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Interesting Facts for Gardeners

Old Fashioned Gardening

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Cottage gardens and English borders are examples of “Old Fashioned Gardening”. Why say that? I think it has to do with the amount of work one is prepared to do, the need for intensive gardening techniques, and the result of an abundant all season show.

It is common in more modern landscapes and lifestyles to have goals of work reduction, ease of maintenance, and simplicity in design. Compare that with the types of garden plans from Gertrude Jekyll’s day.

A Few Vintage Techniques

What might I include in the idea of old fashioned gardening? Well, one technique I hear little of today is “double digging”. When was the last time you were advised to employ this venerable technique when making a garden bed?

I should probably explain… Double digging involve digging two layers deep, and incorporating organic material.

Double Digging Method
Mark out the area of the bed, use a shovel to dig one shovelful deep along a trench. Pile all this dirt to one side. Then another 9-10 inches deep, loosen all the soil in the bottom of the flowerbed. Use a spading fork to mix organic amendments into the bottom layer. Start the next trench, filling the first one with the soil from the second, move along until the entire bed is dug, and all soil is replaced.

How To Double Dig Visuals

The Biennial Show

Another technique from a bygone day is buried with the term “biennial”. The term remains, and many gardeners know that this refers to a plant that takes two growing seasons to complete its growth cycle. But today’s garden rarely needs to utilize the peculiar traits of a biennial plant into their plans.

First let’s look at what happens with biennials:

First season from seed, the plant is putting down roots and growing its leafy structures. The second season involves flowering, going to seed, and dying.

Examples of biennials:
  1. Sweet William Dianthus
  2. Wallflowers
  3. Lunaria
  4. Stocks
  5. Foxgloves

The whole idea of utilizing the unique characteristics of biennials was to provide an “in between” flower show in the natural lull between some of the cycles in perennials. Especially within the spring to summer time right before roses reach their peak, but also in later summer.

Because of breeding advances which bend the natural cycles, there is less of a difference between biennials and annuals for the gardener. Both very often bloom the same season planted from seed.

Still, you can experiment in your own garden to see if certain biennials fill in those seasonal spots where color is needed.

Pruning New Plants

I don’t know if this truly qualifies as an old fashioned gardening tip, or if I just don’t see it advocated as often as I used to…

The idea here was to give a plant, whether tree or vine, usually, a running start in putting down roots that will later benefit the plant’s growth.

We usually buy container plants nowadays, and we look for the largest size or height possible. Then after planting it, we are loathe to lose any of that “superior” growth. But the older advice ( which I think is just as valid today) is to trim down that new plant by a third.

Yep. Lop that extra growth right off.

This is important in perennial vines like Clematis, and in new trees.

 

Old Fashioned Advice

I don’t always remain mired in the “old ways”, but sometimes experience shows that those techniques and tips gave good results. They might be supported by today’s science on the subject and other times not.

The problem with sorting through such information is that we aren’t always given all the facts. Like the old family tradition story of always cutting off the ends of the ham before baking… once the story was unearthed, it turns out Grandma’s pan was just too small, and it had nothing to do with the outcome of a finely baked ham.

The same way, some of the old ways depend upon specific conditions or climates. How to know if this is useful for you? You can research or experiment. Or you can just take someone’s word for it. Gardening is an art, which employs science.

So often we are treating it the other way, and while I’m not prepared to argue against it, our own common sense might guide us to working in our gardens with an eye to results that best suit us.

I know this is a rather rebellious idea in the scientific age, but there you go. I still add organic matter to the native soil when planting a shrub or a tree. Heck, I even add little handfuls of compost when planting a perennial.

But I also don’t garden as much as I used to, and my place is no longer my own little showcase. I have reverted to the idea that it is for my own pleasure and must be whittled down to what I can presently handle.

But I do remember double digging a plot or two and the longtime benefit it rendered.

Well, that is enough reminiscing for now… garden season has begun and I need to use this sunny day to attend to some garden work.

Blessings to you all, my friends.

Discussion on What Versailles May Teach a Modern Homeowner

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I found the following video fascinating. It covers many topics of interest to modern homeowners and gardeners, foodies and historians.

I want to take some of the quotes- there were so many! The simplest, most zenlike is that there is no garden without the gardener. Watch the video… which topic struck you as one to think about?

  1. In discussing the present caretakers of the historical kitchen garden of Versailles, the distinction of a modern landscaper versus a gardener is made. The idea is that landscape architects do not see themselves as gardeners. Can you see how this may be a conflict when a garden is designed? Or landscapers are hired to plant around a home? What kind of considerations may need adjustment?
  2. The point is made of making the garden support itself. This is often considered crass, whether making a blog or making a garden. Yet, it is something the think about. Do our gardens make the best use of the space, does it provided food?
  3. Varieties of plants: are modern ones better or worse than heirlooms? How often do we engage in a kind of plant snobbery, when the taste of fruits or vegetables, their vigor, or the choice of what we grow ought to rather rely on what works best in our gardens? Who best to make that judgment than the home gardener, himself?
  4. Are we addicted to herbicides and pesticides because of our ideas of what “looks good”? Can we exchange the artificial forms of “beauty” for something more ecologically balanced?

Those are some of the thoughts I had, inspired b listening to the lecture.

Spring Fever Struck

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Daffodils always bring Spring’s message

All my life I’ve heard the phrase, “Spring Fever”, but oddly enough I don’t think I ever properly knew the meaning of it.  I had the impression that it meant some kind of seasonal frenzy, a result of people becoming feverish to get on with the business of the new season of growing, spring cleaning, and activities like that.

It turns out that it is nothing of the kind, and I think I’ve been struck with a particularly strong case of spring fever this year.

What is Spring Fever, really?

Quite the opposite of my own off-the-mark definition, it refers to a type of tiredness and malaise that comes with the change of seasons. I’ve noticed this during both autumn and spring in years past, but this year I was hit hard!

Is it simply the change in season, the fact that this was a long drawn out and hard winter?  Or the fact that I crammed gardening, exercise at the gym, and a long walk at the Arboretum in the the past few days? No matter, it is a regular enough phenomenon, that even the Scientific American remarks on it.

We are restless to get started with our projects… but if you are like me, at all, you might find the need for some extra naps to catch up to the renewed pace.

This is not all there is to the symptoms of Spring fever. It climaxes into heightened mating behavior as the season transitions to summer, presumably because of the biological shift of hormones in response to lengthening days. I don’t claim any signs of that part of the observable symptoms due to lengthening years! It’s all I can do to expend my energies in the garden beds at this point.

Springing Forward

Spending time outside more brought a scenario to my eye: my cat went a-hunting and the white flash of a fleeing cottontail that was earlier seen in the drive made a quick getaway.

Tulips are making their appearance around the yard, and the new ones from last autumn’s planting are being eagerly awaited. Being newly planted, they are just a bit delayed from the older plantings, which is normal.

Now that spring has finally arrived, there have been such seesaw temperatures, so hot that spring blooms go by and then the freezes, and, well, Ohio lives up to it’s reputation of changeability.

Tulipa ‘Renown’ in its third or fourth year here.

 Garden Progress

The last couple of days work in progress:

  • Cut down the ornamental grasses
  • Readied two of the raised vegetable beds, one with permaculture method.
  • Begun weeding, continued removing last seasons debris.
  • Readying outdoor furniture, and setting up the screened porch for the summer season
Moving on to the planting that crowds around the Mother’s Day date, the rains are softening up the ground and everything is finally greening up. The only fear I have is that lingering winter means a hurry into summer’s blast without much of a chance to enjoy the spring.
Do you find yourself trying to play “catch up”? I’m not, even if I could ( still nursing that slow to recover knee). I have the luxury of gardening for myself, and if there are some years that I must do without new plants, a bit of weediness, or some other lack then I welcome what joys there are.
Why do we push ourselves so hard? Who are we in competition with? It is not worth such puny satisfaction to forego the enjoyment of our labors, the beauty of birdsong in the morning, or a quiet siesta in the perfect sunshine of a late spring afternoon.

Work, yes, but balanced with a few nods to spring fever laziness.

Random tulip that won’t give up and tasty dandelion tell tales

 

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© 2013 written for Ilona’s Garden Journal by Ilona E. An excellent blog.

Garden Hints and Tips #457

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I just made that number up, but not the helpful garden tip!
Buy lots of Bounce Dryer Sheets.

Bounce Outdoor Fresh Sheets, 240 Count Box

The Garden Professors shared this nugget:

Entomologist Dr. Raymond Cloyd of Kansas State University and his group were intrigued by Master Gardener anecdotes of dryer sheets repelling mosquitoes, though no research had been done. Could your common Bounce sheet also repel other pests? And, to take it a step further, what, exactly, repels them? The answers are “yes” and “lots of volatile compounds.”

Their study [pdf file-Ilona’s note] was published last month in the journal HortScience. Honestly, I’ve never seen descriptors like “controls static cling” and “gives clothes a fresh scent” in a Horticulture journal. Hee! Plus the researchers made it clear this experiment specifically used Bounce Original Outdoor FreshTM. Still kind of humorous, but really good science and the part that’s usually overlooked in the translation to a News Story. Do NOT extrapolate results to include Bounce Spring Fresh, Fresh Linen, and certainly not Downy or Snuggle brands.

Read more…

I might add that we use this tip around here for repelling rodents from taking up residence under the hot tub. Don’t want any wiring chewed.

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© 2010 written for Ilona’s Garden Journal. Copyrights apply.

Garden Fashion – New Trend

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You may not think about it that way, but gardening is as much a fashion victim as home interiors. Who has avocado green appliances any more? And who admits to little circles of flowers in the front yard? Point made. Large scale landscaping follows the same track on a bigger scale, and probably over a longer time span.

Sometimes we need change, something to keep our surrounding fresh, and sometimes a certain fashion just “fits”, but as any well dressed woman knows, there is a basic well designed foundation from which to detour into some less permanent, but fun directions. Good Gardening is like that.

That said, I was first made aware of “Garden Walls” “Vertical Garden”…”Living Walls” or whatever they will finally end up being termed, at the Garden Show this year. Since then, I’ve seen the concept on sites online, so it has been around for awhile, just not on the horizon of most home gardeners. Is it a fad or something that people will incorporate into longer term use?

First, there seem to be some systems, one which looks like a wall board with cups. Another that looks like a network. Urban Gardens explains that experiment in detail, including the illustration above. It is quite technologically complicated.

Then there are large installations in France which seem to be the brainchild of Patrick Blanc. Imagine an ivy covered wall, only with variations of many greens and textures.. that will give you a crude idea of how these look.

Then there is the concept for indoor spaces. These cupped wall boards are attached to interior walls, in places where you would usually find wall art – like over the couch (pictured at the top of the post).

Used in your private garden it might appear something like the display from the garden show:

I wonder a number of things when I see this. If not used as a biofiltration method, or in a commercial environment for air quality, how is it better than a collection of houseplants? And what about the effects of moisture on the wall surface, etc?

Outdoors, wouldn’t it have the same challenge, requirements of daily watering, that container plants often have?

More information from wikipedia,Green Wall
Green over Gray

===just wanted to add a thought====
I was thinking about retro and little circles in the lawn, and although it would be a mowers nightmare, what would it look like to have a polka dot lawn? You know, little circles of the same flower dotted evenly like those fifties polka dots? I’m not advocating anything here- it just struck me as nothing more strange than the Dublin Ohio installation of giant concrete corn cobs in rows.