plants

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

extreme gardening

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I’ve been busy lately, and hadn’t realized how much time had passed since I’ve gotten it together to write up anything I’ve been doing. The thing that’s been keeping me busy has been gardening. Although gardening is a far too genteel way of describing what we’ve been doing. Yard work is really too tame as well. In both cases, maintenance of an already-existing yard or a garden is implied. That is not what we have.

What we have is a temperate jungle. I have never had much empathy for the Europeans who came to occupy this continent, as their single-minded fixation on clearing the land and beating into into a replication of their homes seemed a little maniacal. However, as I spend hours digging out overgrowth — English ivy and kudzu and poison ivy and honeysuckle and Virginia creeper and sumac, to name a few — I am starting to feel for them. I still think their goal, to convert perfectly good forest into mediocre farmland, was out of whack with their context. But I am starting to understand how they could have gone very quickly insane, through working all day to clear one meager patch, only to turn around and see that the patch behind you had shot up another foot. That, in a nutshell, is what we’ve been doing. We like to call it ‘extreme gardening’ to try to make it more cutting edge. But really it’s just laboring away under the hot sun trying to dig out 20 years of neglect from the circumfrence of the yard.

Our main challenger in this effort has been a tenacious indigenous plant that we now know to be pokeweed. We purchased special equipment — a landscape bar — just to deal with this beast. Okay, not only to deal with this beast — we also have about a dozen stumps of various types of scrub to clear out of the yard — but it certainly came in handy. Pokeweed quickly grows to over 6 feet tall, and produces berries that birds love to eat and then poop all over the place. We didn’t get to it fast enough last year, so we have little mini pokeweeds coming up all over the lawn. Those aren’t actually the problem. The problem was — and I am happy to say that we’ve licked it — the weeds that had been establishing roots for the past two decades in the back corner of the yard. The stems and leaves die down each year, but the root mass is amazing in comparison to what’s above ground.

In the end, we had to dig down about two feet to the clay layer, and even so we left some smaller pieces of root that just refused to be dislodged. We had three roots this size to get out, and maybe a half dozen half that size. Plus innumerable little new ones from the berries. But we did it, and we now have a bare, soon to be mulched, area across the back of our yard where we previously only had crazy big weeds. Go us!

My goal is to have the invasives cleared out of the yard — side beds the length of the backyard and beds all around the house — and under mulch by the fall. We’ll be doing a little transplanting, such as moving the bulbs and the lily of the valley to more suitable and less crowded spots, but mostly this is the year of killing. Since it’s now officially summer (a belated happy solstice!) and we’ve cleared maybe a fifth of what needed to be done during the spring, I think we will be lucky to make it by the first hard frost. Granted, we started with the worst fifth, so there’s hope that the rest of it will go more quickly. And, we won’t have to do this again after this year. Or at least that’s the hope, that once we get things cleared out the whole thing will be much easier to maintain.

extreme gardening

first daylilies of the year

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After weeks of anticipation, the first of the daylilies are blooming in our front bed. We have yet to see any flower stems in the row of the larger orange variety, but the smaller yellow ones are off to the races. I’ve heard that daylilies are edible, but I haven’t tried them yet. I’m pleased that the bed has filled in so nicely, compared to when we planted it last spring. It was, at first, a bit scraggly. The aster in particular should be really nice this fall, as it’s already quite tall and lush.

This year, pre-blooming:

Last year, freshly planted:

first daylilies of the year

wild irises at University Hills pond

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Wild yellow irises along the pond bank.

On Sunday afternoon, I took my recently repaired and returned to me babycam up to the University Hills pond. This past week irises have popped into bloom all around the banks of the pond, which pleases me greatly. Irises are my favorite flower, and yellow is my favorite color, so I couldn’t have asked for a nicer development.

Besides the appearance of the flowers, things at the pond have been pretty status quo. The goslings haven’t hatched yet, and the two ducklings are nearly doubling in size each time I spot them. I’ve seen a couple of interesting birds—a female Ruby-throated Hummingbird visiting the irises and a Red-shouldered Hawk circling above the trees—but no new life ones. I’ve continued to see plenty of turtles on each visit, ranging from the large Eastern Redbelly Turtles sunning themselves out in the water to the small Musk and Mud Turtles, one of which I surprised at the edge of the reeds. And, every now and then I catch sight of a Bullfrog, but I have yet to spot any other frog species. I suspect the bullfrogs have totally colonized the place, and being cannibalistic bullies, they don’t coexist peacefully with many others.

No sign yet of the Snapping Turtle I saw there last summer, but I keep looking!

wild irises at University Hills pond