Art Design 4 Garden

Ive been fixing up a little flower garden next to my cold frame. I had a few perennials here that had grown together and gotten weeds and then they got trampled when my husband painted the house this summer. Now that the painting is done, I replanted the bed.

I dug out everything, separated all the perennials, removed the weeds and replanted. I added some compost and a few new plants, including a red bee balm (monarda), orange butterfly milkweed, a purple New England aster, a classic Autumn Joy sedum, a deep red rose (Mr Lincoln), and some annuals. Plants I have include a purple iris, several peonies (which I planted all together) and digitalis.

I also bought a bunch of slate pieces, odds-and-ends at a local garden center and made a U-shaped path of stepping stones. Im hoping to have lots of flowers in this bed next year and walk along the stones to pick bouquets.

I splurged and used the dark black Coast of Maine composting mulch on this small bed. Im looking forward to next year as it matures and fills in.

My sweet potatoes I dug last fall finally sprouted this fall. As Donald recommended, I potted them up. They are on my kitchen window sill with cacti and a poinsettia.

The hammock stand is dead.  Long live the hammock.

A garden is not permanent.  Plants grow, they die, and your interests and needs change.  Fortunately change can come easily in the garden- your landscaping does not have to be forever. The notion of permanence often paralyzes people into never beginning. But in a garden, if you make a mistake or things don’t work out like you expected them, you can change it!  I know this from experience.  You can move plants, compost them, give them away, etc… It is much easier to remove your landscaping than remove a room inside your house!

A new new gardening opportunity

The ravine below our small house in the mountains was covered with snow in the Christmas storm.  The most recent snow covered the ravine, too, but is now melting with warmer temperatures. 

Snow-covered ravine

My gardening companion just sent me this photo (finally) downloaded from his camera, a small digital camera that were now taking traveling, instead of my Nikon D100, an older digital workhorse.

Winter has been so mild thus far that I decided to leave the oca underground until now. This is the crop of edible sized tubers that I dug yesterday and then there are many more pea sized ones which hardly seem worth washing. I have saved out several more that are covered in sprouts which I intend to pot up and keep frost free until spring.
I do think they look jolly appetizing.

Gardening Gone Wild has a photo contest- a picture of a native plant in a garden setting. The prize- eight agastaches from High Country Gardens! This contest gave me the opportunity to look at a bunch of pictures and think about a lot of plants in a different way.

I fanally settled on this picture of a false dandelion (Agoseris glauca). It is one of my favorite wildflowers, and one of my favorite native plants for the garden. It is very drought tolerant- it grows on the west and south face of Missoulas Mount Sentinel, which gets hotter than the sun in summer, and it is easy to grow. It produces a showy large flower on top of a 2 tall stalk and it blooms continually from late May through July (and even beyond if you were to give it additional water). It is a prolific seeder, and readily volunteers, but since this is one of my favorties, I dont think of this as a bad thing.

In the picture above it is shown growing with (and towering above) an understory of prairie arnica (the darker yellow flowers; Arnica sororia), nodding onion (the little purple flowers; Allium ceruum), and a ground cover of hairy golden aster (Chrysopsis villosa).

I am making a time lapse video of my new vegetable garden. So far, the video only shows us bringing the boards for the raised beds down to the garden area. The boards are 2x8 untreated pine.

We also set out a few boards where the edges of the beds will be, just to see how they look.

Time Lapse Video: Making Skippys New Garden

Ill extend the video as we create the garden and as the plants grow this year. Tomorrow we plan to make the raised bed frames.

The hot peppers are just starting to pop up tonight. It seems all the seeds sprout at night, has anyone else experienced this?

These Big Chilli II peppers took 6 days to germinate. They are an Anaheim chili that grows to 10in long & 2.5in wide so they should live up to their name. They are destine for salsa, green chili sauce, red chili sauce and homemade chili powder. They better do well as their faith is already sealed! Im still waiting on my other chili seed in the mail.......

I put together 4 blue eggs and a Meyer lemon as a gift for a friend on Valentines Day.

A nice hot summer and I have my first ever melons ripening! A Charentois and a San Juan. I think maybe a watermelon or two will ripen also. I cant wait to try them!!



How do I know when they are ripe???

Transforming lawns to a vibrant wildlife habitats, growing vegetables, and carefully tending our patches of land are sustaining activities, ones that ground me in what I can do, and away from worrying about the difficult environmental times that face us.

My work (as a garden educator) is also encouraging: I help folks learn how to be better stewards by being better gardeners, promoting native plants and restoring wildlife habitats, and am definitely an encouraging voice about growing more vegetables and fruits in the open spaces (lawn or not) that many Americans have access to, whether on their own property or not.

I love the idea of guerrilla gardening - planting plants where they should be, but arent! These are the curbside planting areas, empty hell strips between sidewalks and roads, and barren parking lot edges.

Gardening and stewardship provides hope, for restoration of both native and created garden space. At least thats what true for me.

hello!

its so nice to be back.

what a great week of posts last week!

a big hug and a thanks to all of our guests.



we have had loads of rain here and more to come

so the garden is large and lush these days.

the hens are happy in their new home

and our banty has begun to lay sweet tiny eggs.

we have harvested our first pear of the season.

and watermelons are growing on our front stoop.

i have plans to start a new rock wall this weekend, if i dont get washed away.

i love this time of year.

fall is in the air

but there is still so much to come.

I like to encourage folks to keep their gardening manageable and focused on what they enjoy (in programs at the botanical garden where I work).  But plants grow, reproduce, and need editing, and its not always easy.

In our acre and half in the Piedmont, Im finding myself doing more heavy-lifting tasks than Id like (with my gardening companion doing field work in the mountains).  Hmm, I guess I havent appreciated how important mowing and weed-whacking have been to keeping even our natural garden in shape.  Yuck -- not pleasant gardening tasks, and weed-whacking has produced a small back strain.  Phooee.

I worry about NOT having enough gardening to do in the mountains, when we eventually decamp to our small house and garden there (hey, theres plenty of gardening work to be done in local community gardens, etc.)  But its hard not to appreciate what having a smaller gardening footprint means.  There are other things to do, after all.

At Chau Ram County Park (with camera and binoculars)

A recent news item confirms what has been in the pipeline for some time, that a bug, of Japanese origin is about to be released in carefully-selected sites in the UK, to control Japanese knotweed. A friend in Japan tells me it has been collected in her area, Kumamoto, right on the southern tip of Kyushu. Here’s a local newspaper story:http://www.47news.jp/CN/201003/CN2010030901000230.html
Given the disasterous history of introducing predators of pests (like Australias’ cane-toad problem) some have expressed alarm at introducing the insect. This does sound like it has been thoroughly researched though, apparently for several years, to ensure that the bug doesn’t affect native flora - so let’s stop worrying and get on with it.
Knotweed is a magnificent plant, which is why the Victorians introduced it - William Robinson in The Wild Garden suggests planting in ‘the pleasure ground’ and by the waterside. Maybe we should blame him? Call it ‘Robinson’s knotweed’ instead of blaming the Japanese.
The press of course love Japanese knotweed. They love stories about foreign exotics causing trouble generally. Something about the triffid nature of the story appeals to that elemental need for journalists to frighten people. And of course an excuse for a bit of subliminal racism - have you noticed that the country origin of these scare-plants or pathogens is always emphasized: Spanish bluebells, Dutch elm disease etc. By the way, if you ever see buddleia being called ‘Chinese buddleia’ then you can be sure that someone has decided its a bad thing and is to added to the list of proscribed plants.
Japanese knotweed is undeniably a huge problem in a few areas, and an irritant in many more. It is not going to take over the country any more than the entire population is going to be eating raw fish for breakfast, or even spreading miso on toast like I do. There is an unattractive eco-fascist tendency which tends to see all non-native plants as problems waiting to happen, and the knotweed as simply the tip of an iceburg. Some ecologists however have pointed out that some spring wildflowers like wood anemones are able to co-exist happily with knotweed and others that growing alongside rivers it is very good otter habitat.
The spread of knotweed since its introduction in the latter 19th century is of course a warning to all in horticulture, that we do need to be responsible with what we grow and where we plant it, but the reality is that the problems we have with invasive aliens is pretty minimal compared to those faced in many other countries. Our long growing season which enables our aggressive grass flora to make vigorous growth for most of the year sees off most potential invaders. And some others, like buddleia, are a positive benefit.
I’d be quite happy to see knotweed as yet another part of our flora, kept well in check by the little Kumamoto-bugs or whatever they are called, just popping up now and again by the waterside, just like William Robinson would have intended.

It was a sunny warm day, in the upper 70s, perfect for gardening. Its nice to be back to work in my own garden after being away for a week.

- Some marigolds and cosmos transplanted to pots.
- Sow 2 flats of seeds for cucumbers, zinnias, pumpkins, winter squash, summer squash, melons and broccoli.
- Prepare one garden bed and plant fava beans.
- Weed the garlic and asparagus beds.
- Weed the main path in my community garden plot.