"Nothing" is what's been going on in my garden. Or is it what I've done as far as winterizing goes? Or does it refer to this blog, and what's happening here?
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.
My overwintering strategy involves moving many potted plants into the garage and basement each fall, but I wait until absolutely necessary. Some of the agaves can take temperatures down to 25ºF (-3ºF) or so, and those I will leave outdoors the longest. When the first sub-freezing night approaches, you'll usually find me standing in the garden poring over Google because I can't remember which species can take those few more degrees of cold.
It's the time of year when my thoughts turn to the garden, and in my garden that really means "bamboo".
This is what you get when you have warm, mild weather for a while...
One of my biggest springtime garden tasks is cleaning up the bamboos. Sometimes this means thinning and tidying the big, arborescent bamboos, but it also means pruning or mowing the groundcover and shrubby bamboos.
Every year as winter comes to a close (or appears to as our crazy warm temperatures seem to indicate) I take a look at the bamboos and assess the cold damage that was done.
It's been a fairly mild winter in St. Louis, except when it hasn't. Temperatures above normal most of the time, except for a couple of times when the arctic air arrived and dropped us to single digits. I believe the low was 4ºF (-16ºC) on two separate occasions (the second while I was out of town).
The ice of last weekend is just a memory -- temperatures are in the 50's and 60's now, too warm -- but I wanted to still share with you what those of us whose gardens are built around bamboos see.
It seems like it's cold everywhere right now. That darn Polar Vortex swinging down and turning our mild, late winter into a my-brakes-on-my-truck-are-frozen-and-it-won't-move kind of cold, cold winter.
When overwintering so many plants indoors (in garage or basement), there are always some that don't make it through to spring.
I always have mixed emotions about going out into the garden after the first hard freeze -- and we had a hard one on Saturday. After previous lows that just barely dipped to freezing or a degree (F) below, it was 19ºF (-7ºC) Sunday morning when I awoke.
I haven't been talking about the cactus beds as much as I normally do in spring. Last year I posted about them several times, as I was curious about which survived the brutal winter. Since this past winter wasn't as harsh and probably also because the cactus bed isn't as new, I haven't been as concerned.
By "it" I mean the bamboo-killing cold. Last year we reached -8ºF (-22ºC) as a low a couple of times here in St. Louis when the Polar Vortex spun down and made us wonder exactly how that arctic ice was disappearing, and the result was that all of my bamboos spent a few months with brown leaves.
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