Redemptive Pruning

This year things are going to look different thanks to the twin blizzards visited on us here in Maryland. It did some ham-fisted pruning, ripped tree limbs half-off, smashed aged boxwood, halved the density of yews. It’s a misery when you lose a venerable tree or treasured shrub and a loss for the local wildlife. The golden juniper at the south kitchen window gave us a close-up and personal view of more than one warbler family as well as various avian tourists over the years, but it's going to have to come out. The old holly on the east side, the one that was home to a family of robins where we could watch generations of fledglings take their first awkward attempts at flight, is iffy. And the now-ravaged cedar that for years shielded the fragrant bank of Hostas by the driveway may end up either having to go or be pruned to such a degree that it will completely change the light that reaches that space.

But the scattered demolishments also offer an opportunity to reassess.

Once we clear away the fallen, we need to look at things through new eyes. Can the cedar be saved? Do we want it to be? Or will its absence give that corner a new look, new possibilities? Will the holly have to come down? Its absence would let sun into the east windows in winter, (a blessing), but would also add unwelcome heat in the summer. Or will we be able to prune judiciously to give it new life?

It’s always a jolt to be forced to change just when you think you have things just as you want them. But it’s also a reminder that life is change. Nothing is static. Even rocks are made up molecules that are made up of moving parts. Being forced to adapt keeps our sinews working, stretching, as unwelcome and difficult as that can sometimes be. But first, the chain saw.

Outdoor Critter Food Bank

I’m a sucker for gadgets, especially new-technology stuff. Some work, others not so much. Two years ago I bought a solar-powered pedestal birdbath, which was fabulous. For a while. It was two-tiered, spouted water up through a little tube that came as a sparkling stream out of the top. The birds loved it, and so did I. But it gave up after six weeks and I could never get it to work again, despite cleaning off the solar panel, installing a new motor assembly sent by the manufacturer, who was clearly having problems with the thing, since the person at customer service mistook me for another unhappy solar-powered birdbath buyer. I’ve also got two Soki solar lanterns, one of which has done US Postal Service duty through rain and sleet and dark of night, the other of which has not worked once.

I’m most attracted to the gismos intended to make sustaining wildlife easier This year after the first really cold snap, I bought lower-tech gismo: a heated birdbath, a blessing for the critters (and me, since I don’t have to keep slogging out to keep an unheated one filled and thawed).

This conversation about gadgets is actually only adjacent to what’s really on my mind, which is how we help wildlife without making it a fulltime job for ourselves. I plant to supply critters, especially birds and other pollinators, throughout the seasons. I don’t believe in buying bird food, which attracts the rats and makes the birds dependent. But I do believe in giving them all the natural help we can. In winter, instead of clear-cutting the garden, I leave the seed heads waving. They are usually denuded by spring.

But right now, the gardens are still smothered beneath about 18 inches of snow. Only a few seed heads wave above that blanket. Even with very little to offer, the poor critters, desperate for food, come. Yesterday evening, about 100 Canada geese landed in my back yard to glean what they could from the seed heads and garden detritus I’d left as well as the little bits of brown lane starting to peek out of the snow. I’m going to scatter corn for them this evening, leftover from my ill-starred attempt to heat the house with a more environmentally friendly corn stove. Scattering the corn, a use of what has otherwise been wasted and stored in metal trash cans, is not baiting – which is illegal – since I won’t shoot the geese. It’s one neighbor helping another in tough times.

Snow Gardening

There will be no gardening today. Not even in a bathrobe. Nor tomorrow or the next or for a while until we dig out. I was all set to drop in a picture of more blooms that are out of sync with the seasons – my dafs were completely open in mid-January when we had a snow – a subject I think is incredibly relevant to the discussion of climate change.

But I’ve got more immediate concerns right now that we’re blanketed as though we live somewhere out in the plains. I spent part of yesterday slogging out to the greenhouse to make sure the little thing didn’t collapse, though it’s rated to withstand a fair amount of wind (50 kts) and weight (can’t remember). I was glad I wasn’t fretting about getting water to seedlings and making sure an outage didn’t freeze a whole batch that I had already started in flats of seed-starting mix. Expensive and frustrating, but then again, gardening can be too, let’s be honest. Meanwhile, I’ve got wads of seed packets on my dining room table, and as soon as I get a few minutes, I’m gonna start to sort them into a series of timings: what gets seeded into flats as soon as I dare (probably after next week’s snowstorm passes and diminishes), and what doesn’t get seeded until later. Waste not, want not. Which is what sustainable gardening and living is all about.

Early blooming

MG blog

I do a good chunk of my gardening in my bathrobe. I go out first thing with the dogs, and while they inspect the yard, I always get sucked into SOMETHING garden-related. Even in winter, if it’s not blowing and minus two I got out with gloves and nippers. Which is how I ended up with black raspberry sprigs in my bathrobe pocket the other day. I’d put the nippers in my robe, boots on my feet (no socks, like a dope) and clumped out to the wild and whippy raspberry (Rubus) patch. Black raspberry canes are like an alien species determined to take over the world. They send out great arching stems that reach down for soil and root from the tip. They always reach outside their bounds, and into the reds’ territory to claim a stake. I had pruned and yanked last fall in late November, but here I was again only eight weeks later doing the same thing in what felt like the dead of winter. You have to admire their determination.

The thing that startled me though, was the fact that a lot of the red raspberry canes’ buds are already starting to swell. It’s too early. Having grown red raspberries, both summer (floricane) i.e. once-beaaring, and fall (primocanes) i.e. twice-bearing if you let them – for 30 years, I look for them to start swelling at the end of February, maybe beginning of March depending on the cold and light. Mid-January is too weird.

Likewise, the tulip magnolia (Magnolia x soulangiana), with a gorgeous buttery bloom, is swelling way early. It’s planted in a fairly protected spot, which last year prompted it to bloom early and then get smashed by heavy frost, but still… For thirty-plus years, the Smithsonian has been doing bloom time studies, which show that plants in the mid-Atlantic region have increased their bloom times anywhere from 2 days to 48 days. Their assumption is that it’s a result of climate change. Still. Even though I get a little stir-crazy and go out with the secateurs in my bathrobe pocket on still winter mornings to prune the berry canes, it doesn’t mean I’m looking for a complete shift. If I’d wanted to live in the Carolinas, I’d have moved there.
Rose is finished inspecting the compost heap, and my toes are ready to fall off inside my boots, so I clomp back inside. When I get there, I discover the thorny bit of black raspberry cane.

Oak Leaf Hydrangeas (Quercifolia)

Nature can be rough on everyone, but especially on gardeners who expect things, like the plants we put in our gardens looking like the pictures in catalogues. Not enough that we deal with drought one week, deluge the next, wild temperature swings, hard frost just as the peach blossoms come into full bloom, you name it. Nature giveth, and Nature taketh away. As with this summer. Nature gave us more than enough rain – not steady mind you, but in monsoon-then-drought-then-monsoon rotation. I’m not really complaining – it’s VERY bad juju to ever, EVER complain about the rain -- but I watched the farmers struggle to get into the fields when they most needed to, watched the onions drown, the tomato blight grow apace, and the raspberries rot on the canes from rampant fungus.

But there’s usually an upside – like forest fires prompting long-dormant tree seedlings (I think long-leaf pines for example) to germinate then sprout. This year, for the first time the Oak Leaf Hydrangeas (Quercifolia ‘Alba and ‘Ailsa’), the ones I planted years ago in large part for their fall color, the ones that sported dung-colored leaves autumn after autumn, the ones that convinced me that catalogues lied (like they did with the Washington Centennial Azaleas when they said they’d thrive here), this year, they’re gorgeous. The morning sun glints through them, and they glow orange and crimson, saffron and scarlet and gold and burnt sienna and a burnished, purply red.

Likewise the young Autumn Glory Maple (Acer Autumn Glory) in front of my daughter’s house. The little beast is doing its darndest to live up to its name, despite its currently diminutive size. And much of it can be credited to the abundance of rain that helped feed the tomato blight, fungus-up the raspberries and grow mildew over virtually every little thing that didn’t move fast enough. But the leaves. Are. Glorious. Native taketh away, but some years, Nature also giveth.

It just doesn’t seem fair. This is the very best time for the purple Cathedral Bells (Cobaea scandens) that I’ve been waiting all summer for. Yet it’s the end of the blooming year. We’ve had a couple of light frosts. The raspberries, which are still producing bless their little hearts, are looking decidedly peaky, and the basil has about had it. Yet the Cathedral Bells are acting as thought it's high summer --spilling all over the back fence, the bale of straw I left there to spread and didn’t get around to, and the ancient horse-drawn plow that we used to hook to the ancient tractor to plow the garden, something I managed to put a stop to by fencing in the entire space. A few more moments and they’ll be taken with the frost. Meanwhile….

I love the Cobaea, especially the purple ones. Massive, demitasse-sized blooms have flamboyant anthers inside that arc out enticing the bees into the flower’s deep hollows. The calyx, a gorgeous smoky blue-green is like a sculpted Russian orthodox priest’s hat, an art form in itself. Cobaea, whose flat dark seeds are sometimes hard to germinate, is a wonderfully decorative climber that, when it takes off, can cover a pergola – something it’s done here in other summers. But this year was cooler, greyer, as I was trying to get them started, and by the time I had a few little hopeful plants, the moonflowers (Ipomoea alba) had taken their place on the pergola. Instead, I planted the five little burgundy-stemmed vines along the back fence thinking I’d find some more prominent spot once they’d grown. But they took forever. They didn’t look like they’d do anything at all for most of the summer -- I had to keep explaining to my husband in extravagantly descriptive terms why he shouldn’t weed them out -- though I was really not convinced they’d amount to anything. And then, boom! They took off. And it was too late to transplant. Instead, I let them go –up over the fence, across the gap and onto the plow, down along the flat tires, flowing up the all-but-useless composter, into the hay bale. The bees love it. They meander along the vines and into and out of those huge cups as though they had all the time in the world. Of course, soon the heavy frost will take them. It’s all ephemeral in the end. Meanwhile, I go out in the morning, marvel at the silvery frost that covers the calyxes like a spangled veil, and give thanks.

bee cafeteria

THIS is why you plant natives. Even if you didn’t appreciate the fact that native plants are a huge chunk of a healthy, well-oiled ecology, you’d let the natives that spring up uninvited stay. Because of the magic of the wildlife. Native plants bring in all those things you see on the Discovery channel, but thought had been eradicated by DDT and suburban sprawl. You don’t even have to plant it. Just let ‘em go and they will come.

For example, I went out with the black lab early one morning about two weeks ago. Often I use the time to weed a little. But this time, I stopped at the six-foot tall stand of wild white aster (Asteraceae), caught by the sight of a mid-sized bumblebee attached to the underside of one of the topmost flowers. He (she?) was sound asleep. I realized as I looked at the froth of flowers that the plants – volunteers all -- were filled with sleeping bees. And not just one species. There were several different bumble-type bees, a few carpenter bees of which we have an overabundance, honeybees, and some other bees I’m too ignorant to I.D.. (Sadly no blue bees, which I had seen sleeping on the undersides of the raspberry leaves earlier in the season.). I dragged my husband, Gary, out to see.

“I thought bees all went back to their hives, or their tree stumps or the ground or the main support in the garage or whatever for the night,” he said, peering at one small bloom to which two different kinds of bees clung upside down. “It looks like they all fell asleep in the cafeteria.”

The bees’ falling asleep in the cafeteria is apparently not that unusual – there is a lovely picture of about seven sleeping honeybees ringed around the center of a Rudbeckia bloom that is a 2007 Maryland Native Plant Society contest winner. http://www.mdflora.org/gallery/photocontest/photocontest2007/photocontest2007_cc_001.html

Watching the sun slowly warm and gradually wake the mixed-Apis crowd, I was not only delighted in a kind of ‘aw ain’t that cute’ way -- sleeping bees are as cute as sleeping puppies though you’re not tempted to touch them. But I was struck by the democratic clustering of the different species. I’ve seen a pair of same-species bees crawl contentedly over each other on a single bloom, but object or leave in a huff when another species comes in to feed. But these were all ecumenically bedded down together as though at camp. As the sun rose and warmed them, they started to wake and feed. Lovely. I realize that to Master Gardeners this is preaching to the choir, but it’s nice to know we’re all in the same church.

Season's coda

The crickets are deafening. The seed heads of the blackberry lilies (Bellamcanda) --solidly one-third of their charm—are waving above the garden chairs, and the pineapple sage is in bloom. It’s a sad time of year but a gorgeous one in its own way.

One of the things I most appreciate at summer’s end are the moonflowers (Ipomoea alba), which are doing their darndest to make up for the declining garden. Those magnificent crepe-de-chine blooms that swirl open like dancers’ skirts waft perfume all over the place as they open at the cusp of the evening, attracting daytime pollinator and moth alike, a bridge bloom between day and night. I’ve strategically spaced them around the property – crawling over the rusted garden sink, semi-blanketing the pergola and taking the long-limbed volunteer lemon tomatoes with them, at the south entry to the garden where they struggle manfully to latch the fence closed (I keep unwinding them and repositioning but they are of a stubborn bent.). But the two moonflowers I most appreciate are the knot of heart-shaped leaves and blooms that have twined up a telephone pole that used to hold a purple martin condo in the driveway garden, and the ones in the raspberries I have finally figured out how to protect from both weeding husband and weed-whacking lawn guy.

The driveway moonflowers make the place look welcoming and add another dimension to the Anemone and blowsy-looking perennial Ageratum that are the end-of-season staples there. But the ones in the raspberry patch are my favorites because I can stand very close and watch the different bees clamber into the blooms’ centers. I can observe the way two bees of the same species will share a bloom while the arrival of a new species creates a new dynamic. There are decisions to be made: shall I defend my blooms against the alien newcomer? Allow him to crawl over my back to share the pollen? Turn and face him off? It’s tribal, atavistic, and seems almost political. Watching without having to make a judgment is luxurious.

The vines too have their own agendas and personalities. Some wrap sleek stems over and around and through, picking up a cane to carry it straight into the air while they reach for the rustic overhead trapezoid. Others clutch a berry-laden cane or two to the waist-high clothesline that attempts to keep the canes in bounds. But when I go out with the dogs, wandering and inspecting, it get to visit the little dramas that nature creates.
I’ve all but given up picking –too many fungus-plagued berries thanks to this year’s weather, too little time and energy. And I’ve finished canning and freezing (mostly).
It’s a bittersweet time. The crickets, punctuated by the last few cicadas, are outside my office door singing an end-of-summer song, a coda to the growing season.

Got Tomato Blight?

Got Blight? You betcha. I’ve been not so much fighting blight since it began partway though the summer as watching it slowly eat my tomato plants.

Several things in addition to the weird cool and alternately soggy and dry weather have helped promote blight this year. The upsurge in interest in heirloom tomatoes, which, as superb as many are, are also mostly not as resistant to a lot of the things, particularly fungi, that hybrids were bred to resist. Researchers surmise that a few big commercial nurseries that produce great quantities of non-resistant heirlooms this year shipped quantities of possibly-infected plants to big box stores, which in turn supplied them to a lot of economy—conscious new home gardeners eager for that old-fashioned taste.

I have not, as has been suggested by Cornel and a number of other research universities, applied ‘cooper products’ to my blighted tomatoes. As experts admit, these products are of limited protection against both infection and further damage. Champ WG and NuCop 50 are ‘organic’ products registered in Massachusetts, which has, along with other soggy northeastern states, had a devilish time this year with blight. (In fact everyone I spoke with on a quick trip up through New York and the Adirondacks howled about their lost tomato crops.). Both products are OMRI-listed. (OMRI is the Organic Materials Review Institute.).

Advice from Cornel sources is as follows:
Removal of a few infected plants may slow the disease, but has not been successful in doing so thus far. If removed, bury the infected plants completely, or bag and put in the trash. Don’t compost them.
Home gardeners need to act quickly to make sure that your plants don’t become a source of spores that could infect commercial farms, as late blight spores are easily dispersed by wind….This organism is not seedborne (however, it is tuberborne in potato), so that tomato plants started from seed locally would be free of the disease, at least for now. Some regional farm and garden centers did distribute infected plants from the same supplier. It is likely that many infected tomato plants have been planted across the entire [northeast] region if they originated from larger wholesale stores.
2. If you want to try to control late blight with fungicides, you need to begin spraying fungicide before you see symptoms – and you need to continue spraying regularly. Use a product that contains chlorothalonil. Even here, these products are only effective if used before the disease appears and should be reapplied every 7-10 days, or 5-7 days in wet weather. Chlorothalonil is a protectant fungicide, with no systemic movement in the plant, so thorough coverage is necessary. For organic farmers and gardeners, the options are very limited, since only copper fungicides can be used, and copper is not very effective on late blight. It is easily washed off by rainfall.

Instead of doing anything chemical to combat blight, I’ve been picking assiduously and canning like mad – quart after quart of gorgeous Super San Marzano plum tomatoes that fill a jar with about seven fruits. I’ve enjoyed the fresh tomatoes I have. But I’ve been careful not to spread the spores. I pick tomatoes and then go inside, shuck clothes and wash before doing anything else either in the garden or elsewhere. For good or ill, that’s been my modus operandi. Save and use what you can, don’t spread it around, and hope that next year, which is bound to be different – the hope and the plague of gardening -- will be blight-free.

A large number of anything concentrated in one place and then shipped all over the place is a recipe for exponentially spreading a problem. (We can apply this to all kinds of things: fast food joints, ennui, fear). I’ve yanked out half of the plants, and dumped them in plastic in the garbage, which was hauled off this morning. The rest are slated for disposal this weekend.

I will continue to plant heirlooms, started from seed in my little greenhouse. I will also continue to mix in some hybrids as I do every year. Diversity is the best protection.

HARLEQUIN BUGS

I was reading an Op-ed piece in the New York Times this morning,
You Say Tomato, I Say Agricultural Disaster,(click on article for the link) which made me realize that as Master Gardeners we are in the front lines of the war on such catastrophes. This article was talking about the devastation being caused by the late tomato blight in the Northeast. But, it pointed out that there are pathways to educating the home gardener, who is part of a larger farming system, that could help stem the spread of diseases such as this.

The article is worth reading and thinking about, as you wonder what your role might be in prevention. We are a part of the Smith-Lever Act that created the cooperative extensions. As a land-grant university the University of Maryland is an active participant. I guess it did bring a certain gravitas to my role in the community.

It brought to mind a very neglected portion of my garden and my own inaction. Maybe not as devastating as the blight, but an unchecked plant problem that I let fester in my vegetable garden. It was an infestation of Harlequin Bugs, Murgantia histrionica. I knew that the Brussels Sprouts were doomed, but I just thought I would get to it later. Meanwhile, the bugs were making haste in copulating on this unfettered piece of real estate, laying eggs and reproducing like mad men.

I am happy to report that I have belatedly solved the problem, and have even begun to reconstruct a scenario that I saved the rest of my garden by creating a trap crop, because I planted my brussel sprouts way to early and therefore created an attractant for the little rascals. I just can not quite reconcile the part where I failed to destroy the plants and the invaders before the rampant procreation, I'm working on that part of the story. So, now the plants and the offending bug, nymphs and eggs have been removed and destroyed, I hope the memory of my need for intervention early in my own garden will not similarly be removed and destroyed.