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Category: Garden

Progress and setbacks in the garden

It is a good thing that I restrained myself from ordering seeds and plants from the plethora of garden catalogs that flooded my mailbox in the depths of winter.

The vegetable garden is so overgrown with weeds, wild raspberries, and sumac trees that preparing any section of it for planting is tantamount to starting from scratch. I might as well just rebuild the garden as I go which means no planting this year.

I did however get the Iris bed completely cleaned out and am now working on another. As you can see not much else is happening in the yard yet; it is still cold and early spring and my gardening efforts are still isolated bits as opposed to a real "garden". I am just happy that this much has survived after all my neglect of the last few years. After all the work I put into this bed I would have hated to have lost most of it.

I was particularly proud over the weekend that I managed to pull up several young sumac saplings with most of their root systems, which was quite a job. I was pulling the roots out from under Irises, which luckily are shallow rooted, and the sedum (which are not so shallow rooted). This meant I was carefully lifting the soil around the desirable plants, uprooting the tree roots, and replanting the perennials in their places. There are a few plants I need to add to that bed; for example I know I lost several oriental poppies a few years ago and only about half of the originals remain. I think I also need to replace an aster or two, but the asters aren't coming up yet so I might have to wait and see. That's one of the beauties of the asters, they grow up and cover the leaves of the poppy just as the poppy is beginning to look unsightly. I am also going to put in some sedum in a place that was supposed to be chrysanthemums. I have never been able to keep the mums alive. Something always eats them — I don't know if it is deer or rabbits or the blessed woodchucks but they were absent last year so I don't expect to see them this year either.

This bed, next to the house is my next clean-out project. There are a few hyacinths blooming and you can see that the iris are coming up lushly. This worried me as they had sent up a late bloom in December when frost killed them. I am glad that they survived well.

But I am not working on it now as I inadvertently stepped in a woodchuck hole and sprained my ankle while I was working in the garden on Sunday. This really annoys me as I know perfectly well the hole is there. I need to work on getting rid of those woodchucks, I really do. I didn't notice the ankle at first, and after I stepped in the hole I pulled up the sumac trees, loosing my balance once and falling and probably twisting the same ankle again. Now I have a bit of a sprain and need to stay off the ankle. I suppose it is good that it is cold again this week and supposed to rain (or snow) every day.

I had also hoped to put in a front walk this year but the reality is that the money is just not going to be there to get it done this summer. I didn't anticipate the reduction in income that came with the disruption of the financial markets; not that things are that tight, but saving up for bigger extras will take longer. I half considered doing it myself, but there is that old problem of digging up clay and roots and laying a proper base, all things that weren't done with the first walk that was put in when the house was built. Clay and slate and frost do not make for a level front walk. But really I only thought of that because I need to dig and replant a good half of the front "yard" and it really would be better to do it after the walk goes in so the "men in boots" don't trample my plantings.

But really, it can probably all wait another year. I've had a brown, overgrown, and unsightly front yard flanking a goat path for a front walk for several years now, what's one more?

I think I need to start a journal with plans and aspirations for all the planting I hope to do someday in my dream life. I read Fine Gardening and get ideas and I look at the plant catalogs and get more ideas, and then I forget what I planned and start lusting after something new. The reality is that it will take me long enough to get the bed made that I will have forgotten what I planned to do by the time the reality of planting gets here. So instead of a garden journal I need a garden dreams journal.

I am still going to plant sprouting broccoli. I will get that bed finished this year since it is in the front yard (and not next to the walkway). And who knows I might stick a little bit of rainbow chard in the flower beds too. I like the flavor of the white chard better, but the rainbow chard looks prettier. Maybe both?

Here is a lone scilla siberica that is hiding under a rock. I had mentioned to materfamilias that I thought all my scilla had been trampled by workmen as there were once hundreds and now there seemed to be none. Then today I saw this lonely little flower and it brought a smile to my face.

April 7, 2009
More Garden Photos

I am really captivated by the soft spring weather, by the colors of the lovely flowers even though they are limited, for the most part to the crocuses still.

I am slowly cleaning out the flower beds, happy to find bits of green poking up here and there, promises of future bloom and encouragement after a couple of years of neglect.

There are always those little unexpected surprises. The crocuses, which were planted on one side of the front walk, beneath the cotoneaster which is in desperate need of prunning, trimming, and outright ripping out, have started a new colony on the other side of the front walk where they are nestled protectively among the pachysandra.

Are these the remnants of some squirrels cache?

I knew crocus colonies would grow but I didn't know that they emigrated as well. These are the kind of happy accidents that make gardening such a joy.

Speaking of joys, there have been scattered appearances of species crocus in the Iris bed as I have cleaned it out and I have been very careful to preserve their delicate leaves and blossoms.

I planted these years ago, before I rebuilt this bed and they never really bloomed much. I think the tiny bulbs got washed away with the tons of soil that washed from the neighbors yard across our yard and driveway and down the slope toward the neighbor on the other side. Of course when I built the new Iris bed with the french drain behind it and down the center, I did save the old soil and added it back in to the amended flower bed soil. So I am not surprised that a few bulbs survived.

I see occasional scattered crocus flowers on the edges of the woods, probably were bulbs have been flung with weeds and grass from previous clearings etc. G noted today that he always thought the narrow striped leaves were a form of grass. So I think he has been sending out little starter crocus colonies all around the property and it is a thrill to seem them blooming here and there.

I like to think that those little bulbs will someday form their own little colonies, like the little colony I found today down the slope below the drain pipe that funnels the water that runs across the driveway down the hill.

I was on that end of the house grilling some burgers for lunch and I looked out and saw masses of purple flowers glowing on the sunshine down the slope. It gladdened my heart to see them there in an area that is really otherwise just a patch of woods.

When I looked down the slope beyond them I also saw some tulip leaves pushing their way up through the soil and piles of leaves and twigs. I suppose the heavier tulip bulbs fell further down the slope.

The tulips are not a total surprise. I usually pull the bulbs up at the end of the season as my soil is not deep enough to produce strong perennial blooms, so there are always a few odd tulip bulbs around the edge of the woods, another example of nature soldiering on.

You can't really tell these are on a slope. I had to practically lie on the ground to get them and use a zoom as well, another things that alters the perception of distance, slope, and space. In reality the tulips are about 10 feet below the crocuses you see in the lower right of the photo. Lots of leaves and junk. This is a part of the yard that basically slopes down to the neighbors. It is my property but it is primarily steep woodland and best left alone. It makes me very happy this morning to see these little outcroppings.

I will look forward to seeing the resulting flowers, whatever variety they may be.

And last of all the early daffodils are finally showing the colors. The daffodils on the hill, left by the previous owners are always the first to bloom, right around April 1. They are right on time.

These are on one side of a large rock outcropping marking the base of the small ledge on which the house is built. I have long meant to rip out most of that area, which was once planted with various flowers but is now mostly weeds except for these few daffodils. I would save the daffodils of course, perhaps adding some more. Some day I will get to this as well. But this area is fine by itself right now, and I have lots of landscaping that needs to be done around the new deck which also requires lots of digging and leveling and terracing and amending of the soil before I can even begin planting. But I like to look around while I am in the garden and think about what it might be "someday". It is fun to dream and plan, and it is fun to work to turn dreams into reality. I just have to remember not to become a slave to some dreams at the expense of others.

March 31, 2009
Rainy Day Post

Rain, Rain, Rain.

That seems to be the pattern so far this spring, a day of rain followed by a day of full or partial sunshine followed by more rain. In one sense this is nice as it gives my poor achy muscles time to recuperate from their time in the yard.

In another sense it is annoying. I would like to paint the deck during the cool spring weather but I need more than one clear day.

But still, spring is progressing and the weather, when it is not raining, is delightful. I love being out working in the yard even if I pay for it in the evenings. It seems that the consequences of not letting the yard go wild for two full seasons following two seasons of only partial work due to workmen, has taken a toll on more than just my flower beds and landscaping. My body is also feeling the pain of being whipped back into shape. At 50 it is not as easy as it once was.

It appears that I was wise not to get to ambitious with plans for the vegetable garden because facing that mass of weeds, shrubs and trees that have taken over that spot makes me feel something like a very small David attempting to slay Goliath, except that in my case a simple sling-shot will not do the job. The peas aren't in yet. With luck and good weather they may be my next weekend. And so much work is needed that I am practically starting from scratch all over again. The thought that I could use the existing garden beds without much work was really just fantasy. There is too much work involved, and I need, for my own peace of mind, to have pretty things in front of the house to greet me every day. Repair and replanting the front beds will take first priority.

I had a lovely day cleaning out flower beds, seeing what has survived (so far) and removing a few weeds who were hoping to get an early start. There is also a colony of Sumac seedlings, now really strapping adolescents to deal with. It amazes me how the Sumac always decides to come up right in the little gaps in the middle of a iris rhizome, so that it is somewhat tricky for me to extricate the invader without damaging or relocating the desirable bulb.

Today however it is raining and we have spent some time inside with books.

I picked up the book of poetry I had been reading a while back, but had abandoned due to lack of concentration, the Collected Poems, by Christopher Middleton and was happy to sit and read, contemplating the poems, while looking out at the rain and fog. I continue to find some the references to German literature and authors incomprehensible, but that is due to my own ignorance. I am still reading the fairly early poems, and I still find some obscure and forced. But I am getting more of a feel for the irony and wry humor of many of the poems, of the rather philosophical bent, and the occasional bits of pure beauty.

Above is the view from the living room sofa. The large barge spent the night and had just finished turning around, probably to accommodate the change in tides. The tug is hidden now at the far right hand side of the photo, just beyond the corner of the house.

These rainy days are good for me in that they remind me to slow down and enjoy life. They remind me of the pleasures of whiling away the day in the company of my husband. They remind me not to get carried away with my plans and visions of what could be and what I might accomplish. Plans and visions are all good, but it is too easy to get wrapped up in the doing and forget to take time just for the living.

I also went to the gym today and finished my short book by Haruki Murakami, What I Talk About When I Talk About Running, which I really enjoyed. I actually think Murakami helped me hook back into my enjoyment of the monotony of my exercise regime. I started a new book as well, I was very near the end, another historical fiction: The Boleyn Inheritance. Really, I am always a sucker for books set in or about Tudor and Elizabethan England. It should see me through many a happy mile.

March 29, 2009
Yes, it is spring.

A combination of minor firsts has left me exhausted this evening. Today was my first day in the garden and it was a joy to be out cleaning out flower beds even if my back is now objecting. Or perhaps it is objecting because today was also my first day back at the gym since before our trip. Either way it is a good kind of tired, a curl up in my chair with a cat on my lap kind of tired, which is exactly where I will be once I post some garden photos. Spring has come and it is so pretty.

crocus

A hyacinth preparing to bloom

A few tulips will be gracing me with their presence even though I did not plant any new bulbs last fall. I guess there is some small advantage to not having worked in the yard last summer, I failed to dig up the old tulips and therefore get a small treat no

And a lovely small iris hiding beneath the leaves.

Hopefully there will be some other lovelies this spring, but I harbor no illusions that the garden has survived unscathed after two years of utter neglect, especially as they followed directly up two years where "men in boots" tramped ignorantly over the plantings.

So now to knit. There will be more I am sure.

March 21, 2009
The Greens Made Me Do It.

I am dreaming of greens.

It is garden catalog season and they come into the house bringing promises of warmth and sunshine and glorious color igniting all our fantasies and lusts.

I think I had said, sometime or another over the past year that I really didn't miss gardening. It was a lie, the basest form of self-deception, because here I am thinking about all the things that need to be done in the yard and I get all giddy with excitement. If I didn't want to garden nothing would "need" to be done.

But I want to work on all those projects that have been spinning around in the back of my head. I want to finish promised flower beds, and plant new flower beds in the sunshine around the deck. I have never had a sun garden, well except for the vegetable garden, and I want to resurrect that as well.

Of course the seed catalogs fan the flames of planters lust, but really I am just as much egged on by Denis Cotter's descriptions of various vegetables in my current book, Wild Garlic, Goosberries…and me. Every page, every new green, or root makes me want to cook, or even more, it makes me want to dig in the earth and grow something new. I got this book because Cotter's Cafe Paradiso Cookbook had become a favorite discovery this past year. This book is more prose with recipes, not really a cookbook, but it makes me want to cook.

The chapter on greens especially got my attention. Even before reading this book I had been contemplating my own bed of Tuscan Kale, something we never seem to find quite enough of in the farmer's market to quench our lust for its dark green almost crunchy flavor.

Then Cotter starts writing about greens I can't find and I want them even more. When he wrote about sprouting broccoli I was drooling. I had to run to the catalog stash and start pawing frantically through the pages to see if I too could grow this marvelous vegetable.

Apparently it needs to overwinter.

This is a problem as it is hardy only to zone 7 and Dutchess County is most definitely zone 6. Granted the part of the county along the Hudson is warmer than further east, but still not zone 7. There is one part of my front yard, protected from the North and the West that perhaps is 10 degrees milder than the rest of the yard. I sheltered an azalea only hardy to zone 8 there for several years, until an unusually hard winter took it.

Still, I was wondering if I could plant it in one of the flower beds in the front yard. The maple has shed its leaves by winter. Would that give it enough sun? Or should I plant it in a big barrel and bring it into the protection of the front yard as the weather turns cold? Can I insulate the pot enough if I wrap it with roofing paper and layers of straw enmeshed in chicken wire? What about layers of straw alternating with layers of bubble wrap?

Have I lost my mind?

Perhaps.

I don't know if this is the obsessive gardener or the obsessive cook coming out here. Perhaps both.

January 13, 2009
A birthday gift to myself

As I was driving home from the hotel this morning I got a call from FedEx. They wanted to deliver a package and a signature was required.

This is what came:

My birthday present to myself: A Panton chair.

I have been harboring the idea that I would get at least one of these as long as we have been working on the deck, probably longer. Modern deck, modern furniture, no?

I sat in one in San Francisco one year and absolutely love it. It fits me perfectly: back support in just the right place for my odd back. That doesn’t of course mean that anyone else would like it. G thinks it is ok, but would not chose to sit in it. The neighbors were over and they side with G on this one. That is OK because it means there is no competition for this chair. It is MINE, all MINE. When I sit in this chair I feel like swinging my arms and legs and smiling, just like little grandson Owen does when he is in the swing. I can see that much knitting, dreaming, reading, and just contemplating the Hudson will be done from this movable perch.

But why yellow? The chair came in white (nah, too boring) and orange-red. But I had some canvas fabric that was originally purchased for some long forgotten project and is now destined to be used to make new seats and backs for a collection of director’s chairs that have been sitting around getting grubby while they were shoved out of the way during the construction process.

The yellows don’t quite match. But there is both red and orange in the stripe and I wasn’t sure red-orange would match either. Yellow will blend in, and G and I both love bright colors. With a cool gray house and cool gray deck, a little color is not a bad thing.

So as you can see, I have yet more sewing to do, and I haven’t even finished those one-seam pants yet. Too much back and forth is going on here for me to ever catch up.

And now that the deck is almost done those directors chairs need to be cleaned up, sanded down, repainted, and have new covers made as well.

The list goes on and on, but the temptation to sit in the chair and just stare at the river is also great: Even though there are fewer boats on the river, apparently due to the high price of fuel, the view is remains way to entrancing to ignore:

July 14, 2007
White

The accomplishments of the weekend are blue and white. Unfortunately, no sewing was involved.

After the crew "cleaned" the pool there was still a fairly noticeable black ring or two. We, the clients, were not happy. I was told by the pool guy that he poured acid on it and scrubbed but it didn’t come clean and that it would fade in time in the pool chemicals. Well, that may be true, but I have had rings in the past that did not fade in pool chemicals.

So of course I did it myself. I didn’t want to get taken off the list for water delivery, and I was afraid that we would be waiting for these guys forever.

Besides, once I thought about it, it occurred to me that if the pool guy was right and the grime was caused by oil residue from the trains that go by several times a day, acid alone would do nothing, because you need an alkaline detergent to cut through oil residue. Although most household cleaners would probably do the trick, some one would require more elbow grease than others.

Luckily, although I am not one of those people who finds cleaning a pleasure, I do believe in keeping the appropriate tools in the house, including appropriate cleaning chemicals, and we have had many oil spills on the garage floor from G’s leaky truck.

It is amazing how bright the inside of a white pool is in the sunlight.

But the results are worth it:

July 2, 2007
Deck progress (no knitting)

May was cooler than usual and I couldn’t get any of the contractors to show up and work on my ongoing deck project. So why do they pick the hottest week of the summer-so-far to all show up and work — and why do I have to keep dragging myself out there in the hottest part of the afternoon, in the sunniest part of the yard, to look at everything and answer questions?

I am drained, I tell you just drained.

But it is looking good:

The privacy wall on the north end of the deck, protecting us from the neighbor and people coming down the driveway. And another view of the same thing seen from across the deck:

Generally I think it looks great. But do you notice that the colors don’t match? The deck is gray Correct Deck as specified in the contract. The contract "deck built according to plans". The contractor tells me they don’t have to paint the wooden parts of the deck to match the gray deck material because the contract doesn’t specifically say that it must be painted. He is right, the word "paint" does not occur. It never occurred to me that it needed to. I thought that if you are building a gray Correct Deck deck, you would make everything match (and this contractor came very highly recommended by many people).

There is a whole lot of painting to be done here.

What does this have to do with knitting? Nothing except that the exasperation factor is eating into my knitting time. And I would never promise someone a gray cashmere sweater and then knit the collar and button bands out of brown cotton while using the excuse "you said the sweater should be cashmere, you didn’t say anything about the collar".

It probably isn’t the same thing, but it sure looks that way to me. It certainly has been a learning experience.

June 19, 2007
Strawberries

The little wild strawberries that make their home in various parts of my yard are ripe:

They are very sweet and good.

The local strawberry season has also begun for the more commercial variety of strawberries. Our favorite U-Pick farm stopped growing strawberries a couple of years ago and we missed it terribly, but it is not really worth driving to the opposite end of the county to pick strawberries (25 – 30 miles) so we just bought baskets at farm stands.

Another orchard started having some self-pick strawberry fields this year and we went up today. After picking 10 pounds of strawberries I could hardly stand up, and I am not sure it was totally worthwhile.

The old strawberry farm had a small, intensely flavorful strawberry, which I loved. These strawberries are large and fairly firm. It is easy to pick them without bruising them. But they don’t have that intense strawberry flavor that the best strawberries should have, and that I expect when I have just picked them off the vine. Even when they are ripe at the edge of over-ripeness the flavor is lacking. This kind of strawberry I can buy in the store without consequence to my back.

These were the prices at the farm stand:

U-Pick $1.49 per pound
Pre-picked $4.29 per quart

When I got home I weighed a quart basket and it was about a pound. So the money savings even made up for the gas spent driving to the farm and back (about a gallon) But the strawberries were no better than those in the store, which are cheaper now (of course I don’t know what the actual energy cost to get them to me is either).

What I want to find is a farm that still grows the old-fashioned, flavorful strawberries that would perfume the house and had that rich strawberry flavor. Those strawberries would be worth bending over and picking, or worth paying for.

Meanwhile I will eat all the little wild strawberries that I can find. Since I am behind on weeding this year, they are plentiful.

June 10, 2007
Gone

A scene of devastation greeted me when I went outside the front door today. I don’t know if I told you this but the sparrows did in fact nest near the door, they nested in one of the planters, one which still happened to hold the plastic greenery that had been planted there over Christmas to brighten the front porch and survive the winter storms. I have enjoyed watching the parent birds flying in and out, but have been careful not to disturb the cover by removing the plastic flowers.

This morning I see bare earth in the pot and several pieces of broken plastic flower stems and scattered bits of silk petals. No nest, but scattered twigs and the like. It could have been a big bird like a hawk or owl but I suspect the culprit was one of the large black (rat) snakes that patrol the property.

A trip to the nursery for plants will at least visually remedy the situation. There is no help for the family that was.

June 6, 2007