A Mishmash of Garden Thoughts



Most of the garden knowledge I’ve gained over the years has been learned through my mistakes as I tried to turn Locust Hill from an abandoned farm into an attractive landscape.  You might not be familiar with a few things I’ve discovered so this column will be a sort of mishmash.

First, because I like to put a photo at the top of my columns,  let’s talk just briefly about the incredible weeds we’re all coping with this summer.  I weeded the little garden in the photo above about a month ago, and now it is once again drowning in weeds.  If only it were drowning in rain water!  The ground has been rock-solid  which makes getting a weed’s root impossible. Thoroughly watering an area early in the morning or late in the day when the sun isn't busy baking the soil helps, but I am very stingy about watering as I have a dug well.  One summer when the well got plugged up and we were without water, I was  the one to decend the ladder and solve the problem, a very unpleasant experience.

With global warming making everything grow so fast, I’ve discovered that buying a flat of Brussels sprout seedling from the nursery means they will start to produce sprouts long before cold weather arrives. That results in sprouts totally lacking in flavor.  I now start my sprouts from seeds directly in the garden in mid-June so they mature in October and have the great flavor that cool weather gives them.

Are you having trouble husking your corn this summer?  I don’t grow corn as I get the most delicious corn for free from the Fords who rent my cow pasture and hay fields, but I’ve noticed a big difference this year in husking it.  The husks have grown so thick and strong that it takes a professional wrestler to pull them off.  Since I am a weak and weary widow at the end of the day it takes me forever to husk my corn!

The warm weather is affecting lots of vegetables.  Imagine having juicy ripe tomatoes in early August, a real treat.  My bush beans are acting like pole beans, sprawling in all directions so it's hard to find the beans.   My peas... turns out my peas were one of my latest mistakes.  I always eat my peas right there in the garden, but the peas I've grown this year have pods that just wouldn’t split open.  It was so frustrating having to dig at each pod, bit by bit and getting a single pea at a time. 

Guess what.  I’d forgotten that I’d ordered a variety of snap pea called Cascadia, the kind you eat pod and all.  Pinetree Seeds doesn’t tell you much on their seed packets and I’d forgotten that for a change I’d ordered edible pod peas.  I’m afraid my mind is getting as dim as a flashlight with a weak battery!

Many years ago I planted pieces of rooted quince in my perennial border, thinking their early blooms would compliment the daffodils that bloom at that time. They did just that, but I definitely don’t recommend this idea.  Quince is a bush and every year it gets bigger and bushier and sends new shoots up in all directions.  They’ve become a real pain as their branches are full of thorns and require clipping every summer.  So just remember if you’re thinking of planting a quince that you can’t talk these shrubs into staying small and beautiful. 

No other tips, but some news.  Remember Golda Meir, my 25 year old goldfish who died last summer?  Many readers have asked if I’ve gotten a new fish for the pond to replace this amazing old lady, and last week I finally got around to it.

Golda Meir

Several readers suggested I get a Shubunkin, a fish that adapts well to new environments.  When I went to the pet store I saw that these fish have dark splotches and might be very hard to see in my pond.  Another fish swimming around in the tank was silvery white. The pet store lady said it was a Comet and should adapt to a new home just as well as a Shubunkin, so that's what I bought. 

 

Many readers sent me suggestions of names  for my new fish, but unfortunately I can’t remember any of them but the one that I decided to use, Ben Hur.  When I'd aclimated him to the water and let him slip into the pond, he dove down to the bottom and disappeared.  He probably won't be big enough to see for several years, and of course I may never see him again if his changed environment is too much for   him.    

Enjoy the rest of the summer and when cold weather comes enjoy seeing the weeds die!

Good and Bad Fences

A blog has such a different format than my old website that it wasn't until this past week that I read all the nice comments various readers have  made.  Thank you all so much.  In future I will respond to them.

All that talk about gates in my last column got me thinking about fences and how important they are, especially around a vegetable garden.  Having grown vegetables without the protection of a fence for 12 years, I know just how much heartbreak it can eliminate.

My first vegetable garden was way up behind the barn, which meant chickens scratching eagerly for grubs in my newly seeded rows, rabbits crunching merrily on my Buttercrunch or fat Mr. Woodchuck inviting his wife to dine on fresh broccoli.  Periodically the sheep or the heifers would escape from their pastures and trample through the garden, but we’ve always been lucky that the deer do not bother us, probably because the dogs live outside.

I felt so strongly about good fences that I had no trouble writing a song about them (to the music of Rodgers and Hammerstein’s “There is nothing like a Dame”) for one of my garden programs.

That’s the kind of fence we put around the vegetable garden when we moved it down to the backyard.  Planting the peas and cukes next to it meant they had something nice to climb, and made staking the tomato plant next to it much easier. It also elimintated the varmint problems.  Ooops, that’s not quite true.  When I grew strawberries in the vegetable garden, I had a real problem with chipmunks who adore strawberries and had no trouble getting over or through the fence.

I must have caught four or five of those little rascals in my Hav-a-Hart trap before I realized it was a hopeless solution.  I now grow my strawberries in a long row covered with netting just in back of a stone retaining wall which makes picking the ripe fruits a joy for someone with a bad back. 

I never raised strawberries in my first garden and don’t remember any chipmunks.  The most notable varmints back then were my dogs. Dogs are great companions and can’t really be considered varmints, but without a proper fence, ours were always lying down on the lettuce or searching through the rows for the rabbits they could smell. 

Hank’s Irish water spaniel, Bog, was the worst.  He loved radishes.  He’d go to the radish row, pull one up, set it between his paws and  consume it. I wish I had a picture of this crazy dog, foaming at the mouth from eating red hot radishes. 

Bog was a great retriever, so I had to be careful when preparing the soil for planting. If I found a rock and tossed it into the bushes near the garden, he would quickly find it and proudly bring them back to me.  That was bad enough, but when he discovered that if he put a rock in front of the lawn mower it would throw it for him I actually had to tie him up when I mowed the lawn.



Gottoo                          Clover

These are the two dogs I have now, Gottoo and Clover.  They often stand at the garden gate, obviously longing to join me while I’m working.  Clover is a rescue dog from Puerto Rico, a well-behaved lady who would probably just sit on the steps to the garden shed if I invited her in while I was planting or harvesting.  She never gives me any trouble. 

On the other hand, Gottoo is an incorrigible Basenji, who would cause infinite harm should I be stupid enough to leave the gate open.  Are you familiar with this breed of dog?  They’re as independent as a cat, cannot bark, but yodel when upset.  It was more than a year before Gottoo wagged her tail at me.  She has destroyed eye glasses, mail, pill bottles, in fact anything left within reach, and loves to tip over waste baskets and trash cans.



Apologies.  I guess I got waylaid from my subject, but I thought you’d rather see pictures of my dogs than pictures of fences.

Great Gates

                                      

Do you have a fence on your property? We have a lot of fences on Locust Hill.  The upper and lower sheep pastures are fenced, as well as the cow pasture and the vegetable garden. How to get over, under or through all those fences requires a variety of solutions.

The gate pictured above is two-sided so it is wide enough to accommodate a truck or tractor.  It has good hinges and opens and shuts with ease.  The other gates wide enough for a truck or tractor to go through are another matter.  We call them Texas gates.  A Texas gate is just a continuation of the barbed wire fence that encloses a pasture, its end post slipped through loops at top and bottom of the gate post.  It’s awkward and difficult to shut as the barbs get tangled together and the poles sag, making it hard to reach the loops. Much to my amusement, I recently discovered that in Texas this sloppy gate is known as a Yankee gate. In Maine it’s a Canuck gate, and in Bavaria a Prussian gate.  Obviously no one wants to take credit for this lazy man’s gate. 

The cow pasture is very large and its barbed wire fence has four different gates, but the section that stretches between our house and daughter Bridget’s cottage on the other side of the meadow has no gate, having been put up long before there was a need for one.  In the first few years after Bridget and John’s little house was built we crawled under this fence every time we went back and forth, all too often catching our rumps on a barb.

  

It took Hank a while, but he finally found the perfect way to solve this problem. From the old house foundation in the upper cow pasture, he found a large flat rock about a foot and a half high.  He maneuvered it onto the stone boat and dragged it over to the fence. Once he’d positioned it half way under the bottom barbwire, it became a stile.  Step up on the rock, swing a leg over the top strand of barb and step down on the other side.  Since grabbing hold of the wire could be nasty, Hank slit pieces of black plastic tubing and slipped them over the wires to make a pleasant handhold.





The gate to the vegetable garden is the one I really want to tell you about.  We call it the “No Wait Gate.”  I probably go through it twenty times a day in the summer, and even when I’m pulling the garden cart, carrying a bushel basket of compost, or balancing a grandchild on my hip, I can open and shut this gate with my foot.

The No Wait Gate consists of a light wooden frame 4 ½ feet wide and 3 feet high.  It has a diagonal support and is covered with light fencing.  Instead of hinges it has screw eyes, screws with circles at their ends. The gatepost has a matching pair of screw eyes, so that a piece of doweling can be slipped through the top and bottom pairs to create a loose hinge.  The lower pair are placed 3 inches above the ground so the gate hangs clear of the ground.  The gate is easily removed in the fall before snow can block it. 



The edge of the gate opposite the “hinged” side rests on the latch, a notched piece of wood rounded on the end and nailed to the fence post. Because the doweling hinge has enough “give,” it allows me to lift the gate up and over the notch with my foot to open the gate, or slide it over the rounded end to slip back into the notch when closing it.  “Look, Ma! No Hands”

Anyone could build the No Wait Gate, so I’ve tried to give you very clear directions.  Neither our dogs nor our sheep can figure out how to open it, but our grandchildren learned to lift it with their hands at about the same time that they learned how important it is to SHUT THE GATE, and how they delighted in slamming it.!





Seeing Red

The flag at the Blackberry River Inn 

It’s probably just because I’m getting to be too set in my ways, but I find it depressing how things have changed since I was a kid.  Because it’s about to be the 4^th of July, I’ve been thinking about the American flag.  I remember being taught that flying the flag wasn’t allowed in bad weather or after sunset.  When we were given the privilege of raising the flag at school we made sure it didn’t get dirty, wet or even touch the ground.

I guess once folks started burning the flag, all these ideas became obsolete, like ladies wearing hats in church or men dressing in a coat and tie at a cocktail party.  Nowadays I see the Stars and Stripes day and night, rain or shine.  I’m not being critical, just making a comment.  The only flag on Locust Hill is in the attic, has 38 stars and is probably full of moth holes.

I can remember when I was around eight or nine our class planted a flower bed that stunned us the following spring by bursting forth as the American flag – seven rows of red tulips interspersed with six rows of white ones and a blue square of I can’t remember what, probably scilla, with white stars.

I’m not so patriotic that I’d contemplate planting such a flower bed, any more than I’d overpay my taxes to help reduce the national debt.  Red, white and blue is a great color scheme for flags and 4^th of July parades, little girls’ dresses and little boys bedspreads.

Red, by itself, is a very strong color so an all-red garden is almost too overpowering to consider.  I’d better add, in my opinion, since beds of red cannas or salvias are very popular. I prefer to use this hue more sparingly.  A single splash of crimson in the garden will catch the eye the same way a pretty girl just home from the Caribbean will sparkle at a winter cocktail party in New England.  If all the guests sported that same gorgeous tan instead of looking white and pallid, she might not stand out.  Too much of anything ceases to be an eye-catcher.

Most annuals are available in red, but both seeds and seedlings are usually sold in mixed colors.  Perennials are easier to find labeled by color, and because they bloom for a limited time, they focus attention on different parts of the garden each month. 

I"m more fond of pinks and blues and have very little red in my garden, but one perennial I particularly like is the blood red Russell lupine. Even when the nurseries don’t label their lupines as to color, you can tell the red by its leaves, which are much darker than those of the pinks, blues and whites.  Unfortunately my red lupines are past their prime so I went over the the Freund's Nursery for a photo.  This is Celosia, also known by its more common name, cockscomb.  It comes in yellow as well as red, a tender annual and easy to grow from seed.

The campions (Lychnis) which bloom in July, are  a nicely contained perennial standing two to three feet high with attractive foliage and large, rounded clusters of fire-engine red flowers.  You may know them as soldiers on the green or scarlet lightning.

Another July bloomer is Monarda, more commonly called beebalm. Its shaggy Raggedy Ann flowers attract hummingbirds, who shimmer and hum over the bright red petals, slurping up the sweet nectar. That’s the best thing about red flowers. Hummingbirds are addicted to them.  These tiny birds are such a treat to watch that even if you're like me and aren't fond of red flowers, you should grow a few just for that reason. 

Have a happy 4^th of July, and be kind to your flag.

Who Loves Weeds??



Weeds make great compost

I’ve decided that reading the Wall Street Journal every day is emotionally exhausting. My feelings run the gamut from fury and frustration to despair and disgust. Rarely do I read anything that’s remotely cheerful, and it’s only once in a blue moon that I find an article related to my own subject, gardening.

For someone who has to dream up a new garden column every two weeks, that is a delight, so I was happy to find a two-page article last week entitled “Why We Must Learn to Love Weeds” by Richard Mabey, excerpts from his book “Weeds: In Defense of Nature’s Most Unloved Plants.”

I enjoy weeding, but do I have to love the weeds? The first page and half of the second gave no reasons why we should love them.  Instead it gave the many reasons why we dislike them,  how they sabotage our plans and ruin our visions of garden designs.  It described many horrible weeds, from New England’s poison ivy to the South’s ravenous kudzu that’s even worse than our bindweed, pictured above. .  Both are obviously related to the Boston Strangler.

On top of that, was the discouraging news that it’s our fault that weeds thrive in the company of humans. We are their natural ecological partners, clearing the soil so that they are most often found where we’ve been weeding!  What an irony.

At last Mr. Mabey offered a few good things about weeds. “Weeds  green over the dereliction we have created. Their willingness to grow in the most hostile environments means that they insinuate the idea of wild nature into places otherwise quite shorn of it.”  He also mentioned that they gave us our first vegetables, our first medicines and our first dyes.  But then he went on to describe more dreadful weeds, one that I and many of my friends have fought to eliminate, horsetails,  and pointed out that their abrasive fronds were once used to polish pewter.    

Turning weeds into compost was one of the only useful things mentioned.   Yes, indeed.  What would we do with all those pulled weeds if we didn’t compost them.  And they do make great compost, full of nutrients. I’ve always felt that the process of composting is one of Mother Nature’s miracles, turning a pile of  greenery into something as tasty looking as chocolate cake.

Are you familiar with Japanese knotweed, Polygonum custpidatum?  My dead-end road is edged with this aggressive weed which can grow to six or seven feet in a summer.  Its blossoms are white drooping panicles, followed by brown berries.  I think everyone living on Locust Hill Road has tried to eliminate it from their property, but with no success.  It spreads by rhizomes and seeds.  Digging up the rhizomes just encourages the bits left behind to start a bigger, better colony of knotweeds.  Cutting the plants down, even 3 times a summer, does little good.  Spraying with poison can stop them temporarily, but they soon come back.  How could anyone love the noxious knotweed?

Some weeds are actually attractive and do well in difficult places.  I have a handsome patch of variegated goutweed just below my sugar maple.  This plant is definitely considered a weed.  It spreads like measles and once established is very difficult to get rid of.  Fortunately my patch is bordered by lawn and a flagstone terrace so it is unable to spread, provided I nip off all the blossoms it produces before they go to seed.  It thrives in deep shade among the roots of the maple tree where nothing else could survive.

My apologies.  I didn't mean to write such a critical column, but I think  the title of Mr. Mabey's article was rather deceiving and set me up to be disappointed.  I don't really hate weeds, but loving them is asking a bit much.

An Artist's Garden

                     

Have you ever bought one of those flower seed collections the catalogs all brag about?  The most popular ones produce a huge variety of wild flowers, but there are also many other types – cut flowers, shade lovers,  even one promising  continuous bloom of bulbs from spring until fall.

Most gardeners I know who’ve tried planting a collection have had little success, so I’d like to tell you about my experience planting “The Artist’s Garden,” a collection of 150 varieties of flowers that Claude  Monet had grown at Giverny, his famous garden outside Paris.

In 1987 when I discovered the freezer still contained six packages of vegetables I’d put up in 1984 I realized it was time to shrink the vegetable garden.  It was 50’ x 50’, filling the entire back yard and had fed our family of five for many years, but with all the children married, it obviously was way too big.

What better place to begin a flower garden than an area that had been tilled and manured, weeded and watered, was full of sunlight and nicely protected from  early frosts?   The Artist’s Garden packet, given to me for Christmas several years earlier, had been sitting in a drawer unopened, since I’d never figured out where to plant it.  Now I’d found the perfect place!  I'm sure choosing it was the reason my Monet garden became such a success.

That winter I opened the Artist’s Garden packet and began reading.  What a challenge! The list of flowers included in the collection was awesome.  Groups of either annuals or perennials were sorted by color and size – Annual/short/blue - Perennial/tall, yellow. _Annual/medium/red-pink. etc.  All the names were in Latin.  The design instructions were not exactly helpful. either.  “Do what you think will look good. There are no rules.”  Hmm. I’ve never been fond of rules, but in this case I could have used some.

Once it finally warmed up in late May, I raked and roughened up the soil, then broadcast each container of seeds over the area, scattering the tall varieties toward the garden’s edges, the short ones close to the paths, the in-betweeners in between.  Then I carefully sprinkled four or five buckets worth of compost over the seeds, raked again and was rewarded by Mother Nature who sent down a soft gentle rain.

As the dozens of unfamiliar seedlings began popping up that first summer, I spent hours trying to identify them.  Garden books are full of photos of beautiful blooms, but not a single one of a seedling.  I felt like Sherlock Holmes as I peered at these wispy little stalks of greenery with my magnifying glass and concluded that I should not pull up anything I couldn't recognise as a weed. 


Feverfew                                Campanula

As it turned out the most prominent flowers that summer were my own - feverfew and pink poppies - that always appeared whereever I sprinkled my compost.  They looked gorgeous, but they weren't Monet's, so I didn't bother taking a photo. The only Monet plants that showed up were the white and pink companulas.

But the following summer I began to see dozens of new flowers as the perennials matured and blossomed.  Solving the mysteries of those unknowns that had previously haunted me was a delight.  What fun to see the first delicate lavender blooms of Granny Bonnet columbine, so different from the yellow and red of the wild variety. What a relief to see that a clump of unknown seedlings had turned into handsome mallows.

There was one particular little vine  that I had resisted pulling up. It looked just like some useless weed, but at last I was rewarded  for my patience -- tiny pink blooms opened their eyes as they nestled in a bed of soft gray lamb’s ears. I'd saved a creeping baby’s breath, Gypsophilia repens-rosea..

I could write another whole  column on the Artist’s Garden, just describing the agonies and ecstasies I went through in the next five years.   My feelings ran the gamut from frantic frustration to ecstatic enthusiasm.  Excitement, exhaustion,  chagrin at my ignorance, every imaginable emotion except boredom. 

By the fourth year the rarest flowers had been pushed aside by more common species included in the collection - Queen Ann's lace, goldenrod and even morning glories, which strange other plants and deserve their other name, bindweed. 

I was also beginning to miss having a vegetable garden, so daughter Bridget and I dug up the plants from a corner of the garden and transported them across the meadow to her house.

I continued to enlarge my botanical knowledge finding new and different plants, but by the fifth year the endless maintenance seemed almost too much.  There is constant work required to maintain such a large crazy quilt of blooms looking well. Dead-heading the spent blossoms, keeping the weeds at bay, thinning the more invasive plants, staking the tall plants like delphiniums and foxgloves.  

By the fifth year  the Artist's Garden  had stopped being a labor of love and as fall neared I began calling my garden friends, inviting them to come and take home whatever plants they'd like.  Bridget and I cleaned up the leftovers and by October we had the first signs of the new lawn that would take over the area. The Artist's garden had been a marvelous introduction to new and different flowers, a never-ending supply of bouquets for the house and a fantastic learning experience. 

If you decide to try planting a seed collection, just remember that preparing the area is eccential and probably best done a year in advance.



The Gardener's Merry-Go-Round

Can you remember the excitement of a carnival’s Merry-go-round when you were a kid?  Racing to get on the big black horse, then deciding you like the white one better, then finally settling on the little gray pony so you’d be next to your buddy. The first warm days of spring are a gardener’s Merry-go-round  as we rush from one job to another. The excitement of seeing that your special rose bush has survived the awful winter, then noticing the delphiniums already need staking, heading back to the shed for stakes,  but unable to resist the sight of a scummy birdbath and getting a bucket instead and…

You get the picture.  Just a thousand different horses to choose from.  This year the first day my back was good enough to let me contemplate getting on my Merry-go-round, I thought I’d  start by checking out the Abitta garden.  To my amazement it was thick with Self-Heal, an interloper I’d never seen on Locust Hill before.  How or why it had managed to settle there, uninvited, was a puzzle.

Prunella vulgaris, the Latin name for self-heal, flips off my tongue with ease because in one of the early paragraphs in my Wildflower program I say “By the time I got married and moved to my husband’s home town, I’d long forgotten all those Latin names I learned in college Botany, and didn’t know whether Prunella vulgaris was a wildflower or possibly one of Hank’s old girlfriends.”

Fortunately good old Prunella has a small weak root and is easily pulled up, but once that job was done, my back needed a rest so I walked down the perennial border, just admiring the sight of the little green hands of lupine leaves, the dazzling clumps of forget-me-nots, unable to resist dead-heading finished daffodil blooms, finding a dozen peony shoots pushing up from under last year’s old leaves.

At the end of the border is a funny little building we call our Hottentot house.  Back in the early 70s we were inspired, having just enjoyed our first sauna  while visiting friends in Vermont,  to construct one of our own.  The Hottentot is a circular building made out of the tongue and groove boards from an old silo George Ford had just pulled down. We cut the boards into eight foot lengths, set them up against the circular foundation we’d poured, and tightened them together with wire, the same way you’d make a barrel, and  topped them with a plywood roof. Inside we constructed a platform which we filled with sling-backed chairs (so much more comfortable than benches,) put in an old kerosene stove  and  filled its top with a pile of nice round stones.  

We had a double reason to build the sauna.  Because our new pond leaked badly, it was only full and swimmable in the spring and fall, and resembled a mud puddle in the heat of summer.  The sauna allowed us to dive into the icy water in April and May and again in October and November.  A few years later we added industrial rubber to the roof so I could plant a variety of flowers on it. The roof's baking heat required  almost daily watering, more frequent than I could manage, so the only plants to survive were dandelions and weeds, but we continued to use the sauna frequently until the kids were married and were no longer living at home. From then on it was only used to store inner tubes, life preservers and other swimming paraphernalia.

What can happen to a neglected building over a period of twenty years can be shocking.  When I opened the door that day, I could hardly believe what I saw.  The weight on the roof combined with termites had collapsed the large roof beam. The silo boards had rotted in places, leaving large holes in the walls. Woodbine vines growing at the back of the building had snuck inside and wrapped themselves around the chairs whose cloth backs were tattered rags.   Decay had turned our Hottentot house into a catastrophe. 

I’m sure if Hank were here instead of in heaven, he’d have some wonderful idea of what to do, but I am a total blank. Is it worth repairing? If I tear it down, what do I do with the cement floor?  Should I buy a gazebo to take the Hottentot’s place?  I’ve been looking at dozens of gazebos on the Internet.  They're very expensive and they're just too cutsey.  I can't picture any of them on Locust Hill. And what would we use a gazebo for anyway?   It would be too open to hide the mess of swimming gear (with the leaks fixed, the pond is swimmable all summer long) or the tangle of weeds and woodbine sprawled behind it.  If any of you have a suggestion to solve this Hottentot problem, please send me an email.  In the meantime, I've shut the door.

Before the day was over both my back and I had cheered up and I continued on my Merry-go-round, transplanting a half-dozen clumps of forget-me-nots that had appeared in the vegetable garden to spots in the border, weeding around the blueberry bushes I bought last year and mulching them with fresh pine needles. They didn't look very happy, so the last thing I did was mix up some Spray ‘n Grow (a marvelous concoction that acts like a double dose of vitamins to plants) and gave the blueberries a bath and used the rest of the mix on the clematis vines, tree peonies and other perennials.

What a treat to finally spend a warm day in the garden.  I hope you're enjoying your days on the garden Merry-go-round.  We've certainly waited long enough for spring to arrive, haven't we?