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.

There are baby poison ivy plants popping up everywhere in my yard.  I have never seen anything like this. It’s crazy. And it’s frustrating because no matter how many seedlings I pull, when I turn around I find more. The worst is that they like to grow under existing plants, so they are hard to see and hard to remove without disturbing the plants I want there.  Sometime soon I’m going to have to set aside a couple hours for nothing but poison ivy removal. I hate to spend my limited garden time doing that, but we’re being overrun.

The flooding we had this past weekend washed away part of my pocket prairie. That is, I’d put down a thick layer of cardboard topped with leaves in an attempt to smother all the nasty stuff growing there already (like poison ivy– what fun!) before I planted my prairie plants.  That seemed to be working beautifully. The water washed away the leaves and some of the cardboard. Once I can get out there again without walking through water an inch deep, I’ll see if I can’t repair some of the damage. The fence at the far end of the garden caught a lot of the leaves, so I might be able to haul them back to the prairie area.

The fact that I hadn’t been able to plant my prairie seems like a blessing in hindsight. I’ve been frustrated that I couldn’t get that planted this year but there’s an upside. It would be worse to get it planted and lose a bunch of plants to the flooding. The prairie didn’t get done this year for two reasons: the first was that the cardboard and leaves hadn’t decomposed as I’d thought they would. Hopefully that won’t be the case next year, and if it is, I’ll consider removing the cardboard since it will have been smothering things for over a year at that point. The other reason was that I had the darndest time getting the native grasses to grow, and at a certain point it became personal so that I’m determined to do it myself rather than buy plugs or small plants.

I did end up getting big bluestem to grow… I thought. In fact, it grew much more vigorously than the little bluestem. And when it got big enough, I couldn’t see that it was different from some invasive weed grasses. I just don’t know enough about the various grasses to know for sure. The big bluestem seed came from a trade, however, rather than a commercial source, so I worried that it was mis-identified. I certainly didn’t want to plant an invasive non-native grass in my garden. I have enough of that to pull as it is! So that went bye-bye.

So I’ve come up with a different approach to getting my prairie. I’m going to try some native grasses that are supposed to be easier to grow. And I’m going to keep trying the big and little bluestem at the same time.  As I said, that’s become a personal challenge. I’ve ordered the seed and I’m going to get busy with it as soon as it gets here. If I can get some germinations, the plants will still have most 4 months for growing.  They might be large enough for planting next year.

It’s been a busy week in the garden and I haven’t been inside much to be posting to the blog. I applied another AVCT soil drench and I’ve gotten a lot of weeding done and after the 4 inches of rain in a little over a day, I began putting down a thick newspaper topped by leaves mulch to trap that moisture in (and stop the weeds, of course). It’s raining again now (we’re supposed to get another several inches this weekend– we’re sure going to wish we had this come late July!) and again, once it stops, I’ll be out early next week taking care of another bed. Of the 4 beds in the rose garden, I will only mulch 3 (if I have enough leaves to get that far). The other still floods with a current when it rains much. Until I get that fixed any and all mulch washes away.

In the meantime, I’m scouring the web for information on AVCTs and CTs.

If there is only one thing I’ll take away from my first year of WSing, it will be to cover all my pots with screen before the spring seeds start flying. I spent more than 4 hours today weeding my little pots. I’ve gotten 80 pots cleared out, but that still leaves another 120+ to deal with. I suppose there are a couple good points to this: It’s a reason to give each plant a close examination and it gives me some idea of what I have out there and how many of each. One thing I’ve noticed: the echinacea that survived the big flood might as well not have. They are pitiful little things. For now I’m leaving them alone, but I may decide to yank them and use their pots for something else. All the rain we’ve continued to get post-flood has made them extremely unhappy.

This past winter, before I sowed my pots of aster oblongifolius, I checked to see what information I could  about germination rates. I read more than one person say it has a low germination rate. Since I really wanted to have some, I sowed a lot of it. Well, it turns out the lowest germination rate was about 50%. So of the gazillion seeds I sowed, I now have about half a gazillion seedlings. Oh my goodness! It’s a good thing my parents just moved and my mom wants a butterfly garden. Guess who’s getting a lot of asters!

I’ve lost count of how many maple and seedlings I’ve had to pull in the last few days. They are sprouting everywhere— including in my WS pots. I won’t do WS next year without covering those pots to keep those blasted seeds out of them.

Well, garden neglect hit a whole new level this past 2 weeks. We’ve had so much rain that I couldn’t weed much of the time. And then the rest of the time, truthfully, I just didn’t want to deal with chiggers and ragweed. Mostly the ragweed. The chiggers I can at least use bug spray to deter.

I sucked it up today, though. I still have some plants to get planted. We’re supposed to have several inches of more rain in the next 2 days, possibly starting tonight. I figured I’d better get those plants in while I could. (It’s been dry for a whole 2 days now). Unfortunately, much of my pot ghetto went to the big compost heap in the sky while they waited for me to plant them. It makes me sick. I did still have 7 I planted today and another 6 or so that need to dry a bit before I plant them. (They are dianthus and their pots are saturated from the rain, which they don’t appreciate. I figured planting them right before several inches of rain wasn’t smart. So I’ll let them dry out in the interim).

The ragweed is still a problem. I’ll be feeling it the rest of the day now. I did get some weeding done,a mere drop in an ocean. And I moved a couple of buckets of soil that needed to be put up against the house to direct water away from the basement instead of it pooling as it has been. It looks like it will make a difference.

While out in the garden, I noticed several things. First: my Buxton Blue geranium has bloomed for the first time– finally. I don’t blame the plant. It started the growing season with only two of the sorriest looking leaves around. It took major damage from a late freeze. Anyway, it’s recovered nicely and is blooming. Yay! Three pieces of plants which broke off during weeding earlier in the summer have all taken root and are growing quite well. Another yay! These were small pieces originally and they’ve increased their size several times over their starting size. The mums and sedum are doing well and apparently settling in from their rude move a few weeks ago. In fact, the mums have new buds on them. Do mums keep blooming until frost? The sedum and blooming and looking lovely and the shade garden is looking nice. The garden is FULL of happy butterflies, bees, and other insects. I noticed, too, that a half dozen borage seedlings have sprouted. I guess they are the eager ones. They aren’t going to get too far before a killing freeze.

The soil is what has surprised me the most, though. In three of the 4 beds, my husband generously ammended them with literally tons (20, I think) of builders sand, manure and other stuff. He lugged all the bags up and tilled them in. (This was years ago). Those beds were given some help. The native soil is nothing but pure clay. The fourth bed got nothing. I was in a hurry to get some stuff planted in it, so I just started planting. Poor plants! Today I was really pleased to see that what I have in that bed is no longer pure clay. It’s not as friable as I hope to get it some day, but it’s much, much improved. I have done only one thing in that bed that could be considered remotely helpful: I mulched. The other thing that was helpful was something I didn’t do: I quit using chemical fertilizers and fungicides a couple of years ago. The incredible change to the soil is due, I believe, to the hardworking worms in it. And there are a LOT of worms. It’s amazing the difference they’ve made.

In another bed (one of those that got the original treatment), I was even more surprised. This bed is on a bit of slope and every time we get a heavy rain, it washes all of my mulch away. (I keep meaning to put some sort of berm at the top of it but haven’t). So I quit mulching. This poor bed has sat in baking sun, unprotected. This summer I didn’t even water there except by hand for the plants that were new to the garden. As I was weeding today, the soil was as friable and perfect as could be. How on earth did that happen? I’d sure like to get results like that in the rest of the beds! I was also very pleased to see that the teeny tiny baby salvia I transplanted there have taken and are doing very well. Those won’t get washed away, either. They are tough plants.

So, I didn’t get enough done out there today but between allergies and the fact that I had a workout at Curves this morning, I’m beat! The kids will be home soon and they’ve got a play date with several friends up at the park. I plan to become one with a park bench while they play! If I’m lucky and the rain holds off a few hours longer than they think, I might be able to get some more weeding in tomorrow morning. And I need to get the apples of the apple tree. I’ve never made a pie before, but I think I’d like to use those apples to make some pies. With the next couple of days being rainy, that might be a nice activity.