Experimental Growing

I s’pose much of gardening is experimentation, though some experiments are more forthrightly whistling in the dark than others. I’ve never had a cold frame before, though I know people who religiously seed things into frames made from old windows – winter salads are a favorite. So, this year, re-infused with enthusiasm by a new greenhouse, I decided to try growing herbs with nothing more than a heat mat and row cover at night – eventually very mildly aided by a half-filled barrel of water. So far so good. I had also started some arugula since several of my more favorite salads include arugula –roasted beets with goat cheese and toasted walnuts and balsamic dressing on arugula, for one, warm roasted butternut squash, French lentils and scallions on arugula for another. Each benefits from that peppery bite arugula, so different from lettuce, imparts, but finding fresh arugula in a grocery store here on the upper Eastern Shore in winter is almost impossible.

Along with the herbs, I seeded some of Renee’s rustic arugula in a flat. It came up, got repotted, and survived a fair amount of neglect as I hovered over the parsley and cilantro (and lime basil that didn’t make it). But by early February, it was getting spare looking, definitely needing something else, a way to go forward in its growth.

Last Friday, when it was 70 blessed degrees, I went out and finally put together a cheaply made plastic cold frame that had been sitting in a box in my shed for nigh on two years. Turned out the box was full of marmorated stink bugs, who, I was fascinated to observe, play possum when they sense that you are killing their brethren. Then, when they think you’ve ceased and desisted, they start moving again. I watched this happen probably ten times during the course of constructing the cold frame, so it’s not my imagination. I eventually managed to get them all. I hope. Shoved the box into the recycling, plopped the cold frame down on a bed on which I had spread compost last fall and shoved in the few repotted arugula plants. I closed the lid and forgot it for a couple of days.

Snow fell– four inches or so – on Monday night and when I went out to check the fairly flimsy cold frame, I expected to find it collapsed. But lo and behold, no! It had held. I scraped off the snow, but found the plants looking decidedly peaky. I figured they wouldn’t make it after all tough I left them just in case, and today – two days later – they were perky. Definitely. The ground, as determined by the finger test, seemed warm enough, so I planted them. Then for good measure and another experiment, I seeded a little row of arugula in the protected ground beside them. We’ll see. Despite the snow and cold, the bowed heads of the dafs in the shelter of my back step are once again standing up. The cardinals and robins are larking in the trees, and the lilac buds are starting to swell. Perhaps I’ll even have arugula salad before too long. And if not, maybe I’ll have learned something.

Cupola Doing Double Duty?

I have to confess, I accepted this fabulous gift with some trepidation. A 120-year-old cupola, a bit decrepit, and so heavy it took a front-end loader to get it onto the trailer we brought it home on. But I had in mind a place for it; I planned to use it as an anchoring point for the garden that sits halfway between the kitchen window and the vegetable garden. Even more important, it would become, I hoped, a bat condo. We’re getting overrun with mosquitoes. We have bats, but not enough apparently. I love to sit outside on summer evenings. But given that there is no screened-in porch and too many mosquitoes, my desire is incompatible with current reality. Enter ecology. I hope.

“Aren’t you afraid the bats we have in the attic will stay there and invite more friends to live in the cupola?” asked my son, who set the cupola in place.

Matt’s an inimitable bat-bouncer. When he lived at home, I could call on him to take care of the occasional in-house bat. He takes sieve and cookie sheet, waits until the bat lights, then immediately slaps the sieve over the bat, slides the cookie sheet beneath, and ushers the creature outside unharmed. Bats, who follow spore trails to find their nesting places, are also curious and can slide into the most amazingly tight places – I once watched one slide up under an asbestos shingle in our old house.

The cupola laid on its side partially wrapped in a tarp, all winter. I worried about it becoming an eyesore and unfinished project. But for my birthday, Matt and Gary set it up on the foundation Matt built. Several days ago, Matt painted it with solid stain. I love it. Whether or not this very cool garden ornament will also serve as a growing bat population’s summer house remains to be seen. Meanwhile, I just enjoy looking at it as a plant the beans.

*For anyone interested, I know where you can get another reasonably priced antique cupola for your garden. Just let me know via a comment on this blog

Greenhouse Volunteer

"You know," my gynecologist said during a visit I made to her some years ago. "Life wants to live."

This was her conclusion to the story of a woman who had come worried that she was pregnant yet knowing she couldn't be. She had had her tubes not just tied, but had had a section cut out. Yet here she was: pregnant. When my gyn operated, she discovered that the severed tubes had reached a tiny strand across the gap, like sympathetic hands, creating a bridge for the egg that became that woman’s surprise last child. "Life wants to live."

Sometimes that's hard to believe when gardeners work their fingers to the bone to get something to grow and end up skunked year after year. That's how it was with me and sweet peas, those oh-so-simple heirlooms. To everyone else, maybe, but not to me. I had been putting out sweet peas, in the ground, then as plants, for years with only anemic results; nothing like the lush displays that lure you (me) in catalogues. I had decided to give up on sweet peas and enjoy them in OTHER PEOPLE'S gardens. Enviously. Yet I went out to the greenhouse a couple of weeks ago to clip some of the parsley that sprouted from a seed I apparently dropped onto the pea gravel floor this time last year while starting plants. And lo and behold, there it was: the sweet pea!

This little guy had fallen into the gravel, had sprouted during one of the worst snowstorms in living memory, and was BLOOMING! A pair of rich mauve flowers, a lovely contrast to the sagey-green vine, were happily snugged against one of the table legs. As a result of years of poor performance when I work at it, I don’t think I’m going to try to grow sweet peas outside this year. I just don’t want to devote the space when so many other things can legitimately claim it. But I might just buy a packet of sweet peas to dump in the pea gravel at my feet in the greenhouse, and wait to see what happens.

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.