Home Garden Companion

Ilona's Garden Journal




2007

Garden Update August 22

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It seems a bit soggy here, but we don’t have the heavy rains that they have suffered in other parts of Ohio. Usually, because of the high water table, if we get lots of rain there is ponding, but we are not experiencing that. The weatherman says that because the ground was dry the rain sheeted off into the waterways. Likely so.

All is green and I have tomatoes but they are still green – no sun, no ripening, and it is gray every day right now. The weeds are flourishing, but I haven’t been out there to work on that. I did get the butterfly weed (asclepsias) and another lavender plant transplanted in before the rains. I put the butterfly weed over by the pyracantha, because I thought the oranges of the flower and the berries would nicely echo each other. I should harvest my peppers. I’ll probably pick some tomorrow. I have plenty of Hungarian hot, but nary a bud on the sweet peppers. I think I planted them in too good of ground. They are tall, lush, green plants, but no flowers or peppers on them. I put them in a spot that I used to use for making leaf mold. It’s just too good for them!

But next year will be better for veggies, I got the rototiller back from the repair guy and as soon as the weather allows I will dig up the new, s-u-n-ny spot near the house for my vegetable plot. I love new freshly dug gardens. They hold such illusions;)

The type of heliotrope I got this year is not a very pretty plant- very rangy. Of course it didn’t help that I let them dry out a few times. (That wrecks havoc with the leaves). My new hydrangeas had wilted a few times, but they recovered well. I just had to remember to really soak them, even though they were mulched. Not to worry, now though with all this rain. The moisture lovers should burgeon forth.

My autumn clematis is just starting to break blossom and the honeysuckle (Belgica), has been pretty- although I still don’t have the trellis back up… I was supposed to have gotten that done at the beginning of the season, and now it is the end of summer already! The phlox are blooming but not as full as they might be. I probably need to try to divide some of them.

The trouble is that I can’t dedicate the kind of time and effort to the garden that I would like to. I’m going to get some improved topsoil later this month or early next, looking forward to what I can do with that (top up the raised beds and use some on the new veg. garden).

Rural report:
The sweet corn is all harvested in this area, the soybean fields look good, and the field corn looks decent. Too much rain will mean some disease problems, etc. Japanese beetles continue to be a problem in the garden, I don’t know if they affect the crops. I saw a praying mantis last week- the first I’d seen in a long time. My son found it and I told him to please place it carefully in my side garden. It wasn’t a very large one, but I hope they are making a comeback- I was thinking of getting another batch through mail order next season.

Drove past a place that had a tree filled with yellow transparent apples. That is an old type used for applesauce, it ripens the earliest here. There was a sweet new colt in a neighboring farm pasture, and a herd of Jerseys a few miles away. We don’t have so many dairy herds around here anymore, and they tend to be small ones. I think the Jersey is the most beautiful cow… saw a PBS special on showing Dairy cows , you wouldn’t believe all they do to show their cows. Hairspray is the least of it. My uncle used to raise and show Puli and Komondor dogs, but I don’t think they go through what these cattle people do. Or maybe I just didn’t know…..

July ’07 State of the Garden

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Lavender Walk

I have been gardening, not blogging, and this was one of my resolutions for 2007. So far so good. It has been hot here, but we received some rain earlier this month; a huge downpour on the Fourth, which as a lady at Curve’s said “We will take what ever comes and not complain.” Bravely said, since they marched in the local parade.

Not I, though…no,  I was busy grilling fresh, never-frozen, tuna steaks that had been flown in that morning from Hawaii. Ahhh, the beauty of the great country we live in!! Amen!

My garden rejoiced in that rain, even though since then it is somewhat dry again.

In one of those do as I say, not as I do situations: keep your containers watered! I let mine dry a bit, and they take awhile to recover if you do that. I wish now I had used that soil with the water retaining pellets. The containers overall look fairly good and I have been fertilizing. I took a few pictures, but will do a post when I have more examples blooming fully.

Saturday I weeded and worked until I was sick. Literally. The heat makes me sick and I didn’t drink enough water, but I pushed through because I wanted to keep the garden renovation momentum going. Besides weeding, did a bunch of mid-season mulching. took care of getting out some poison ivy, too. It was a productive day, but I paid for it.

The lavender and ageratum along the walk are finally looking like they took hold – it was a chore to keep them alive when everything was so dry and hot, but the rains helped and I weeded them Saturday. Purslane and grass are terrible invaders in this area of the garden.

Frost, Rain…No Flowers= Glum Gardener

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I tried to stay upbeat, I really did, but the way spring has turned I feel rather glum today. Puddleglum Glum. Anyhoo… I look out my windows and with the rain I can’t garden, the frost left the magnolias tormented and now dead looking, the rest of the spring flowers pretty spare. Ah well.

I did, however, put some work into getting my tulips page updated and online, Just Tulips. In a normal year, I would suggest visiting gardens to see examples of tulips that you like, but this year I’m not sure how the tulips are faring. My Darwins hadn’t opened yet, but the flowers and their foliage are all flopped over. The useful thing about checking out spring blooms is that you usually order bulbs long after you’ve forgotten all about spring, but if you write down the garden combinations and varieties of tulips that you like now, it helps when ordering from catalogs,etc. I think it makes more of a difference with tulips than it does with other fall-planted spring-blooming bulbs; tulips have such differing heights bloomtimes and colors that seeing them in real life makes so much of a better visualization.

I also wrote a little something on the Renegade Gardener’s 2007 perennial choices. I love the plants he considers premium plants for the garden- definitely going to look for those this year!

Midwest Drought Predicted

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You never know what you will come across in the financial pages. In the commodities market, news was posted about the La Niña conditions and the weather conditions that are expected as a result. Their predictions for conditions are not happy ones for farmers or gardeners.

Late wet spring is possible with worries that farmers won’t get their crops in the ground early enough to make it through the following drought. Well, we know about weather predictions, and their rate of accuracy, but it is good to be on the cautious side.

The good news is that we have high levels of moisture in the ground, and reservoir levels are probably up. So just remember to buy your soaker hoses this year- so much better than sprinklers, and mulch your shrubs and trees.

Which reminds me… I don’t know how often I see mulch piled up against the trunks, and that is just not right. It is very bad for the trees, so pull it away from the actual trunk and give the tree a little breathing space; mulch is meant to insulate and conserve moisture over the roots.

AAS Winners 2007

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The AAS has announced some winners for 2007. A Celosia, Petunia, Vinca, and Pepper. These are the the best performing new garden seed selections available. I am particularly interested in the Vinca ‘Pacifica Burgundy Halo’ and Petunia F1 ‘Opera Supreme Pink Morn’

The Celosia, ‘Fresh Look Gold’ is pretty and Celosias are useful feathery spires in the annual choices for the garden. It is usually good for drying, but has a sort of ungainly look in my opinion. I don’t hate them, but am not a big fan of any of the Celosias.

The Petunia, however, is a different matter. I have grown petunias in the “Morn” series previously and they have a delicate coloration that is very appealing. Petunias give dependable and beautiful color all summer- no matter how difficult the conditions become. So I am very happy to see this superior selection. It will be on my own list for garden purchases this spring. ” Pink shading to creamy white with a yellow throat”.pink morn petunia

The other promising selection is the vinca, Pacifica Burgundy Halo’. I have always preferred vincas to impatiens for the partial shade areas of my garden. That is because the impatiens needs much more moisture than my climate area allows, and vinca gives a similar appearance with much prettier leaves. As the article puts it, they have “proven heat and drought tolerance”. You need this in prairie conditions. This new offering is described as ” Burgundy with large white center” and so it will give the overall effect of variegation that such contrasts provide the eye at long range. The darker color means you might want it in the sun- vinca grows in sunshine and part shade.It is a lovely addition to groups, such as a container with motley combinations of plants.

The pepper I wasn’t interested in because I never grow hot peppers. In 2006 there was a pepper called Pepper F1 ‘Carmen’, I was interested in that one. It is reported that “‘Carmen’ peppers are sweet even when immature or green. One of the improved traits is the earliness to ripe red.

crossposted from Ilona’s GardenGate Gazebo – the news part of my website.

The Cold Zone

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Now this is more like it…now it is winter in Ohio, albeit a little off schedule. I thought I would take the opportunity to mention a few things about planting zones, amid the news this year that the zones will supposedly change. One of the more helpful articles on this is from Farm and Garden – quoted a bit first, below.

My own experience is that while we may play around and stretch the boundaries a bit in our garden planting, the fact remains that if you live in a cold climate, especially, you will get one of those really cold winter snaps every few years or so. If you have planted something that isn’t hardy in your area ( as categorized by the zone maps) you will probably lose it to the extreme cold of that year. This is especially true of some trees like the ornamental cherries and your rose bushes. One particularly cold year I lost all my roses, not a few plants. From that time forward I planted only the hardiest, except in very sheltered areas of my garden ( right next to the leeward side of the house). That year I also lost my Chinese Chestnut trees. The zone maps warn you of this sort of risk. Of course you don’t have to heed it….

The zone maps tell you more about plants than they do about your expected weather- as the Farm and Garden article points out. It is really an issue quite apart from global warming, though that is the way the political hotspot reports like to warm things up. Regardless of what you think on the issues, the plants will only take so much cold when they are considered hardy to a specific zone. And that is the information you want.

There are many other factors that affect cold hardiness, too. Some things are hardy if they don’t have wet feet, or if they are properly mulched, etc. So the combined knowledge in a plant profile – where it was native, the zone it grows in, the moisture needs, etc… these will all factor in. And a strong healthy plant weathers through a challenging season better than a stressed plant.

Things like this were in my head while I have wondered about how my garden will take the broken dormancy of January and the arctic cold ( that is what the weatherman calls it) of this February. We have little to no snow cover. I am bracing for the worst, but then my garden is under reconstruction anyway, and I have no idea what has survived the neglect of the past several years. I do know that some of my trees are in dire need of pruning. I looked out at the weeping crab, Jade, and it had water sprouts galore! How did those get there? Probably overlooked since I have a Hansa rose shrub underneath…. but the winter has exposed the needed grubbing out that must come as soon as the weather breaks.

So when do we need to use zones? If you farm in warmer climates you need to know how much cold a plant must have. …If you’re growing perennials in a cold climate you need to know what zone those plants are hardy in, and in which zone you’re located. …The USDA zone map doesn’t guarantee a definite average minimum temperature. Microclimates are small areas inside a zone that are a little warmer or cooler than the surrounding area.~Farm and Garden

the U.S. Department of Agriculture has been working on updating its climate map for nearly four years, but hasn’t produced a finished product. –Carpetbagger Report

“the U.S. Department of Agriculture is now in the process of redrawing the USDA Plant Hardiness Zone Map, a tool used by gardeners to determine what trees, flowers and food crops will survive in what zone. The map, first created in 1960 by Henry T. Skinner (then director of the U.S. National Arboretum in Washington) codes the country into 11 regions, determined by the duration of cold weather and lowest winter temperatures in each zone.

The map has been adjusted twice before: once in 1965, to add temperature data that had been missing from the original; and again in 1990, to include climate information for Canada and Mexico and to reflect what the USDA Web site officially describes as “changes in the weather.”

The USDA’s most recent plans for revision were initially undertaken by the American Horticultural Society with a grant from the USDA. The AHS published its findings in its own in-house magazine, The American Gardener, in 2003. Across much of the country, it showed climate zones bleeding to the north–reflecting a general warming trend and a changing habitat for plants.

The USDA, however, called the map inadequate and insisted that the AHS withdraw it.” –Columbia News Service

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Unrelated, I saw the most beautiful full moon yesterday. It was orangey yellow and then turned a soft gold as it rose. In my Winter page I have lists of the names for the winter moons. In days past when the lunar months ruled man’s recognition of passing time they were given descriptive names. February Moons include Big Winter Moon, Horning Moon, Hunger Moon, Ice Moon, Red Cleansing Moon, Storm Moon, Sun Moon, Quickening Moon, Wild Moon, Chaste Moon, Dark Red Calves, and Trapper’s Moon. Ice Moon is the Celtic appellation and I think that is the one that best fits our season this year- I was looking at the “Ice Moon”. Once high in the sky it was the appropriately cool white and gleaming orb that lights the winter’s sky with a burnished silver glow.
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And on the note of moons… this year we will get to have a blue moon- so if you ever promised yourself something or hoped for something in a blue moon- this is your time:)
“Although the full moon occurring Thursday, May 31, 2007, will look like an ordinary full moon, it will actually be a bit extraordinary—a blue moon.
What is a Blue Moon?

There are in fact two definitions for a blue moon. According to the more recent definition, a blue moon is the second full moon in a calendar month. For a blue moon to occur, the first of the full moons must appear at or near the beginning of the month so that the second will fall within the same month (the average span between two moons is 29.5 days). May 2007 will have two full moons: the first on May 2, the second on May 31—that second full moon is called the blue moon. “Blue Moons“