Birch Tree Bed

It's going to be a heat index of 110 - 120 for the next two days. And today was our 18th day in a row in the upper 90's. No rain. Even the farmers here have gone on water restrictions. You KNOW it's bad when....

I've been giving a little attention, for the first time, to the small bed towards the back of the lawn that has 2 birch trees and a bed of day lillies. It needs some love. Things I need to do for it:

Water once in a while
Seed head the lillies so they bloom next year - done
Prune the birches to keep them healthy and let light to the lillies
Weed
Dig up, divide, and replant the lillies
Fertilize next spring

I'm trying to decide what to do with all the divided lillies. They're huge. But where do I need a new lily bed? Maybe on the back fence? But I was thinking more ramblers there. As part of the new bed on the SW corner? Make a small bed on the NE corner? Fill out the front garden, pull up a hosta or three? Just toss them or give them away? I've got no idea!

Walk Through my Garden July 06

OK I took a quick walk through the garden this evening and snapped a few pictures. This way I have something to review and compare with later in the season or in years to come! I didn't get everything - the entire North side of the house is so weedy it's not worth taking pictures, for example; and a lot of plants were wayyyy past their prime and barely recognizeable in the heat. But I did get a few things that are important right now. Keep in mind as you look at the garden we have just endured the driest June and July in 115 years. We have had something like 2" of rainfall all summer and this is normally our wet season! Plus temps in the upper 90's if not 100's since mid June. So everything looks very brown and dried out; it doesn't normally look so bad in a non-drought year. Anyway starting as we walk out the back deck (the backyard faces East) and around the South side of the house up to the Front yard.


This is one of the sunflowers blooming under the birdfeeder, against the deck. And three bumblebees apparently. There are about a half dozen huge blooms and they look so cheerful there!


This is a closeup of the red rasberry thicket in back. Dry hot conditions mean it hasn't produced much this year but I have been able to dry a lot of tea.


This is a wider view of the thicket.


The birch trees have had some sort of disease the last two years - the underside of every leaf is bright magenta? Plus some insect damage. I"ll have to figure out what it is.


On to the veggie garden, the cherry tomatoes are producing well so far.


My strawberries on the other hand are mutants. These bushes are two years old and healthy with plenty of suckers and only slight insect damage, but the berries on all three varietals are misshapen this year. They're kind of flat ovals instead of strawberry shaped. They still taste wonderful but teh shape thing is weird!


The basil has survived well and is fully into flowering as of July. I'm still harvesting some for pasta every few days.


Away from the veggies on the South side, past the perennial garden, is my calendula - this is one of the plants, a single bloom version.


And past the calendula, the ugliest spot in the yard and one of the most visible - my ugly SW corner by the driveway. Hopefully in a few weeks it will be bedded with shrub roses and annuals.


The shade strip by the front pathway - impatiens thrive there.


Potted impatiens by the front door make a cheery welcome.

I have to take pictures of the front flower bed with the hosta and columbine, but the light was all wrong this evening (it comes in from the West so my shadow was in everything!) They will be in a future update!

Cukes

Just wanted to add that this past week I picked both my beautiful cucumbers, they measured at 12 and 13.5 inches!! They were HUGE! And so deliciously tenderly sweet, the best cucumbers I have ever eaten, seriously. Yay!

Roses

I am making great progress through my horticultural guide to the area and I have been taken in the last few days by the section on roses. Now roses have never been my favorite plant, although I know they are one of Pete's. And in this climate, traditional roses (the hybrid teacups) can only survive if you SERIOUSLY baby them, and I mean seriously. Example: to overwinter them you have to prune down the plant, dig it up and bare root it, wrap the roots in peat moss that is watered daily to be kept moist, and keep the whole thing in a box of styrofoam peanuts in the garage for 6 months checking the temperature each day to make sure it stays below freezing but not too far below freezing. Any deviation results in dead plants. Ummm no thank you.

However, while the hybrid teas are possible to grow here but largely impractical, the older varietals of roses DO survive here. Some are even native. These are the old garden shrub roses, a few are ramblers, with the pretty double petals. Before 'roses' were turned into what you now get on long stems they were these lovely bushes. And THAT is exactly what I want on my SW corner of the house. A couple nice shrub roses to provide blooms and fragrance in the summer and rosehips in the winter. Yes they will be a lot of work to overwinter and prune and everything else. But they're going next to my beloved blueberry bushes which will take plenty more babying than any roses might, so why not! I also want to try some of the hardy ramblers along the back fence to brighten it up a little from the grey overgrown grass that lives there now.

I figure 2 - 3 shrub roses on the corner garden fronted with a nice display of annuals every year will be a beautiful addition. Now I just have to make my decisions about which ones to pick up. They've got to go in within the next few weeks so they are well settled before winter or I'll lose them. Suggestions on color or varietal welcomed! (We're hardiness zone 4, so anything you suggest has to be hardy to 4 or below.) This is SO much fun!

We just got back from 5 days in California for Terryl and Jordan's wedding. There had been no rain for close to 3 weeks before we left with temps in the 90's. While we were gone temps were over 100 every day with no rain except a passing sprinkle, high humidity. Now again there's no rain forecast for at least another week. It is a very hot, very dry summer. I know all the farm crops around here have been devastated and we're supposed to go to water rationing soon (our town is all well water, the aquifer is running low!) So my plants are suffering.

While we were gone the sunflowers by the back deck steps bloomed, and they look glorious! From the backyard it totally changes the look of the house and adds a lot of color and cheer. There are a half dozen plants ("planted" by mistake under the bird feeder as seeds fell) and two are in full bloom now with more on the way. They reach the height of the deck, over 5' tall!

We also have smaller flowers all around that area that are new this year, I assume they are strawflower (what was n the birdfeeder.) We will see!

My cukes in the veggie garden are an impressive 9 - 10" long, two of them. They are a lovely dark green but I heard not to pick them until they get glossy, so we'll wait another day or two. I have at least one small acorn squash.

Whenw e got back the peas had dried on the vine a bit, despite watering (they were done producing) so I picked them all, shelled them, boiled them, and made them into baby food for Iris. I got 10 overfull cubes yesterday not counting the one I gave her for lunch. Amy and Hank and all the kids ate themselves sick off the peas earlier so that was pretty impressive! I need to pull the vines down now.

I've weeded some more on the South side - everything is dead and gone on the corner where I'm going to plant some shrubs and annuals. I pulled most of the grass and sticker weeds from beind the calendula. We cut down the tree (birch? Elm? Who knows?) growing up inside the lilac there and it looks a ton better - be warned for next year that when I went to uproot the small trees growing through the lilac I discovered there were several large stumps underneath that have just been cut back each year instead of uprooted. BIG stumps. I wasn't seeing baby trees I was seeing new shoots. So I'm not sure what to do about that!

The day lillies in the back went through a shortish bloom and are now suffering from the heat and dry conditions. They have no blooms and are bent over and limp.

The black raspberries are past their prime but the red ones in back are coming into summer harvest. There aren't a ton of fruit but definitely some on each plant plus still some new green leaves for tea.

Tomorrow morning I will water and then harvest the calendula for drying. I"ll try to get some pictures too of how everything looks!

In the Garden - mid-July 2006

Well for now at least, I'm going to make this my gardening journal, while I play with the customization and try to get comfortable enough here that I can make the leap over from my current blog. Coincidentally, I need a gardening journal, so for now I'm going to be keeping notes about the garden in here!

It's mid-July, 2006. VERY hot and dry, drought conditions this year. We haven't had any measureable precipitation in 16 days and temps in the 90's. I've had to do a lot of watering! The bridal veil hanging by the front door likes to stay pretty dry and only watered maybe twice a week even in the heat. It puts out new purple leaves and blooms when kept dry. The impatiens are handling the heat fantastically with minimal watering - whether this is due to heavy mulching, shade or just hardiness I am not sure. The veggies are dry but surviving and producing on watering deeply 2 - 3 times a week, and the north side snowberries are doing much the same (again, heavy mulch.) The calendula seems to be doing OK but frankly, the entire south side of the house is more weeds than garden these days.

Speaking of weeds, I am up to my eyeballs. I let the 'sticker bushes' in the front get away from me and now they're like 5 feet tall and flowering, round purple flowers rather like thistle. UGLY, and too big to really get at them. I weeded the SW corner this afternoon, cutting down all of the large weeds that I attempted to kill with Roundup a week ago and clearing ground. In another week or two the idea is to plant a flowering shrub there in the full sun, maybe another by the garage door, and surround them with bright annuals and definitely again with the mulch. I have 10 cubic feet in the garage, hope it's enough for this project!

What else... the snowberries were planted June 1st. The bulbs all had a very short season and then died and most look stunted and withered really fast. The hosta are ugly as ever. I have a cheap ($4!) red petunia on the front porch in a plastic pot that is actually thriving in the fuller sun there. Bacopa in a basket that was off the back deck died within a week of purchase, too dry perhaps? The calendula are just coming into bloom now and are quite pretty! They have long thick floppy pale green round tipped leaves like rabbit ears, and bright yellow big blooms. I planted easily 3 packets of chamomile seeds this year and do you know out of all that I have seen three tiny plants so far with a total of 5 tiny blooms. They perhaps were overtaken by grass on the side of the garage there. I weeded, fertilized, watered, and then just raked the seeds in but the crabgrass grew much faster than the chamomile. Little success there. The plants have one long stem with lacy little leaves coming off it, kind of like carrot tops. Oh, and I made a discovery today: the plant I assumed was lavender beside Amy's window is actually a form of sage. Sniff test proves it. The trees all seem to be doing well but the front trees and the birches need pruning. The lawn looks good overall but is suffering in the drought and is gathering a lot of weeds - crabgrass, nutgrass, clover and creeping charlie. We put down a weeder feeder in spring which did off most the dandelions, but we have yet to figure out how to kill the others.

Right now in the veggie garden:

Acorn squash is huge and still flowering with maybe a dozen flowers and a handful of small fruit already. Supposedly they will be ready to pick in a few months when the soil spot turns from cream to orange.

Basil likes to be wet and needs to be planted late; it did well this year and flowered last week. Think about mulching it next year. I have some small round brown edged holes and don't know what pest causes them. Lots of flavor and I've made several dinenrs with it already.

Carrots are doing fine but aren't ready for harvest yet. Some are still very tiny and the biggest are about 3" long.

Peas - I planted the edible pod snap peas this year - have just reached their peak with dozens of pods ready for munching. They are VERY sweet, like candy! The vines are quite large and go up a piece of chicken wire, to a twine net across the tomato stakes, and up the fence. Plan on giving them a really big trellis next year!

Strawberries are producing but only smallish and mushy berries. Some flowers still too. They are 2 years old this summer. As last year, the pink lady is the most productive and has several berries every day. All are suffering from something eating holes in their leaves. Two of the bushes have produced trailers this year.

Tomatoes so far are doing alright. They've reached the tops of the cages and have several flowers and a few small green tomatoes. I planted only cherries this year.

Cucumber vine is enormous! Watch these for frost as well as they are tender, none survived at all last year and this year only 1 of my 6. But that one is huge, goes all across the garden and up the fence, and has several flowers as well as 5 or 6 cucumbers on it. The largest is about 6" long. I need to get something under it to protect it from rot, although rot is far from my mind in this drought!

The raspberries are developing amazing foliage this year, with tons of new bright green leaves every week no matter how many I pick and dry. The berries are scant right now and are mostly white with a few turning a bit pink. Dave seems to think these vines will have a small crop now and then produce again heavily in September. The new suckers he planted have some leaves and one even has a few berries, but they are mostly sticks this year!

The black raspberry has just reached or passed its peak. There were tons of berries falling off the bush and no one picked them so I helped myself to some!

And that's what's going on so far!

Ummm is this thing on?

Have I finally found a permanent home for Sonn?