Gardening by Mistake

It looks like two of the four viola pedatifida that literally vanished overnight are trying to make a comeback. Yay! Four was a pretty pitiful showing as it was, and two is even more so, but I’m very happy to have them anyway. Now I’ll be able to see if they make it through the winter. If so, I’ll know it’s a good place to plant more next spring. They are supposed to be quite picky about where they’ll grow. I’m hoping I put them at a good site.

I’m pretty much done with the weeding in the beds. There’s still plenty of work to be done out there. I’ve got plants that never got planted that I’m hoping to finally get into the ground and I have mulching I need to do.

I have fallen in love with my salvia azurea. I grew some from WSing. As with the viola, this plant was new to me so I planted fewer than a dozen of them. I will be adding a lot more next year. They are absolutely charming! And they have the clearest, true blue flowers. I have some next to some echinacea and I love the way those colors look together. I will warn you that these plants will flop if they do not have other plants to prop them up. If you hate floppers, you’ll either have to have them grow next to plants like echinacea or stake them. Some of my have flopped to the ground and others are propped on the echinacea. They can be cut back early in the season for shorter plants. I may do this with my ground-floppers next year.

I’ve been spending a lot of time weeding the tall grass prairie that took over my garden. (That is, if a tall grass prairie was made of invasive, non-native grasses). I did a great job of staying on top of the weeds until about mid-July. Then we had unbelievable heat and humidity and I hid inside. The weeds kept growing with abandon.

I’ve been noticing what is still growing and what is no longer in evidence from what I planted. So far, aquilegia is the only thing I’ve noticed that has vanished. Oh, and one of my asclepias tuberosa plants. Everything else is still hanging on somehow. It’s been a hot and dry summer since mid-July. My viola pedatifida, WS and planted this year, were looking beautiful on Friday morning as I weeded. On Saturday evening they’d vanished, no trace that they’d ever been there. I assume the blasted rabbits got them.

As I’ve been weeding I’ve had a lot of time to think about this year’s gardening and I’ve gotten pretty bummed out about what seems like my many failures this year, the first and most noticeable of which is the current weed situation.  Another item high on the list is my failure to get as many plants added as I’d set out to. My goal was 350 plants. Last year I added 170 or so. So far this year, I’m at a measly 123. I still have winter sown plants sitting around waiting to be planted, so it’s possible (I don’t know that it’s likely, though) that I could make it to 170 this fall. I’ve just got to get more planted next year. And that might sound like a lot of plants, but I have (stupidly) 1,000 square feet of garden to fill in. 170 is a drop in a very large bucket. Added to my list of disappointments are the failure to get my prairie rain garden in and my front border done. Both of those go on my list for next year.

Maybe by the end of the growing season I’ll have gotten more planted and everything will be nicely weeded and maybe even mulched and I’ll feel better about things. For now, though, I’d have to say that this growing season was a real disappointment and failure.

Oh boy did I overdo it in the garden today (Sunday).  On the positive side, I got a LOT of weeds pulled and made a lot of progress. On the other hand, I still have tons more weeds to go and I probably won’t be able to move my legs for a few days. Ha! It figures.

While out there I made the happy discovery that I do actually have at least one snake out there. I didn’t see the snake, but I saw the skin it shed. I’m fine with keeping that as close to encountering the snake as I come. I don’t care if I ever see it/them– I just want them out there eating voles, grasshoppers and whatever else. I’d say I wish they’d eat the damn rabbits that get into the garden, but I don’t think I want my snakes that big! Vole-eating-sized is good enough for me.

Saturday we were in Topeka for the day. We spent some time at the Lake Shawnee gardens. I’m intending to get some pictures from that visit up this coming week. Maybe I’ll work on that while my legs recover from today!

The poison ivy count continues to climb. I don’t know how many of those buggers I pulled today. It had to be more than 100. And that was only in the front border and front flower bed! I haven’t even started on the back yard or the rose garden. It’s crazy.  It’s a very good thing I don’t get rashes from the stuff.

Going out to the garden is an exercise in depression right now. We’ve been having 105-110 degree heat indexes for two weeks now. Think I’m getting any weeding done? Nope! Think that heat’s stopped the weeds any? Ha!

I’ve done so well on the weeding front this year, but right now looking at the garden, you wouldn’t know it. I don’t have “nice” weeds, you know, short ones that grow close to the ground and aren’t horribly visible. Henbit comes to mind. No, what I have is yellow nut sedge (and in bloom it’s even taller) and grasses. Lots of very tall grasses. And not the native kind, darn it. Those I’d just relocate. No, I’ve got a disaster out there right now. I haven’t sprayed my roses for 2 weeks. If I miss this weekend, that’ll be 3 spray sessions, and the roses are definitely showing it. The black spot does just great in this high humidity.

I think I’m going to have to suck it up and at least give it a try this weekend, 110 degree heat index or not. Ugh.

I was delighted recently to discover a new plant, grown from winter sowing, is a first-year blooming plant: ruellia humilis. This is a native to Missouri, familiarly called the wild petunia, although it is not related to petunias. There are other reasons to like this perennial aside from its early bloom. It is one tough plant, dealing with a brutally sunny spot and getting only rain for moisture, not to mention our high humidity.  That’s the beauty of a native plant in its preferred environment!

Another winter-sown plant has turned out to be a first-year bloomer as well: agastache foeniculum. This one is not technically a native to my area, although it’s a native in neighboring states, so I cheated an included it for this year.

I’m trying for the first time a method I’d read about some time ago. With this method, you take a 2-liter bottle or a milk jug or whatever container you want, and you put a small hole in the bottom of it. Place it where you want to water and fill it with water. The water will slowly drip from the container. It will drip so slowly, in fact, that it has time to be fully absorbed into the soil, rather than running off it or being evaporated by the sun. This will provide a slow, deep watering for the spot you place it.

I started collecting rainwater this year. I’m too cheap to pay for an expensive rain barrel, and in my situation I couldn’t use the spiffy hose on one, anyway. So I have a large, and I do mean large, tub sitting under a spout. I probably collected 35 gallons in that. When I’m on top of it, I bail some of that into a second container that holds something like 17 gallons. In a good rain, I collect some significant water which I’ve been using to brew my AVCTs (chloramine free!) and to water plants. I need to use up today what I collected last Sunday because I have seen the very first mosquito larvae. As soon as I see them, I use up whatever water remains in the bin. It takes something like a week for the mosquito larvae to complete its cycle and become a mosquito, so by doing this I make sure I’m not raising mosquitoes.

I’ve got my first 6 gallon milk jugs out in the garden, dripping as I type. I learned something, though: only put one hole in the container. A smaller hole leads to a slower drip and a longer watering time. If you put two holes, even small holes, you’ve just lost your nice, slow drip. I’ve got one jug that way and that is how I discovered this. It will still do a good job watering, but it won’t be quite a good as the others. (Also, don’t let your husband use a pocketknife to make the holes because he think the slit will work just fine. It won’t! Use a small drill bit or an ice pick or something like this.) It will be interesting to see how long it takes for those gallon jugs to drip empty. Only some of my roses will get watered this way. I don’t have enough water for them all. Hopefully we’ll get rain soon and I’ll be able to re-charge my water bins and then another bed of roses will get a slow, deep watering between rains which don’t come often enough  this time of year when it’s blast-furnace hot.

Incidentally, you can use this same setup (a jug with a single small hole in it) to attract birds. Hang the dripping jug over a container that can collect the water. The sound of water will attract the birds. If you use a shallow container, the birds will likely bathe in it.

“The Soil Biology Primer is an introduction to the living component of soil and how it contributes to agricultural productivity, and air and water quality. The Primer includes units describing the soil food web and its relationship to soil health, and units about bacteria, fungi, protozoa, nematodes, arthropods, and earthworms. It is suitable for a broad audience including farmers, ranchers, agricultural professionals, resource specialists, conservationists, soil scientists, students, and educators.”  (from the USDA National Resources Conservation Service website).

This book includes information written by Elaine Ingham and Clive Edwards, two of the big names in their respective areas of expertise (soil microbiology and vermiculture, respectively). You can buy the book for $18, or you can read it online. The hard copy contains additional pictures not found in the online version.

If you are interested in nurturing your garden or just want to get a better idea of all the myriad components of soil life, this is required reading and just the starting point. Once you’ve read this, consider reading Teaming with Microbes by Jeff Lowenfels and Wayne Lewis.

Early results are very positive in my trials. I’m using aerated vermicompost tea in my attempt to keep my roses black spot free, or at least mostly black spot free.

On June 7th, I took pictures of about 40 of my roses, most of them the worst cases of black spot. Then the next day, I started spraying them with the tea. So far they’ve been sprayed with AVCT 3 times. Some roses don’t look much different, two might actually look a little worse, but then there are the rest which look like different rose bushes. Some of my roses are black spot magnets, and they are looking beautiful. The changes in just 3 weeks are quite remarkable. At the end of the season I’ll post final conclusions and some before and after pictures. I’m looking forward to seeing how the roses look at that point.

This is my first year growing cucumbers. I have planted 3 vines, and I think I still have another 2 in pots. I suspect that 3 vines will be more than enough to bury us under cucumbers. My son wanted to grow cucumbers to make pickles. All I can say is, he’d better eat them if we make ‘em!

I planted one cucumber vine where it can climb up New Dawn. As far as I’m concerned, that will be the best possible use of that rose bush. I hate that bush. It has one good flush in the spring, but the blooms last only about 3 days. Then for the rest of the growing season it just blooms  here and there but never in a big flush. Someday I’d like to replace it with something else. Until then, I can use it as something for the cucumber vine to climb.

Those huge downpours we had recently and all those inches of rain in one week led to some significant flooding and washed away some aquilegia I had planted only a couple weeks before. Tonight, I planted more aquilegia in that same place.  Am I being foolish?  I hope not. That flooding we had isn’t something we have often. In the 10 years we’ve been here that’s probably happened only 2 or 3 times. And I figure by the time it could happen again, the young aquilegia I just planted will be established and should be able to withstand a brief flood. Also, my hope is that I’ll have the rain garden in before then, and that should make a big difference.

All told, I got 20 plants (all grown from seed) taken care of tonight. It feels so good to have them gone from the front porch! Now, to get the others planted….