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garden : planning, weeding, and more planning

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Now that spring has truly arrived, I’m assessing what needs to be done in the garden and making plans. Plans for this spring, that is. There are multi-year plans in the works — replace fences, redo walks, eradicate invasive weeds, move roses — but those aren’t what I’m focusing on. In the short-term, there are beds that I’ve already created that need some work, and that’s where this spring’s energy is going.

First up is the foundation bed on southeast front wall of the house. For reasons that are no longer clear to me, I believed that bed was shady and planted azaleas and a native phlox there. It is, however, one of the sunniest beds around the base of the house. Which means that the azaleas and phlox are, shall we say, cooking in their current spots; I’ll be moving them around the corner to the south side of the house which is quite shady due to the shadows cast there by trees and the neighbor’s house. Once they’re out of the way, the entire bed will be (1) properly edged and weeded, (2) soil-treated, and then (3) planted to within an inch of its life with sun-loving and part-shade flowering perennials. This last bit is made possible by Springhill Nurseries in Ohio, whose sales — double your plants for 1 penny! half off your entire order before April 22nd! — were just too good to resist. I spent a few hours poring over the catalogue, moving little post-it notes (with such information as color, sun requirements, and flowering time) around on a map of the foundation bed, and cutting out little pictures of the flowers themselves. In the end I had a visual guide to the future garden and an order placed for 70 plants (at an average cost of $2 each). Not too shabby.

Not all of those 70 plants will be for the front foundation bed: one of the hydrangea bushes will be a thank-you gift for friends who helped us haul our belongings up to the attic (nothing like a ha’penny outlay to show you appreciate someone) and some are destined for other parts of the yard. Namely, the bed at the front of the house along the walk that desperately needs some help to keep all the mulch and topsoil from perpetually running down the bank onto the sidewalk. To that end, I’ll be planting a row of white carpet phlox under the daylilies as an anchor, as well as a row of basket-of-gold up the short edge of the bed along the front steps. But wait, you are now thinking, isn’t that where the aster and coneflowers are? Yes, indeed: those will be migrating into the foundation bed and forming part of the autumn-flowering contingent there. To create a bit more winter structure, I’m going to finally plant the Summersweet that I received at the Migratory Bird Festival last year (and hope that it’s actually still alive) in the corner of the bed opposite the light post and add the iceplant from the rear fence (dividing it into two clumps). I imagine it will still look rather — what’s the technical term? — scraggly this summer, but I’m hopeful that by next spring everything will have established itself. The lavender-colored phlox I planted there last year is happy as a clam, so that bodes well for the carpet phlox, which is really my main concern. The last bit of this grand plan is to add some summer flowers to the spot to the right of the porch steps that currently only contains daffodils. The parallel spot on the other side of the steps is where I’ve planted the lavender, which continues to grow and bush out and I expect (hope) will shoot out plenty of lovely flowers this year. The flowers will be globe thistle, shasta daisy, and some low-growing daisies in the black-eyed susan family.

All of this planting and replanting will be taking place in May, which is when the plants are able to be dug up from the field and shipped, and I look forward to a long leisurely summer of sitting back and watching my garden grow once I’ve gotten everything in place. There may be a push for the killing of more liriope or ivy, or the digging up of sapling stumps, and there’s also the issue of the bluebells I plan to move to the side of the house. But after that, after that it’s all sitting around and enjoying the view. Once I get the all the chickweed pulled from the backyard, that is.

garden : planning, weeding, and more planning

garden log : long slow spring

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Maybe it’s because I’m watching my spring bulb transplants like a hawk, but spring this year seems to be arriving ever so slowly. I’ve had only three crocuses bloom in the transplant bed, although six crocuses that I missed last year popped up in various places around the yard. The daffodils are just now opening, but only the plain yellow ones in the clumps that I didn’t actually move; the double-bloomed jonquils that surprised me last spring are nowhere to be seen. I’m hopeful that they’ll still make an appearance, as none of the neighbors have any blooms beyond basic daffodils and crocuses.

In other parts of the yard I’m starting to see signs of life. The forsythia is in full bloom, the flowering quince is covered with lovely salmon buds, and the peonies are being to poke their red shoots up from the dirt. The irises that I planted under the dogwood last year are also showing signs of sending up shoots; I’m sure the squirrels got to a few of the tubers, so we’ll see what’s left to bloom. I’ve gotten out and pruned the roses, although a couple of the bushes could use a second sweep since it’s been so cold. The large white azalea in the front of the house appears to have set buds, so I’m looking forward to that blooming.

From that list of happenings, it’s clear that I’m resting on last year’s laurels with the garden work this spring. By this time last year I had weeded and transplanted and dug and mulched. This year it’s been cold and I haven’t been motivated to get out and start digging up weeds. When I do get out there, one priority will be treating the foundation bed on left side of the porch as the sunny spot it truly is and rescuing the shade-loving azalea from the spot where it’s bound to be scorched through the summer. My neighbor’s removal of a thirty-foot magnolia from her backyard made our front yard quite sunny, and I am still tracking what that will mean for the plants. In the longer term, it probably means that we’ll have lovely raised beds of vegetables in our front yard, complete with bean and squash teepees.

garden log : long slow spring

dusting off the old keyboard

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It’s been an embarrassingly long time since I’ve sat down to write anything here, for which I apologize. Of course, the longer the gap the greater the barrier to restarting. So this meta commentary is to serve as the restart. Go!

During the interregnum I’ve been busy with life. We took a weekend (plus a couple of evenings) and painted the bedroom, a nice warm beige that makes you feel like you’re going to sleep and waking up in a cappuccino. We then (finally) painted the upstairs bathroom, a nice soft blue that makes you feel like you’re brushing your teeth in…a room that’s blue. The blue is pretty mellow, partly out of deference to my partner’s desire not to live in A Fun House ™ but also because we’re trying out low-VOC paints and the color spectrum is much more limited. Apparently it’s the nasty chemicals that make you high as your brain cells keel over that give wall paints their lovely bright vibrant colors. Sad but true.

In addition to knocking those two interior jobs off our my seemingly endless list of home improvements, we’re mostly just planning planning planning. We need to install some exhaust fans, replace some light fixtures, make the basement improvements, and replace the second pump on the boiler which bit the dust last month (we’ve been using a space heater in the family room, which is the only area affected). And then, of course, I have big plans for the garden! Number one: make it seem like an actual garden! I suppose all the other plans are just sub-plans, really. With the gardening season comes the food-growing season, which now means the food-stockpiling season, so I’m kind of already looking forward to that. Even though we are still working our way through last year’s frozen and canned stockpile. Which is fine, because even though it seems like the bounty is just around the corner it’s actually a few months away. So there’s plenty of time to use the frozen cherries, squash, and blueberries and use up the jars of apple jelly, right? Right.

On the art front, my workspace has been disrupted by the water problems in the basement, so I’m switching gears while that gets completed. I’ve started a quilt, for which I am (a) using a pattern and (b) following generally accepted principles of quilting with regard to measuring and ironing seams and the like. I say this because ten 12 years ago I made a quilt, knowing absolutely nothing except how to use a sewing machine and pretty much entirely winging it, and I am therefore duly chastised by my partner whenever I refer to this new quilt as my first quilt. The use of modifiers like ‘proper’ or ‘real’ does nothing to help the situation.

So there you have it. Since I seem to be mired in domestic concerns, I am attempting to bring the art in where I can and just roll with it.

dusting off the old keyboard

garden log : let it snow!

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The impressively happy lavender plant by the front step.


Snow-topped garlic chives and ice plant, with aster in the background.

It doesn’t snow that frequently here; last year it only snowed once, at about this point in winter. Last year’s winter was hardly cold enough to be called winter, and I fretted that the bacteria and fungus pests weren’t getting enough nights of killing cold. This year, though, winter’s been satisfyingly cold (more satisfying for the garden plants than the inauguration spectators, I’d venture). Today’s snow is the first of the year, and will likely be gone in a few days, washed away by the rains that are coming tomorrow. Before that happens, I seized my chance to document the winter structure of the yard, something gardeners tell me is just as important as the summer blooms. Taking a closer look at the stalks I’ve left to do their own thing over the winter, for plant health as much as for aesthetics, I can appreciate the beauty of the beiges, browns, and reds, holding up the snow and staking out their places. The lavender is not even properly ‘stalks’; it’s thrived in its new spot and appears to be weathering the cold without any negative effects. Last year I cut back the aster, chives, and ice plants by now, as well as pruning the roses. I’m glad I let them be this year; the stalks are perky and heartening to see, and the roses are looking healthier than I’ve seen them since we moved in.

Just this weekend I noticed the first shoots of daffodils, star plant, crocuses, and hyacinths poking their way up through the earth and cleared the leaf cover away. I’m hoping the coming cold rain is just what they need water-wise and the snow doesn’t stunt their growth. There’s not much else to do this time of year except cut back the winter stalks and deadwood on the shrubs, both of which I’ll do just as soon as the snow melts and the buds become more visible.


Ice plant along the south fence, with the pink rose in the background.

garden log : let it snow!

food : all things quince

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Quinces from our backyard.

One of the best surprises we’ve had as we’ve gotten to know our house and yard was the discovery of quince trees in the rear corner of our neighbor’s yard, along the border between our two properties. Because we are the neighbor to the south, and there are other trees to the north in our neighbor’s yard, the trees grow toward the sun, overhanging our rear sidewalk and garage. During the first year we were here, we saw one or two yellow things on the ground by the back fence, and commented to each other that an animal must have dragged an apple or something into the yard and left it there. That was the sum total of the interest we paid in the situation and the energy we expended in addressing it: very little. We were busy with other parts of the yard, and a bit overwhelmed by the sheer amount of work it would take to clean up the property; the last thing we wanted to do was investigate mysterious happenings out by the garage.

The second year we were here, we spent more time in the yard during the autumn clearing the ivy, pruning the trees, and covering the weed-laden garden beds with a thick leaf mulch. During all that time in close proximity to the rear yard, we noticed that the yellow fruits were actually growing on the trees, and were littering our rear sidewalk by early November. This piqued our curiosity, and we consulted one of my partner’s colleagues who grows quite a lot of his own fruits and vegetables on a lovely piece of land that used to be part of a dairy farm. He told us we had quinces, a fruit of which I had only heard vague and mysterious references to before that point. Nonetheless, I gathered them up and set them on the back steps to cure while I figured out what to do with them.


Quince jelly.


Quince paste.

There are, it appears, two things to do with quinces. You can make jelly or you can make membrillo, a thick paste that is a favorite dessert in Spain that’s served with manchego cheese. You can also bake and poach them, mixing them in with apple desserts for additional flavor, which we tried as well. With two dozen enormous yellow fruits having literally dropped from the sky into our yard and folks all over the internet raving about the glory of the flavor of the quince, I decided there was nothing for it but to make jelly…and membrillo, since it would be a shame to have all the pulp just go to waste. This was my first foray into canning, and I had to improvise somewhat. I used a stockpot for the boiling water bath (which, by the way, I don’t recommend) and set to work chopping and boiling and draining and boiling and skimming and stirring and pouring, ending up with about a dozen half-pints of jelly and about 20 pieces of membrillo. Happily, everybody I know seems to love membrillo, a delicacy I had never heard of before embarking on this new culinary path. We were able to give away the membrillo, in addition to serving it to guests at every opportunity, and enjoyed the jelly for much of the year. I also learned that canning is actually not that hard — although quince jelly is arguably the easiest product to start with, containing just the right amount of natural pectin to gel on its own and turning a lovely deep rose color to let you know when it’s done.

Following this roaring success, we made a concerted effort to help the trees this year. We cut back the ivy that surrounds them and pruned all the not-inconsiderable deadwood. Once we knew what to look for, the trees became incredibly easy to identify, and we were pleased to discover two small saplings at the sides of the main grove, no doubt sprung up from fruits left to lie under the thick ivy ground cover. Later in the spring we were rewarded first by flowers and then by little green fruits. Little green fruits which soon littered the ground when the gale-force winds of the early summer storms blew through. This autumn, there was not a single yellow fruit on any of the trees, much to our disappointment. We are hopeful that quinces are like some varieties of pears, with large and small production years, and that next year will be a banner year. In the meantime, I have been combing the internet for a mail-order source of quince fruits, to no avail, having learned the hard way that their floral flavor is truly as addictive as quince fans claimed!


Tarte tatin, with a layer of quince slices — magnifique!

food : all things quince