Still crazy after fourteen years by Elizabeth Licata

Pre-blog, my garden practice gets lost in the fog of history. I know I started gardening seriously in 1999, when we bought property, but I am not quite sure exactly what I was doing month by month until 2005, when I started documenting it with a blog. And that’s the only reason I started; it wasn’t to rant, exactly, though that came naturally early on. It was to keep track of what I was doing.

Now, I don’t much care about keeping track, but I was wondering when I started bulb forcing en masse, which has been my normal fall gardening activity for some time. I see an ebay “you won!” email for a vintage forcing glass from 2003, so it must have been at least since then. After about ten glasses froze, I stopped putting those in the root cellar, instead just pulling bulbs from soil and transferring them to the glasses when the time was right.

I know that not too many gardeners bother with any of this; many find the bulb-chilling period too onerous, and, I am sure, think the whole process is wasteful, as forced bulbs are considerably weakened for future planting (though it’s possible). But I get enough out of it to make up for all that, including winter gardening fun, holiday gifts, and—most recently—the pleasure of being called crazy by the very bulb-sellers who are taking my money. That (above) was one of my last notes from Scott Kunst, the former CEO and founder of Old House Gardens, and if anything could have confirmed my determination to continue my mad quest to make hundreds of flowers grow inside from December through March, that note was it.

Thanks, Scott! As of now I have 175 hyacinths and tulips in the root cellar, and plan to add the rest to the unheated attic (which I find works just as well) in the coming weeks. It’s a mild sort of madness—these days, it helps keep me sane.

Still crazy after fourteen years originally appeared on Garden Rant on October 31, 2017.

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3 Common Winter Pests in Central PA

Winter may not be a time of year that people equate to dealing with pests in their home. But the truth is, your home has everything you and pests need to survive and thrive: shelter, food, and water. As temperatures start to descend through the fall and into the winter, pests are planning ahead and seeking out a place to overwinter and endure the long, cold season. Let’s learn about a few of these unwanted winter house guests.

3 Common Winter Pests

Mice

The word “mouse” comes from an ancient Sanskrit word (musha), which means to steal; stealing is exactly what mice do. They move in without asking and scrounge up nesting material from insulation, dryer lint, furniture foam, or any other suitable products. Then they live in wall voids, behind stored items, in or under cabinets, in your pantry, above drop ceilings, and even under the hood of vehicles parked in your garage. They feed on food you bought with your hard earned money and then leave 30 to 50 droppings and 300 plus micro-droplets of urine anywhere and everywhere they travel in a 24 hour period. Mice reproduce very quickly and a female mouse can have eight litters in her short life span, which is often less than a year. She is capable of giving birth to a litter every 24 to 28 days, and young mice are sexually mature within 5 to 8 weeks. Professional mouse control methods can incorporate identifying and or sealing access points, mechanical traps, snap traps, glueboards, and tamper resistant bait stations.

Centipedes

Centipedes are a pest that is very high on the list of bugs people hate because of their size, speed, and “creepy crawly” impact. They usually live outdoors, but when residing near a home’s foundation they can come inside seeking shelter, warmth, or a tasty meal. They feed on insects and spiders but in spite of that fact homeowners are not likely to want to have them around their property. Larger centipedes have the ability to bite, but ironically not with their mouth parts. The front legs appear and function like jaws, and do in fact contain venom glands. Centipede bites are usually not serious, but an over the counter antiseptic should be used on the wound, and a doctor consulted if the skin is broken.

Ongoing centipede problems should first be addressed by eliminating harborage areas such as piles of rocks, trash, boards, or other debris that is close to the exterior foundation. Exclusion, or the sealing up of cracks or voids providing access can often be effective to lessen or eliminate centipedes finding their way in. Residual insecticides can be applied in cracks and crevices or as spot treatments in areas where centipedes may hide.

Silverfish

Silverfish: their name essentially reveals their appearance: silver in color and shaped somewhat like a fish. Silverfish have the ability to live indoors or outdoors, but often go unnoticed around the exterior. They are commonly found inside especially during the colder months when people are spending more time indoors. They can be found almost anywhere inside the house, but are often found in high moisture areas close to a food source. They lay their eggs in protected areas such as behind baseboards, and they hatch in about 30 days, depending on moisture and temperature conditions.

Silverfish can eat a variety of foods including oats, flour, paper, starch, glue, paste, textiles, and dead insects. They can do considerable damage to some natural and synthetic fibers, books, magazines, and other paper products. Control is attained through application of residual insecticides labeled for control of silverfish. Treatment can be applied in basements, attics, closets, behind baseboards, under bathroom fixtures, and around water pipes.

Contact A Pest Control Professional Today

These pests and others can be addressed by contacting your local Pest Control Professional. They have the training, experience, certifications and licenses, application equipment, and the most effective materials to keep your warm and cozy home as pest and worry free as possible this winter.

About the Author — Barry Bradley

Barry Bradley is a Master Pest Control Technician for Tomlinson Bomberger and has been caring for pest control needs on residential and commercial properties since 1993. He is licensed through the State of PA and also holds an Associate Certified Entomologist accreditation.

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The Boston Ivy, 2017

Once a year, usually when we are at our peak of fall color, I try to write about the Boston ivy that covers a neighboring 100 foot long wall parallel, opposite, and next door to Detroit Garden Works. In the early days of the shop, that originally giant cream colored concrete block wall towering over [...]

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A Back Porch Recipe for Peace by Bob Hill

From left: dogwood and winterberry. bark of three-flowered maple.

Gardening offers me an outside recipe for inner peace, or at least the opportunity to go hide on our screened-in back porch and ponder the meaning of life, mortality and the furrowed bark and brilliant fall colors of our three-flowered maple.

I look out, and the pink and white dogwood trees I planted almost 40 years ago at a time and place in life where I was as uncertain and vulnerable as they are now fully grown, their arching limbs solid and secure, and yet still reaching out beyond all that toward whatever must be.

I sit alone on that porch of our 150-year-old farmhouse and see a once bare and weedy landscape flowing with such home-made history, promise and fate, becoming every day more aware it’s all passing me by. What began with my hands will quite soon be out of my hands.

My recipe to deal with that approaching finality is to enjoy the moment, to look out where the dogwood limbs almost touch the bright-red fruit of the winterberry bush, itself to soon serve as desert for the cedar waxwings before they -as with so many Louisvillians – head south to Destin, Florida for the winter.

It is a recipe equal parts joy, pride and resignation. I knew very little of raising dogwood trees 40 years ago, or the winterberry bush, or the nearby blackgum tree with its waxy red and orange leaves that add to my autumnal joy and back-porch satisfaction.

I dug their birth holes with a sharp spade, enjoying the clinging dirt and easy sweat that came with it.  All that helped create my atavistic responses to some long-gone ancestor who went at the same basic chore with a sharpened stick and no need of pricey garden gloves or three-dollar bottles of water.

History and recipe come thickly in that area, which is named “Janet’s Garden” because it is well-weeded and organized – two attributes that own my wife but have so far escaped me.

Her garden, perhaps 30 feet behind our back porch, is our museum and water-fountain-mecca. It is flanked by two massive concrete planters that once served as cattle feeders at the long-gone Louisville Bourbon Stockyards.

Its low front iron fence came with our house – or at least we like to say so. There is no one left to prove us wrong. Its tall, spikey back fence came from a century-old Louisville Highlands home.

The garden centerpiece is the rusted metal frame of a window from the nearby Jeffersonville Quadrangle that first let in light in 1874 and served as a storehouse and shirt factory for the next four American wars.

All peace recipes must come with their own bloody histories, too.

The recipe ingredients on our eight acres go well beyond Janet’s garden. They include a massive pin oak, itself once so vulnerable my father backed over it in his car.

It now towers over all in our yard, nurturing squirrels – our guests in need of shade – and memories of my parents.

Our barn is rough-cut, lumber, a new-old structure built from other wooden barns that were torn down one board at a time and hauled home to recycle history once the old nails were removed.

The beams that support it came from a forgotten funeral home, its ghosts all left behind. The barn went up over a year’s time with help from a lot of hammer-handy friends and about ten cases of beer – another old recipe.

The stone wall that angles around the barn came from a stone wall at the back of a neighbor’s field that time and weather had laid low and buried in the weeds.

Robert Frost was right about that one. Our good neighbor sold it all to me for $100. Our son and I loaded all those heavy, hand-chiseled keepsakes into a once-white pickup truck – 14 loads in all – and brought them home for reuse, this time as my wall.

Such ownership is temporary. I have no doubt that after I’m gone someone else will come to buy those stones to mix into their back-porch recipe.

Our daughter still lingers here at our farm home, too.  She loved its nature. She joined our local 4-H with her mother as her teacher. She grew her own flower memories.

A straight-A student, she learned the multi-tasker jump shot that helped her gain an Ivy League entrance on a cement basketball court constructed with the help of even more friends in the shade of our volunteer maple trees.

The view out our back porch slides over to a paw paw tree, a weeping green fir, a now massive sugar maple first transplanted in a wheelbarrow, and a dominant Kentucky Coffee Tree with its dark, heavily ridged bark and wide welcoming arms. Even Hoosiers need a Kentucky Coffee Tree.

The ingredients all blend together – the old and the new, the sense of time, the sense of place -and I never tire of its meaning and offerings of peace.

It is history. It is friends. It is family – the three ingredients of life that have always meant the most to me, and surely must be the same with you.

A Back Porch Recipe for Peace originally appeared on Garden Rant on October 30, 2017.

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Can This Marriage Be Saved?

Gardeners have a complicated relationship with their gardens. The balance of power goes back and forth, much like any other serious relationship. A treasured plant/child that fails to thrive-whose fault is that? Exasperation is as prevalent as passion over a garden. A death in the garden, as in a major tree, is tumultuous, and instantly [...]

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Dueling Gardeners on Stage by Susan Harris

Though not a big theater-goer, I HAD to see the comedy  “Native  Gardens” when it played in DC because it’s about next-door neighbors representing different demographics and attitudes toward gardening. I’ll admit that I laughed, but the stereotypes in the play – of people and of plants – bugged me no end.

First, the dueling couples. The people on the right are passionate about their garden, involved in the local gardening community, and enter their garden in the Potomac Horticultural Society’s garden contest every year. They’re old, white, a defense contractor and a retired bureaucrat, and just in case we’re not sure what to think of them, we learn that they’re Republican. Are they representative of gardeners today or negative stereotype from another era? Either way, I’m offended.

The couple on the left are the opposite in many ways, and clearly the darlings of the playwright and the audience. They’re young, Latinos, a successful lawyer and his PhD candidate wife who advocates for native plants and preaches loudly about how terrible the neighbors’ plants are. You know, hydrangeas and azaleas. “Your plants are hurting the environment!” she proclaims more than once.

They all agree on one thing – that the chainlink fence has to go!

The saving grace in all these stereotypes is the use of the young couple’s Latino origins to enlarge the topic beyond plant origin to human origin. When the older man claims he should be able to continue to garden on some land that turns out to belong to the neighbors, he claims “squatter’s rights,” going against his presumably anti-squatting grain. And when the older couple accuses the native-plant supporter of being anti-immigrant, her retort is that nonnative plants are colonialists who arrived here to conquer the indigenous population. Clever!

Mexican-American playwright Karen Zacarias is perfectly suited to addressing the characters’ different national origins. Whether she’s suited to tackling disputes over plant origins is another matter. According to this article, the dueling gardener idea came to her at a dinner party.

Someone brought up a fight they were having with their neighbors and someone else brought up a fight their parents were having with their neighbors, and we all started talking about how awful that is, because it’s where you live.

The two families have different ways of gardening and it’s about the culture of gardening and the politics of plants. It’s a big-hearted comedy with a lot of sharp little teeth in it. By focusing on plants, we are able to discuss so many different things going on in our culture right now and our country right now.

But where did the playwright get her understanding of plants, native or otherwise? Her representative declined my request for an interview so I don’t know, but she DID write three book recommendations into the play, in its most preachy moment. The older couple (and the audience) are told they should read:

• Garden Revolution: How Our Landscapes Can Be a Source of Environmental Change by Larry Weaner and Thomas Christopher
• Bringing Nature Home by Douglas W. Tallamy and Rick Darke
• Wild Urban Plants of the Northeast by Peter Del Tredici and Steward T.A. Pickett

Now the Tallamy book is an obvious choice but Garden Revolution is about meadows, so a surprising choice for urban audiences. But truly misguided is the selection of Del Tredici’s book defending invasive plants in urban settings. The three books are promoted in the theater lobby and website, and the DC Public Library is credited with helping the theater choose the books, which are also recommended on the library’s website. There the book descriptions confirm my suspicion that the book-picker hadn’t actually read them or was too unfamiliar the topic for the job.

Set Design Strategy Revealed

I’ll stop ranting now and end with an interview with set designer Joe Tilford, whose research into garden styles and plants is pretty interesting.

The Butleys, on the other hand, have been winning horticulture club prizes for their garden, though never the top prize, just honorable mentions.

“This is not an award-winning garden,” Joe said. “This is an award runner-up garden.”

To get a feel for what that meant, Joe consulted with a garden competition consultant. (“There are such things,” he said.)

The consultant told Joe that Frank Butley would probably force his plants to grow in such a way that they became a thick mass of colorful blooms. Unnatural, even.

The conflict between what is unnatural and what should be natural “is really important in the play,” Joe said. And the gardens — on one side a lush lawn, neatly trimmed hedges and compact flower beds; on the other, weeds and dirt — become the battlefield.

“We used dwarf roses — two different kinds,” Joe said of the Butleys’ garden. “We used azaleas. We used hydrangeas. We used peonies.”

Dueling Gardeners on Stage originally appeared on Garden Rant on October 27, 2017.

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There’s fall color—and fall color by Elizabeth Licata

Every day on my way to work, I always look at a certain house, just before I make my final turn. It is the one vibrant spot of color on a block, which, though perfectly nice, is typified by sedate, small front lawns and a few foundation plantings. But these people. These people are gardeners and plant lovers. They start with daffodils and tulips in April/May and continue with perennials and roses throughout the summer. But, interestingly, you don‘t really notice the roses until very late in the season, when they are almost the only plants blooming. The image here shows what they look like at the chilly, rainy end of October, with Halloween 5 days away. (I didn’t get too close because I do not know the homeowners and didn’t want to be lurking around their property. ) I love that the roses are different heights—not just one big planting of Knock-Outs, for instance.

Roses en masse never look that great as a composition; their individual forms show up better in close-up. But still, as November approaches in Western New York, you can’t do much better for a cheerful front yard planting. No mums, no Autumn Joy, no pumpkins—not that there’s anything wrong with those. Just a few remaining perennials and roses, which give me a lot more pleasure than the typical plants of fall.

At home, I still have a few roses coming out. I also have tropicals (above), lots of coleus, and my faithful lobularia; there hasn’t been anything close to a hard frost yet. I’ll be interested to see how late into the season my drive-by roses last.

There’s fall color—and fall color originally appeared on Garden Rant on October 26, 2017.

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Waiting for Camus by Allen Bush

Rose and ‘Heavenly Blue’ morning glory.

Albert Camus nearly got it right when he wrote: “Autumn is a second spring when every leaf is in flower.” The French philosopher didn’t clutter a good line with what really blossoms in autumn for many gardeners. In practical terms, with cooler temperatures, the weeds wind down.

This year, in Kentucky, just when we were relieved of day-after-day October temperatures well above normal, the ping-pong competition heated up.

Ping-pong?

No telling what the absurdist-minded Camus might have thought of ping-pong. That may have been a more fitting subject for his colleague Samuel Beckett.

Peter Vaananen captured the Millwood Trophy.

My neighbor Mac Reid and I play a couple of games each week in my Salvisa barn, as long as it’s not freezing cold.  From the first white blooming snowdrops in February until the last weeping willow drops its leaves in November, we are battling for ping-pong dominion in north Mercer County.

After another season of trash talking one another from opposite ends of the ping-pong table, we decided to lure new talent to the barn.

An idea was hatched. Rose and I would host the 1st Knox Lane Invitational Ping-Pong Tournament. The winner would be awarded the not-quite-yet prestigious Millwood Cup—a mothballed trophy (once used by Mac for chess matches with his son) now re-commissioned for ping-pong.

We would celebrate friendships.

Simple and Michael Bowell with dogs (Willie, Rufus and Lula Mae) and the aromatic aster, ‘Raydon’s Favorite’. BTW…Today is Simple’s 66th birthday. Happy Birthday Simple!

Three weeks prior, walnuts the size of baseballs, covered in green, leathery husks, started pounding the ground. Hedge apples were scattered around—the size of softballs or bigger.

Danger! Avoid walking near the bombing zones of either.

Goldenrods had gone by. Aromatic asters and morning glories could wait no longer for Camus.

Finally.

Sassafras

Two young Sassafras put on a show in orange and red. I was proud they had come this far. I had started the pair from seeds seven or eight years ago. They still have not flowered. I’m hoping at least one of them will be a seed-bearing female. I rarely see the blueberry-colored, small fruit in gardens or in the wild.

Ping-pong players, and a few non-players, came to Knox Lane last Sunday.

Friends sat on lawn chairs and picnic tables. They ate, they drank; they talked and laughed.

It was a colorful fall afternoon.

Good enough for Albert Camus.

 

Waiting for Camus originally appeared on Garden Rant on October 25, 2017.

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At A Glance: Recent Work

Plenty of fall containers got planted this past week.  In looking over all the pictures, it is obvious that the star of the show (after Marzela, of course) is the story of the leaves. Ornamental cabbage and kale are known for their substantial leaves. This container is a mass of different types of large blue [...]

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Discovering Sally Fox, Legendary Cotton Breeder by Susan Harris

At my town’s film festival last weekend I met a filmmaker just out of USC film school whose masters project had been accepted by (and then won an award from) the festival. The short film – True Colors by Bethann Morgan – is the scripted true story of Sally Fox, the plant breeder who invented a naturally grown and dyed cotton that’s strong enough to be machine-spun and is therefore marketable. Her path to plant-breeding glory naturally ran into global competition and pushback from the Cotton Board – the lobby for conventional growers of white cotton, the kind that needs lots of pesticides, bleaching and dyeing.

This student film – funded largely by the Alfred P Sloan Foundation, which supports science education – opened my eyes to the harms caused in the production of white cotton, and introduced me to an inspiring young female plant breeder who never gave up.

There’s no trailer for True Colors but I did find this old Smithsonian Institution film about Fox and her research, which began in the ’80s. One interesting detail among many is that green and brown cottons deepen in their coloration with wear and washing rather than fade like conventionally dyed cotton.

More recently, there’s lots online lots about Fox, heralding her as “legendary,” for example, in this article.

Her early inspiration is detailed here:

The story goes that she began weaving around the age of 12, buying her first spindle with money from babysitting jobs. Sally studied biology and entomology in college, then traveled to Africa with the Peace Corps to help develop natural ways to fight disease-causing pests. This exposed her, for the first time, to commercial fertilizers and pesticides.

Returning to the US, Fox got a job as a pollinator for a cotton breeder working on pest-resistant plants. There, she discovered some cotton seeds that were pest-resistant, but brown. So, as an experiment, she began breeding brown and, eventually, green cotton. She would select the best seeds that produced the longest fibers, replanting them time and again until she created two colored cottons that were long enough to be spun on a machine.

This article about woman inventors describes her $10 million cotton-selling business as “revolutionizing the industry.”

It was the best of both worlds – a more environmentally friendly product that was also turning a profit. After globalization forced most of the spinning mills to South America and Southeast Asia, Fox’s business took a hit, but she continues to make new naturally colored cottons to this day. Each new color takes about 10 years to produce – but, for Sally Fox, the patience is worth the payoff.

Yep, Sally Fox is  back in business.

Learn more about naturally colored cotton.

Discovering Sally Fox, Legendary Cotton Breeder originally appeared on Garden Rant on October 20, 2017.

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Erasing nature by Elizabeth Licata

Photo by Zoe Rodriguez Photography

“acorn, adder, ash, beech, bluebell, buttercup, catkin, conker, cowslip, cygnet, dandelion, fern, hazel, heather, heron, ivy, kingfisher, lark, mistletoe, nectar, newt, otter, pasture and willow.”

These are the words that have been removed from the Oxford Junior Dictionary.

“attachment, block-graph, blog, broadband, bullet-point, celebrity, chatroom, committee, cut-and-paste, MP3 player and voice-mail.”

These are the words that have replaced them.

This is not a new controversy, but the first I’d heard of it was during a moving and enthralling talk by author Terry Tempest Williams, given last week as part of a local lecture series by internationally known authors. It’s called Babel and is put on by Just Buffalo Literary Center.

These replacements of words associated with nature correlate well with the ongoing threats to protected natural spaces, including US national parks and monuments. First, there are the dangers imposed by nature—wildfires, coastal erosion, and flooding. Then there are those that have long been imposed by man—pollution, oil drilling, mining, development, and unregulated recreational uses. Then there are the new threats to reduce the size of certain monuments and/or open them to more commercial uses. Tempest Williams’s latest book, The Hour of Land, is a poetic celebration of America’s national parks. During her talk, she spoke of her favorite parks; she also spoke of recently designated monuments that are threatened by the current administration.

In a recent review of twenty-seven national monuments, there are vague plans to reduce the boundaries of six and allow “traditional” uses (drilling and mining) of four. Among the threatened monuments are Bears’ Ears, a red rock expanse in Utah; Gold Butte, a place of petroglyphs, canyons, and desert in Nevada; Cascade-Siskiyou in Oregon/California, which would be opened to logging; and several areas in the Pacific and Atlantic oceans that are homes to reefs, atolls, and islands filled with protected species.

The current thinking in the administrative branch seems to be that commercial/industrial needs are more important than all other needs and that all lands, even lands as wild as these, are there for us to use or denude as we see fit. It’s not just the national monuments, either. Coal-fired power plants are undermining the Great Smoky Mountain National Park, Grand Canyon National Park has long been challenged by pollution, and the Everglades is a mess. Is it likely that agencies now led by those who have long opposed regulation will do much to mitigate these conditions?

Sadly, I have visited all too few of the parks Tempest Williams writes about in her book—and none of the monuments she discussed during her talk. But I agree with her when she says (in a recent interview): As we watch this administration undermine decades worth of environmental laws and regulations …. dismantling and discrediting science, including forbidding government employees from even speaking the words “climate change”—we can rise up and speak out against these injustices. We can call Congress, we can write letters and opinion pieces, we can attend community meetings, and we can meet these direct assaults on all we hold dear, each in our own way with the gifts that are ours. But we must act.

Erasing nature originally appeared on Garden Rant on October 17, 2017.

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The Case Against Earthworms by Thomas Christopher

When I dug in my Berkshire garden this summer I found a host of earthworms.  That, it turns out, is bad.

I was raised to regard earthworms as the gardener’s best friend.  It’s true, these benevolent creatures (or so I regarded them then) aerate the soil with their tunnels and eat organic litter from the surface of the soil, carrying it back underground to excrete it as “castings” that are full of nutrients for plant roots.

My mother, a devoted gardener and my first horticultural instructor, always impressed on me the beneficial role that earthworms play in the garden.  Later, when I had graduated college and was studying horticulture at the New York Botanical Garden, my favorable view of these creatures was reinforced by a book written by no less an authority than Charles Darwin: The Formation of Vegetable Mould through the Action of Worms, with Observations on their Habits.   In this book, Darwin cited calculations that the population of earthworms in the average garden numbered some 53,767 per acre and calculated from his own observations that, depending on the quality of the soil, worms deposited as much as 18.2 tons of castings on the surface per acre per year.  Darwin regarded this as marvelously beneficial, which in some settings it is.  But in the northern United States these industrious creatures are a catastrophe from an ecological perspective.

For earthworms are not indigenous to the northern United State; they were wiped out by the glaciers of the last ice age.  And although there are many species of earthworms that are native to the southern parts of our country, most of the ones we find up here are introductions from Europe or Asia.  Native or foreign, though, earthworms can have dramatic effects in changing the quality of the soil, consuming and decomposing much of its organic content.

This transformation has an adverse effect on native vegetation.  Especially harmful are some of the non-native worms, which are enthusiastic and efficient consumers of organic litter on the forest floor.  This layer of fallen leaves and twigs acts as a mulch and a reservoir of nutrients for surface rooted trees, ferns and wildflowers.  Eliminating it can drastically effect the survival of these species.  Nor are the natives the only plants at risk.  I know of one gardener in Connecticut whose woodland perennial garden was overrun by the large, hyper-active Asian earthworms popularly known as “jumping worms” or “crazy snake worms” (Amynthas agrestis).  In a matter of months the shredded oak leaves with which this gardener had mulched her beds disappeared, and the soil was so over-aerated that plant roots dried out.  She no longer mulches – that just incites a worm population explosion — and periodically applies a tea seed meal based plant food, Early Bird Natural Organic Fertilizer, that is toxic to earthworms.   In this way she keeps the population of jumping worms in check, but she will never eradicate them entirely.

“Crazy snake worm” — note prominent white “clitellum” or ring

 

 

It’s easy to introduce earthworms unintentionally to your garden, as I have learned.  The ancestors of mine — ordinary nightcrawlers (Lumbricus terrestris) — probably arrived in some truckload of compost or the decomposed manure I brought in from a horse farm.  My friend in Connecticut suspects that the Asian worms arrived in her garden in the soil around the roots of a plant shared by another gardener or container-grown nursery stock.  Often, though, worms are deliberately introduced.  Left-overs from a fishing trip are dumped into the woods or garden, or worms escape from tubs or beds in which they have been cultivated to help compost kitchen and garden debris.

Hopefully, the cold winters in my zone 5 garden will help to slow the earthworms spread, and I intend to spread the tea seed meal.   I like my woods as they are – worm-free and full of native wildflowers.

 

 

The Case Against Earthworms originally appeared on Garden Rant on October 16, 2017.

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Fall Planting

If you garden in southeastern Michigan, your garden is drenched. We have had the kind of steady hard rain spanning a good many days that I call mushroom rain. I see them popping up everywhere. I am not complaining. We have had a very dry summer, and a hot and dry early fall. The cabbage [...]

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Landscape Architect Wins MacArthur Genius Award by Susan Harris

Nice news this week via Brad McKee, editor of Landscape Architecture Magazine, who writes:

Kate Orff, ASLA, became the first landscape architect to receive a MacArthur Foundation fellowship, which carries a $625,000 award over five years for “originality, insight, and potential.” Orff was among 24 fellows named by the foundation today, who also included artists, activists, scientists, and historians.

Brad notes in passing that six (!) architects have won the coveted “genius” fellowship.

This first-time inclusion of a landscape professional reminds me of a similar trend at the U.S. Commission of Fine Arts, the body that reviews important projects here in D.C.  The seven Commissioners there now include three landscape architects – the most ever by two – and they’re all women. I reported the milestone in this post.

But back to Kate Orff:

Her description of the design firm she founded resonates with me especially: “We’re science-driven, research-driven, and activist in our approach.”

The MacArthur Foundation describes her work this way:

Designing adaptive and resilient urban habitats and encouraging residents to be active stewards of the ecological systems underlying our built environment.

Kate Orff is a landscape architect envisioning new forms of public space that reveal and revive the hidden ecological systems underlying our built environments and encourage urban residents to become active stewards of their natural surroundings. Her research and design practice addresses the challenges posed by urbanization and climate change (such as biodiversity loss and rising sea levels) through in-depth collaborations with ecologists, engineers, educators, artists, and community members that aim to make our urban habitats more adaptive and resilient.

In reviewing her firm’s projects I noticed they include making self-guided podcast tours that invite city dwellers to explore the natural histories of their regions. Yet another example of podcasts permeating our culture, a trend I applaud!

Check out the other 23 recent MacArthur recipients to see what good company Kate Orff is in.

Photo credit – MacArthur Foundation.

Landscape Architect Wins MacArthur Genius Award originally appeared on Garden Rant on October 13, 2017.

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Ask Your Budtender First by Allen Bush

 

All photos via Shutterstock

I went to a legal pot dispensary in Denver this summer. Marijuana, you’ve no doubt heard, is a hot commodity in Colorado. The dispensary reminded me of the Long Branch Saloon on the long-playing television series Gunsmoke (1955-1975). Miss Kitty traded gossip in the saloon with U.S. Marshall Matt Dillon and Doc Adams but kept a close eye on the brothel upstairs.

The skunky aroma of marijuana distinguished the pot dispensary from the Long Branch Saloon. No stench of stale cigars or whiskey in the pot dispensary. Though the Gunsmoke cowboys packed six-shooters, no one was caught dead huffing a one-hitter in the Long Branch Saloon—or in the pot dispensary, for that matter.

In Denver, a nice hostess took my driver’s license and told me to wait downstairs. Someone upstairs would come for me in a few minutes, she said.

I sat waiting with a half-dozen men and women— a melting pot of ages, colors and piercings—staring warily at one another. Were they thinking the same thing I was: What would my mother have thought if she knew I was shopping for pot?

I was called upstairs to the showroom ten minutes later. A clean-cut and clear-eyed 20-something budtender answered my naïve questions with short, crisp answers.

There was no specific strain recommended for M.S. (my affliction), but there are Cannabis sativa strains, containing lower percentages of the psychoactive tetrahydrocannabinol (THC) crossed with Cannabis indica that contain more of the beneficial, and non-mind altering cannabidiol (CBD). Various hybrids, loaded with CBD, reduce anxiety and induce a good night’s sleep.

I was recommended a starter sampler of Cannabis hybrid buds (one-gram quantities each) of three different strains. My budtender also suggested a few edibles.

And how, I asked, could I smuggle cannabis buds or edibles back to Kentucky?

“I don’t know,” she said. No doubt, the same line was recited to other paranoid, out-of-state patrons who have watched Midnight Express too many times.

There were customers waiting downstairs.

Wham-bam, thank you ma’am!

I was hurried along.

The legal pot dispensaries are not in the business of advising smugglers.

Good thing.

I didn’t want to get busted on the airport tarmac in Louisville, on my return, with illegal Cannabis-enriched, edible gummies strapped to my waist.

Ask Your Budtender First originally appeared on Garden Rant on October 11, 2017.

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Closing edicts by Elizabeth Licata

This provided a long-lasting accent in a dull area.

Lessons learned from the 2017 gardening season (so far):

Never again:

Morning glory (convolvulus): The central mission of this (gorgeous) blue cultivar seemed to be to envelope every plant within its reach, while making sure to release as few flowers as possible in the process. The blooms, when they arrived, were too few and far between to overcome my disgust with the plant, which by then had enveloped most of a rose bush. I should have known when it was advertised as a “lovely ground cover for difficult areas.” I suppose many of you will think I should have known, period.

Black-eyed Susan vine (thunbergia): The orange cultivar I had was a star performer in trials, but, again, total domination without flowers was the motto. It got plenty of sun, too. I think I counted 2 flowers as of yesterday. And it’s a real pain to unwind from its host plants. (I like to encourage climbers to grow amid roses and other shrubby plants, but not without floral interest.)

These branches will go, but most of the trunk will remain, if possible.

Old, faltering maple: Sadly, this year is the end for a tree that has delighted visitors to the garden for decades. And we let it go too long. Now, its partial removal (leaving a lot of it standing) will mean cutting out part of a fence and using a lot of equipment.

More, please!

Tulipa ‘Akebono’: Here’s the perfect alternative to too-heavy double tulips. It’s semidouble, stands up well, and has gorgeous red striations and green sepals. Really a fascinating tulip, and I thought I’d seen them all.

Lobularia: This has been going strong since early May; it now nearly covers the fountain its supposed to encircle (a good thing) and has a lovely honey scent. Many who see this think it’s allysum; it’s so much better.

Plumbago: I bought this on impulse and tucked it in a shady corner. It should have sulked but performed with regularity. Worth buying every year.

Athyrium ‘Ghost”: Best fern ever. Forget the Painted (one of its parents), which just kind of lies there. This is upright, sculptural, and a pretty silver.

And there’s more, but a lot of it is too embarrassing to confess.

Closing edicts originally appeared on Garden Rant on October 10, 2017.

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Bred In The Bone

Though we have had a long string of warm days, the fall season is well underway. For Rob, the first whiff of fall means it is time for him to seek out and assemble a striking and unusual collection of pumpkins and gourds that will enchant gardeners who frequent Detroit Garden Works. Though it might [...]

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The Gardens (and More) of Asbury Park, NJ by Susan Harris

Goldenrods and Boneset (I think) blooming in Asbury Park this week

When I go to the beach it’s in the spring or fall, and even in glorious weather like we’re enjoying this week, I don’t really lie on the beach. As a plantaholic, I gravitate toward nearby gardens and plant-filled natural areas instead. There the blogger in me takes over, so I snap photos and later post my favorite scenes here. (See North Beach, MD or Rehoboth Beach, DE.)

I’ve walked and cycled Maryland and Delaware beach towns so many times over the decades, it was a thrill this week to discover a beach I’d heard about (from Bruce Springsteen) but never visited.

I’d read that Asbury Park had gone to the dogs but that lately, it’s returning to its glory days. So finally, people are fixing up the funky old homes, and some of them are even gardening.

Like these I noticed in or near Asbury Park.

I won’t show you the typical homes I saw, with their sad patches of turfgrass and nothing else. Hey, maybe the owners will notice the stark contrast with these homes and get inspired!

Nothing unusual here – just the common Knockout roses – but they sure deliver.

I was naturally drawn to this restaurant, even though I suspect the vines are fake. Whatever! The whole gardeny effect is terrific.

The landscaping for this restaurant on the boardwalk is fine with me but wow, the architecture! It was originally a Howard Johnson – could you tell?

Okay, now I’m going totally off-topic because the town’s original Beaux-Arts buildings blew me away! Above, the Paramount Theater and Convention Hall .

The historic structures in this view have yet to be renovated – the Casino Arcade and Carousel House.

The stayed at the Mid-Century Modern Empress Hotel, where entertainers like Frank Sinatra and Judy Garland once stayed, the manager proudly told me. From my fourth-floor ocean-view room I could watch the sun come up over the ocean without getting out of bed. (For only $79 a night!)

Asbury Park was never just a beach town; it was an entertainment mecca in its heyday. Signs of that focus coming back were clear to me even on a Monday night in October, when I heard a terrific blues band playing along the boardwalk.

Also on a Monday night in October? Three bands performed at this large, lively venue.

Finally, the mother lode for Springsteen fans – The Stone Pony.  It’s open all winter on weekends.

The Gardens (and More) of Asbury Park, NJ originally appeared on Garden Rant on October 5, 2017.

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Fall Favorites

Fall is a favorite season. I like reflecting on all the efforts made in the garden imagined in the winter, begun in the spring, and realized during the summer. Once the fall arrives, there is the beauty of the harvest to be appreciated. There is an entire season of hard work that is coming to [...]

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Baby Robins… Throwback Thursday

The post Baby Robins… Throwback Thursday appeared first on Miss Smarty Plants.

Our busy spring included many changes and one of the things I really enjoyed was watching this clutch of baby robins. The beautiful blue eggs are like little jewels in the spring months and I was so excited to see these inside an electric panel box near our house. With a small opening about two inches round, this was a perfect protected space for these baby robins to grow.  So for this Throwback Thursday (perhaps I should call it “catch up on things you forgot to share” Thursday?) I hope you enjoy these images of “my” baby robins.

 

Baby Robins May 1:

Robins usually lay one egg per day, creating nests of 3-6 eggs. The Iowa DNR says, “She then sits on the eggs for 16 to 17 days and spends another 16 to 17 days at the nest feeding the little hatchlings. Iowa robins usually try for two successful nest attempts between April and August.”  It looks like a lot of room in this box now, but just wait until the last photo!

Baby Robins May 10:

Its hard to say exactly how old these baby robins are here (somewhere between 1-9 days?).  Oh these little guys are not cute…

What does the robin life cycle look like?  Here is a breakdown of each part of a baby robin’s development broken down by the number of days.

Egg	12 – 14
Nestling	9 – 16
Fledgling	10 – 15
Total	31 – 45

Baby Robins May 13

As you can see, the nest is starting to get crowded!  The other feathers seen here are from our chickens and must have been picked up by the mother robin in the course of building her nest.

Q. How long do robin babies stay in the nest (nestling stage)?
A. Baby robins jump from their nest when they are about 13 days old (but the range is 9 – 16 days old).

Q. When do young robins learn to fly? (fledgling stage)
A. After leaving the nest (fledging), it takes another 10-15 days for babies to become strong fliers and independent birds.

Baby Robins May 17:

If my the camera on my phone hadn’t marked the date for these images, I would never believe how different these baby robins look after just four days. Eyes wide open, feathers developing and certainly more activity. It is hard to tell, but at this point one of the babies died. It was still in the box and later in the day the adult robin had pushed it out.  Developing five strong robins this far is still much better than most averages.

Baby Robins May 23:

This is the final image of “my” baby robins before they left the nest.  When I teach classes on butterfly gardening I usually give folks a hard time about how carefully the watch over “their” caterpillars and make sure there is enough food for them to pupate. It isn’t really ours at all, but it is easy to develop an attachment to the show nature provides us.

 

 

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