinematic masterpieces which I call “All the Monarchs which swarmed the Heptacodium last week”.

I loved watching all the Monarchs. My parents were in and marveled at all the bugs and butterflies which they just don’t see any more in their more suburban lot. I hope it’s just a one season anomaly for them, but when you hear the stories of disappearing bees and bugs, and vanishing bird populations, and crashing amphibian numbers, you can really worry. As the afternoon rolled into an amazing sunset, we watched the lingering insects wander off and several bats move in to swoop and ambush the careless, while all the nighttime crickets and katydids started to ratchet up their chorus. It wasn’t bad at all.

September sunset on the deck.

The Monarchs have been just like the weather. They swarmed the yard and then disappeared. A few came back. More came back. They disappeared. Today there are dozens again and the temperatures and humidity make it feel like we’re in the South again. Who knows? At least it keeps me off the streets 😉

$63 for a questionable colchicum purchase
$65 for a quality colchicum purchase
$38 for additional unnecessary plants
$18 for two more unnecessary plants
$49 for clearance plants which also unnecessary, yet irresistible
$15 for a ceramic pot which made the trip to the box store worth it

$992 total so far for the 2018 gardening year.

sorta like suburbia

more than you ever wanted to know about my garden

Category Archives: wildlife