plants

first peony of the year

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peony

This morning delivered the first peony bloom of the summer. The bloom is on the plant that came with the house, and there are a dozen or so more buds to look forward to. While the transplanted peonies seem to have survived, they are unlikely to bloom this year. My grandmother claims that peonies are hard to kill, which is heartening. I’m willing to wait a couple of years for them to start blooming; I’m hopeful that they’ll fill out into a nice drift against the fence.

In other garden news, weeding continues apace. Every single week I am newly amazed by how long it takes to clear each small patch of ground. This weekend a friend came over and helped us clear some stumps and liriope out from under the large holly tree. Once I get the remaining roots up, I’ll boost the soil and then transplant the lilies of the valley from around the yard into that area. That whole process should only take, oh, about 15 or so person hours of labor. After which we’ll start on the beds along the other fence. Each week, we are reminded of how hard the town public works staff labors, as they take away huge piles of roots and weeds and vines and branches each time we put in an hour of work on our yard. I really need to take them over some tasty baked goods one of these days.

Since it’s been raining, I put some indoor time toward creating an index of the plants currently in the yard, as part of my effort to track the progress on our house. Unfortunately my camera was out for repair when the spring flowers were blooming, so photos of those will have to wait until next year.

first peony of the year

killing caterpillars, and other less than pleasant garden duties

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In general, I try to take the ‘live and let live’ approach to insects outside (mosquitoes being the obvious exception). Eastern tent caterpillars really creep me out, though. I don’t like the way they fall from the trees; even if they don’t fall on me, they make a disturbing plopping sound when they hit the ground plants. I especially don’t like the way that, no matter what I do, I invariably end up stepping on them (which is gross) because they are around in such abundance. Unfortunately for me, we have in our yard several cherry trees of the variety they love to eat. Which means, nests busting out all over the place.

This year, I decided to just bite the bullet, alienate my insect-protecting friends, and kill as many of them as I can before they mature. It seems less cruel to smash a nest full of itty bitty little caterpillars than run around stepping on them when they’re full grown. But that’s really just a post-hoc justification: I want as few of them around as possible, and killing them in the nests is the most effective way to make that happen (given that I neglected to try to seek out and remove the eggs during the winter; I’ll try that next year). I hope that if I remove the tents I can reach, my feathered friends will help by eating as many as they possibly can as they mature.

At any rate, we started that last night, pulling down (and in some cases pruning out) the limbs with tents we could reach with a ladder. Although it’s not the recommended approach, we burned the webbing and then pulled the mass out of the trees. I’m torn on whether to just cut back the limbs that are infested; one of the trees (the smallest and youngest) is close to the garage, and there’s a goodly chance it will need to be taken out when we repair the foundation. It’s tempting to just take it out now and be done with the caterpillar issue there, but it’s a nice little tree and I’m fond of it. Besides the creeping me out factor, I hate to see the caterpillars decimate the trees (even though I know intellectually that it doesn’t create long-term harm, as the trees generally refoliate without issue).

The caterpillar killing came at the end of a day of digging up onion grass (another exception to my general ‘live and let live’ approach, as it stings my eyes when I mow the lawn) and pruning deadwood out of the dogwood (I’m a bit concerned that the dogwood might be struggling with a fungus; a smaller one in our yard died off completely last year and will be the next thing we work on taking out). This year’s garden work seems to be clustering up around the theme of ‘remove all the stuff that’s died off or invaded due to years of neglect by the previous owners,’ with a sprinkling of ‘move plants that are in the completely wrong environment to a different part of the yard where they will get the sun (or lack thereof) that they need’ thrown in to keep things interesting.

Which is all to say, check back in a few years for photos of things actually growing: we’re not quite there yet.

killing caterpillars, and other less than pleasant garden duties

spring is sprung & yard work has begun

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All of a sudden, this past week, flowers are popping up all over the place: from the ground, on trees, and all over previously skeletal shrubs. We didn’t see our neighborhood at this time last year; the major tree flowering fell in between our first visit to the house and when we moved in the following month. My parents also missed this by a couple of weeks on their recent visit; because the winter was a regular (i.e. cold) one, the early blooming of the past few years didn’t happen. Our dogwood hasn’t bloomed yet, either, and I’m looking forward to that.

It’s really quite pretty, and it’s easy to see why the Bradford pear trees were such a popular choice for the town now that they’re in full bloom. Because of the cold winter the azaleas haven’t bloomed yet, but the forsythia and cherry trees are also in bloom this week. Before moving out here, I didn’t have any allergies: now I have them for these three weeks each spring, when the pollen count goes through the roof. I maintain that they’re not technically allergies, but just a completely predictable and healthy reaction to having my internal head membranes become coated in plant dust.

All these flowers serve as a reminder that spring is really and truly here, and the time to take advantage of weak root structures and soft earth is now. ‘Ivy, begone!’ is the theme of this season’s yard improvement project plans. In practical terms, we’re trying to fill our two trash cans with yard debris (old wood, pulled up weeds, pulled down ivy) every pickup (twice per week) from now until all we’re left with is the lovely mundanity of side beds that are weed-free, soil-treated, and mulch-covered.

With a little luck, that will be sometime before next winter. If that’s all we accomplish this summer and don’t plant a single new thing in our yard, I will still be ecstatic.

spring is sprung & yard work has begun

repotting house plants

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A couple of weeks ago, my largest jade plant took a tumble off the windowsill. It had been getting imbalanced, I just hadn’t realized quite how much. I’d rotated the pot to help it even out, but the weight on one side was great enough to bring the whole thing down. With the fall, the plant lost branches along one side, making it too uneven to survive as is. I decided to cut it back, to pretty much dismantle it and plant each of the small branches as cuttings.

After gathering up the little limbs that were scattered on the floor (I just threw out the leaves; there were too many to accommodate), I had 9 new pots worth of plantings. It didn’t take me long to get them into the pots, but I’m still working with the light in the house and finding enough places to help them grow. The east- and west-facing sides of the house have deep sills, and those sills have been where I’ve kept plants up until now. With this profusion of pots, I moved a small shelf in front of a south-facing window upstairs, and I have a couple of rows of plants hanging out there. I imagine that I’ll be checking and shuffling them around for some time until I’m satisfied.

The mass repotting of the jades provided an opportunity to repot a couple of other plants that had been needing attention. I divided my aloe plant, which had grown from a tiny sprout ($2 at the Ikea checkout counter) to two huge plants crowding each other in the pot. Now they each have their own pot, and they just crowd each other on the windowsill. I also repotted a pot of variegated pothos cuttings that I had plunked into a pot full of dirt from my yard nearly 10 years ago, when I didn’t have any potting soil. The intervening years hadn’t been good to them: they still had only their individual roots and nothing like what you might call a root system. Now they’re luxuriating in potting soil, and I have high hopes that they’ll grow long and prosper. Somewhere down the line, I’ll hang hooks in front of the south-facing windows and hang the spider plants in those. For now, though, everything is doing fine, and that’s good enough for me.

Best of all, there’s still plenty of room in the house to introduce more air-filtering plants and become as sophisticated as future space shuttles.

repotting house plants

Classical Chinese Garden, Portland

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On my last day in Portland, I visited the Classical Chinese Gardens, in historic Chinatown. It was really lovely, even in the winter, and I regretted not having my camera with me. I would have liked to have photos both of the archway into the the area—reminiscent of the one in DC’s historic Chinatown—as well as of some of the interior features. Although it was quite a cold day, I enjoyed seeing the winter architecture of the garden perhaps more than I would have the in the summer. It provided a lot of material for ideas for the growth and planning of my own garden, in terms of layout of paths, beds, trees and shrubs, and—of course—the water features. I wouldn’t mind having a few bonsais in the house (I really loved the examples of the forest formations that I saw), nor a gong or garden bell, come to think of it.

It’s my hope that our yard will eventually accommodate a pond (which will have to be small), a walking path (ditto), and a patio of some kind. I would have to say that, of all the features there, the paths and patios at the Chinese Garden were the most thought-provoking; they were done in a variety of pebble mosaics, something that I hadn’t considered for our own (eventual) patio, but which I really liked quite a lot. Although I don’t have any photos of my own, they are in the same style as these ones at the Classical Chinese Garden in Vancouver, BC. I had been considering just sand-packed flagstone, but the texture of the pebble mosaic was really nice, and the quality of the stones was somehow both more formal and more homey than the flagstone. We have a rectangular space for the patio, ‘in’ the L of the back of the house, so a formal pattern would fit quite nicely.

We’ll see. Besides being the middle of winter (such as it is), my own skill with mosaics is far from the level needed to start working on major home projects. Not to mention the leaking garage foundation, which takes a slightly higher priority than making our backyard a haven of art and serenity.

But only slightly.

Classical Chinese Garden, Portland