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Catalog Shopping for Perennials
Last time I wrote about browsing the tool and vegetable catalogs, so today I’m going to indulge my flowering plant lust and write about that.
I think of catalogs as sources of both fantasy and planning. The fantasy part has to do with wishing I could grow certain plants in my region – tender plants that would be horrified at the several feet of snow now covering my garden, acid-loving plants who wouldn’t survive our prairie soil. When I was in North Carolina at the beginning of the month I saw forsythia in bloom. Honestly, it made my heart well up with joy: plants, real flowering plants, would appear in my garden too, eventually. (You may well ask, ‘Rinda, why do you keep living in Chicago if the winter always makes you fear the earth has died?’ to which I’d answer, ‘Spring isn’t spring without winter.’ But I’m weird.)
Fantasy is great, and who’d want to live without it, but it won’t pay the rent, as we know. So then I turn to planning. Now planning involves some knowledge of the present condition of the garden, which is where the notes and photos I took last summer come in. I need to know what worked and what didn’t, where there were holes in the garden, which parts of the garden looked blah, what stretches of the season needed color.
One good thing about catalog planning is that it saves you from impulse buying –you know, when you go to the big box store or the garden center and see something really pretty and buy it, even though it won’t really work in your yard or it’s been forced into bloom early or late. Catalogs let you study what’s going to bloom when, how big they’ll get , and what they like to grow in. For annuals, it’s not as crucial: if you’re buying annuals in flats or pots at a garden center, the rule of thumb is to buy plants that don’t have many blooms. If they’re flowering like crazy with so few roots, they’re high on chemicals and they may just flop in your yard or container. You’re better off buying plants with buds and maybe a bloom here or there (to check for color) and letting them grow in at home. When I studied annuals in my training, we were taught to pinch off any blooms when we planted them so the plant would put its energy into roots first.
Searching for perennials in catalogs is a great idea. In many of the online catalogs, you can search by exactly what your needs are. I just did a search for a plant that blooms in early spring in full sun in zone 5. The only one I got was Phlox subulata, Creeping Phlox, a plant I love. It’s good for edging borders and rock gardens, it spreads rapidly, and even in Chicago, it stays green all winter. A search for plants that bloom in spring in full to part shade yielded 29 plants, only one of which wouldn’t grow in my zone (although at $115/plant, I wouldn’t buy it if it would!). I could have modified my search to specify height, bloom color, and soil conditions.
The tricky part here, though, is that they may show three cultivars of the same plant, and it’s hard for you to know which ones are going to perform best for you. A case in point is Brunnera macrophylla, aka Siberian Bugloss (I like the Latin name better because ‘Bugloss’ just sounds too odd to me). Brunnera is a shade-loving plant with large, coarsely textured leaves. It blooms in the spring, with sprays of gorgeous tiny blue flowers, so that two or three planted together make a real impact in May. But some of the cultivars, which have great variegated leaves in the pictures and when you get them, don’t perform as well; the leaves fade to green, so you’ve paid two or three times the price of the straight species and the plant ends up little different. My personal experience is that you’re better off getting a plain Brunnera and using something else for variegated foliage, like the many lovely Hostas, the Variegated Solomon’s Seal, the Jacob’s Ladder ‘Stairway to Heaven,’ or even a variegated Carex (Sedge), like ‘Ice Dance.’
Another caution is that the pictures in the catalog generally show the plant in bloom, and it won’t be in bloom all season. For example, when I searched for early summer blooms in full to part sun in zone 5, one of the first (alphabetically) plants was Alchemilla mollis, Lady’s Mantle. The image shows the plant in full bloom, but this plant blooms for a short time in June and then it’s done. Most people plant it for the foliage, which is an attractive silvery green that holds moisture in droplets on the leaf. (I once heard it got its name from the alchemists’ belief that if you drank the droplets, you’d attract true love.) But the plant gets pretty tired looking in the heat of summer, and it does better in shade than sun, and the catalog isn’t going to shout that at you.
If you find a plant you like, use a search engine to get a much more complete description. My favorite plant information sites are the botanic gardens or university sites located in the zone where the plant will live. They’ll tell you more about how the plant performs in the garden and they’ll give you more images of the plant, in bloom and out.
Another reason to consult a botanical site is to discover how aggressive a plant may be. For example, the plant catalog description for Centaurea Montana, Mountain Bluet, says it will bloom all summer if you shear it to the ground after the first bloom (will you do that? ) but the Missouri Botanical Garden (‘Mobot,’ a great resource!) says, ” Can spread somewhat invasively by stolons to form colonies in optimum growing conditions (particularly in cool northern climates where it is more robust). Remove spent flower stalks to the ground after bloom. Sparse rebloom in late summer-early fall may occur. Plants need to be divided every 2-3 years.” So Mobot tells us the plant is aggressive and that rebloom is sparse. So if you’re looking to fill in a large space, you’ll know you don’t need to buy a lot of plants if you’re patient and willing to work in the garden. As much as we all love plant fantasies, when we’re putting plants into scarce space, we need to be realistic.
One last example: I searched for early fall blooming plants for part shade and came up with Kirengeshoma palmata, or Waxbells. It’s not a common plant, but it’s gorgeous, about 4’ tall, happiest in shade and acidic soils, with large, maple shaped leaves and surprisingly delicate yellow flowers in fall. The photo shows a large mass of plants. If you had a large mass of them, they’d be very dramatic. If you had one, it might well get lost at the back of a border. And you need to know what your soil will support: my soil is acidic and I have two of these plants. They don’t bloom or grow vigorously, although I still like them a lot. I’d like to get more, so they’d make more of a statement, so that may be one of the plants I acquire this season. If so, I’ll get at least 4 more so each of my plants will have two friends. I’ll see them better that way. Looking at the plant on the Mobot site, I see that the catalog has described it pretty accurately, but the Mobot photo is much more realistic, showing a few blooms and remarking that the plant is mostly grown for its foliage.
I hope this cautionary guide to catalog planning has been helpful. I think catalog buying is a little riskier than buying plants you hold first at the garden center, but that said, I’ve had some very good experiences with perennials from catalogs, and of course you can get bulbs and bare root shrubs pretty reliably on line.
This will be my last ‘expert blog,’ at least until the economy picks up. It’s been fun writing these, and I’ll continue to check in to the site and share my thoughts and pictures, respond to yours, and be a regular old member. I hope you’ll visit my website after mid-February when its new design will be up and running: view link Happy gardening to all!
I think of catalogs as sources of both fantasy and planning. The fantasy part has to do with wishing I could grow certain plants in my region – tender plants that would be horrified at the several feet of snow now covering my garden, acid-loving plants who wouldn’t survive our prairie soil. When I was in North Carolina at the beginning of the month I saw forsythia in bloom. Honestly, it made my heart well up with joy: plants, real flowering plants, would appear in my garden too, eventually. (You may well ask, ‘Rinda, why do you keep living in Chicago if the winter always makes you fear the earth has died?’ to which I’d answer, ‘Spring isn’t spring without winter.’ But I’m weird.)
Fantasy is great, and who’d want to live without it, but it won’t pay the rent, as we know. So then I turn to planning. Now planning involves some knowledge of the present condition of the garden, which is where the notes and photos I took last summer come in. I need to know what worked and what didn’t, where there were holes in the garden, which parts of the garden looked blah, what stretches of the season needed color.
One good thing about catalog planning is that it saves you from impulse buying –you know, when you go to the big box store or the garden center and see something really pretty and buy it, even though it won’t really work in your yard or it’s been forced into bloom early or late. Catalogs let you study what’s going to bloom when, how big they’ll get , and what they like to grow in. For annuals, it’s not as crucial: if you’re buying annuals in flats or pots at a garden center, the rule of thumb is to buy plants that don’t have many blooms. If they’re flowering like crazy with so few roots, they’re high on chemicals and they may just flop in your yard or container. You’re better off buying plants with buds and maybe a bloom here or there (to check for color) and letting them grow in at home. When I studied annuals in my training, we were taught to pinch off any blooms when we planted them so the plant would put its energy into roots first.
Searching for perennials in catalogs is a great idea. In many of the online catalogs, you can search by exactly what your needs are. I just did a search for a plant that blooms in early spring in full sun in zone 5. The only one I got was Phlox subulata, Creeping Phlox, a plant I love. It’s good for edging borders and rock gardens, it spreads rapidly, and even in Chicago, it stays green all winter. A search for plants that bloom in spring in full to part shade yielded 29 plants, only one of which wouldn’t grow in my zone (although at $115/plant, I wouldn’t buy it if it would!). I could have modified my search to specify height, bloom color, and soil conditions.
The tricky part here, though, is that they may show three cultivars of the same plant, and it’s hard for you to know which ones are going to perform best for you. A case in point is Brunnera macrophylla, aka Siberian Bugloss (I like the Latin name better because ‘Bugloss’ just sounds too odd to me). Brunnera is a shade-loving plant with large, coarsely textured leaves. It blooms in the spring, with sprays of gorgeous tiny blue flowers, so that two or three planted together make a real impact in May. But some of the cultivars, which have great variegated leaves in the pictures and when you get them, don’t perform as well; the leaves fade to green, so you’ve paid two or three times the price of the straight species and the plant ends up little different. My personal experience is that you’re better off getting a plain Brunnera and using something else for variegated foliage, like the many lovely Hostas, the Variegated Solomon’s Seal, the Jacob’s Ladder ‘Stairway to Heaven,’ or even a variegated Carex (Sedge), like ‘Ice Dance.’
Another caution is that the pictures in the catalog generally show the plant in bloom, and it won’t be in bloom all season. For example, when I searched for early summer blooms in full to part sun in zone 5, one of the first (alphabetically) plants was Alchemilla mollis, Lady’s Mantle. The image shows the plant in full bloom, but this plant blooms for a short time in June and then it’s done. Most people plant it for the foliage, which is an attractive silvery green that holds moisture in droplets on the leaf. (I once heard it got its name from the alchemists’ belief that if you drank the droplets, you’d attract true love.) But the plant gets pretty tired looking in the heat of summer, and it does better in shade than sun, and the catalog isn’t going to shout that at you.
If you find a plant you like, use a search engine to get a much more complete description. My favorite plant information sites are the botanic gardens or university sites located in the zone where the plant will live. They’ll tell you more about how the plant performs in the garden and they’ll give you more images of the plant, in bloom and out.
Another reason to consult a botanical site is to discover how aggressive a plant may be. For example, the plant catalog description for Centaurea Montana, Mountain Bluet, says it will bloom all summer if you shear it to the ground after the first bloom (will you do that? ) but the Missouri Botanical Garden (‘Mobot,’ a great resource!) says, ” Can spread somewhat invasively by stolons to form colonies in optimum growing conditions (particularly in cool northern climates where it is more robust). Remove spent flower stalks to the ground after bloom. Sparse rebloom in late summer-early fall may occur. Plants need to be divided every 2-3 years.” So Mobot tells us the plant is aggressive and that rebloom is sparse. So if you’re looking to fill in a large space, you’ll know you don’t need to buy a lot of plants if you’re patient and willing to work in the garden. As much as we all love plant fantasies, when we’re putting plants into scarce space, we need to be realistic.
One last example: I searched for early fall blooming plants for part shade and came up with Kirengeshoma palmata, or Waxbells. It’s not a common plant, but it’s gorgeous, about 4’ tall, happiest in shade and acidic soils, with large, maple shaped leaves and surprisingly delicate yellow flowers in fall. The photo shows a large mass of plants. If you had a large mass of them, they’d be very dramatic. If you had one, it might well get lost at the back of a border. And you need to know what your soil will support: my soil is acidic and I have two of these plants. They don’t bloom or grow vigorously, although I still like them a lot. I’d like to get more, so they’d make more of a statement, so that may be one of the plants I acquire this season. If so, I’ll get at least 4 more so each of my plants will have two friends. I’ll see them better that way. Looking at the plant on the Mobot site, I see that the catalog has described it pretty accurately, but the Mobot photo is much more realistic, showing a few blooms and remarking that the plant is mostly grown for its foliage.
I hope this cautionary guide to catalog planning has been helpful. I think catalog buying is a little riskier than buying plants you hold first at the garden center, but that said, I’ve had some very good experiences with perennials from catalogs, and of course you can get bulbs and bare root shrubs pretty reliably on line.
This will be my last ‘expert blog,’ at least until the economy picks up. It’s been fun writing these, and I’ll continue to check in to the site and share my thoughts and pictures, respond to yours, and be a regular old member. I hope you’ll visit my website after mid-February when its new design will be up and running: view link Happy gardening to all!
Great Garden Books
If you got some gift cards for the holidays, or even if you just got a library card, here are some great winter reads:
I’ve mentioned Gardens: An Essay on the Human Condition by Robert Pogue Harrison in an earlier blog. I can’t tell you how much I enjoyed this book. It’s so rich in history and thought. For example, Harrison, who teaches at Stanford, muses on the Stanford campus, and from there he thinks about campuses in general, the tradition of siting learning in a kind of garden. This takes him back to the Greeks, to Plato and Epicurus, for whom the garden was the best place for learning. For Plato, the garden is a sanctuary from the political and business worlds. There, students and teachers can indulge in serious and extended conversations, since he believed that people learn not from reading, but from reflecting with trusted and admired others on ideas and experiences. As I read this chapter, I thought about the ideas I hold most dear, the ones that have steered my life, and all of them I learned not (or not just) from books, but from talk, bouncing ideas off friends and colleagues, testing the ideas, revising, retesting, all in contexts that felt safe, like a garden. For Epicurus, the garden is more than a sanctuary: it is a place where students learn to garden. In gardening, students have the experience of cultivating, and the central lesson of the school was the cultivation of values and virtues, such as friendship, consideration, gratitude, patience, and hope. I love the idea that we can cultivate ourselves as we cultivate the soil, and it makes sense to me as I practice being a better person than I am.
In the same vein, The Enchantment of Gardens: A Psychological Approach by Ruth Ammann . A psychotherapist, Ammann meditates on the garden as the intermediate place between the built environment – the home – and nature. In that respect, it is an image of the human soul: part nature and part culture. Inverting this relationship, she also considers the ‘soul garden’, the interior landscape that constitute our identity. Here’s a characteristic passage: “Gardens stage a continuous back-and-forth between the devising, building, ordering, fantasizing, loving, or hating individual and nature, which responds to the range of human activity in its distinct manner, subject to its own rules and antics. The more affectionately we feel our way into nature’s unknown essence, the more harmonious our garden becomes. Its totality is a microcosm and thus affords the individual an opportunity to take part in the greatness of creation on a small human scale.” What I like in this passage are the words, “and hating,” and “antics.” Ammann isn’t sentimental about people: she knows that we have pesky, irritating, sabotaging, snarky sides as well as our loving, creative, and clever sides. And nature isn’t romantic either: it’s often violent, unruly, and disruptive. In many ways, nature and humans are mirrors – and of course, humans are part of nature, animals with big brains. The book has lots of great photos, but it’s a small paperback, not a coffee table book.
Two more books are hard-bound and full of photos, but also psychological in many ways. The Pattern Garden, by Valerie Easton, approaches garden design from the point of view of patterns of instincts and experiences; “I believe that the garden calls up our deepest instincts, and it is from these instincts that good design is born, “ she writes in the introduction. These instincts she calls “archetypal ideas and longings.” Chapters of the book take up elements of gardens that fall into different patterns: issues of scale, journey (paths, gates, etc), enclosure, destination, water, art, and material patterns. The pictures are terrific, and so is the writing: “The way a garden is experienced doesn’t depend on the width of a border or the height of an arbor. It is the atmosphere, the emotional experience, an individual’s comfort and response that make a garden memorable. You know how in every recipe there are certain elements vital to the success of what you’re making? You can play around with the amount of cinnamon, or even substitute one egg for two when you make gingerbread, but if you leave out the molasses or the baking soda (let alone the flour and sugar) you‘ve got a mess. The essential elements in a “recipe” for planning a new garden, or rejuvenating an older one, might well be enticing destinations.” She goes on in this chapter to write about and illustrate garden destinations: patios, benches, focal points, and sheds. She’ll get you thinking about your garden, the way you feel in it, the ways you want to change it.
The Inward Garden by Julie Moir Messervy, like The Pattern Garden, is richly illustrated – every gardener needs some wonderful picture books to get through winter. Also, Messervy is concerned with ‘the archetypal landscape,’ which may be like caves, mountains, harbors, islands. “The archetypes also link our feelings, memories, and associations to a particular spatial form. You may experience the same surge of joy looking out from your skyscraper office window that you felt in your tree house.” Flowing from this, Messervy sets out to encourage the reader to analyze the inward and outward sites of her garden. This is a book that’s written just for you: it helps you think and dream about your garden - and your life. It includes chapters on children’s gardens, and it prompts you to remember the gardens of your childhood.
Finally, Gardens in the Dunes, by Leslie Marmon Silko. This is a novel which explores a number of different worlds of gardening. Silko herself is part Laguna Pueblo, and the central characters here are members of the Sand Lizard people, a fictional group living in the southwest of the United States. The voice we hear most often is that of Indigo, a young girl, and her understanding of events shapes the story. The gardens in the novel include the garden of the title, a desert garden watered by rain and guarded by a rattlesnake. It is the home of the narrator, and her thoughts and heart keep returning there. There’s a garden in southern California, another very elaborate garden in Connecticut, and two in Europe, one in England and the other in Italy. Only the Connecticut garden is seen as imposed on the land; all the others, to one degree or another, respect the local traditions and spirits. The novel is set around the time of the Ghost Dance at the end of the nineteenth century, and much of what happens in it will be shocking to readers who are unfamiliar with the history of American Indians: children are kidnapped and forced into boarding schools where they are taught to disown their traditional cultures; people are herded into reservations, far from the traditional lands; others form shantytowns along the edges of railway and irrigation projects. But the garden episodes are truly wonderful: the title garden is lovingly detailed, and the European gardens are rich with European traditions of the genius loci, the spirit of the place.
I hope you’ll take a minute to visit my remodeled website in the next couple of weeks. It’s not up yet, but it will be soon. If you bookmark it now, you’ll be able to find it when the updates come online. It’s at view link
I’ve mentioned Gardens: An Essay on the Human Condition by Robert Pogue Harrison in an earlier blog. I can’t tell you how much I enjoyed this book. It’s so rich in history and thought. For example, Harrison, who teaches at Stanford, muses on the Stanford campus, and from there he thinks about campuses in general, the tradition of siting learning in a kind of garden. This takes him back to the Greeks, to Plato and Epicurus, for whom the garden was the best place for learning. For Plato, the garden is a sanctuary from the political and business worlds. There, students and teachers can indulge in serious and extended conversations, since he believed that people learn not from reading, but from reflecting with trusted and admired others on ideas and experiences. As I read this chapter, I thought about the ideas I hold most dear, the ones that have steered my life, and all of them I learned not (or not just) from books, but from talk, bouncing ideas off friends and colleagues, testing the ideas, revising, retesting, all in contexts that felt safe, like a garden. For Epicurus, the garden is more than a sanctuary: it is a place where students learn to garden. In gardening, students have the experience of cultivating, and the central lesson of the school was the cultivation of values and virtues, such as friendship, consideration, gratitude, patience, and hope. I love the idea that we can cultivate ourselves as we cultivate the soil, and it makes sense to me as I practice being a better person than I am.
In the same vein, The Enchantment of Gardens: A Psychological Approach by Ruth Ammann . A psychotherapist, Ammann meditates on the garden as the intermediate place between the built environment – the home – and nature. In that respect, it is an image of the human soul: part nature and part culture. Inverting this relationship, she also considers the ‘soul garden’, the interior landscape that constitute our identity. Here’s a characteristic passage: “Gardens stage a continuous back-and-forth between the devising, building, ordering, fantasizing, loving, or hating individual and nature, which responds to the range of human activity in its distinct manner, subject to its own rules and antics. The more affectionately we feel our way into nature’s unknown essence, the more harmonious our garden becomes. Its totality is a microcosm and thus affords the individual an opportunity to take part in the greatness of creation on a small human scale.” What I like in this passage are the words, “and hating,” and “antics.” Ammann isn’t sentimental about people: she knows that we have pesky, irritating, sabotaging, snarky sides as well as our loving, creative, and clever sides. And nature isn’t romantic either: it’s often violent, unruly, and disruptive. In many ways, nature and humans are mirrors – and of course, humans are part of nature, animals with big brains. The book has lots of great photos, but it’s a small paperback, not a coffee table book.
Two more books are hard-bound and full of photos, but also psychological in many ways. The Pattern Garden, by Valerie Easton, approaches garden design from the point of view of patterns of instincts and experiences; “I believe that the garden calls up our deepest instincts, and it is from these instincts that good design is born, “ she writes in the introduction. These instincts she calls “archetypal ideas and longings.” Chapters of the book take up elements of gardens that fall into different patterns: issues of scale, journey (paths, gates, etc), enclosure, destination, water, art, and material patterns. The pictures are terrific, and so is the writing: “The way a garden is experienced doesn’t depend on the width of a border or the height of an arbor. It is the atmosphere, the emotional experience, an individual’s comfort and response that make a garden memorable. You know how in every recipe there are certain elements vital to the success of what you’re making? You can play around with the amount of cinnamon, or even substitute one egg for two when you make gingerbread, but if you leave out the molasses or the baking soda (let alone the flour and sugar) you‘ve got a mess. The essential elements in a “recipe” for planning a new garden, or rejuvenating an older one, might well be enticing destinations.” She goes on in this chapter to write about and illustrate garden destinations: patios, benches, focal points, and sheds. She’ll get you thinking about your garden, the way you feel in it, the ways you want to change it.
The Inward Garden by Julie Moir Messervy, like The Pattern Garden, is richly illustrated – every gardener needs some wonderful picture books to get through winter. Also, Messervy is concerned with ‘the archetypal landscape,’ which may be like caves, mountains, harbors, islands. “The archetypes also link our feelings, memories, and associations to a particular spatial form. You may experience the same surge of joy looking out from your skyscraper office window that you felt in your tree house.” Flowing from this, Messervy sets out to encourage the reader to analyze the inward and outward sites of her garden. This is a book that’s written just for you: it helps you think and dream about your garden - and your life. It includes chapters on children’s gardens, and it prompts you to remember the gardens of your childhood.
Finally, Gardens in the Dunes, by Leslie Marmon Silko. This is a novel which explores a number of different worlds of gardening. Silko herself is part Laguna Pueblo, and the central characters here are members of the Sand Lizard people, a fictional group living in the southwest of the United States. The voice we hear most often is that of Indigo, a young girl, and her understanding of events shapes the story. The gardens in the novel include the garden of the title, a desert garden watered by rain and guarded by a rattlesnake. It is the home of the narrator, and her thoughts and heart keep returning there. There’s a garden in southern California, another very elaborate garden in Connecticut, and two in Europe, one in England and the other in Italy. Only the Connecticut garden is seen as imposed on the land; all the others, to one degree or another, respect the local traditions and spirits. The novel is set around the time of the Ghost Dance at the end of the nineteenth century, and much of what happens in it will be shocking to readers who are unfamiliar with the history of American Indians: children are kidnapped and forced into boarding schools where they are taught to disown their traditional cultures; people are herded into reservations, far from the traditional lands; others form shantytowns along the edges of railway and irrigation projects. But the garden episodes are truly wonderful: the title garden is lovingly detailed, and the European gardens are rich with European traditions of the genius loci, the spirit of the place.
I hope you’ll take a minute to visit my remodeled website in the next couple of weeks. It’s not up yet, but it will be soon. If you bookmark it now, you’ll be able to find it when the updates come online. It’s at view link
Winter Gardening: Harvesting Catalogs
The holidays are over, the days are getting ever so slowly longer, and what does a gardener do for fun? Why, we plant mental gardens made of cut up catalogs.
So today I’m going to review some of my favorite things:
Tools: Every gardener needs a basic set of tools. A good shovel, a sharp spade, pruners, maybe loppers, a pitchfork, a transfer shovel, a rake, some trowels, something to throw weeds in while you’re working, and maybe a kneeling pad. If you can do it, I think it’s worth getting the best tools.
Make sure your pruners can be sharpened and that you can buy new blades for them. Good pruners should last years with a little oil and sharpening stone. And they’re worth every penny. If you’re going to be pruning trees or shrubs, you may want loppers too. Get a good spade and a file to sharpen it with or find a hardware store or garden center that will sharpen for you. A sharp spade makes the work of digging borders much much easier. If you like a neat garden, with clean lines between the planting beds and the lawn, you need a sharp spade. The difference between a digging shovel for planting (generally with a tip that’s curved to a point) and one for moving mulch or compost onto the bed is that the transfer shovel has a thinner, squared off end. Since it isn’t used to dig, it doesn’t need to be pointed at the end, and you get more mulch in each shovelful that way. For hauling yard waste to the compost bin, I like tip bags and tubtrugs, but a large paint containers from the hardware store works too.
I’m not going to write about composting here, since I’ve done so recently, but composting supplies are easily bought on line. Before you do, though, check with your municipality: as I’ve said, the city of Chicago makes compost bins available at cost to residents twice a year, and it’s a real savings. I also have a plastic bin on my kitchen counter for food scraps. When it’s full, I just take them out to the bin. I have to say that the current weather – snow, more snow, below zero temps, more snow, balmy days in the teens – have curtailed my composting. I can’t get to the bins through the piled up snow. It just kills me to throw banana peels into the garbage, to waste all those lovely coffee grounds, but what can you do? It’ll thaw eventually.
If you enter ‘compost supplies’ in your search engine, you’ll find plenty of sources. My favorite is gardeners dot com. And just to reiterate, if you want to do one thing to improve your garden this year, it’s compost!
Now on to the fun stuff: plants!
Let’s start with fruits and vegetables. I just searched using ‘garden catalog’ and ‘buy fruit tree’ and found a wealth of sources. So here are some thoughts:
Figure what vegetables and herbs your family likes best, and plant those.
Figure what space you have, and decide how many plants you can accommodate. They’re so cute when they’re tiny, but remember how humongous those zucchini plants get, so make sure you’re planning for the mature size of the plant.
Make sure you’re planting in full sun. Vegetables need 8 - 10 hours of sun a day. Most vegetables prefer well drained soil, so if you are planting in clay, consider building raised beds so the roots can drain well before they hit the clay. I heard a famous gardener talk this winter, and one of the things he said was that tomatoes like sandy soil. Worth a try, right? Compost also helps with drainage. (Do I sound like a broken record? Are you old enough to know what a record is?)
Try something new this year. One year I had some volunteer eggplants growing in my garden. Someone must have tossed seeds the fall before. I had never grown eggplants, and rarely eaten them. I had avoided them because I’d heard they are linked with arthritis attacks. (The story is that if you have arthritis, you should avoid the nightshade family of veggies, which includes potatoes and tomatoes. I like tomatoes and potatoes, so I didn’t consider them aggravating. OK, it’s irrational and self-serving, but hey!) Anyway, I harvested some beautiful eggplants, which my kids and neighbors enjoyed. I still don’t like the taste of them, but I learned how easy they are to grow.
Last summer I tried tomatoes in a large container on my deck. I will confess it was not spectacularly successful.. For one thing, I forgot to fertilize them. For another, they were north of some shrubs and probably didn’t get enough sun. I got about 4 tomatoes – don’t think I’ll repeat that this year.
Try some edible flowers. Nasturtiums an d daylilies both have edible blooms, and they look really snazzy on your salads. You could also try angelica and anise hyssop, both of which have a licorice flavor. I’m told that borage blooms are good in punches, lemonade, and gin and tonic. Before you eat any flower, make sure it’s edible by going online and searching; this is particularly true with daylilies, so remember the name of the cultivar you’re growing. Also, and this is really important, never use pesticides on plants whose flowers you want to eat. (If you normally use pesticides, do an online search for integrated pest management to learn about more environmentally-friendly ways of controlling insects.)
How about planting some fruits this year? If you have plenty of space and sun, you could consider a fruit tree. These are easy to buy bare root online. Just put the roots in water as soon as you get the shipment, and if you can’t plant right away, dig a trench, set the roots in and put the tops at a 45 degree angle; cover with soil and water. You can leave the tree this way for 3 – 4 days before planting.
Make sure you allow enough space for your full-grown fruit tree, and site it away from areas where people are going to be playing in ways that might damage the tree. Remember too that you may decide to spray a fruit tree, so you don’t want it near anything that could be damaged from spray. If you don’t have much space, you may be able to find dwarf varieties of fruit trees. I’d go to a local nursery for these, to make sure you get good advice and a locally-grown plant. Dwarf trees have the fruiting branches grafted onto a dwarf trunk, so you need to be careful.
Also, think about shrubby or tender fruits, such as blackberries, raspberries, blueberries, or strawberries. Blueberries do best in acid soils; if your soil is alkaline (pH greater than 7) you can plant blueberries in containers where you’ve mixed half peat and half potting soil. Raspberries and blackberries shouldn’t be planted too close together, because of disease transfer issues. Strawberries need to be sited where they’ll get good air circulation, and don’t plant them where nightshade plants – potatoes, tomatoes, peppers, eggplants – have grown in the 5 previous years.
All the fruits need full sun as well. You can plant them in the spring as soon as the soil can be worked, and remember that you need patience for fruits.
OK that’s enough for today. I’ll write about flowering plants next time.
In the meantime, happy dreaming. And those of you in the south, enjoy your lovely blooms. We’re jealous, up here.
So today I’m going to review some of my favorite things:
Tools: Every gardener needs a basic set of tools. A good shovel, a sharp spade, pruners, maybe loppers, a pitchfork, a transfer shovel, a rake, some trowels, something to throw weeds in while you’re working, and maybe a kneeling pad. If you can do it, I think it’s worth getting the best tools.
Make sure your pruners can be sharpened and that you can buy new blades for them. Good pruners should last years with a little oil and sharpening stone. And they’re worth every penny. If you’re going to be pruning trees or shrubs, you may want loppers too. Get a good spade and a file to sharpen it with or find a hardware store or garden center that will sharpen for you. A sharp spade makes the work of digging borders much much easier. If you like a neat garden, with clean lines between the planting beds and the lawn, you need a sharp spade. The difference between a digging shovel for planting (generally with a tip that’s curved to a point) and one for moving mulch or compost onto the bed is that the transfer shovel has a thinner, squared off end. Since it isn’t used to dig, it doesn’t need to be pointed at the end, and you get more mulch in each shovelful that way. For hauling yard waste to the compost bin, I like tip bags and tubtrugs, but a large paint containers from the hardware store works too.
I’m not going to write about composting here, since I’ve done so recently, but composting supplies are easily bought on line. Before you do, though, check with your municipality: as I’ve said, the city of Chicago makes compost bins available at cost to residents twice a year, and it’s a real savings. I also have a plastic bin on my kitchen counter for food scraps. When it’s full, I just take them out to the bin. I have to say that the current weather – snow, more snow, below zero temps, more snow, balmy days in the teens – have curtailed my composting. I can’t get to the bins through the piled up snow. It just kills me to throw banana peels into the garbage, to waste all those lovely coffee grounds, but what can you do? It’ll thaw eventually.
If you enter ‘compost supplies’ in your search engine, you’ll find plenty of sources. My favorite is gardeners dot com. And just to reiterate, if you want to do one thing to improve your garden this year, it’s compost!
Now on to the fun stuff: plants!
Let’s start with fruits and vegetables. I just searched using ‘garden catalog’ and ‘buy fruit tree’ and found a wealth of sources. So here are some thoughts:
Figure what vegetables and herbs your family likes best, and plant those.
Figure what space you have, and decide how many plants you can accommodate. They’re so cute when they’re tiny, but remember how humongous those zucchini plants get, so make sure you’re planning for the mature size of the plant.
Make sure you’re planting in full sun. Vegetables need 8 - 10 hours of sun a day. Most vegetables prefer well drained soil, so if you are planting in clay, consider building raised beds so the roots can drain well before they hit the clay. I heard a famous gardener talk this winter, and one of the things he said was that tomatoes like sandy soil. Worth a try, right? Compost also helps with drainage. (Do I sound like a broken record? Are you old enough to know what a record is?)
Try something new this year. One year I had some volunteer eggplants growing in my garden. Someone must have tossed seeds the fall before. I had never grown eggplants, and rarely eaten them. I had avoided them because I’d heard they are linked with arthritis attacks. (The story is that if you have arthritis, you should avoid the nightshade family of veggies, which includes potatoes and tomatoes. I like tomatoes and potatoes, so I didn’t consider them aggravating. OK, it’s irrational and self-serving, but hey!) Anyway, I harvested some beautiful eggplants, which my kids and neighbors enjoyed. I still don’t like the taste of them, but I learned how easy they are to grow.
Last summer I tried tomatoes in a large container on my deck. I will confess it was not spectacularly successful.. For one thing, I forgot to fertilize them. For another, they were north of some shrubs and probably didn’t get enough sun. I got about 4 tomatoes – don’t think I’ll repeat that this year.
Try some edible flowers. Nasturtiums an d daylilies both have edible blooms, and they look really snazzy on your salads. You could also try angelica and anise hyssop, both of which have a licorice flavor. I’m told that borage blooms are good in punches, lemonade, and gin and tonic. Before you eat any flower, make sure it’s edible by going online and searching; this is particularly true with daylilies, so remember the name of the cultivar you’re growing. Also, and this is really important, never use pesticides on plants whose flowers you want to eat. (If you normally use pesticides, do an online search for integrated pest management to learn about more environmentally-friendly ways of controlling insects.)
How about planting some fruits this year? If you have plenty of space and sun, you could consider a fruit tree. These are easy to buy bare root online. Just put the roots in water as soon as you get the shipment, and if you can’t plant right away, dig a trench, set the roots in and put the tops at a 45 degree angle; cover with soil and water. You can leave the tree this way for 3 – 4 days before planting.
Make sure you allow enough space for your full-grown fruit tree, and site it away from areas where people are going to be playing in ways that might damage the tree. Remember too that you may decide to spray a fruit tree, so you don’t want it near anything that could be damaged from spray. If you don’t have much space, you may be able to find dwarf varieties of fruit trees. I’d go to a local nursery for these, to make sure you get good advice and a locally-grown plant. Dwarf trees have the fruiting branches grafted onto a dwarf trunk, so you need to be careful.
Also, think about shrubby or tender fruits, such as blackberries, raspberries, blueberries, or strawberries. Blueberries do best in acid soils; if your soil is alkaline (pH greater than 7) you can plant blueberries in containers where you’ve mixed half peat and half potting soil. Raspberries and blackberries shouldn’t be planted too close together, because of disease transfer issues. Strawberries need to be sited where they’ll get good air circulation, and don’t plant them where nightshade plants – potatoes, tomatoes, peppers, eggplants – have grown in the 5 previous years.
All the fruits need full sun as well. You can plant them in the spring as soon as the soil can be worked, and remember that you need patience for fruits.
OK that’s enough for today. I’ll write about flowering plants next time.
In the meantime, happy dreaming. And those of you in the south, enjoy your lovely blooms. We’re jealous, up here.
The Meanings of Gardens
From compost to composure: this week I want to blog about – or at least spin off from – a book I’ve been reading that I really like a lot. It’s by Robert Pogue Harrison, and it’s called Gardens: An Essay on the Human Condition.
Harrison starts with the idea that gardens are the human refuge from history: history is full of wars and suffering and busyness, while gardens are retreats where we find calm and beauty and rest. However, he goes on to claim that what we love about our gardens is not just the peacefulness – because we are restless, and easily bored. What we love about gardens is the care we provide there, the opportunity to work with the soil, rocks, water, and sun to create places that express our souls.
This really makes sense to me. As much as I enjoy visiting the great public gardens where someone else does the work, I don’t want to live in Eden or any other non-earthly paradise where the fruit just hangs there perpetually waiting to be taken. I like the process of gardening – I like getting my hands in the soil, in the roots; I like the bending and stooping and schlepping. I like the relationship it sets up between me and the plants.
I do two kinds of gardening: for myself and for clients. Designing someone else’s sanctuary is a tricky and challenging business: I try to be as sensitive as I can to who the people are, what they imagine about their garden, how they’ll use it, who’ll use it (kids? Grandparents? Pets?), and how much work they want to put into the garden. A lot of people tell me they want low-maintenance gardens, and I respect that, as much as I can. People’s lives are busy and they have a lot of commitments. They may not know much about how to take care of a garden, and they may not care to. But there’s no such thing as a no-maintenance garden. (Roy Diblik, a renowned Wisconsin plantsman, does a presentation he calls the “Know-Maintenance Garden.” I just spent fifteen minutes rooting around in my files to see if I had a handout from his talk. I don’t . My files are as overgrown as my garden gets in July.) Gardens are living things, and like relationships, they have to be tended.
What I like to do is teach people how to garden and encourage them to get out and try things, once I’ve given them the structure and the start. People can be very nervous about their gardens, afraid they’ll kill something or pull up a good plant instead of a weed. I try to communicate a spirit of playful caring in the garden. A new garden is a lot like a new baby. It needs more care – and different care – at first than it will in ten or fifteen years. When I was a new parent, I was nervous too, and I had to learn to diaper and bathe and feed my daughter. But it quickly became familiar, and what I learned I made into my own way of doing things. Gardeners can do the same: at first you follow the “rules,” such as they are, but soon enough you’re improvising or experimenting, being a plant mom or dad in your own way. I count myself most successful when my clients start transplanting, dividing, adding new plants, pruning, weeding, and deadheading: putting their own labor into their gardens. I figure that’s when the garden starts to become meaningful to the gardener.
My own garden is an adventure: it’s nature, it wants to live. If I’m tired of the catmint flopping over the back walkway, I pull it up and move it behind the compost. Mickey Cat will find it wherever it goes. If the Endless Summer hydrangea proves an Endless Bummer, out it goes (or, more precisely into the parkway garden of the rental unit next door, where at least it will provide foliage). Both are thriving despite their not-fit-for-prime-place rejection. Of course, some plants don’t thrive: they just up and decide that they’re not getting enough water or it’s too damned sunny here or they don’t like clay. And since I’m still learning about plants – I figure a few lifetimes and I’ll maybe know enough – I make mistakes. But the mistakes are what teach me about the plants. And yes, I do talk to them.
When I walk into the garden, I’m conscious of many needs. Some weeds need to be eradicated. Some old blooms need to be deadheaded. Some plants have overgrown their space and need pruning. Some need water. Some have powdery mildew or aphids. Some need staking. Some days they all seem to call at me at once, while other times I can do one chore, feel really satisfied, and relax. For me, though, the garden is mostly not about relaxing in the traditional lounge-in-a-hammock sense. In the garden, I’m conscious of what I should be doing, what I want to be doing, to keep growth and decay in balance. The pictures of gardens that we all drool over capture a moment, but a garden is a process, and change is its real beauty. Sprout to bud to flower, to seed or fruit; ripeness to decay; decay to soil; soil to sprout to bud to flower to seed. Like an orchestra, a garden features first one species then another, each claiming a moment at the focal point. Like an orchestra, too, a garden needs to be played, or worked: each stage in the cycles poses its own tasks. In this way, we invest ourselves in the garden. It’s my work in the garden that makes it an expression of my being, my soul. And that work, while it can be physically demanding, is ultimately the relaxation I crave, because it absorbs me, it focuses me, it takes me out of my quibbling ego, and it roots me in the place I know best in the world.
When Robert Pogue Harrison talks about gardens in terms of “the human condition,” it’s this idea that we are human because we care for others, we care for the land, we care. And the action of caring, the work of cultivating our gardens, is also a form of self-cultivation. I’ll write more about this soon: he has some very interesting thoughts about what it means to cultivate oneself, that I’d like to explore with you.
In the meantime, I hope you and your gardens are well. If you’re in the north, your garden has gone to bed for its long winter’s nap; if you’re in the south, you may be swaddling it against a possible frost or simply cutting it back and watching it grow again. Have a wonderful holiday season!
Harrison starts with the idea that gardens are the human refuge from history: history is full of wars and suffering and busyness, while gardens are retreats where we find calm and beauty and rest. However, he goes on to claim that what we love about our gardens is not just the peacefulness – because we are restless, and easily bored. What we love about gardens is the care we provide there, the opportunity to work with the soil, rocks, water, and sun to create places that express our souls.
This really makes sense to me. As much as I enjoy visiting the great public gardens where someone else does the work, I don’t want to live in Eden or any other non-earthly paradise where the fruit just hangs there perpetually waiting to be taken. I like the process of gardening – I like getting my hands in the soil, in the roots; I like the bending and stooping and schlepping. I like the relationship it sets up between me and the plants.
I do two kinds of gardening: for myself and for clients. Designing someone else’s sanctuary is a tricky and challenging business: I try to be as sensitive as I can to who the people are, what they imagine about their garden, how they’ll use it, who’ll use it (kids? Grandparents? Pets?), and how much work they want to put into the garden. A lot of people tell me they want low-maintenance gardens, and I respect that, as much as I can. People’s lives are busy and they have a lot of commitments. They may not know much about how to take care of a garden, and they may not care to. But there’s no such thing as a no-maintenance garden. (Roy Diblik, a renowned Wisconsin plantsman, does a presentation he calls the “Know-Maintenance Garden.” I just spent fifteen minutes rooting around in my files to see if I had a handout from his talk. I don’t . My files are as overgrown as my garden gets in July.) Gardens are living things, and like relationships, they have to be tended.
What I like to do is teach people how to garden and encourage them to get out and try things, once I’ve given them the structure and the start. People can be very nervous about their gardens, afraid they’ll kill something or pull up a good plant instead of a weed. I try to communicate a spirit of playful caring in the garden. A new garden is a lot like a new baby. It needs more care – and different care – at first than it will in ten or fifteen years. When I was a new parent, I was nervous too, and I had to learn to diaper and bathe and feed my daughter. But it quickly became familiar, and what I learned I made into my own way of doing things. Gardeners can do the same: at first you follow the “rules,” such as they are, but soon enough you’re improvising or experimenting, being a plant mom or dad in your own way. I count myself most successful when my clients start transplanting, dividing, adding new plants, pruning, weeding, and deadheading: putting their own labor into their gardens. I figure that’s when the garden starts to become meaningful to the gardener.
My own garden is an adventure: it’s nature, it wants to live. If I’m tired of the catmint flopping over the back walkway, I pull it up and move it behind the compost. Mickey Cat will find it wherever it goes. If the Endless Summer hydrangea proves an Endless Bummer, out it goes (or, more precisely into the parkway garden of the rental unit next door, where at least it will provide foliage). Both are thriving despite their not-fit-for-prime-place rejection. Of course, some plants don’t thrive: they just up and decide that they’re not getting enough water or it’s too damned sunny here or they don’t like clay. And since I’m still learning about plants – I figure a few lifetimes and I’ll maybe know enough – I make mistakes. But the mistakes are what teach me about the plants. And yes, I do talk to them.
When I walk into the garden, I’m conscious of many needs. Some weeds need to be eradicated. Some old blooms need to be deadheaded. Some plants have overgrown their space and need pruning. Some need water. Some have powdery mildew or aphids. Some need staking. Some days they all seem to call at me at once, while other times I can do one chore, feel really satisfied, and relax. For me, though, the garden is mostly not about relaxing in the traditional lounge-in-a-hammock sense. In the garden, I’m conscious of what I should be doing, what I want to be doing, to keep growth and decay in balance. The pictures of gardens that we all drool over capture a moment, but a garden is a process, and change is its real beauty. Sprout to bud to flower, to seed or fruit; ripeness to decay; decay to soil; soil to sprout to bud to flower to seed. Like an orchestra, a garden features first one species then another, each claiming a moment at the focal point. Like an orchestra, too, a garden needs to be played, or worked: each stage in the cycles poses its own tasks. In this way, we invest ourselves in the garden. It’s my work in the garden that makes it an expression of my being, my soul. And that work, while it can be physically demanding, is ultimately the relaxation I crave, because it absorbs me, it focuses me, it takes me out of my quibbling ego, and it roots me in the place I know best in the world.
When Robert Pogue Harrison talks about gardens in terms of “the human condition,” it’s this idea that we are human because we care for others, we care for the land, we care. And the action of caring, the work of cultivating our gardens, is also a form of self-cultivation. I’ll write more about this soon: he has some very interesting thoughts about what it means to cultivate oneself, that I’d like to explore with you.
In the meantime, I hope you and your gardens are well. If you’re in the north, your garden has gone to bed for its long winter’s nap; if you’re in the south, you may be swaddling it against a possible frost or simply cutting it back and watching it grow again. Have a wonderful holiday season!
Compost - Garden Gold
Last Sunday I harvested compost from two of my bins and spread it on some places in the garden that really needed a boost. It was so satisfying: I love the way the compost smells, it’s fun to see the product of all those banana peel s and coffee grounds, and although I never thought of myself as a green thumb when I was younger, I do have a really kickass garden. OK, I confess, I had a younger friend help with the harvesting . But I did the spreading, and I made the compost….
So, since I’ve been at it, and since there have been a number of questions in the messages over the last year or so about composting, so I thought I’d write something on both theory and practice of creating and using compost.
Compost enriches the soil in many ways: it adds organic matter which contributes nutrients to the soil, it loosens the soil and makes it easier for roots to establish, it increases the ability of the soil to hold plant-available water, and it enables the soil to hold nutrients. Organic matter is a major structural component in binding soil particles together. It Improves tilth (the ease of working the soil) and strength of soil structure and decreases soil erosion. So when you add compost to your soils, you’re increasing the plants’ access to both food and water. Compost also contains lots of microorganisms, which work together with plants’ roots to enable them to take up food. Often, sick plants can be nursed back to health with the use of compost.
Compost also replenishes soil that’s been over-fertilized or herbicided. Chemical fertilizers, such as the ones you buy in most big box stores – you know, the ones that promise ‘miracles’ or ‘vigor’ - will, over time, kill off most or all of the microbes in the soil. Compost will restore them, and if you manage your compost, you can even produce soil that has the right kinds of microbes for the plants you want to grow.
So how do you get started?
First you need a place to start your compost. It’s good to choose a site that is convenient (so you’ll actually use it), has a hose available, is protected from the wind, in a place with decent drainage, and close (ish) to where the compost will be used. I have three compost bins: one’s just outside the kitchen door, and I usually put my food scraps in it. It compresses down really nicely, so I don’t worry about overstuffing it. Another is by the back fence, next to the garage. I use it for plant waste, and it does get overstuffed and the plants break down slowly. Also, I’m really lazy about harvesting from it. The third is between my house and my neighbor’s, to encourage them to contribute their food waste. It’s the biggest of the three, but also the hardest to harvest from.
Consider your system. You can do compost with something as simple as a chickenwire enclosure, but not everyone wants to put food scraps where raccoons have access. Also, some neighborhoods don’t take kindly to permeable structures. Some municipalities have ordinances about compost, so if you think yours might, it can’t hurt to check. It’ll probably be easy to find out online. Ask around and see what others in your area are using. You can also buy compost bins, both at hardware stores and garden centers and online. The city of Chicago makes compost bins available at a deep discount to residents once or twice a year. Maybe your municipality does something like that too. (We can also buy rainbarrels, but that’s another story.) The ones I got from the city have tops that lift off and doors at the bottom that you can remove to harvest the completed compost. I also have another bin that comes in pieces. Picture a square about 2’ across with a perimeter of plastic about 6” high. Three of these, one on top of the other, constitute the compost bin. To harvest you have to lift off each square of plastic, put the top one next to your current compost bin, and transfer the undecomposed material into it. Then you do the same with the next one till you get down to the good stuff. You harvest it and reassemble your bin next to its previous location. Frankly, I wouldn’t get another of these again: big pain in my you know what. You can also buy rotating drums that will process your organic material much more quickly into compost. You have to turn them pretty regularly but then you get compost in a few weeks. These are good if you want compost quickly, but they’re more expensive. I’d suggest doing an online search so you can see what’s available and then figure your budget and needs.
In my soils class we learned that the optimal size for a compost pile is one cubic yard. That’s a yard by a yard by a yard. It doesn’t sound big, but it produces a lot of compost. Anything bigger doesn’t get hot enough in the middle, and anything smaller doesn’t have the mass to maintain heat and moisture. But don’t get all fussy about it – just do it at this point, and later when you’re sold on the process you can get fancy.
You can put most kitchen scraps in your compost, but don’t put meat, dairy, or oils or fats. So any vegetable matter, fruit peels (I put peach pits in, because they’ll add texture to the soil), bread, coffee grounds, coffee filters, tea bags, rice, pretty much anything but meat and dairy. Chop up the big stuff so it breaks down more easily – I slice banana peels, chop up melon rinds, etc. Add your leaves in the fall and your mown grass, unless you’re smart and just leave it on the lawn. You can even persuade your neighbors to let you add their leaves and grass too! The more grass you add, the better the compost will be for vegetables and annuals; the more leaves you add, the better it’ll be for trees, shrubs, and perennials. (Annuals like their nitrogen from nitrates, and green matter help that. Woodies and perennials like their nitrogen from ammonia, and brown matter helps that. Green matter fosters the growth of bacteria, which produce nitrates; brown matter supports fungi, which produce ammonia.)
Don’t put any weeds in the compost that have seeds still attached, and don’t put in diseased plants. Also no manure from animals that eat meat. It’s a good idea to shred some newspaper from time to time and include that, and it’s also smart to add some soil from your garden, because it will contain the microbes and other organisms that decompose the stuff you put in. The microbes will increase in the compost, and when you add it to your soil, you give your garden a booster shot of the organisms that help them take up nutrients and water.
Very smart people go into their compost from time to time and poke it around so more air gets to it. In some composting systems, this is hard to do if you’re short, because the angle for getting a pitchfork in is hard on the back. It never hurts to have taller friends or family. Compost also needs some moisture. Some systems allow some moisture from rain to seep in; if yours doesn’t, it can’t hurt to add some water from time to time so the material has the consistence of a damp sponge. You want the compost to get very hot; that’s part of what promotes decomposition, and it will get very hot in the center, even if you just dump it on a pile and put some chicken wire around it, but it will get hotter faster in a black plastic compost bin. In winter it will freeze, which won’t help but won’t hurt either.
I know people who make their own compost teas, and if you’re interested I can write about how to do that, but it does require some equipment.
I hope you’re having fun in the garden if you live in one of those warm places that can grow year-round. If you’re stuck in the north, though, we’re moving into catalog season, so that has its own fun. If you haven’t done it yet, this is a good time to make notes on what you did in the garden this year, what looked great – and what didn’t – and what you need to remember for next season.
So, since I’ve been at it, and since there have been a number of questions in the messages over the last year or so about composting, so I thought I’d write something on both theory and practice of creating and using compost.
Compost enriches the soil in many ways: it adds organic matter which contributes nutrients to the soil, it loosens the soil and makes it easier for roots to establish, it increases the ability of the soil to hold plant-available water, and it enables the soil to hold nutrients. Organic matter is a major structural component in binding soil particles together. It Improves tilth (the ease of working the soil) and strength of soil structure and decreases soil erosion. So when you add compost to your soils, you’re increasing the plants’ access to both food and water. Compost also contains lots of microorganisms, which work together with plants’ roots to enable them to take up food. Often, sick plants can be nursed back to health with the use of compost.
Compost also replenishes soil that’s been over-fertilized or herbicided. Chemical fertilizers, such as the ones you buy in most big box stores – you know, the ones that promise ‘miracles’ or ‘vigor’ - will, over time, kill off most or all of the microbes in the soil. Compost will restore them, and if you manage your compost, you can even produce soil that has the right kinds of microbes for the plants you want to grow.
So how do you get started?
First you need a place to start your compost. It’s good to choose a site that is convenient (so you’ll actually use it), has a hose available, is protected from the wind, in a place with decent drainage, and close (ish) to where the compost will be used. I have three compost bins: one’s just outside the kitchen door, and I usually put my food scraps in it. It compresses down really nicely, so I don’t worry about overstuffing it. Another is by the back fence, next to the garage. I use it for plant waste, and it does get overstuffed and the plants break down slowly. Also, I’m really lazy about harvesting from it. The third is between my house and my neighbor’s, to encourage them to contribute their food waste. It’s the biggest of the three, but also the hardest to harvest from.
Consider your system. You can do compost with something as simple as a chickenwire enclosure, but not everyone wants to put food scraps where raccoons have access. Also, some neighborhoods don’t take kindly to permeable structures. Some municipalities have ordinances about compost, so if you think yours might, it can’t hurt to check. It’ll probably be easy to find out online. Ask around and see what others in your area are using. You can also buy compost bins, both at hardware stores and garden centers and online. The city of Chicago makes compost bins available at a deep discount to residents once or twice a year. Maybe your municipality does something like that too. (We can also buy rainbarrels, but that’s another story.) The ones I got from the city have tops that lift off and doors at the bottom that you can remove to harvest the completed compost. I also have another bin that comes in pieces. Picture a square about 2’ across with a perimeter of plastic about 6” high. Three of these, one on top of the other, constitute the compost bin. To harvest you have to lift off each square of plastic, put the top one next to your current compost bin, and transfer the undecomposed material into it. Then you do the same with the next one till you get down to the good stuff. You harvest it and reassemble your bin next to its previous location. Frankly, I wouldn’t get another of these again: big pain in my you know what. You can also buy rotating drums that will process your organic material much more quickly into compost. You have to turn them pretty regularly but then you get compost in a few weeks. These are good if you want compost quickly, but they’re more expensive. I’d suggest doing an online search so you can see what’s available and then figure your budget and needs.
In my soils class we learned that the optimal size for a compost pile is one cubic yard. That’s a yard by a yard by a yard. It doesn’t sound big, but it produces a lot of compost. Anything bigger doesn’t get hot enough in the middle, and anything smaller doesn’t have the mass to maintain heat and moisture. But don’t get all fussy about it – just do it at this point, and later when you’re sold on the process you can get fancy.
You can put most kitchen scraps in your compost, but don’t put meat, dairy, or oils or fats. So any vegetable matter, fruit peels (I put peach pits in, because they’ll add texture to the soil), bread, coffee grounds, coffee filters, tea bags, rice, pretty much anything but meat and dairy. Chop up the big stuff so it breaks down more easily – I slice banana peels, chop up melon rinds, etc. Add your leaves in the fall and your mown grass, unless you’re smart and just leave it on the lawn. You can even persuade your neighbors to let you add their leaves and grass too! The more grass you add, the better the compost will be for vegetables and annuals; the more leaves you add, the better it’ll be for trees, shrubs, and perennials. (Annuals like their nitrogen from nitrates, and green matter help that. Woodies and perennials like their nitrogen from ammonia, and brown matter helps that. Green matter fosters the growth of bacteria, which produce nitrates; brown matter supports fungi, which produce ammonia.)
Don’t put any weeds in the compost that have seeds still attached, and don’t put in diseased plants. Also no manure from animals that eat meat. It’s a good idea to shred some newspaper from time to time and include that, and it’s also smart to add some soil from your garden, because it will contain the microbes and other organisms that decompose the stuff you put in. The microbes will increase in the compost, and when you add it to your soil, you give your garden a booster shot of the organisms that help them take up nutrients and water.
Very smart people go into their compost from time to time and poke it around so more air gets to it. In some composting systems, this is hard to do if you’re short, because the angle for getting a pitchfork in is hard on the back. It never hurts to have taller friends or family. Compost also needs some moisture. Some systems allow some moisture from rain to seep in; if yours doesn’t, it can’t hurt to add some water from time to time so the material has the consistence of a damp sponge. You want the compost to get very hot; that’s part of what promotes decomposition, and it will get very hot in the center, even if you just dump it on a pile and put some chicken wire around it, but it will get hotter faster in a black plastic compost bin. In winter it will freeze, which won’t help but won’t hurt either.
I know people who make their own compost teas, and if you’re interested I can write about how to do that, but it does require some equipment.
I hope you’re having fun in the garden if you live in one of those warm places that can grow year-round. If you’re stuck in the north, though, we’re moving into catalog season, so that has its own fun. If you haven’t done it yet, this is a good time to make notes on what you did in the garden this year, what looked great – and what didn’t – and what you need to remember for next season.
The Late Autumn Garden
It’s late-October, and my Midwest garden still has some life in it. The New England Asters have stopped screaming, but they’re more or less still whispering purple, there’s phlox with energy left, the obedient plant is still going, and the Monkshood. One rogue clematis bloom just appeared, and, can you believe it, an iris I planted last spring has sprung a delicate, heartbreaking white blossom. My pink climbing roses are lovely. Some of the annuals are plugging away too, although the petunias have had it, turned in, shut out the lights. But the lantana keep on going, and I have two adorable deep pink, almost peach, hibiscus that are braving the 55 degree days.
These brave souls awaken such complicated feelings in me. I talk to them, cling to them, knowing that their beauty is lost already in the inevitable victory of winter. Like Persephone, doomed to the underworld for half the year, they live for whatever sun is left, as if they’re determined to enjoy every last bit of light. It’s funny: in September I can’t wait for the New England Asters. Their purple is so vibrant, so assertively beautiful. But by now, when they’ve been blooming for a couple of weeks, I wish they’d held off a little longer, wish I had more time with them.
Here in Chicago, we used to have first hard frosts before Halloween. I can’t remember how long it’s been since that happened, but it’s years. Now the annuals hang on way longer than they used to, often till mid-November or later. But annuals have to hang on. I deadhead them so they’re still trying to reproduce: Snapdragons, lantana, pansies, some of the callibrachoas; and don’t get me wrong, I love them. But there’s also a part of me that wishes they’d just get it over with and we could face the gloomy gray of loss. Isn’t that weird? I guess it’s like the parts of people who are caring for loved ones in long terminal illnesses; there’s always a voice that wishes it were over.
We don’t really wish it were over. We wish the suffering were over. We want to hasten the renewal. The pain of anticipation is so keen. And of course once it’s done, once our loved one has passed, our gardens have wilted, we scream to have them back.
We are prisoners of time.
So what the autumn garden reminds me of is mortality. Yours, but mainly mine. Can we ever accept that? Our own inevitable deaths? They tell us young people feel immortal, but I think most of us do. No, I take that back; not immortal, but somehow exempt. It’ll happen to everyone else, but I just can’t believe it’ll happen to me.
Not just mortality, of course, but aging too. I think personally I’m more afraid of not living fully than I am of dying, and while I’m still around and kicking, I want to add to the beauty of the world one garden at a time.
And the gardens are beautiful in their dotage too; the flaming reds of the maples, the deep burgundies of Oak Leaf Hydrangeas and Virginia Sweetspire. A couple of weeks ago I was in upstate New York when the trees were at their prime, and the weather was brisk but sunny and life just seemed totally all right.
Where am I going with this? Are we over -50’s beautiful in our autumn too? Of course we are, but everywhere you look the image of beauty looks 23. Do we just need a better p.r. firm?
Nature teaches us so much. Nature will renew: next spring I’ll be oohing and aahing over the Scilla and Irises I just planted yesterday. I’ll be focused on Virginia Bluebells and Jacob’s Ladder, Kerria and Serviceberry. The next generation of my family will bring all that exuberant joy of spring into my life too. Life goes on. And just as fall yields to winter, winter can't hold out against spring.
But of course since we’re conscious creatures, I won’t forget the fall either.
I hope this fall helps me to become more intentional about what I want the time that’s left to be: what do I want to do? To see? To achieve? To contribute? What is my reason for living? And where do gardens fit in all that? These are the questions I’m finding hard to ignore. What about you? What questions does time force you to confront?
These brave souls awaken such complicated feelings in me. I talk to them, cling to them, knowing that their beauty is lost already in the inevitable victory of winter. Like Persephone, doomed to the underworld for half the year, they live for whatever sun is left, as if they’re determined to enjoy every last bit of light. It’s funny: in September I can’t wait for the New England Asters. Their purple is so vibrant, so assertively beautiful. But by now, when they’ve been blooming for a couple of weeks, I wish they’d held off a little longer, wish I had more time with them.
Here in Chicago, we used to have first hard frosts before Halloween. I can’t remember how long it’s been since that happened, but it’s years. Now the annuals hang on way longer than they used to, often till mid-November or later. But annuals have to hang on. I deadhead them so they’re still trying to reproduce: Snapdragons, lantana, pansies, some of the callibrachoas; and don’t get me wrong, I love them. But there’s also a part of me that wishes they’d just get it over with and we could face the gloomy gray of loss. Isn’t that weird? I guess it’s like the parts of people who are caring for loved ones in long terminal illnesses; there’s always a voice that wishes it were over.
We don’t really wish it were over. We wish the suffering were over. We want to hasten the renewal. The pain of anticipation is so keen. And of course once it’s done, once our loved one has passed, our gardens have wilted, we scream to have them back.
We are prisoners of time.
So what the autumn garden reminds me of is mortality. Yours, but mainly mine. Can we ever accept that? Our own inevitable deaths? They tell us young people feel immortal, but I think most of us do. No, I take that back; not immortal, but somehow exempt. It’ll happen to everyone else, but I just can’t believe it’ll happen to me.
Not just mortality, of course, but aging too. I think personally I’m more afraid of not living fully than I am of dying, and while I’m still around and kicking, I want to add to the beauty of the world one garden at a time.
And the gardens are beautiful in their dotage too; the flaming reds of the maples, the deep burgundies of Oak Leaf Hydrangeas and Virginia Sweetspire. A couple of weeks ago I was in upstate New York when the trees were at their prime, and the weather was brisk but sunny and life just seemed totally all right.
Where am I going with this? Are we over -50’s beautiful in our autumn too? Of course we are, but everywhere you look the image of beauty looks 23. Do we just need a better p.r. firm?
Nature teaches us so much. Nature will renew: next spring I’ll be oohing and aahing over the Scilla and Irises I just planted yesterday. I’ll be focused on Virginia Bluebells and Jacob’s Ladder, Kerria and Serviceberry. The next generation of my family will bring all that exuberant joy of spring into my life too. Life goes on. And just as fall yields to winter, winter can't hold out against spring.
But of course since we’re conscious creatures, I won’t forget the fall either.
I hope this fall helps me to become more intentional about what I want the time that’s left to be: what do I want to do? To see? To achieve? To contribute? What is my reason for living? And where do gardens fit in all that? These are the questions I’m finding hard to ignore. What about you? What questions does time force you to confront?
A Spring Surprise Party
Ah, October. Time to think about bulbs. If you’re in zones 5-7, October is the best month. If you’re in zones 2-4, you should have them in the ground already, but you can probably get away with doing it now, and if you’re in zones 8 or 9, you should be planning and buying your bulbs now for November planting.
I’ve done some blogs on bulbs in the last couple of years so I don’t want to get repetitive. I’d like to focus on some of my favorite less usual bulbs. Not tulips, daffodils, crocus, or hyacinth, but some of the more unusual ones.
Among my favorites are the tiny bulbs that look best in mass plantings: Scilla, Chionodoxa, Muscari, and Puschkinnia. I'll post some pictures if I can figure out how to do that.
Scilla has several species, and all are hardy to zone 4. Probably the most familiar is Scilla siberica, a deep blue flower that blooms in early-mid spring on 4-8” stems. Each stem has one flower, and you’ll need to plant a lot of them to make a splash, but when you do, it’s quite a show. There’s a railroad right of way I drive along to get to the Chicago Botanic Garden when the highway is underconstruction, and once upon a time someone planted about a zillion Scilla along one stretch. It’s always a thrill. A house I also drive by often has another zillion or so out front, and it’s like they’re giving a present to everyone who passes. Luckily the bulbs are inexpensive, so you can afford to plant a lot of them. Choose a spot maybe under some trees or in a field where it doesn’t stay wet in summer, and lay out a space where you’re going to put them. Dig down about 3” and plant the bulbs densely together, then cover with the soil. They will naturalize, too, so you’ll get more and more in years to come.
There’s a white version of Scilla siberica (called ‘alba’) and a deeper blue called ‘Spring Beauty.’
Scillia bifolia and Scilla mischtshenkoana (you get a prize if you can pronounce it) are also lovely; bifolia is a lavender color, and mischtshenkoana a pretty light blue.
If you live in zones 8-9, try Scilla peruviana. It’s taller, and hundreds of tiny flowers bloom together to make a kind of beehive shape . Really a stunner. If you’re in zone 7, some people say you can mulch it heavily and get it to grow there too.
Chionodoxa forbesii is hardy in zones 3-9. It blooms in early spring, so the common name is Glory-of-the-Snow. The tiny flowers have white centers and blue or lavender on the petals. These bulbs have 5-10 flowers per stem, and like the Scilla, they want to be planted in masses. (They like each other.) These guys bloom around the same time as crocuses, and you can even plant them in the lawn and then just mow them when it’s time to start that chore. If you live further south, you could try Chionodoxa nana, blue flowers with white centers, hardy to zones 7-9.
Muscari, or Grape Hyacinths, are also great planted in masses. They have clusters of tiny flowers that look sort of like a bunch of grapes, if you can imagine a bunch of grapes that stays very upright. They come in a bunch of different colors. Muscari armeniacum is the most common version; it comes in a lot of cultivars, which means flowers in a number of colors ranging from intense blue, to lavender, to almost white. It’s good for zones 4-8. Muscari aucheri, which is good in zones 6-9, has smaller flower heads but more color choice, including a two-toned blue and white number called ‘Mount Hood.’ Those of you in zones 7-9 can grow Muscari macrocarpum, with yellow-green flowers that point out and are less densely clustered than the other species.
Some Muscari will naturalize quite aggressively. M. armeniacum has the advantage that its leaves go dormant in the summer but then regrow in the fall, so you can plant them on top of other bulbs. When it comes time to plant more bulbs, you’ll know not to plant there.
In fact, you can plant all of these tiny bulbs on top of other bulbs, and that produces a great display. Plant your larger bulbs – narcissus or tulips, hyacinths or lilies – at a depth 3 times the width of the bulb, often 6” or so. Then put some soil on top, and add the smaller bulbs. They will give your taller bulbs kneesocks.
Puschkinnia scilloides are also early spring bloomers, with spikes of white or light blue flowers to about 6-8”. Like the others, they should be planted together. They’ll bloom more or less between the Chionodoxa (early) and the Scilla and Muscari (later).
If you get excited about these very small bulbs, you could also check out the tiny Irises – Iris histriodes, with blue flowers only about 6” tall, Iris danfordiae, with yellow flowers similarly sized, Iris reticulate, which blooms really early (I’m always surprised when I see them out). These are hardy zones 3-9, so you’re most likely good to go on them. Put them somewhere you’ll pass by every day in early spring; it’s like a surprise party for yourself.
Another fun off-brand bulb is Fritillaria.
You may know the Fritillaria imperialis, with its bloom downward facing on quite tall stems. Those aren’t the ones I’m talking about. I have a small patch of Fritillaria meleagris in my yard; they’re a kind of deep purple, bell shaped flower on very slender stems, and they give me pleasure every spring. They like moist soil and shade, so if you have those conditions, you can get them in white as well as the deeper purple, and they’re a lot of fun.
Let me know what you’re planting for next spring!
I’ve done some blogs on bulbs in the last couple of years so I don’t want to get repetitive. I’d like to focus on some of my favorite less usual bulbs. Not tulips, daffodils, crocus, or hyacinth, but some of the more unusual ones.
Among my favorites are the tiny bulbs that look best in mass plantings: Scilla, Chionodoxa, Muscari, and Puschkinnia. I'll post some pictures if I can figure out how to do that.
Scilla has several species, and all are hardy to zone 4. Probably the most familiar is Scilla siberica, a deep blue flower that blooms in early-mid spring on 4-8” stems. Each stem has one flower, and you’ll need to plant a lot of them to make a splash, but when you do, it’s quite a show. There’s a railroad right of way I drive along to get to the Chicago Botanic Garden when the highway is underconstruction, and once upon a time someone planted about a zillion Scilla along one stretch. It’s always a thrill. A house I also drive by often has another zillion or so out front, and it’s like they’re giving a present to everyone who passes. Luckily the bulbs are inexpensive, so you can afford to plant a lot of them. Choose a spot maybe under some trees or in a field where it doesn’t stay wet in summer, and lay out a space where you’re going to put them. Dig down about 3” and plant the bulbs densely together, then cover with the soil. They will naturalize, too, so you’ll get more and more in years to come.
There’s a white version of Scilla siberica (called ‘alba’) and a deeper blue called ‘Spring Beauty.’
Scillia bifolia and Scilla mischtshenkoana (you get a prize if you can pronounce it) are also lovely; bifolia is a lavender color, and mischtshenkoana a pretty light blue.
If you live in zones 8-9, try Scilla peruviana. It’s taller, and hundreds of tiny flowers bloom together to make a kind of beehive shape . Really a stunner. If you’re in zone 7, some people say you can mulch it heavily and get it to grow there too.
Chionodoxa forbesii is hardy in zones 3-9. It blooms in early spring, so the common name is Glory-of-the-Snow. The tiny flowers have white centers and blue or lavender on the petals. These bulbs have 5-10 flowers per stem, and like the Scilla, they want to be planted in masses. (They like each other.) These guys bloom around the same time as crocuses, and you can even plant them in the lawn and then just mow them when it’s time to start that chore. If you live further south, you could try Chionodoxa nana, blue flowers with white centers, hardy to zones 7-9.
Muscari, or Grape Hyacinths, are also great planted in masses. They have clusters of tiny flowers that look sort of like a bunch of grapes, if you can imagine a bunch of grapes that stays very upright. They come in a bunch of different colors. Muscari armeniacum is the most common version; it comes in a lot of cultivars, which means flowers in a number of colors ranging from intense blue, to lavender, to almost white. It’s good for zones 4-8. Muscari aucheri, which is good in zones 6-9, has smaller flower heads but more color choice, including a two-toned blue and white number called ‘Mount Hood.’ Those of you in zones 7-9 can grow Muscari macrocarpum, with yellow-green flowers that point out and are less densely clustered than the other species.
Some Muscari will naturalize quite aggressively. M. armeniacum has the advantage that its leaves go dormant in the summer but then regrow in the fall, so you can plant them on top of other bulbs. When it comes time to plant more bulbs, you’ll know not to plant there.
In fact, you can plant all of these tiny bulbs on top of other bulbs, and that produces a great display. Plant your larger bulbs – narcissus or tulips, hyacinths or lilies – at a depth 3 times the width of the bulb, often 6” or so. Then put some soil on top, and add the smaller bulbs. They will give your taller bulbs kneesocks.
Puschkinnia scilloides are also early spring bloomers, with spikes of white or light blue flowers to about 6-8”. Like the others, they should be planted together. They’ll bloom more or less between the Chionodoxa (early) and the Scilla and Muscari (later).
If you get excited about these very small bulbs, you could also check out the tiny Irises – Iris histriodes, with blue flowers only about 6” tall, Iris danfordiae, with yellow flowers similarly sized, Iris reticulate, which blooms really early (I’m always surprised when I see them out). These are hardy zones 3-9, so you’re most likely good to go on them. Put them somewhere you’ll pass by every day in early spring; it’s like a surprise party for yourself.
Another fun off-brand bulb is Fritillaria.
You may know the Fritillaria imperialis, with its bloom downward facing on quite tall stems. Those aren’t the ones I’m talking about. I have a small patch of Fritillaria meleagris in my yard; they’re a kind of deep purple, bell shaped flower on very slender stems, and they give me pleasure every spring. They like moist soil and shade, so if you have those conditions, you can get them in white as well as the deeper purple, and they’re a lot of fun.
Let me know what you’re planting for next spring!
Seed Exchange Challenge
People have been emailing me off-group to ask how we're going to get this seed exchange going, so I have a suggestion. Go into your garden tomorrow and find five plants whose seeds you could harvest and share. Post those five. If you then see seeds you want, email the person privately to arrange an exchange. I imagine we don't want to post our mailing addresses for the world to see, but it should be safe enough in private messages. What do you think?
Rinda
Rinda
Seed Exchange
How about this: if you have seeds to exchange, send a reply with a list of what you have and whoever would like some can just email you with a request and an address. Ideally these would be exchanges, but it might be a matter of some one-ways. What do you think?
Rinda
Rinda
New Homepage
How do you feel about this new homepage? I don't even know where to find the blog I wrote yesterday on saving seeds and taking cuttings. It just seems less friendly to me. What do you think?
Rinda
Rinda
