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garden log : forsythia in bloom, plants a’poppin, and pruned trees

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Sedum by the south fence.

I was happy to see that the sedum wasn’t at all hurt by being moved a foot to the west last year. I discovered it popping up under the rose bush along the far part of the south fence when I was clearing that area of vines. When I transplanted the peonies gifted to us by our neighbors I also moved the sedum to give both it and the rose bush some root room. The clump is a lovely splash of green back there now that I’ve cleared the fall’s leaf cover off of that bed, and it could probably be separated in two without hurting its overall growth. I have a small bit in the front bed, and I wouldn’t mind moving a larger bunch to the front. Herbaceous perennials are kind of a weird mystery to me, one of the neater forms plants take. I mean, they die off, right? And then they grow back. It’s pretty cool.


The forsythia bush at the back of our house, in full bloom.

This year I’m making a concerted effort to take photos of the shrubs and trees as they bloom. Partly for my own cataloguing effort, but also to have a reminder of what the yard looks like at various points through the year as I’m planning new additions or relocations. The forsythia is a particularly striking bush; set against the rear of the house it gets the setting afternoon sun and positively glows. Sadly, it is a plant that I’d never encountered before moving out here and appear to be specifically allergic to. Last year’s experiment with bringing in a striking array of cut branches for the dining room ended with a lot of sneezing and a lovely arrangement greeting visitors on the porch. This year I’m admiring them from afar and remembering to keep the window closed. The sheer volume of pollen from the pear and cherry trees in bloom in our town leads me to strive to keep the windows closed anyway, which is hard this time of year as the weather is just starting to get lovely and cool.


Front to back: orange daylilies, garlic chives, and yellow daylilies, with variegated violets off to the left side.

And, it’s amazing what a difference two weeks makes! The front bed is growing like crazy, and we haven’t had all that much rain. It’s supposed to be quite wet this weekend, though, so I’m sure that they’ll sprout up even more. I look forward to seeing even more violets come into flower; I love the look of the scattered throughout the front lawn. In terms of work I did in the garden this week, rather than work the plants did for themselves, I pruned the deadwood out of our neighbor’s cherry tree that abuts our house. It’s a lovely old weeping cherry, but it’s in close competition with several large maples for sunlight and it had a few large limbs that needed to be removed. I’m hopeful that I got to them early enough that the tree will start to believe it’s not actually dying and send up some new sprouts to balance out its lean. Even if it doesn’t, cutting deadwood out of fruit trees is one of my favorite gardening activities. Seriously, it is. It’s my favorite thing to do at the farm and I’ve gladly applied that experience to the trees around our property here.

Finally, I rescued from ivy strangulation and relocated to the front bed the last of the daylilies that were growing up along the alley at the back of our yard. There are still some along the back of our neighbor’s fence, but I plan to just pull the ivy up and mulch around those. I’m sure that with a little encouragement they’ll fill out to make a nice drift; he has a double lot with his garage off the street, so the alley facing is long and unbroken. First things first, though: killing the ivy in my own yard is of highest priority!

garden log : forsythia in bloom, plants a’poppin, and pruned trees

garden log : new composter & blooms a’bloomin

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Bloomin’ quince.

With the official coming of spring, plants are bursting into bloom all over the yard. The flowering quince has been in full bloom all week, joined yesterday by the forsythia and the opening of the daffodils. The flowers were a nice reward for the work I’d put into clearing the beds, and I was pleased to see that a liberal sprinkling of cayenne pepper was successful in blocking the attempts of the squirrels to dig to China and treat the crocus bed as a lunch buffet.

The outdoor work of this past week was decidedly less appealing than the flower rescue of the week before. We pruned the Eastern tent caterpillar egg sacs out of the small cherry tree, only just ahead of the appearance of the caterpillars themselves. I am loathe to have the trees sprayed, but the caterpillars really creep me out. If there are nearly as many as there were last year I may go that route. We also discovered that at least one of the cherry trees is diseased; I’m going to have our arborist advise us on whether it will recover or if we should think about just having it removed.

Our other main project was cutting deadwood out of the large quinces and cherry trees that form the north property border. While we were there we—and by ‘we’ I mean my partner—wrestled a six-foot high ‘stump’ covered in ivy out of the back corner of our neighbor’s yard. When we moved in the upper half of the ivy-covered trunk of this dearly departed tree had fallen and landed on our garage, held in the air by the vines. Having cut it free and wrestled it to the ground the first year we were here, we had some idea of what removing the stump would entail. Thankfully, the public works employees in our town are wonderful, and they took the whole thing away without us having to saw it into smaller bits. Earlier in the week I’d cut down three saplings that were crowding the larger trees, and they also took those trunks without a problem.


Our new double-barreled tumbling composter.

The other big development in the garden this week was the arrival and assembly of our new tumbling composter. I’ve always wanted to compost, having become fascinated with the process as a young child, and I persuaded my partner that it would be both possible and financially advantageous to do so in our small suburban yard. In selecting a composter, I was concerned with minimizing animal access and being able to do the manual work of turning the compost myself; he was concerned with odors and having an overly visible contraption that made us the laughingstock of the block. The selection that best met most of our needs was the Mantis ComposTwin, a high-tech tumbler that cost the most upfront but seemed most likely to be workable for us in the long-term. To address the visibility and mocking concerns, we chose to place it under a tree and behind the neighbor’s bush, on the south side of the yard. Because it’s contained and aided by ‘composting agents,’ I’m hoping that the relative lack of sun won’t impede the composting process; it will be a few weeks before we are able to fill the drum and find out if it will actually make compost.

At any rate, it arrived on Monday, in three large and heavy boxes, and a friend came over that evening to help us put it together. Yes, that means we celebrated St. Patrick’s Day by assembling a contraption into which one places food scraps to rot. Now you understand my life. The assembly process took us about three hours, with a break in the middle for dinner. We quickly lost the light, so after assembling the frame outdoors we moved to the foyer and front porch to assemble the drum. There was quite a bit of pushing and pulling and cursing, so I highly recommend having at least two people to assemble this beast. Once together, we placed it on its frame and threw in an inaugural mix of leaves and kitchen scraps, in the backyard in the dark. And then we had some beers.

Next up: pruning the deadwood out of the neighbor’s dogwood and weeping cherry that border the north side of our yard. I also plan to cut down another sapling that’s grown up right next to the maple’s trunk. And, of course, there’s always more lirope to kill.

garden log : new composter & blooms a’bloomin

garden log : crocus rescue and a new bed

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Shoots in the front bed. From top to bottom: early-blooming yellow daylilies, garlic chives, and late-blooming orange daylilies.

Assessing the yard this spring, I’m relatively pleased with what I have to work with. A thick leaf mulch still covers the beds, although I’ve raked the leaves away from the plants I’m trying to encourage: the crowns of the peonies, the bluebells, the poppies. I have big plans for the whole year, and I’m raring to go; it’s hard to believe that this is more than two weeks sooner than my first garden-related post last year. Granted, it’s been a mild winter, and the warm weather has caused everything to pop up a bit earlier than usual, which contributes to the feeling that every moment is one with valuable potential for yard work. Nonetheless, I’m proud of myself for the progress I’m already making.

My nemesis in our overgrown garden is liriope. For reasons that remain unfathomable to me, folks around here love their liriope. I see it all around the DC area: taking water from trees in city boxes, smothering flowering bulbs in residential border gardens, and running wild from any bed where it’s been planted and left untended. This last is the case with our yard: we had liriope crowding trees in the back yard, smothering bulbs in the front yard, and popping up all through the backyard in competition with the grass that my partner is so keen to preserve. Never have I been so keen to kill something, and I relish every chance to get to dig those suckers out by their runner roots.


The bed to the right of the front steps, after the first day of weeding. Behind the daffodils, in the rear left corner, are the crocuses rescued from the left bed. The remaining liriope is still visible in the lower right corner; in that area was another clump of tenacious crocuses.

Given my animosity for the plant, the first thing I did in the garden this year was dig some up. I cleared it completely from the small bed to the left of the front steps, unearthing a sizable cluster of crocus shoots when I did. I made it about halfway through the bed on the right side of the steps before hitting my three-hours-in-a-row wall for laboring in the garden. The right bed required a bit more care, as it contained the daffodils that I am working hard to preserve. After only two flowers last year, I’ve been granted ten buds this year, and the last thing I wanted to do was stress the plants so much that they wouldn’t open. Three hours got me one and a half liriope-free beds, and a gigantic bag of lawn trash. I was reasonably satisfied, and vowed to return to dig another day.


The new bed, with spindly daffodils from the backyard and a variety of crocuses from the front beds. I don’t expect they’ll bloom this year, but I look forward to seeing what they’ll produce next spring.

That other day was today. Having discovered daffodils along the south fence of the backyard and even more clumps of crocus in front of the house on the left, I was eager to create a more permanent spot for them. I created a little bed around the front light post (sorry, grass), into which I moved all the daffodils from the backyard. That took about an hour, after which I broke for lunch. After lunch, I spent another hour moving all the crocus sprouts that weren’t blooming, with their resident earthworms, to the new bed. Finally, I tackled the remaining liriope to the right of the front steps. I successfully cleared the rest of the liriope from the small bed itself, after which I moved the crocuses to the new bed and the freed daffodils to the vacant corner made by the steps and the porch. I expect that the daffodils are tall enough to get light over the steps and smaller plants can be set between the daffodils and the lawn. Another day. After covering the new bed with a light leaf mulch and clearing up the weeds, which generated another big lawn bag of refuse, I called it a day.

When I think of the work I’m doing in the garden, I am put in mind of a quote I read somewhere—maybe a blog, maybe one of the garden books I’ve been consulting lately, they tend to blur together—that said, the difference between a landscaper and a gardener is maintenance. I find that I move between these two roles, and a third one of ‘plant rescuer’: killing and uprooting the invasives; tending the successful beds I’ve been able to eke out of the overgrowth; and moving or nurturing the plants that we continue to find under all the mess. Maybe one day my ‘gardening’ will consist of a snip here and some weeding there, but today is definitely not yet that day.

garden log : crocus rescue and a new bed

ringing in the new year with Neo

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Salud!

Having received the third DVD as a holiday gift this year, we’re planning to ring out 2007 with a Matrix movie marathon. I’ve seen the first one several times, but I think I only saw the later two in the theater.

To go with our movies, we’ll have nuts (thank you, stocking stuffers!) and a very nice bottle of champagne given to us in 2006 as a housewarming gift. According to the interwebs, it should be even nicer now having aged in our basement for 18 months, and I am greatly looking forward to it, being the champagne junkie that I am.

Here’s wishing you a happy end to 2007 and a joyful 2008. Peace.

ringing in the new year with Neo

book challenge 2007 update

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As I roll into the last quarter of the year, I’m pausing to take stock of how well I’m doing on my own personal book-related challenges.

As expected, I have had no trouble actually reading, but a bit less success powering through some of the denser works that have been sitting by the side of my bed for years. Of the books I’ve read this year, just over half have been from the public library, and quite a few more have been books I’ve acquired this year. Only about 20% of what I’ve read have been books I’ve had kicking around my shelves for years. Which means, oh math whizzes, that on the order of a quarter of the books were books I acquired this year in one way or another.

I think I’ve done pretty well at not buying books. There are a few measures for ‘pretty well.’ I purchased very few new books at full price (the works of China Miéville that I didn’t already own in order to get them signed because I’m a geek that way; Barbara Kingsolver’s most recent book; the new books in two fantasy series that we read; two books by Canadian authors; and Sherman Alexie’s new novel for young adults). I purchased several books from the bargain table that I’d been wanting to read for some time or couldn’t resist once I’d read the cover (The Big Year is solidly in this last category). And, I obtained quite a few used books during the time I volunteered at the bookshop (many of these are cookbooks, actually, although a good few were ones I subsequently read for this challenge). Oh, and: I purchased at least one exhibition catalogue new.

I’m not sure what this says about me beyond the obvious: I like books.

Looking ahead to the next 10 weeks, my goal for the end of the year is to write reviews for the books I’ve already read. I trickled off with this at about book 20, so that means 30 or so reviews, which is roughly 3 per week for those following along at home. I’m on it.

book challenge 2007 update