garden

breaking the long silence

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Things, as we know, don’t always go as planned. The big news around these parts is that I’m pregnant, expecting a baby in October. That’s not the unplanned element; the unplanned part was the way in which this situation (and all the accompanying ailments, small and large) coincided with a terribly hot spring that has continued into into a miserably hot summer. As a result, I’ve done very little over the past few months in the way of the sorts of things I normally write about here: cooking, hiking, gardening, birding, et cetera. Since I don’t plan to turn this into a parenting chronicle, I’ve been silent.

All of my plans for the garden have fallen by the wayside: it’s hanging in there (thank you, drought-tolerant natives), but we’ve done little to encourage or develop it. The rose for which I had such high hopes (and for which I bought the pyramid trellis, about which I never blogged because I was absorbed with other things) has turned out to be only a sprout of the stock variety, not the vigorous New Dawn climber we were expecting. So, we’re going to uproot it and move the Blaze climber from the backyard to the trellis this autumn, after adding more compost to the soil over the course of the summer. It won’t be as striking as the pale rose would be, but it should be nice enough. I had great plans to use the excavated dirt from the dry well that was installed as part of the completed basement project (another event I planned to write about this spring but never did) to grade the side of the house where the worst water problems recur, but we haven’t gotten around to that and now it’s just too hot and dry to undertake a project of that nature. On the positive side (hah!) the two little struggling azaleas in that spot totally gave up the ghost this past month, so that’s fewer plants we’d have to worry about relocating. In all seriousness, we just haven’t had the mental or physical energy to make a plan for a new garden on that side of the house, dig up the turf, move the plants at the side of the house, layer the dirt, and then reseed or replant or do whatever it is that we’ll do for which we don’t yet have a plan. I’m not sure what that means for the future of the pile of dirt, but it does mean that the side of the house will be grass that slopes toward our house for one more year.

On the food front, we’re trying a new farm share this summer, through Lancaster Farm Fresh Cooperative (LFFC). We’ve generally loved subscribing to Even’Star Organic Farm (and hope to be allowed back into the winter share), so the choice to try something new in the summer was a tough one. We were swayed by a few factors: LFFC is farther north, and I hoped that would mean that we might see more of the crops that Brett struggles to grow organically in the local heat and humidity; they offer a half share which we thought might be more manageable, especially as my interest and energy for cooking has waned these past months (more on that momentarily); and we were able to also purchase a fruit share, which I again hoped would be less pesticide-laden than what I can get from local farms due to the difference in location and climate. So far, the variety has been different (made possible in part by having a number of farms as suppliers) and the volume has been similar to that of our full share; not quite what we expected! The fruit shares start this week, and I’m greatly looking forward to that; I’m hoping to see an overall cost savings in our budget as fruit is something that we normally purchase at the markets all through the summer. In terms of keeping up with the cooking, I’ve had more energy the past month or so, but my partner picked up the slack for the first six months of the year, and it wasn’t always pretty. We created very high-quality compost with the greens that just got away from us at times, and it took us a while to get back into a rhythm. We’ve been doing well lately, although meals have consisted largely of turkey burger (or chicken sausage) plus cooked vegetable plus raw vegetable plus lettuce (which I think we’ve probably seen the last of in this regional heat wave). Healthy, yes, but not particularly creative. At the moment, we have a stockpile of several varieties of sweet(ish) onions and many zucchini. We’re working our way through the zucchini (sautéed each night and made into muffins at least once a week), have a couple of eggplants waiting to be made into baba ghanoush, and I plan to make onion relish this week (tomorrow, if I can get organized early enough in the day). So far it’s early enough in the season that plain sliced cucumbers and tomatoes are still refreshing; soon we’ll likely need dressing and herbs and a variety of other flavors to spice them up. And, with the acquisition of our new chest freezer (another exciting event that went totally unremarked upon), we’ve frozen almost all the bunches of kale we’ve gotten this summer and will deal with them at some point in the future. Likely they’ll find their way into soup or lasagna or something else that can be prepared, frozen, and then reheated in the fall when we’re definitely going to be struggling to find time to eat, let alone cook.

With regard to the rest of the house, we’ve been working like mad people to create space for another human being. That’s entailed putting everything back into the basement post-repair and moving everything out of the shared office (into the attic, basement, or family room), which leaves us with a family room that is going to need some rearranging and redoing. It has also left us with an empty room, however; my partner has painted and installed a new light fixture, and we’re working on the next step of acquiring furniture and blinds (while the paper blinds from Home Depot have worked fine for us in the upstairs for four years now, I figure this is a good excuse to start getting real ones installed). We have been blessed with generous friends and bountiful thrift stores, so we are fairly well-stocked in the baby clothes department, at least in the sizes up to three months. Getting a dresser into the room will go a long way toward clearing some of the clutter in other parts of the house, where stacks of minuscule outfits are accumulating. Getting the bed will go a long way toward me not wondering where the heck we’re going to put an actual baby. At any rate, at the end of this preparatory process we hope to have new fans, working smoke detectors, and a much more organized house (out of necessity more than anything else; we’re not living in the largest space over here, although the family room addition goes a long way toward improving that).

Now that I’m simultaneously more energetic and stuck mostly inside because of the heat and smog, I expect to have at least a few more updates before the end of the summer. I may even fill you in on what we accomplished this spring, but don’t hold your breath.

breaking the long silence

garden : irises!

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One of the lovely purple bearded irises.


The purple irises against the side of the house.

I love irises. There’s something about them that I find jaunty, and jauntiness is a quality I value highly in a flower. Also, they grow by the sides of ponds and lakes and in swamps, so I enjoy them as I enjoy everything else about water ecosystems. In my garden, I now have three species: German bearded (tall purple and yellow, shorter white, and some mystery varieties that haven’t bloomed yet); Siberian (only acquired last spring, so not yet blooming); and some shorter native ones (larger taller blue and shorter smaller white). I purchased the natives, but the others were gifts from neighbors. This spring I’ll be moving the shorter white irises into a new spot at the corner of the front bed, which will hopefully give more room for the taller ones to propagate. Eventually, I’d like to have several areas bursting with color-coordinated irises, and (as with most things in my garden) that requires patience and organization in the absence of a large monetary outlay. (This is also the plan for the daffodils, by the way: identify them by color, move those that are similar into clumps together and hope that they multiply over the course of several years if left largely alone.)

Of course, the area with the irises is precisely the side of the house that is slated to be dug up, steeply graded, and replanted later this summer. Which will be great opportunity to separate the yellow flowers from the purple ones, assuming I keep track of them adequately in the interim. Look for little bits of plastic tied around stems, that’s the best system I’ve devised so far.


The short native shade irises under the dogwood.

garden : irises!

garden : daffodils!

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The varieties of daffodils that bloomed in March and April, mostly unidentified.

A friend of ours acquired so many spring bulbs with the house they purchased that every time she wants to move or remove or plant something in her yard, she unearths dozens of bulbs. Since other parts of the yard are invariably already full of bulbs, she’s been offering them to me. As I’m a softie who can’t say no to free plants, especially flowers, I most recently accepted about 100 daffodil plants of various kinds. Yes, we know you’re not supposed to divide them in the spring, but the ones that had buds have all opened into flowers (many while the they were still in the bucket waiting to get a place in the ground).

Our yard started with just a couple of clumps of plain yellow daffodils (most likely King Alfred, an extremely common regular yellow trumpet variety) next to the front steps. I would have sworn that we had a jonquil pop up in that bed a few years ago, but I haven’t seen it since and don’t know which bulb it might have been from (there are a few that have only been foliage since I moved them around two years ago). I also unearthed a number of narcissus along the back fence while weeding, which I moved into the lamppost bed two years ago, but they have yet to bloom (although one did produce a bud this year, so I’m eagerly awaiting its flowering). Because I’m really only gardening in the front until we replace the fence in the back, I have been hesitant to attempt anything like a plan involving spring bulbs. However, I dove in once I had a bucket of plants sitting around waiting for action!

In the end, most of the plants went into the front sidewalk bed. I used the smaller varieties—a true dwarf yellow trumpet daffodil and an 8″ (or so) yellow non-trumpet daffodil where the part that should be the trumpet is a flat ruffle on top of the outer petals—to create a thick border row along the bottom of the bed below the line of orange daylilies. This is where I attempted to introduce carpet phlox last year, with no success at all; it was far too shady once the daylilies came in and the phlox all died. I am more hopeful about this new plan, as Christopher Lloyd specifically recommends interplanting with daylilies, as the foliage of the later plants grows up and hides the dying foliage of the daffodils (about which he is otherwise fairly disdainful). Seems reasonable. In addition to that row, I planted several clumps in the empty spots left by the demise of the creeping sedum I’d introduced several years ago (one regular sized yellow daffodil with a fairly bright orange trumpet, one regular height slender yellow daffodil with a more muted soft orange narrow trumpet which might be the Jetfire variety, and a clump of the aforementioned flat ruffled soft yellow type).

Once I’d basically filled that bed with daffodils, I was left with only a gazillion more to put in other parts o the yard. I planted four clumps of Ice Follies (the one variety I could conclusively identify!) under and in front of and in between the various azaleas in the yard, with a couple more clumps of the shorter varieties interspersed (most likely the flat ruffled kind). I then gave away 20 or so plants and bulbs to another neighbor. And have not yet started to find places for the tulip bulbs (I’m thinking a fair number can go into the spot in the front foundation bed where the poker primrose didn’t survive).

I will say that the front looks quite cheery with all the yellow and white and orange blooming this early. I’m curious to see how it looks next year, and whether the masking effect of the daylilies works as advertised. When my partner returns later this week with the digital camera, I’ll try to get a photo of each of the different blooms. In the meantime, I need to train a climbing rose up a pyramid trellis and move a few perennials around. Yes, this is the year of sitting back and watching things grow. Can’t you tell?

garden : daffodils!

garden : spring is popping up

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It’s always exciting to see the first daffodil buds, particularly since I’ve moved the bulbs and as a result am never sure I’m going to get flowers. This year I have crocuses in the little bed I created by the lamp post, so even if I did plant them too deeply (as I suspect) they’ve recovered enough to flower. The daylilies are sending up shoots, the sedum has buds, and the aster already has a number of sprouts breaking through. This year is (planned to be) a year for watching things grow. We have no plans for new beds, moving things around, or new plants. This could change, but simply sitting back and observing the perennials is the official plan.

It’s too rainy for taking pictures, and exactly rainy enough for ordering a new dehumidifier for the basement. I’m on it.

garden : spring is popping up

garden : refugees and autumn clean-up

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This autumn found us with a number of refugee plants on our porch that required a permanent spot in the yard. The sad demise of the hydrangea and the clethra twigs at the end of the summer left some space open, and we expanded the planted areas to include spaces in front of and under the azaleas near the house.

There were two main categories of plants: those moved from our neighbor’s yard as she thinned the plants she’d acquired with the house, and those I couldn’t resist bringing home from the autumn plant swap I organized in town. In the first category, I had pink and red mums and a bag of mixed daffodil and jonquil bulbs, the latter of which had spent the summer under the bench on the front porch, a storage method I don’t recommend but which resulted in only a handful of rotten bulbs. The pink mums went in front of the white azalea on the right side of the porch (as you face the house); not that they bloom at the same time of year, but I like to spread the pink around. For a person who really is not a fan of pink, I’m acquiring quite the variety of pink flowers in my garden. The daffodil bulbs I planted under the smaller of the pink azaleas on the left side of the house, under the sassafras. There’s quite a nice patch of ground there, now that the liriope and ivy has been beaten back, and if the daffodils do bloom, they’ll be easily visible from the street. I am not entirely confident that they’ll get enough sun, but they’re easy enough to move (and they certainly weren’t going to bloom from a bag on the porch!).

The last refugee from a friend was a small sage, which I also planted on the right side of the steps. It will probably grow into the space currently occupied by the spring bulbs, which is fine; I’ll move them as needed and it will be nice to have an herb there rather than the bare patch we get when the bulbs die back. None of the perennials I planted on that side of the steps really took, either from lack of sun or competition from the maple roots. I hope the ones in the larger front bed will return next year; we may need to take the more drastic step of burying edging material to keep the small tree roots from encroaching and smothering the flowers.

For the first time this year, Women’s Club members (myself included) organized an autumn plant exchange. The real hit of the swap was the sale of plants by Chesapeake Natives volunteers; the group raised over $300 by selling native perennials for $2 to $6 each. I managed to resist purchasing any—although I will probably replace some of the plants I purchased last spring with native varieties, now that I know where to find them—and came home with only a few flowers that were donated by neighbors. I was pleased to acquire a peach climbing rose and more bearded iris. I have found myself incapable of turning down a free iris, so despite already having some lavender irises waiting to be planted (in a bag, under the bench on the porch) I accepted some white ones and a couple of a fancier variety that combine cream and a darker purple (I think). The irises went into the sidewalk bed, on the end where the space had been cleared for the ill-fated clethra ‘bush,’ and the rose was planted on the southeast corner of the house in the spot that had been prepared for the hydrangea. The iris will look nice on that end of the bed, as it’s the first group of plants you see as you approach the house. I expect that if I’m able to keep the rose alive and create an adequate support for it, it will also look nice anchoring the corner of the bed against the house. Any support will also create some visual structure for that front bed, as everything else currently in it dies down and is cut back in the winter. Just as soon as I get another couple of dry days, I’m going to put the next batch of compost around the plant and cover the whole area with mulch.

In addition to all this planting, I cut back and cleaned up the dying foliage from the summer plants, something I will try to do earlier next year (at least in the case of the peonies). We’ve also completed two rounds of leaf raking, and the ground is covered again. With a little luck we’ll get a dry stretch next week that will allow us to clean them up when they’re a bit easier to manage. Wrestling with a lawn full of wet leaves is not my idea of fun, even by yard work standards!

garden : refugees and autumn clean-up