The Right Combination

Today I went out shopping for the Supertunias that I plant in the front whiskey barrel.  I am doing a repeat of last year only adding some Diamond Frost Euphorbia because they were right there on the bench next to the Supertunias.  Not my first time for using Euphorbia but sometimes it can be hard to track down.  That's what is difficult about making an exact shopping list.  Anyway, the first annuals to be purchased are the long spreading ones like the Wave Petunias or Supertunias.  This is because they sustain the most damage on the sale benches and during transplanting.  It's best to get them untangled and home before they get too big and awkward.

This leaves me with two more whiskey barrels and three large pots to plan.  I know the one large pot will have Wizard Mix Coleus which is again a repeat of last year.  But I am using a different pot this year.  And one whiskey barrel I know I'm using Marigolds and bronze leafed Begonias.  That leaves me with one whiskey barrel and two large pots that I have no real plan for.  I know I'm sick and tired of dead-heading regular Petunias.  Again.  Other than that I'm open to just about anything.

So what do you do when you are fresh out of ideas?  Well Proven Winners has a great list of "garden recipes".  Seven hundred and thirty combinations to be exact.  Just search through their outstanding pictures and they will tell you how many of what variety they used to achieve those results and whether the combination is best for sun, partial sun or shade.  You can even enter search filters such as color scheme, exposure, bloom time etc.  When you pull up the recipe you can click on each specific variety and go to the info page for that plant.

Once you have selected the combo you are going to shop for, just print out two pages with the photo and the list and you're good to go.  They could use a little work on their print format.  The actual recipe sites do a much better job.  But other than that it's a great tool to overcome artist's block.  Now I just have to pick a couple and hit the greenhouses!

Idle Hands are the Devil's Workshop

So what do you do while you are waiting endless weeks for the snow to stop and warmer weather to arrive?  You surf the net.  And when you surf the net you get all these great ideas.  It is like going to the grocery store when you are hungry.  You buy too much!  I spent most of April internet shopping for plants.  Not just seeds.  The plants that require commitment and action right when they arrive! Bareroot trees and tubers.

Helleborus Wedding Party Mix

Canary Brilliants Itoh Peony

Cercis The Rising Sun Redbud

Dinner Plate Dahlias

Last night I planted my bareroot redbud tree and the fancy peony.  This evening I have to construct the dahlia supports!  On top of that we have all the spring yard maintenance to do, and seeds to plant and the tomatoes already need transplanting and there is no end in sight to the fun things that need to be done outside.

New Project 2018

Well Spring, we're going to go ahead without you!

We did finally get two nice days in a row and I got a lot done.  The raised bed garden is prepped and ready to go.  Two rows of peas and some carrots seeded.  Three flats of lettuce seeded in the cold frame.  Over-wintered plants spruced up, potted up, trimmed up.  And I've started on the landscaping.

March is usually the best time to start cleaning up and mulching the landscape.  You don't have to work around foliage.  You can see the dandelions that are hiding in clumps of perennials.  The soil is soft.  I'm a month late, but everything still looks like March.  This past weekend I scooped all of the puffball fungi out of various areas, raked the myrtle bed, the snow on the mountain bed and the chameleon plant bed to clear out all of the pine needles, oak leaves and dead stems from last year.  I dug out a few things that I'm tired of. Then I mulched the areas with the most daffodils because in a few weeks they will be in full bloom and it will be too late.

As I mentioned in my last blog post, I will no longer be sharing my garden with the next door neighbors.  I need more room to properly rotate crops and rest the beds without struggling with planning and the constraints of succession planting.  But don't feel bad for the neighbors.  We are in the process of designing and building a garden in a spot which is out of the way for us, but very convenient for them.  If the neighbors tire of gardening (why would they?) then I can still use it for planting field pumpkins or an asparagus bed or raspberries or something.

Site of the Garden Annex

This plot of land used to be a brushy wooded area, but it is also in between areas which have been developed and over the years it has become lawn by default.  It is behind the mulch bunkers, and beside the drainage ditch, and near the neighbor's barn.  And because of this, it has become relatively flat and mowable.  It has full afternoon sun from mid-morning to sunset.  It is well drained and sheltered.

When the mulch bunkers were built, the area was cleared and the bunkers were leveled with loads of bank run.  This elevated the bunkers above the future garden plot, and created a slope that needs to be leveled.  The bunkers themselves were built from 2x6 lumber reclaimed from a temporary bridge that the town highway department removed.  They had been nailed side by side like a butcher block and asphalted over.  A lot of asphalt seeped between the boards giving them this ugly drippy effect.

When we completed the water project two years ago, there was a patch of tiger lillies left over from the days when our frontage was open ditch and woody wilderness.

The tiger lillies were filled in between two tree stumps. 
Before we dug up the stumps, we salvaged the lillies

We scooped them out with the backhoe and plopped them onto a pile of top soil in the woods until fall when we planted them along the back of the bunkers.  We figured they would grow tall and fill in and disguise the ugly drips.  Which they did.  But now fenced from the deer they will take over fast.

Tim carved out the bank in front of the lillies and began placing railroad ties along it to form an elevated bed.  The entire garden area is going to be higher than the surrounding driveways, so he is placing RR ties all the way around it and will fill in with gravel.

To make the mulch bunker look a little more attractive, I scraped all of the brittle tar drips off and Tim sprayed it with rubberized undercoating.  That neatened things up considerably.

If this area ever dries up again, we can finish laying out and measuring so we know exactly what is going to fit in here and we can make a materials list.

We are now in a holding pattern waiting for dry weather.

Spring 2018

Buckwheat

C'mon Spring!  You can do it.

This has been a long winter.  February was mild and that got every one's hopes up for an early spring.  But then winter started back in full force.  In the past three weeks I've experienced some of the worst driving experiences I've ever had.  I even gave up on a fun work meeting at our district office and turned around and headed home.  And I'm no quitter!   But it's melting now, the birds are coming back and gardening season is just around the corner.

It's time to make plans.  This year will be different because I will no longer be sharing half of my raised beds with the next door neighbors.  They will have a garden of their own.  Which means I now have 12 beds instead of 6.  My husband asked me "what are you going to do with all of those beds?"  - Well, anything I want to do!

First off I can improve my crop rotation.  Each family of crops should be rotated on a 4 year rotation because that is how many years it takes most soil born problems to dissipate.  And the beds need to rest somewhere in there with a cover crop of grass as a green manure.  So ideally one crop (tomatoes for example) requires 5 beds.

The order of rotation is also important.  Tomatoes should be proceeded with grass and followed by legumes.  In fact just about any heavy feeding crop should be followed with legumes which fix nitrogen in the soil.  That isn't difficult for me because I always plant several beds in peas and beans.

I will plant 4 beds with a cover crop of Buckwheat.  I chose Buckweat because I haven't grown it before, and the flowers will attract pollinators.  There are a lot of options for cover crops.  I've used both red clover and vetch. I've also planted black beans just for the fat that they are a legume, You can also plant alfalfa, oats, rye grass.  A lot of the recommended cover crops are more appropriate for large scale gardens or farm crops, especially because their root systems make it difficult to dig them up when you are done with them.

Resources for Crop Rotation and Cover Crops
Rodale's Organic Life
GrowVeg.com
Mother Earth News
Cover Crop Basics

Secondly, I am going to do something I've been wanting to do for many years.  I'm going to have one bed for cutting flowers.  Zinnias, Cosmos, Calendula, Snapdragons, Sunflowers and things I haven't even thought of yet.  Most of my flowers are landscape components.  You want to cut them and bring them in, but if you do then you can't enjoy them outside.

 But I'm sure if I start cutting stems from my cutting bed then I will want to fill in with other interesting things from the landscape like Black Eyed Susan and Fountain Grass. 

Thirdly, this leaves me one more bed to experiment with.  Because of my rotations it will be the 8x8 bed next to the garden shed.  That's where I usually plant potatoes or squash but this year I will experiment with some herbs I haven't planted before like Lavender.  This is part of my research prior to designing a full fledged herb garden.  I have herbs tucked in here and there but as I learn more about their habits I will be better able to plan a complete herb garden. 

Next weekend I will begin setting up my seedlings in the house.  The focus will be on tomatoes.  It's high time I did a year of my Barlow Jap tomatoes and replenish my seed store.  What do you think the odds are that I will deviate from this plan and plant a few more varieties?  And end up with Too Many Tomatoes?

Finding My Christmas Muse

I was more than content to postpone Christmas spirit 2 or 3 weeks in favor of warm sunny weather, but this morning we woke up to snow.  Not a lot of snow, but enough to let you know that winter is on its way.  I've slowly but steadily going about my Christmas decorating and creative crafts.  No stellar results yet.  Decorating has consisted mostly of the scattering of spruce tips (fake), pine cones and candle (also fake).  Last year my main focus was fresh greens.  But this year it didn't seem anywhere near as important.  Due in no small part to the fact that after three weeks or so, sodden floral oasis begins to smell bad.

Friday was a gorgeous sunny, dry day so I took my garden hod and pruners around and gathered more than enough fresh greens for a centerpiece (or two).  I decided to duplicate last year's arrangement in the wooden bowl.  That's pretty normal for me, repeating a successful idea.  Especially when lacking any exciting new ideas.  I'm not sure why last year I felt I had to cast my net so wide to get a variety of greens because I did pretty well within a hundred yards of the house.

Grape Vine Tendrils

This year my brilliant new idea was grape vine tendrils.  I pulled a few grapevines out of the berry patch and cut out the sections with interesting curlie-cues.  I had several left over partial cans of gold spray paint which were all shot, so I dry brushed glimmery gold paint on each one and also on the edges of a few small pine cones.

Last Year

You can start with all the same basic ingredients, and each effort produces slightly different results.
Not necessarily an improvement, but a unique outcome.  I always keep notes each year as to what my inventory of decorations are and what I used where and what I want more of.

This Year

Last year's passion was fresh greens, and this year it seems to be bottle brush trees.  My inventory of bottle brush trees has tripled.  Which means I'm saving empty water bottles, because along with my obsession with decorating inventory is clever and organized storage.  Storage Tip: Empty water bottles with the tops cut off, stapled into six packs, allow you to neatly store the trees without them getting crushy bottle brush tree bed-head.

So the seasonal decorating continues.  I have a couple of craft projects going on.  A paper putz house, paper-mache snowmen and "altered Altoids" which is what they call miniature shadow boxes created from empty Altoid Tins and scenes cut from greeting cards.  The beauty of all of these craft projects is that I already have most of the ingredients.  You can do a lot of interesting things with paper and glue.

A Slow Start

Thanksgiving came pretty early this year and I'm not ready for holiday decorating yet.  The tree is up and that's about it.  Usually, on Black Friday, I put on Christmas music and probably a movie and spend 6 hours decorating the whole house ceiling to floor, no corner forgotten.  This year I spent the day really cleaning the house instead.  I usually clean the house well the weekend before because I don't want to decorate dusty shelves.  This year on Black Friday I pulled the area rugs, dusted the walls and corners, cleaned the wood floor and the tile kitchen floor, shampooed the area rugs and laid them out in the sun to dry and basically drove every dust bunny out of the place.  This morning when it was time to decorate, I developed a strong disinclination to glittering up my clean floors.

But I did decorate the tree, after assembling it out on the front porch and carrying it inside.  I went slowly, with the hand-vac close at hand, glitter contained.  The only other decorating I did was bottle brush trees, ornaments and candles scattered amongst the china displayed in the pie safe which is something new, and therefore more interesting from a creative standpoint.

Then I duplicated my favorite arrangement from last year which took all of three minutes, the amount of time it took to place batteries in the candles.

One thing I'm totally drawing a blank on is the table centerpiece.  That is usually my most creative idea of the year.  Sometimes I do the same one two years in a row, but never more than that.  I usually find something online for inspiration.

2005

 For several years I used the centerpiece form I got from the Colonial Williamsburg catalog.  This is a neat cut iron form which holds a hurricane lamp glass or a pineapple in the center, and has rings to hold pears or apples, or just ornaments after your pears get over ripe.   You place a foam or oasis disc underneath to hold your greenery and I always made the effort to find fresh greens.

2008

 Sometimes a new collectible purchase inspires my centerpiece,  This oval enamelware roaster base is a great beginning and I replicated this arrangement at least once.  Again with fresh greens.

2012-13

 In the kitchen, my cheery red colander is my favorite starting point

2014

2015

 Sometimes I find an inspirational photo online and have to go looking for the components.  This sometimes leads to whole new collections.  My Campfire Marshmallow arrangement brought a lot of fun and the following year I amended it to add the mini-marshmallow tin. 

Double Decker Marshmallows 2016

Last year's simple wooden bowl base is my favorite I think.  I may duplicate this.  I also bought a lantern for my autumn decorations this year so maybe I'll use that instead.

2016

Or maybe this year I'll just go buy a poinsettia....

Turkey Party

There is something about a soaking rain that brings out the turkeys.  It seems like whenever we have a stretch of rainy weather I find a soggy turkey slouched miserably in the yard trying to air out.  Not a year goes by without us seeing a few turkeys, but they aren't as common since the coyotes moved in down the road.  Today we saw a whole flock of soggy but happy turkeys.  In fact, they were having themselves a little turkey party.

It started with a lot of airing out and preening and ended in a hoe-down.  They were dosey-doeing and promenading and popping up in the air like popcorn.  We tried to count them and came up with at least twenty.  

Besides the turkey party, our two squirrels, one back and one grey were darting in and out, and a couple of cautious deer lurked in the edge of the woods.  The deer aren't as bold as they usually are.  We promised a friend of ours who bow hunts that if he just sat in the glider rocker on the garden patio, the deer would come to him, and that's exactly what happened.  I've been joking that when we opened her up she was full of Hosta.  And that's not far from the truth.  So we're down one large doe, and hoping to get rid of the medium sized doe as well.  

In fact, here she is.  That's right! You'd better watch your back.