There are a couple of wonderful patches of ornamental grasses in suburban Chicago. No, I'm not talking about some expansive prairie restoration project, or some botanical garden display (although they probably have nice grass plantings too).
One of my favorite things about winter is being able to see the structure of all of the deciduous trees. I love trees when at all times of the year, but seeing their dark, naked branches against the bright winter sky (or sunrise, or sunset) has always been special to me.
A few years ago for Christmas I gave my mother a small container of mixed succulents. These weren't plants that I grew myself, but I had seen them at the local garden center and thought they would look nice in her window -- unlike mine, her house has a nice big south-facing window that gets a decent amount of sunlight in the winter.
I know I keep mentioning the mild start to our winter, but it's been making a big difference in my garden. One benefit is that I've been able to clean up the yard at a more leisurely pace -- which is great because I was concerned how exactly I'd be able to get it all done this fall. Something I tackled last week was cleaning up some of the annual vine remnants.
I never would have thought that at the end of December I would find a plant that was so green in the garden.
The day after Christmas, and there is one plant in the miserable failure that was my vegetable garden this year that is still going strong: kale.
To those of you who celebrate this holiday season, I wish you a wonderful one!
This mild start to winter has given me a longer than usual taste of green.
I've had minimal gardening experience with cactus. I inherited what was once a 2" (5cm) tall potted cactus at least a decade ago and have watched it grow to over 2' (60cm) tall over the years, and have seen a patch of prickly pears in a nearby neighbor's front garden, and I grew some cactus from seed last year... and there was also the small cactus that I was quite allergic to -- if it touched me I would break out in a very itchy rash almost immediately -- but I let that one die outside one winter. That's the extent of my dealings with cactus though. Compared to some people like this, and this, I know nothing.
Some posts are pretty, involving interesting plants with colorful blooms and lush foliage. This is not one of those posts, because it came about from my attempts to clear off my driveway. Yes, the driveway that this year became essentially a garden center, covered in pots of all sorts of plants.
Not a creature was stirring... that's because they're not in the house. They're in the garage. One of my annual struggles is to only overwinter plants, not animals. Especially the rodent types.
With all of my winter preparations: bringing potted plants into the garage, into the house, digging up dozens and dozens of elephant ear bulbs, digging non-hardy rootballs for storage over the winter -- somehow I forgot about one plant. I seem to do this every year. (Thankfully it's not the same plant each year -- I like to spread around the neglect.)
Although it's been quite mild so far this year, once winter kicks in there won't be too much opportunity to get out into the garden, so the view of it from inside of the house is much more important. There are three main windows that look out into the back yard, and I thought it would be good to show you what I get to look at for the next few months. First though, the windows get cleaned.
By "pick-me-up" I really mean "prop-it-up". And by "it" I mean bamboo. This Phyllostachys glauca 'Yunzhu' keeps defeating my attempts to keep it more upright and out of my neighbor's yard. (The property line is between the vertical pole in the bamboo and the edge of the wooden compost bin. So although the roots are in my yard, it looks like about 50% of the plant is actually in my neighbor's yard.)
One thing you notice when you first get into gardening and plants is that there is a lot of terminology involved. If you've not had any exposure to Latin or Greek before, you will when you visit your local garden center and start reading plant tags. Although knowing the common names of plants may be a good starting point, that's often not enough to narrow it down to a specific plant. Try going to the nursery and asking for a "moonflower", or "daisy". Plant genus and species names are usually in latin, and asking for "Chrysanthemum maximum" is going to get you exactly the plant you wanted (Shasta daisy).
My indoor plant table where I overwinter way too much stuff is mainly functional. I think of it like a greenhouse, sort of a production facility. A jumble of pots, different plants, indoor gardening tools, pest control products, dead mantis carcasses, spilled seeds, dried leaves that have dropped or been cut -- basically, it's not pretty.
Considering the time of year and the amount of holiday-related happenings that most people are involved in, you might thing that's what the title of my post means -- that I'm short on time getting this post out, or shopping, or doing something in the garden.
I'm not a blonde and I'm not skipping work, so you may wonder what exactly "blonde skips work" means, and what a post with that title is doing on my blog. I wondered the same thing when I saw it in the search terms that Google told me was getting people to this site.
One of my biggest challenges each winter is what to do with the plants that are tropical or not quite cold-hardy enough to survive the cold months here. It basically comes down to one choice: keep them in the garage, or keep them in the house.
Of all of the overwintering tasks I have each year, the potted bamboos are the most work. Not that overwintering bamboo is difficult, especially since most of the plants I have should be cold-hardy here, but they're in pots which reduces their cold-hardiness.
Part of my overwintering strategy each year is to take cuttings of tender plants, root them indoors, and grow them under lights for the winter. By springtime I'll have several new plants of each variety to put into the garden.
As the temperature is predicted to plunge to about 14ºF (-9ºC) tonight -- which is quite a bit below the normal of 28ºF (-2ºC) -- I decided it would be a good night to fire up the wood stove. We had a high-efficiency wood-burning stove "insert" installed in our fireplace a few years back, and it's wonderful for cold evenings and mornings. I was looking forward to the first fire of the year, so out to the woodpile I went (thank you full moon!), carried in a couple buckets of wood, and opened the stove door for the first time for at least six months.
The cold that has settled into my body has left me unwilling to write more than a few words.
The other day I noticed there were a few more potted elephant ears that I hadn't dug up yet -- I knew I had a lot of these this past year, but I didn't realized exactly how many. In any case, I noticed something else about these specific pots:
Today's post is going to be a little bit different, as I'm not going to talk about my garden at all. I'm also not going to talk about other gardens, or animals, or Nature, or building anything. I'm going to talk briefly about this blog -- or more to the point, some features of it I'd like to point out.
Yesterday I wrote about saving some water plants, growing them inside the house under lights. Those were small plants -- today I tackle the big one: the papyrus. I actually had three large plantings of papyrus 'KingTut' this year because I was able to successfully overwinter a few plants last year. With that experience I'm going to experiment a little and should end up with lots of papyrus for next year -- plenty to share with neighbors.
Even though I've only recently completed my pond and haven't done any planting around or in it, I already have several water or bog plants. In fact I've had water plants for a few years, growing them in pots or in the ground -- most water plants do fine in regular garden soil as long as they get enough water. The problem is that most of the water plants I have are not cold-hardy enough to survive our winters, so I need to overwinter them in the garage or the house.
My gardening friend Mike emailed me a couple of weeks ago saying that he had a lot of large nursery pots that he wanted to get rid of, and wondered if I was interested. I told him YES, but couldn't get out there right away. Yesterday morning he gave me a reminder call, asking if I'd be able to pick them up this weekend, and if so, he wanted to show me his begonia collection. He caught me between projects, so I jumped in the truck, excited to get a few big pots -- I knew I'd be needing them next year.
I've grown cardoon on and off for about 5 years now. The first year the one plant I put into the ground flourished, becoming huge and beautiful. It didn't survive the winter though. The next year I had two pretty nice plants in the ground, and for whatever reason they both overwintered, giving me those huge, wonderful thistle-like blooms the next year.
I've been growing purple fountain grass (Pennisetum setaceum 'Rubrum') for several years, and used to buy new plants each spring as it's not cold-hardy enough to survive our St. Louis (zone 6) winters. For the past few years I've been overwintering plants indoors under lights -- it's time for me to do this again now.
Even though I've just recently done this, it's time for another collection of mini-topics.
Now that the pond project is finished for the year, I can "relax" a little bit and do some easy tasks. Pretty much everything I'll be doing in the yard in the next few weeks will be related to overwintering, helping plants make it through the winter. For the last two years I've had the temporary greenhouse, but I've decided not to bother with it this year. Not that it matters for today's post, so I'm not sure why I mentioned it now.
This past weekend I finally finished building the pond -- if "building" is the right word. "Finished" is probably not the right word either, since this project -- like most parts of the garden -- will constantly be evolving, changing, and maturing. The bulk of the work is done though...
I've been looking at rocks quite a bit recently as I finish up my pond project. I love everything about rocks (except hauling them around): their texture, colors, forms.
There's a beacon in my garden right now. It's large, it's colorful, and it is shining so brightly -- especially on an overcast day.
After almost a week of delays due to weather, the holiday, and other projects that I was involved with inside the house, I finally was able to work on the pond again yesterday. You may remember from the last pond post that I finished up in the near darkness by creating the pebbled beach, but was unable to take a photo of it. Here's what it looked like yesterday morning, which is exactly how it looked that evening of the previous post:
Earlier this autumn I had a late-season discovery on my parsley: another black swallowtail caterpillar! I had already rescued and raised some of these caterpillars this summer, and was surprised to see one so late in the season. Knowing that as soon as this youngster got big enough for me to spot him the raccoons would also see him, I put him into my caterpillar jar and watched him pupate.
Two springs ago I tried growing plumeria (or Frangipani) for the first time. I bought a couple of dormant cuttings (sticks), potted them up, and watched them flourish over the summer. Then I brought them into the garage for the winter and both died and rotted instead of going dormant as I was expecting. Then late last spring I decided to give it another try, bought three more less expensive cuttings (received six!), potted them again, and waited.
A few days ago I posted about my success in remembering to plant garlic at the right time of year for once, and titled that post "I did it!" Well, garlic wasn't the only fall-planted "bulb" that I've been wanting to plant for years and finally managed to this year. (Does that sentence make any sense?)
I've been off work for the last few days, and I had expected to get the pond project pretty much wrapped up by now. Unfortunately another (indoor) project and the weather have combined to move work on the pond farther down the priority list.
Just when I think that the autumn colors are done for the year, a few of the smaller plants in my garden crank up the vibrancy.
Every spring I lament the fact that I didn't plant any garlic in the fall. I love garlic, and it's dead-simple to grow from what I've read, and I grow lots of other herbs and vegetables, but garlic is something I've never managed. Garlic chives, yes (loads and loads of it). Actual garlic? No.
If you're a regular reader, you know that I grow bamboo. In fact, like many who grow it, I'm a bit of a bamboo nut. I have plenty of bamboo plants of all sizes, both in-ground and in pots -- too many some may say. Still, when the opportunity to get some bamboo seed comes up, I can't say no!
When I was in school there were always kids in the winter who came to the bus stop with wet hair. When it was cold enough, there'd always be somebody who said something like "your hair will break off if it freezes". I personally doubt this will actually occur, but I'm pretty sure I know who started this rumor (if it in fact is untrue).
As happens every so often, I take photos of things that don't merit their own post. Sometimes those photos are forgotten, or intentionally ignored, but sometimes I feel the need to combine them into a "catch up" post. This is one of those posts -- a collection of unrelated recent observations.
As we move into the colder, darker part of the year, I get to see and photograph more sunrises. The location of the sun as it peeks over the horizon, the time at which it does so, the almost-constant presence of clouds -- all of those things combine to let me see mornings like I never seem to be able to during the summer.
I had some time this weekend to continue working on the pond. The weather was dry, warm, and I was eager to keep this project moving forward. If you remember from the last post, I had filled the pond about 80% or so, but couldn't go higher because the retaining wall needed to be finished.
As you may recall, I have two passion flower vines in my garden this year. One potted that that the raccoons stripped of fruits, and one growing on my pergola which has been untouched. I've been checking those fruits every week or so, but haven't noticed them getting any riper -- although I don't have much experience with knowing a ripe fruit from an unripe one.
Two mornings ago after our first hard freeze of the year I woke up to a frosty world. As the forecast was calling for pretty warm temps of 65ºF (18ºC) for the day, I had to act quickly.
For me nothing says autumn like falling tree leaves, and the often vibrant colors they take on before dropping.
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