Feeds:
Posts
Comments

Posts Tagged ‘gardening’

Pests and Possible Solutions

Posted in gardening, tagged , , , , on January 24, 2025| 2 Comments »

Our yard is a curious yard for flower and herb gardening: nearly full shade during the winter when the sun is low and the Doug firs around us block its rays (there are no trees (per se) in our yard). In the summer, there are large swaths of the yard that are full sun to part sun. And there are sections that remain shady all year round, with just a little sunshine in the middle of the summer.

And the soil! Where once there were livestock over seventy years ago, the soil is rich, loamy, and wormy. Ignored sections tend to be clay, the predominant soil type of this area. I have well-drained areas and a few areas that remain wet. I battle fungus: black and brown spot, moss, and – in some corners, powdery mildew. Aphids are the biggest insect pestilence, but I have to be careful in my battle against them because our yard is also a pollinator habitat: birds and beneficial insects teem year-round.

My battle against invasive plants is slow and deliberate, executed with extreme caution: I have a liquid herbicide that I apply with a paint brush on the newly cut stems of offending plants: Himalayan blackberry, the neighbor’s flowering fruit tree that insists on shooting up starts in out yard, and a few miscellaneous “weeds”. It has to be done when the sun is out for several days in a row and protected from the curious nose of our doggo.

I have also applied the salt-vinegar-soap mixture to certain leafy plants, but that also needs to be done with caution. The salt will render the soil unfertile for a few years if you use too much. And it doesn’t outright kill, it merely stops the growth and then I have to go in and snip off any green starts I see, denying the offending plant needed sunshine and air. (1-gallon white vinegar – best to use 30% stuff you can get at places like Home Depot – + 1 cup salt and a dash of Dawn liquid soap to help it adhere to the leaves and stalks). A hot day works best. I killed the Comfrey that was taking over part of my yard with that solution and a LOT of snipping. It took three or four years to win the battle.

(Yes, I know: Comfrey is a wonderful herb and a pollinator friend. But it is also invasive, tends to powdery mildew, and causes lovely rashes on contact. Borage, a close relative, is much easier to contain and the pollinators love it just as well.) (An opinion, not a rule.)

Aphids are trickier. I’ve tried Neem and I have tried a natural recipe of soap and water (easy on the soap and it must be Dawn). I planted Marigolds between my hybrid tea roses, but I haven’t tried that around my honeysuckle. I started using a natural spray of essential oils last summer (too late, I am afraid): thyme, peppermint, cloves, and rosemary mixed in a quart of water and sprayed liberally. I also planted two native honeysuckles to complement the cultivar I already have, and I am hoping that the native ones have some resistance to aphids.

I purchased copper fungicide last year to help combat the brown- and black- spot fungus that is ever present in a Pacific Northwest semi-shade yard. I applied it to the ground when I mulched my roses, but I do need to apply it to my peonies as well (and my yard is full of peony cultivars!). My understanding is that the fungus lives in the soil (or profligates there). I also found two natural remedies in my Garden Notes file today.

  1. 1 litre 7-Up (less 1 cup – you drink that) + 1 cup mouthwash + dash Murphy’s oil or Dawn liquid soap. Doesn’t specify what brand mouthwash, but I will assume it is one that is “minty” fresh.
  2. 1 T baking soda + 1 gallon water + 1 T white vinegar + 1 T cannola oil. Since it is being used on plant foliage, I would assume you use the food variety of vinegar, less acidic. I can foresee this leaving a white residue of baking powder of plants, but it is quite diluted. The only other problem I have with this is the cannola oil. We don’t use cannola oil in any of our cooking or baking.

The former recipe looks doable for me, but I’d love to hear from other folk what remedies wou have tried (natural, mind you).

Slugs and snails are our “other” pestilence here in the Pacific Northwest. You can pour beer into a receptacle and let them drown themselves (rather gross to throw away every morning with their fat carcasses, and a waste of beer). You can use slug bait (I do, but only in places where I can shelter it from birds, mice, and doggo). But the best deterrent is simply removal. Toss those puppies into the middle of the asphalt street and let Nature (or tire treads) take its course. Eliminate hiding places (this is a biggie: the fewer places for slugs to hide, the fewer slugs you have. Snails, too.)

I do have another trick up my sleeve, but it is for potted plants: copper tape applied around the base of the pot. Copper conducts electricity which gives slugs what is equivalent to a “hot wire” shock to a horse. My husband has copper piping that he places around the lettuce and similar greens in the vegetable garden. Science, folks.

I’d love to have your input on solutions!

Read Full Post »

Indoor Gardening

Posted in gardening, tagged , , , , , , on January 17, 2025| 1 Comment »

I purchased two four-inch potted plants today. I am truly trying to have an indoor green thumb, but I haven’t had much luck cultivating that talent. I started killing houseplants when I was pregnant with my oldest and my luck hasn’t changed much since. So far, I have managed to keep a pothos living (and expanding) and a couple peace lilies. The latter are beginning to look sad after twenty-nine years (I got them when my mother died). The pothos I have had for much, much longer.

I had a Christmas cactus that I grew for thirty-some-odd years, until my favorite cat finally knocked it over and killed it. She broke the pot it was in, too. I was very sad about that: I had purchased the planter and cactus for a nickel at a church bazaar when I was about nine years old. But of all the cats I have ever lived with, this one was my all-time favorite, so she was forgiven. I think she was angry because we kept introducing more cats into our household. I’ve never had the heart to buy another Christmas cactus or to replace the broken pottery. But I have had other cats.

The pothos survived my pregnancies and has been divided several times. Nowadays, I just trim it back and refuse to root any more starts from it: I have two of its babies, and that is plenty. (The seemingly dead plant is a ginger plant. It may or may not be dead. I might have left it outside too long and the cold got it. We’re holding out hope.)

The peace lilies have always been my red flag: when they wilt, I know I have forgotten to water in a couple weeks! But water them and they bounce right back. This is how terrible I am at indoor gardening! They have been divided, but the first few years of my retirement have been hard on them. I always had them at work, in my office, where they thrived. Now they languish and I am promising them to do better in 2025.

I don’t remember when I picked up the old aquarium or when I decided to try growing plants in it. (I kill fish, this was never going to be used for fish!). Most of my early attempts died, but the asparagus fern has clung tenaciously to life. I added one parlor palm, and it thrived, so I added another. There’s an English ivy in there now, but I don’t know if it will live long or not: it picked up a fungus that I have treated with copper fungicide. Time will tell. I started talking to my plants when I started the terrarium, but I didn’t start daily misting until a week ago.

I know: most plants need daily misting, especially in the winter. I’m trying to be so much better! I check the roots with a meter once a week in the winter and water lightly as needed, no more waiting for the peace lily to wilt! I snip the dying leaves off. I opened the Rodale Book on Indoor Gardening that we have owned for at least twenty years, and I finally read it (the parts that are pertinent, anyway).

I did all the reading and buying of plant guides after I purchased an 8” potted Wandering Jew last fall. It was severely root bound and started dying shortly after I brought it home. I tried repotting it, but I didn’t have a pot large enough and the damage was done. So, I cut a few starts off and put them in a jar on my windowsill and am patiently waiting for them to have enough fine roots to survive repotting, probably in March of this year.

The death of the Wandering Jew impressed on me how little I really know about growing and keeping indoor plants. Who kills a Wandering Jew? Or a Spider plant, for that matter? I mean, other than me. And why am I so terrible at this? All my plants are in a southern or eastern exposure, but they really don’t get a lot of sun: in the summer we keep those blinds closed to keep the house cool and, in the winter, the tall Douglas firs across the street block the sun from our house. My surviving plants are all lovers of indirect light. I can check that box and look for more plants that like indirect light.

The house gets dry in the winter and the heat vent blows on the plants: of course they need misting! Somehow, I just never grasped the need to mist my houseplants. According to the several sources I read, twice a day misting is optimal, but they should be happy with once-a-day misting. That is more than they have been getting!

Today, I found a cute little coleus and a tiny spider plant, newly potted, and on sale at a local grocer. I know, I know – don’t make splurge decisions. But I did. I won’t transplant them until I see they are thriving. I will read up on them. I will transplant them when I pot the Wandering Jew starts. I’d like to put one of them in the terrarium, but I need to know it will thrive in that container.

The dinosaurs need more vegetation.  My goal is to be a better indoor plant grower and to help the dinosaurs in the terrarium.

Read Full Post »

Notes From Last Week

Posted in gardening, tagged , , , , , , , , , on January 9, 2025| Leave a Comment »

I wrote last week’s garden post without remembering that I own a manual tiller. I don’t use it for tilling which is why it didn’t register on my brain. I use it to help turn the compost. I do have a compost turning tool, but between the pair of them, I can get quite a bit of things turned and mixed inside the compost bin.

Here’s the tool. You are supposed to press it into the ground and twist, but I never had much luck with that maneuver. The ground needs to be soft, to being with. Compact grasses and sod are too much for it. It does work well in muddy soil.

I tried it out today with varying degrees of success. The most important thing to remember is that it still requires a lot of twisting which eventually screws up my old back. I got it to work in mossy grass, in already loose soil, and in muddy soil. Bottom line is: it is only going to work to a moderate degree and I still need to purchase a motorized small tiller of some variety.

While I was at it, I turned the soil inside the compost bin with the official compost bin tool. You push the tool deep into the compost and pull it out. The little blades open and pull up stuff from the bottom of the compost. I pulled up a lot of decomposed matter, soldier fly maggots, and red worms. The latter two creatures are extremely beneficial to compost and a sign that one’s compost bin is working.

I purchased the bin for a small fee from Metro. The tools I bought online. The compost comes from several areas: the kitchen, the lawnmower, and the firepit. We compost eggshells, rotten vegetables, leftovers from vegetables, and whatever we pare from fruits, onions, potatoes, and the like. Grass clippings get added in the early part of the growing season, before the grass goes to seed. Flower discards, but never weed discards. Charcoal and burnt ends from the barbecue and the firepit. It takes a couple of years to heat up enough to create soil or mulch, but that’s just that our yard sits in the shade for six – eight months of the year. The bin gets as much sun as possible.

Soldier flies are only one of the major composting insects we harbor, but they are probably the most important. They are large flies, don’t come into the house (except by accident), and live only to mate and lay eggs in the compost. The compost keeps the eggs and maggots warm, then they pupate, and more flies are born. It’s a very cool life cycle. The red worms are great for bait fishing, but they seem to stay inside just the compost bin: we have a yard full of earthworms that aerate the soil and feed the few moles that dig through the yard in search of a meal.

Earthworms and moles are both beneficial to the yard, although moles do occasionally upset some plant roots whilst they search for their favorite protein: earthworms. Moles also prey on crane fly* larva and cut worms, both very destructive insects.

*We used to call crane flies “Mosquito hawks” because they look like giant mosquitoes without the proboscis. They don’t eat in their adult stage: that’s for mating and laying eggs, hovering around outdoor lights, and scaring the bejesus out of people who don’t know what they are.  It’s their larvae that damage the roots of grasses and plants, but mostly grasses.

Read Full Post »

Clearing Flower Beds (Killing Lawn)

Posted in gardening, tagged , , , , , , , , on January 6, 2025| Leave a Comment »

Here’s a garden hint for the do-it-yourself old-timey organic gardener: cardboard.

I have spent too many years with an edger and muscle power digging out sod for new flower beds (or just to preserve flower beds already invaded by grass). I would cut out little squares, then slice the edger underneath and lift up the square of sod. In the right conditions, you can shake out most of the soil caught up in the roots, but that doesn’t happen most of the time. What you have just lifted out of the ground is now something you can’t put into your personal compost (grass, roots, seeds of weeds are all a huge no-no in a small compost.) or into the public yard debris bin (if your community does yard debris pickup, even).

The “lawn” consists of at least six different types of grass in our yard. From what I can discern there’s two kinds of pasture grass (a fescue and one “Yorkshire Fog”), two bluegrass, one rye grass, and one native bent grass. Several of those spread by rhizomes and “root runners” – those are the worst!

Your personal small compost pile probably does not get “hot” enough to kill the grass roots or weed seeds. They will break down (albeit VERY slowly) into something resembling soil, but when you use it, the grass and weed seeds will gaily sprout upward and you have more weeding to do.

Where we live, we have a yard debris service that is “free” (included in your monthly garbage bill, extra for extra bins which we always need). This yard debris is hauled to a commercial composter where the compost gets hot enough to destroy all those seeds and grass starts, but here’s the caveat: they don’t accept sod with soil clinging heavily to the roots. And sod *is* heavy.

I developed a system whereby I hauled the sod to the hazelnut tree and tossed it underneath, root side up, to die. Nothing grows under it except for the stray Himalayan blackberry and a bit of escaped English ivy (both are a pestilence). I have tried. Everything ends up dying like the sod I toss under it, and the sod takes years to break down into soil under the hazelnut (but doesn’t resprout, because nothing grows under hazelnuts except the aforementioned invasive plants. I’m working on getting rid of those).

I was young and had energy and muscle tone in those days. I also knew I was losing a lot of precious topsoil with that approach. My new flower beds were lower than the ground around them.

The cardboard idea has been around for a long time. I simply hadn’t tried it. Who wants large, open boxes of brown cardboard melting in your yard in the rain over the winter. (Love all those prepositional phrases in one sentence!) The winter of 2023/24 changed my mind. I’m getting older and slower and the edger is losing its sharpness (I know: a trip to a tool sharpener would fix that issue in a jiffy and for a sum). I decided to give the appearance factor a good “who cares?” and I placed cardboard in the front yard where I wanted a new flower bed.

The result was wonderful. Awesome. The grass (such as it is in our yard – more on that later) and the sorrel, the false dandelions, dandelions, and even the thistles all died. I approached it the same way I had been doing, but now that the sod was dead, the soil just fell off the roots leaving me with just a handful of dead grass and roots. I tossed those items into the yard debris bin and shook out the soil (and consequent insects and arthropods and worms necessary for good soil) back into the bed. Sifted a few rocks out (OK, a LOT of rocks out – we live on top of a bluff formed by ancient lava flows and some sedimentary rocks, plus there was gravel dumped in the front yard by previous owners). The result was a fluffy bed ready for planting, rich in nutrients, and poor in repeat unwanted plant growth. My herbs thrived and I had little weeding to do through the growing season.

This Autumn, I added a lot more cardboard cover to the yard, estimating the amount of energy I hope to have in the Spring/Summer and where I want new flower beds.

This Spring, I hope to add a small rototiller to my repertoire, replacing the edger. I don’t know why I never got a small rototiller in the past. I enjoy the manual labor, I was only working with small yards, and I was too cheap to spend the money. My husband has a rototiller for the vegetable garden, but it is too large for the small spaces I work in and is never available when I want to work. That search and the result will be another blog post in the future.

Read Full Post »

Jaci’s Garden

Posted in gardening, tagged , , , , , , on January 1, 2025| 1 Comment »

I have decided to turn this blog into a Gardening blog. I find myself drawn outdoor more often now that I am retired, and I am even beginning to delve into the murky waters of maintaining houseplants without killing them. I have a lot of gardening how to and how not to ideas, along with my own journey into landscaping the property we currently live on (and, hopefully, any property we move onto in the future, assuming we don’t end up in some Senior Living facility where I will be forced to garden houseplants).

I did get quite a bit done in the garden in 2024. The biggest item on my to-do list was to build a retaining wall inside the vegetable garden area. I bought a pallet of concrete stones a couple years ago (like, three or four years ago). The pallet has been sitting in our driveway taking up valuable parking space for that amount of time. I had a vision of what I wanted to do but the excuses for not doing it were myriad.

I’m not going to kid you: I am 68 years old and things are a little harder to do now.

But I sucked it up last summer and started hauling rocks from the driveway into the veggie garden area. The idea is not only to stop the neighbor’s gravel from eroding into our yard, but to create a long planting bed along the edge of the fence.

It’s almost complete: I have enough rocks left over to put one more layer around the fence, enough corrugated tin to use as a weed/gravel barrier, and then we need to put good potting soil into the space created. It’s not as straight as it could be, but I did it entirely myself, from the weed removal to the rock hauling (well, I coerced a certain someone to help a little with the rock hauling, but most of it was my back ache). My husband will be elected to cut the tin into smaller pieces but I will tell him that when the weather improves and I finish the planting beds.

Now, we just have to agree what plants are going to be planted in that border bed. I want a large rhubarb somewhere in there. My husband has already planted an espalier pear tree and an artichoke that hasn’t produced fruit, but also hasn’t died. We haven’t had a killing frost yet this winter so it may still die. Then, again, maybe it won’t and 2025 will be the year that we get at least one artichoke from it.

My favorite project of 2024 was a bird bath that I made out of a discarded pedestal to a sink we pulled out of our bathroom during the remodel. I placed it in the center of the lawn south of our new deck and dug out a flower bed around it. I placed native round rocks all around that and planted some annuals (I rarely garden with annuals, but it was late in the season, and they were all I could find at the local nursery). I will replace them with something perennial in 2025.

I have multiple bird baths of different depths and sizes: this is the one the crows love. The only expense was the bowl I used for the basin: $4.99 at a thrift store. E6000 is the glue I used to attach it to the pedestal.

Read Full Post »

Posted in gardening, tagged , , , , on October 13, 2024| Leave a Comment »

I spent several hours in the garden today. It is mid-October and things are slowing down. I haven’t watered in a few weeks, trusting the rains to come and do the work for me. The rain has been sporadic but comes often enough that even the planters remain green and growing. The rain barrel is full and soon I will have to close it off for the winter. I lost one rain barrel to a late winter’s freeze when I forgot to drain it, I don’t wish to do that again.

I cleaned one birdbath, the one the crows drop pieces of dog excrement in as they search for undigested peanuts. It’s a battle: the dog wants the bird peanuts, but he doesn’t even chew them: he swallows them whole, shell and all. The crows have learned there are nuts to find in shit, and they soften said shit in the water they (and other birds) are supposed to use for drinking and bathing. I console myself that they are no longer leaving me gifts of newly hatched birds in the water. Crows or raccoons: someone has to wash their food.

I try to get a late edging around my flower beds to discourage the spring growth of grasses (plural) which make spring weeding miserable. Grass and wood sorrel, my chief enemies. I cut the peonies to the ground now. I leave the evening primrose stalks of rich seeds along with the Russian sage and black-eyed Susans: the goldfinches, house finches, juncos, and chickadees will feast of them throughout the winter. So, too, the oregano. The rosemary is just beginning to bloom and honeybees swarm it in the waning Autumn sun.

I have finished most of my flower beds already. Mentally, I note where certain plants are that need to be moved in the spring, and which ones will need to be moved later in the Fall, when the stalks have died back, and the rhizomes or bulbs are left. I divided my Dutch irises a few days ago, today I dug up a couple dozen rhizomes of the purple ones and set them on the corner in a box marked “free”. I have more than enough purple Dutch irises, ones my father gifted me many years ago from my mother’s garden. I keep the blue and white ones, my favorites.

Once, someone on an Internet forum tried to school me on how to take care of irises. I was wrong, he said, to state that irises are basically weeds and need little care. I laughed. My irises came from 6500’ elevation in Nevada. My mother had them planted in gravel, on the southwest side of the garage, under the shadow of the motorhome. She died in 1995. My father hated irises and left them to die. Sometime between 2002 and 2003, he dug them up, threw them in a box, and shipped them to me, here, in the fertile Willamette Valley. I have divided them three times since then and given countless ones away. Irises are basically weeds and can survive a lot of abuse, drought, ice, snow, and even slugs, the latter being their greatest enemy in my garden.

I do kill some plants. Sometimes I do it intentionally and sometimes they just don’t like the way I treat them. Houseplants are usually the first to turn brown leaves upward and refuse to put out new roots, but I am getting better at keeping them green. I don’t always know why a certain plant will not take off in my yard, especially when I have had some degree of success with the plant in the past. Flowering currant, a native to the Willamette Valley, is one such failure. I grew it at another house, but it has failed to take root in this yard, and I have tried numerous times. But it took me over three years to rid my garden of comfrey and Japanese anemonies, and I am still battling fireweed (although not too fiercely, as I rather like fireweed).

This past summer I experimented with growing more native herbs. I already had several herbs in the ground but expanded. I planted nettles in a planter and kept them cut back so they could not go to seed and spread in my yard. I harvested leaves, dried them, and have already tried them in tea. I wore long sleeves and gloves when I harvested them: I have memories of crawling into a nest of nettles under the aspens in the Ruby Mountains when I was a girl. It was not pleasant. I don’t blame the nettles, but the little girl who didn’t pay attention.

I harvested yarrow and feverfew. My husband wants me to grow colorful yarrow next year, not the plain white stuff of our childhood. I will no doubt oblige. I have Lady’s Mantle, Holy Basil, Elencampe, sage, lavender, wild sorrel (I didn’t plant that, it has taken over our “lawn”), mallow, thyme, hyssop, elderberry, and more.  Sometimes, I just sit and stare into my garden and the many flower beds and wonder what all I have planted and what I can harvest and what I should get rid of or introduce.

My garden is a canvas. I have plants I dislike and some I even hate: grass is one. There are many kinds of grass, and I despise most of them. I like sedges. There are a couple ornamental grasses I can live with. But grass as a whole, I despise. I am allergic to most grass. If I could have a yard free of grass, I would be in Heaven. And for that reason, I grew flax this past summer. I hope to sow flax seeds into the lawn, mixed with the false dandelions and wild sorrel. I am slowly cutting out more and more of the lawn area for flower and herb beds. I don’t think about the color or composition as much as I think about eliminating the grasses.

I reached a place where I must quit garden work. The largest flower bed has been cleared and most of all the other ones are winter-ready. I still have peonies to cut back, and asters that are just now fading which will need to be dead-headed before the cold sets in. There is one tree peony that I hope to dig up and transplant into a container, separating the grass from its roots and (hopefully) giving it a new start at life. It is probably fifty years old and I wish to be very careful.  I moved one tree peony two years ago and it is happy in its new location. I can do this.

Photo: climbing nasturtium that took all blessed summer to grow and is finally climbing and blooming right before the rains come.

Read Full Post »

Dirt Under the Fingernails

Posted in gardening, tagged , , , , , , on April 14, 2024| Leave a Comment »

Today was a wonderful day to get lost in the garden. My soul needs to get lost. The day-to-day pressure of this life wears on me. Dirt under the fingernails is healing.

We discovered the neighbors have a small field of mining bees nesting in the bit of yard just north of our fence. There must be over a hundred little holes in the ground where the bees are laying eggs! Fortunately, this is the one neighbor that is an organic gardener and is interested in preserving native pollinators (especially as this species of bee is stinger-less and very laid-back).

I planted four sword ferns on the north side of the garage, in that little strip of land that is ours but is a set back from the property line. The idea is to fill it in with ferns so neither the neighbor nor us will have to mow the lawn/weeds that grow there. We forget about it, and it isn’t their responsibility. Ferns the size of VW Beetles is the logical answer.

I filled in the part north of our driveway with orange daylilies and daffodils last Autumn. The yucca has been there 20 years (I planted it). There is still a section of about 4×3’ that needs to be filled in, but I’ll get there, eventually.

I fulfilled a promise today, too. I made this promise ten or fifteen years ago: that I would obtain a blackcap raspberry from the wild for a friend in North Portland. My husband brought me two blackcaps last Fall and I was able to gift her one. Her husband picked it up today.  

My husband put two filbert saplings into the ground. Our lone filbert produces hollow hazelnuts, Guess you need more than one filbert in order to have meat in the hazelnuts. It only took us 18 or 19 years to figure that out and another few years to find a source of free filbert saplings.

He buried my hardy fuchsia when he planted one of the filberts. In his defense, he did not see anything growing right there: the fuchsia doesn’t begin to put up stems until late May. I saw it right away and carefully scraped all the soil off my precious flower. I’ve had it for 20 years!

Warm weather came on so quickly this year that I have fallen behind in the weeding department, especially with the chickweed. It is already gone to seed. At least this year I am not battling a ton of grass that migrated into flower beds, and even if the chickweed spits seeds everywhere when I pull it, I will still be able to get ahead of it in the coming months. That is, if one ever does defeat chickweed! It pulls up easily even as it spits hundreds of seeds into the air.

I did more, but mostly I just didn’t think. I didn’t think about our losses. I didn’t think about the day-to-day worries. I didn’t worry. I just smelled loam and leaf, apple blossoms. I watched blue orchard mason bees collecting mud from under the stone wall out front. I reveled in the city of mining bees next door. I let earthworms crawl away. I talked to the crow that came to watch me.  I stayed in the moment. And that made today a wonderful day to garden.

Dirt under the fingernails. Better than a manicure.

Read Full Post »

April… Then May Flowers

Posted in gardening, tagged , , , , on April 12, 2024| Leave a Comment »

It is that time of year when an organic gardener’s thoughts turn to soil amendments, natural slug repellent, and turning compost so that the soil at the bottom of the heap can be used. We also turn our heads and slam on the brakes at every plant sale we see, especially if there might be native plants to be had. We know if our garden spots are shade, wet, well-drained, full sun, part sun, clay, or well worked topsoil. My flower beds are all of those listed.

I have a list of plants I want. I always have a list of what I want to do in my flower beds. The vegetable garden belongs to my husband. He always has a list of the vegetables he wants to grow. Have list, will shop.

This year one of my goals is to completely fill the useless spot just north of our garage with sword ferns. It’s a three-foot mandated distance between our garage and the adjacent property line. No one wants to mow it. Full shade. No available water. The only true solution is to plant sword ferns and allow them to fill in the spot, kill the grass, and end the need for mowing. I have been adding small ferns to the spot over the years but this year I have four large sword ferns donated by a friend from his pasture. If I plant them now in the cool weather they will be established by summer and there will no longer be a need to mow north of the garage. Minimal maintenance, win-win for both parties.

Last fall I filled in the sunny portion of that piece of property with orange day lilies. I also have a magnificent yucca plant growing there. I picked the yucca up out of a FREE pile in front of a house one day. The orange day lilies were given to me by someone. There are daffodils growing there as well, a gift from the previous owner of this house. No more mowing a section of our lot that is difficult to get to and maintain. Ta da!

Minimal maintenance.

I took my list to a plant sale last weekend. It was a fund raiser for a State Park nestled in Lake Oswego. The prices of the (mostly) natives was more than I cared to pay, so I walked out empty-handed and right into the arms of a group giving away bare root saplings of “native” trees and shrubs. I turned down the witch-hazel (and later learned it is not a native to Oregon, although it is indigenous to parts of North America). I already had a mock orange that is two years old and establishing itself. There were a couple others that I questioned as to whether or not they were truly natives. I settled on three bare root plants: black gooseberry, a dogwood, and Indian Plum.

The dogwood is not the native Pacific dogwood, but a Florida import. Say, what??! Oh well, it was free, and I picked out saplings small enough that my husband can work his Bonsai magic on them. I was the only person standing around that had any idea what I was getting with the gooseberry. I’m more familiar with the yellow kind from the more arid side of the State, but this is a native from the Oregon coast – and a gooseberry promises tart berries perfect for a pie. I may have to make a gooseberry/huckleberry pie: I have an evergreen huckleberry (also native to the coast) that produces tiny berries in the late fall.

The Indian Plum is not a plum but produces tart berries that look similar to plums. It was a subsistence plant to the tribes of the Pacific Northwest and is one of the earliest flowering bushes which is a boon to the native pollinators. I’ll figure that out if and when it bears fruit. It can just be an ornamental for now: a native ornamental and attractant to pollinators.

My list incudes two lavenders: a Spanish lavender and a French lavender. I had both in my garden and they both died. My Spanish lavender was over 15 years old. I think I simply had the French lavender in the wrong part of the yard. I also want to get a second campanula, toad lily, phlox sublate (McDaniel’s Cushion), curry plant, and Chinook hop. I need a new rhubarb: the one I have doesn’t grow tall now produce long juicy stems. I’d like to add oxalis and bunch berries to the shade flowers. I also have some annuals on my list: petunias and climbing nastrutiums.

I purchased 19 packets of herb seeds from Mountain Rose Herbs. Those are waiting to be sown. Not for today. I bought the nasturtium seeds from Reneé’s Garden. The Chinook hop from Thyme Garden. The rhubarb is coming from Gurney’s. And the rose I bought from Jackson Perkins is showing some signs of life… (All of my English tea roses are from J&P, this one was a replacement for a floribunda I didn’t like. The floribunda went to a good home. This rose is also on probation until it starts growing…)

Today was the first day of Garden Palooza, a large plant sale south of here, almost to Salem. It is held at Bauman’s Farm & Garden in Gervais. I set aside a certain dollar amount and hope we don’t go over budget, but this year we were way under budget and came away with more plants!

I found both lavenders. My husband found the tomato starts he wants. He also found a pretty campanula for me. The one I currently have is a blue color: Serbian bellflower (campanula poscharsky). The new one is Birch’s Campanula and it will be a pretty purple color. Bauman’s also had so many pretty petunias! I found a full sun ground cover called Creeping Baby’s Breath (gypsophila cerastiodes). Drought tolerant. I need so many ground covers, they do a much better job than bark mulch at keeping the soil moist and weed free. Also, as perennials, the ones I pick out will last longer than bark or hazelnut shell mulch.

Oh, but the best buy of the day? Don found a tree peony for $24. Not $240 or $140, but $24. Tree peonies are not inexpensive even in a year without inflation. There are three old ones in the yard presently along with at least 80 other peony plants. I’m told the yard had more peonies but that was when Barney Schultz lived here, and he died over 30 years ago. The house sat empty, was purchased and flipped, and the grass killed so many peonies during the years of neglect. Then we bought it and I have single-handedly cleared all those peony flower beds, carefully divided tubers, and coaxed those beauties to new life. In short, I don’t need another peony or tree peony.

But $24. Gallon pot. Paeonia lutea var. Ludlowii (Tibetan Tree Peony). It’s young and I may have to wait a few years to see the large yellow blooms it promises. My other tree peonies are white, cream, and pale yellow fringed with red. Of course I bought it.

Our friend gifted us with two filbert trees as well as the ferns. We already have one filbert but the hazelnuts have never produced nuts. You learned you need more than one filbert. (Side note: the trees are filbert trees, the fruit is referred to as a hazelnut.)

So much planting in the near future. And making of larger flower beds to accommodate the 19 varieties of plants I purchased in seed form from Mtn. Rose Herbs.

The next big plant sale is the first of May.

Read Full Post »

The Garden Has Been Calling

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , on April 19, 2019| Leave a Comment »

It’s cool and getting ready to rain right now, but for the past three days I have taken my coffee outside to sip while I watch the world around me grow. Some mornings were a tad chilly, but a towel on my bench and a blanket over my knees, hot coffee in hand – who cares as long as the sun peeps out from behind clouds?

The birdsong this morning drowned out the ambient sounds of the city (the distant freeway, traffic on the street beyond our fence, the drone of airplanes): “Cheery Up! Cheery Up!” sang robins delineating their territories and calling their mates. The familiar “Brr-Whirr” of the Spotted Towhee told me that they are nesting nearby.

The past few days, a male Anna’s hummingbird has been doing it’s dangerous aerobatics over our heads: it flies thirty feet up into the air, hovers, then makes an arcing dive. Ten feet above the ground, it abruptly changes directions back toward the heavenlies and the wind through its wing feathers creates a loud “CHIRP!” overhead. He’s courting a mate, but often she’s nowhere in sight. (It is a startling sound if you don’t know it is coming and he lets loose his miniature version of a sonic boom just over your head.)

My computer is being crazy slow today and my photos are not loading properly.

IMG_5745I’d love to show off the new flower bed I created in front of the house, where I have planted my rose (which is showing no signs of life!), a Rose of Sharon, and left room for many more perrennials while cutting down the need for lawn mowing. Purple anemones, Vinca Minor, hens-and-chicks, above the wall, Lady’s Mantle and orange daylilies below, on the city right-of-way.

Along the back fence, I pulled and cut and swore at English Ivy that has entrenched itself over the past 15 years (the last wild spot in our yard). I’ve weeded and planted – no more than three hours per day (my mind wants to keep doing but my hands and back rebel – especially my hands! – and I have to give the work up. Still, I have accomplished more in April of this year than any single year in the past – yay for retirement and the freedom to be out there when the air is clear and the day is still cool enough to work!

IMG_5735

The crazy Camellia is over-laden with blooms, a cacophony of pretty pink-and-yellow flowers, new green leaves, dying yellow leaves, and messy wet fallen blooms. I hate it when it looks like this, the limbs drooping low with all the weight and the slippery mess underneath.

IMG_5744

My husband broke my garden bench (it was rotting through). I’m excited about this corner because I have Comfrey that will try to push past its boundary of weird metal grating – a perfect bee flower I have to gold in check because it *is* invasive and it can cause caustic reaction to skin. I planted a blue elderberry to the right of the comfrey (behind the yew), a blue huckleberry just to the left of the white grate and a red flowering currant behind the bench. COLOR! (The black plastic is killing the nasty Oregon Grape). I plan to encourage the forget-me-nots to fill in a neglected space – but I also love them right where they are in this photo, blooming bright blue and covered in mason bees.

IMG_5743

It looks sweet and tiny here, inside its cage, but that broad-leafed plant will be six feet tall by mid summer: Comfrey.

I love this time of year, my hands in the dirt, the small insects and invertebrates (except the slugs!), and the myriad of birds who come to visit. Mesmerized by diamond-dew drops in the early morning, I sip my coffee and know I will not get anything done inside the house on such a day.

Read Full Post »

Of Moles, Towhees, and Bats

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , , , , , on April 23, 2018| 3 Comments »

My husband and I sat around our little outdoor firepit tonight, discussing gardening, weeding, and animals I counted at least 22 ducklings in the community pond this morning, and at least five mama ducks. One hen had one duckling. The hen I have been following still had nine (hers are the oldest, hatched Thursday of last week). Three pairs of Rufous-sided Towhees flitted around us, emboldened by the absence of dogs, perhaps. Never have we observed the elusive towhee behaving as boldly as tonight, the three pair!

The sun set, the sky darkened, and the first bat of the season flitted – briefly – overhead. A large bat, at least 8″ wingspan. We both have fond summer memories of bats diving in while we played out our last evening games, and horror stories of bats entangling in hair (my parents discouraged such hysteria). We both tossed rocks to bats in those dusky summer evenings to see if they would catch them: they always did.

Last night, as I took my husband on a tour of the front yard and the weeding/edging I had done on this first absolutely gorgeous Spring day in the Pacific Northwest, we nearly stepped on a small gray animal. It was deep in the moss and grass of the lawn, just a slight movement, followed by a naked pink half-tail. It was oblivious of us standing above it, watching. I forbade my husband from pulling it out by the tail just to see what it looked like: we both know what moles look like. It just wanted earthworms or crane fly grubs.

Burr hurr aye. (A la Brian Jacques and the Redwall series of books. Read them. They are magical.)

I have been in a funk since Christmas. I haven’t created anything new artistically. I haven’t written. I feel dead inside, creatively. My day job is just another place to go to, and make money, but not a place of passion or exciting change. I’ve felt “dead”.

I don’t know what I am going to do with this blog: keep it, practice writing, or… Family history, gardening, grandchildren? I feel as dull as the grey clouds that hover over the earth, promising only rain, and cold rain at that.

It is good to feel Spring is finally here, and that life might be awakening. I spent yesterday working with my hands in the loam, hoping to rekindle a little life in my heart.

IMG_20180422_171307

The giant rhododendron on the north… And the broken rain barrel. 😦

 

IMG_20180422_171452

The stark differnece between last year’s black-cap raspberry vines and this year’s canes. I need to cut out last year’s canes – nest year’s will go there in less that six months from now, and this year’s canes will be pruned out next spring.

I was going to move this ceramic “bird” house, but there’s a paper-wasp nest inside. I bought the bird house at a farmer’s market… love that the paper-wasps have taken over it. (Mud-daubers, paper wasps).

Finally, tonight we watched towhees – at least three pair – buzz about the yard, gathering sticks and nesting material. Rufous-sided towhees are elusive and secretive birds, more often heard than seen. To have three pair flitting about around us, unafraid, was amazing.

I do not know what I am going to do with my blog. Perhaps it had worn out its welcome and is a thing of the past, and I need to move on. But what if I do not record these seemingly mundane experiences? What if you never learn if the towhees nested and raised young, or the paper-wasps hatched, or the ducklings survived… Or the mole lived happily ever after because we are the gardeners who do not set mole traps or spray pesticides/herbicides?

I don’t know.

Read Full Post »

« Newer Posts - Older Posts »