Not only have I not been blogging about the garden for the past year (or a little more), I've also not been doing much gardening.
I thought that it would be a good time to show you the front garden -- the view that my neighbors get, and what I see when I pull up to the house each day.
For a couple of years now I've contemplated a fairly drastic change in the garden, but I could just never bring myself to make it happen. Until this past July that is, when one day I decided enough was enough and I got to work.
I usually avoid putting spoilers into my post titles, but since I post so infrequently these days I thought I'd get right to the point. A couple of weeks ago I was doing some winter damage assessment on the bamboos, and was taking a close look at this completely fried Phyllostachys dulcis:
I've been contemplating a drastic chop of one of my bamboos for several months. Since cutting a large, established plant to the ground is an emotionally difficult thing to do -- probably physically difficult too actually -- I debated for a long while.
We've had quite a mild winter, with our coldest days coming very early -- in mid-November. Temperatures have been in the 40's F (5ºC) for most of the winter, or even warmer. We've had plenty of moisture too, mainly in the form of rain.
One of the reasons that I've been posting so infrequently so far this summer (yesterday's post was my first in about two weeks!) is that there are a lot of projects left out there, and it's either do or write about it. (Time to catch up a bit!) One of those projects is bamboo maintenance. The dry fall and winter combined with a couple of extended spells of bitter cold took a heavy toll on many of the bamboos and there are many dead culms to remove.
There is much bamboo work to do this spring. Much is normal maintenance: pruning, cleaning. The dry fall and harsh winter have created an extra amount of damage that needs to be removed too, but I also skipped some tasks the last year or two and am paying for it now -- mainly rhizome pruning and therefore having to wrangle a few back under control.
Ah, beautiful bamboo culms:
As I hinted at earlier this week, it's time to take a look at the bamboos and survey the damage that winter has dealt to them. If you prefer seeing healthy, green bamboos (as I do) with little evidence of winter's wrath, then you should look at the before photos I took in December. What comes next won't be pretty.
So it looks like I'll be doing quite a bit of finger crossing in the next few weeks...
We're approaching the time when the garden starts changing pretty quickly (wishful thoughts of Spring?) so I thought I better post what things looked like on January 19th. I went out there intending to take photos of the bamboo for comparison with the "before" photos taken earlier.
Worst Foliage Followup ever? The "cold snap" (that's a friendlier, happier way to say it I think) we had to welcome the new year did what I expected to the bamboos: fried them.
Not to me! Although I wouldn't blame you for jumping to that conclusion based on the frequency (low) at which I've been posting lately. No, I mean say goodbye...
In the previous post I showed you the "easy" bamboo planting. It was "easy" because it was something I could do myself. Sure it took three hours, but that's garden time so it's fun, right?
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With the site cleared of the old bamboo, it was ready to plant the "new" one. This wasn't a case of grabbing the black nursery pot that contained the new plant though.
Back near the end of September I posted about my bamboo removal project, how I had hired a neighbor kid with a strong workout ethic to dig out three of my disappointing bamboos.
My garden -- like yours I have to assume -- is full of good and bad this year. Here's an example of good and bad in the same view:
I grow a lot of bamboo, as regular readers know. Most of them are quite cold-hardy for St. Louis, but there are a few of them that are marginal. This means that they don't do well in our winters, and after a few years I've given up on them.
As you probably have noticed, I've been going long stretches this summer without posting -- sometimes only one post a week (or less)! Mainly this is due to a busy schedule that leaves little time for gardening, but it's also due to the weather, as it's just been a very hot summer. Until now that is.
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