What are you doing in your garden?
The following are ramblings from my garden. I would love to here the ramblings from other people's gardens.
It's spring where I am, and I absolutely love spring! The last full moon (the one in February) I call the Angry Goose Moon, because it's around that time that my male goose turns into a monster, and I need to pull out my shield (a garbage bin lid) to move around the yard while warding off his attacks. His change in demeanor signifies the onset of spring for me.
Some people divide spring into early spring and late spring, but I live in a cool, wet environment that has a very long spring which is why I prefer thinking about the garden in terms of the moon cycle. The beginning of spring is Angry Goose Moon. During this phase, the hummingbirds start visiting, waiting for our native red flowering currant (Ribes sanguineum) to bloom. Everyday it gets closer and closer (I expect it to be in full bloom any day now). My hated Burkwood Osmanthus (Osmanthus × burkwoodii) begins rapidly trying to turn into a tree, and I'm reminded that I still haven't figured out what to plant in its place as I trim it back down a manageable level. And OMG the freaking cranesbill geranium (Geranium sanguineum) has once again gotten into everything, but I loathe to get rid of it all because the bees love it so much. This year I am being way more ruthless than years pass and have filled several bins of it for the yard waste collectors.
Usually this is also when I start seeds, but I'll be leaving for six weeks, so the seed catalogues will be collecting dust this year. Instead I'm checking out my propagation efforts from last year. I need to move a beautiful hydrangea (Hydrangea macrophylla) that gets way to big for the area it's in, but I've been afraid to move it case it dies, so last year I took 30 cuttings, which all rooted. It looks like 29 of those made it through the winter. I have no need for 29 more hydrangeas, but I now know I can move the mother plant, and if it dies, I'll have something to replace it with. In the mean time I'll plant the new ones in bigger pots to give away next year when they are more established.
Last fall I divided up some of the lemongrass (Cymbopogon citratus) I planted last year, plopped them into 10 pots, and brought them indoors to winter over. It looks like five of them made it. It won't be late enough for me to get them in the ground before I leave, but I will put them into bigger pots and get them under artificial light. Hopefully they will still be alive when I get back.
I'm not much of a rose fan, but outside my back window is a shrub rose (Rosa glauca) that has beautiful red tinged foliage and purple stems. It only flowers for a short time, and the flowers aren't anything to write home about, but they are followed by nice plump rose hips that I harvest for tea. It is absolutely in the wrong spot with its large growth and overly thorny stems. Last year I took a lot of cuttings of it and some natives roses that inhabit the same area, and it looks like most of them made it. Once they are large enough (another year or two) I'll plant them in a spot where their flesh ripping thorns won't be bothersome, remove all the large specimens, and replant the area with berries (I'm thinking about a mix of blueberry and honeyberry (Lonicera caerulea). Another potting up project before I go.
I enjoy plant medicine and started quite a few medicinal plants from seed last year. I started a bit late so nothing got in the ground, but it looks like most of them were able to winter over in the potting shed, but not all of them. I sowed 30 seeds of skullcap (Scutellaria baicalensis) of which only 6 germinated. I was going to move those six into the house to winter over, but I ended up with a spider mite problem in the house from having earlier brought in my toothache plants (Acmella oleraceae) and didn't want them to get infected. Unfortunately none of the skullcap survived. The toothache plants in the house didn't survive either, and I wish I had extracted their medicinal properties before their death, they were certainly large enough. But this paragraph started like it was going to be about wins. The biggest win, the one I'm most excited about, is that all of my mountain meadow arnica (Arnica chamissonis) made it! Their first leaves of spring are pushing through the soil, and their roots are pushing out of the holes of their pots. I don't believe there is a better plant for muscular aches and pains than arnica, and I am looking forward to harvesting it to make salves. I did seed way too many than my garden can hold, so as soon as I determine whether or not they they also are infested with spider mites, I will offer them up for other people to add to their gardens. I'm also excited that all the elecampane (Inula helenium) made it through the winter, though once again I seeded way too many. The added bonus is this plant can tend to be weedy in my locale, so I will only plant a couple down in the weedy medicinal area to let them compete with each other.
Side talk about garden pests. Besides slugs, which if I allow the ducks to move through the garden, don't damage too much of my garden, my gardens are fairly pest resistant. I spent a lot of time last year moving through it with a magnifier taking pictures and videos of the smaller insects that live among the plants. It's a whole other world living just out of reach of my normal vision! Of particular interest to me were a few of my phlox plants (Phlox paniculata) that had deformed leaves. On closer inspection I saw what I assume is spider mites. A few weeks later, taking video again, I saw what I assume are predatory spider mites, and a few weeks after that the phlox started growing correctly. There are so many predators out there doing "gods" work, and if any of you gardeners are ever bored, I suggest rabbit holing into garden predators.
I'm rambling, where was I?
Oh yeah.
I also use this time to severely prune stuff back that missed my list the year prior. In my culinary herb garden there is a bay tree (whether it's Laurus nobilis or Umbellularia californica I do not know). It's a monster that should not be planted where it is. I know I could hack it it back almost to the ground and it would come back, except that its branches cover my bathroom window in a way that gives me privacy from the cabin on the other side of the creek, while letting light in. It's this constant battle between keeping it small enough that wildlife can't use to get to the roof, yet large enough to afford me bathroom privacy. I just hacked a bunch of it off and I suspect I'll be doing the same again in the fall.
This place has a lot of problems, and I have to remain vigilant in celebrating the successes and not getting lost in lists of things to do. But there's a lot of beauty in our property, and I do enjoy experiencing it. Angry Goose Moon is the time of year when I am filled with the most hope for the future.
The previous owner of my home was apparently quite an avid gardener, and as a result I have an overgrown flower garden that is well beyond my capacity to care for in full! I have ID'd many of the plants at least (the inventory from the top of my head is poppies, irises, salvia, SO MANY day lilies, some hostas, ground cherries, brown-eyed susans, tulips, a forsythia bush, a silverleaf willow bush, and some very beautiful peonies), but I'm still a bit leery about messing around too much with it. The lilies definitely need to be dug up and split, and I plan on tearing out some of the bushes to make room for a staircase to my backyard as my home is on quite a steep hill but otherwise I just kind of muddle through. I definitely, definitely need to downsize.
I am a bit more comfortable with vegetable gardening, and would prefer to devote more of my space to that. I particularly like growing tomatoes and peas; this year those are going to take up most of the space in my raised beds, which are on a side yard separated from the front yard by my driveway.
Right now where I am the ground is still covered in snow, and it'll be soaked for a while yet, so I've only started some spicy peppers. Never done those before! I'll see how it goes.
One of the worse jobs I ever did was for a client that wanted day lilies removed from an overgrown, compacted garden bed. I bid the job out for like 4 hours and ended up being their for two days! Hopefully your soil is light enough to allow for easy removal.
I have a day lily problem here also. One summer I tried to start getting them out, but they are intertwined with tree roots and on a creek bank. I gave up after a half hour. I used to let the goats into the area for a few hours a week, and they kept them from spreading and slowly started shrinking their foot print, but I don't have goats anymore. Now I weed-whack them. I don't whack them enough to shrink their foot print, but I have stopped their expansion.
My garden is a bit frustrating at the moment.
It's a shared garden and we have gardeners who come in once every 8 weeks. They mow the law and tidy the flower beds. But they're not good gardeners so their tidying consists of just ripping out anything that isn't already established. This means it's impossible to grow anything from seed. We're stuck in a weird situation where they don't want to do it; the landlords don't want them to do it (because the landlords see the value in nice flowers); and the tenants don't want them to do it, but it still happens. I'm going to try to stake out an area with canes and twine.
But that's not the main problem. The main problem is the neighbour is very slowly taking down the wall between our gardens, and rebuilding it. It's taken over 3 years so far. And every time they get the builders in those builders trash the beds.
To avoid all this I'm looking at pots and tubs. I've been resistant to this idea because it feels weird to buy a tub, and compost, to plant plants when I have all these beds available. But that's just me being a bit weird about it.
Also, at the end of the garden there's a bit of spare land (that came about as a result of land redevelopment - old industrial site was redeveloped to homes and a bit of spare land was left over) and it's behind fences. For a while it was full of thistles and flowers and packed full of bees. But in England we've got laws saying you're not allowed to let thistles grow on your land, so the owners sent their gardeners in to spray everything and rip it up. Since then I've been throwing seeds over the fence to try to get some flowers in there. I didn't understand why they never grew, but I found out that the gardeners go in and spray it every 6 months and then rip up everything. So it's just bare scrubby mud.
The entire situation you described would irk the heck out me. I don't think you're being weird about not wanting to plant into pots in tubs when you shouldn't have to. I wonder if you can use some tubs as a barrier to the workers and plant not only in them, but in front of them also?
We're moving in a few months, so we'll be digging up our perennials and trying to transplant them. The new house has a great garden bed with something I've never seen before: the previous owner has embedded large planters into the actual garden bed and each planter has its own drip line. They are split into zones so as long as I'm careful about what I plant where I should be able to automate all of my garden watering from now on.
I don't know what the weather is like where you're at, but here in the pacific northwest it's the perfect time to pot up perennials from the garden.
Automated watering by zones sounds awesome!
Just put in two small garden beds. The tomato plants are growing pretty quick, doubled in size in about three weeks. And the strawberries are already starting to bear fruit. The other plants are growing a bit slower.
Oh my goodness, what part of the world are you where you already have tomatoes in the ground and strawberries almost fruiting? This year I'll be buying tomato plants when I get back in town. It should be just about time to get them in the ground (May).
What type of climate are you in that you had some calendula flower through winter?
That seems absolutely lovely. We have an area near here that has a nifty piece of geography that makes it similar to your link even though it backs up to the rain forest. I've always wanted to move there!
I'm growing vegetables this year, and peonies. I want pumpkins for the end of the summer or beginning of fall, so I'm planting some seedlings soon.
There are some native cacti that are able to survive the winter here (I'm thousands of miles away from the desert), so I want to get a cutting and trying cultivate it. I've been meaning to do this for years, but I never get around to it.
What do you do with the pumpkins?
What sort of weather do you have and what cacti are you considering?
They're mostly for decoration, but I plan to make pumpkin curry with them. I live in an area with a humid continental climate, and there are native prickly pear cacti that are able to survive the relatively harsh winters here.
Pumpkin curry is one of my favorite things to do with pumpkin (actually curry in general is one of my favorite things since it's so versatile)! I know a lot of people like to roast them or make pies from them, but I am not a fan of either of those things. I also like to grow a lot of winter squashes because they store well through a good portion of the winter, and there's nothing like pulling out a squash I grew through the summer during the cold winter to make something spicy.
We are recharging our raised bed with new soil this year. The wife miscalculated the order and we have waaay more than we need so we are giving some to the neighbors and friends. The beds look so much better with the new black soil. Hopefully we will have a good crop of tomatoes this year.
What kind of tomatoes are you doing this year, and are you doing any other vegetables? I won't have a large vegetable garden this year, so I'm having to live vicariously through others :)
We've tried a variety of tomatoes over the years. The cheery ones seem to do the best. This year with the new soil we are going to do another mix and see which do well. We also plant beans, sweet potatoes, cucumber squash and several varieties of hot peppers to make hat sauce with.
I love the typo, "the cheery ones!" It made me smile.
I find the smaller tomatoes do best for me also, but for me it's because we don't get hot enough long enough most years to ripen the larger ones. I do always put some in just in case.
Just bought some flowers and potted our seedlings of carrot and bell pepper. Really hope it works!
Later in the season you'll have to fill us in on how it goes. I'm rooting for them!
Ripping out loads of ivy, I've got several borders where the plants are being overwhelmed. There's ivy in the rear of the garden which is fine as it's nice for the bees/wildlife but elsewhere it's difficult to manage.
Are you talking about English ivy, Hedera helix?
I hate English ivy, it's one of the few things I'm allergic to, and there's so much of it on my property. When I hire people to remove it, I have to sit inside with the windows closed until an hour or so after they leave.
Yeah that's the one. Luckily I don't have any allergy to it but pulling it out is still unpleasant.
Where are you at?
Our front yard is basically a sea of dandelions. This spring, we've been slowly replacing the dandelions with other drought friendly plants and succulents. In the process, we learned that the one tree in our front yard has its roots extending literally everywhere, so digging enough dirt to plant new flowers and bushes have been more difficult than i'd thought.
Last weekend, we planted two lavender plants, put newspapers around the plants, poured mulch all over, and then watered the area. A couple days later, we found 3 dandelions poking through all the layers of newspaper and mulch. we're now thinking about using cardboard boxes instead of newspapers.
Copying my comment from below: Depending on where you are you may be able to get a subsidy to remove your current lawn. As an example in many areas of California you can get up to 2 dollars per square foot of lawn replaced by drought tolerant plants. Check out offers with your local water department, water utility, municipality, and natural resource conservation district.
Where you have dandelions, we have exactly the same experience with nasturtiums. When it's their time to shine it doesn't matter what else thinks it is growing there, the nasturtiums have it.
Ugh, gardening among weedy tree roots is tough. If you end up using the cardboard, I'm interested in hearing how it turns out. I have a similar area, and have been thinking about using the same method.
I always do cardboard under my mulch, I have a garage full of the stuff that I've been saving for months now. The worms love it, and it's great at weed suppression. It's free. It's practically required if you're not tilling. I pull all the tape off, and don't use cardboard that's heavily printed on. Not sure what's in all those inks, best to avoid, I figure.
Highly recommend.
Planning my outdoor garden this year has been my coping mechanism for getting through the winter blahs. I got a cheap growlight and have been starting a few herbs under it. Right now I have basil, dill, rosemary, and parsley. When we get closer to the last frost I'll probably start a few seedling pallets of flowers and things to move outside. I just got some lavender seeds in the mail that I'm pretty excited about.
I have a 4x4 raised bed in the back that I'm going to do carrots, beans, pumpkins and maybe throw some of the herbs I have indoors right now in there too.
My lawn is also pretty bad with dandelions and poor soil. It's a bit overwhelming so I'm just going to tackle one section this year. I got some good compost and an alternative grass mix with fescue, ryegrass, strawberry clover, English daisies, white yarrow, and baby blue eyes. I plan to mix that 50/50 with regular grass seed and just see what happens. I don't really care about a pristine lawn, I just want it to look more healthy.
I'm most excited about my cannabis grow. Last year I did four plants (legal here) in containers. Everything was looking good until we got hit with weeks of rain and colder temperatures in late summer. I ended up having to harvest early to avoid powdery mildew and rot. I still ended up with almost a pound of cannabis, but the quality wasn't what it could have been.
This year I'm going to grow autoflowers, which yield less per plant but should be ready to harvest by early August, hopefully avoiding the colder rainy weather altogether. I'm still trying to figure out the right nutrients/soil mix. I've read that autoflowers typically like less nutrients than regular cannabis plants. I want to do organic powdered nutrients but I'm scared of adding too much or too little as they are less forgiving because of how fast they mature.
That should be plenty to keep me occupied this summer.
I love your anecdote about your angry goose.
Depending on where you are you may be able to get a subsidy to remove your current lawn. As an example in many areas of California you can get up to 2 dollars per square foot of lawn replaced by drought tolerant plants. Check out offers with your local water department, water utility, municipality, and natural resource conservation district.
It would be great to get updates as it progresses.
I have a "lawn" area that is in total disrepair due to being our drain field, mostly sand, and the dog digging massive holes before she was trained not to. About six years ago, I decided to tackle it, and planted a native grass mixture. I watered it, and it was so gorgeous that summer, but the following year nothing came back. I gave up on it, because there is so much else to do around here. However, through the years, volunteer grasses and weeds have taken hold, and they seem to be creating a small level of topsoil where once there wasn't any. But I hadn't really noticed what was happening until I read your post immediately after reading an article that mentioned someone else developing a grassy area. It reminded me that I had had aspirations for that part of the yard, and after a failure, I put blinders on and stopped noticing it even though it's right outside my window! So I walked outside and really looked at the area, looked at what it is instead of what it wasn't. It's ripe for me to try again!
Are you starting from seed? I looked into buying seed, but couldn't get over the prices!
Yes I'm starting from seed. The prices are definitely high if you compare them to veggie seeds, but when you compare the cost of cannabis to veggies it totally makes sense. A $15 feminized seed will pay for itself several times over even if you only yielded an ounce from it. And if you buy from good breeders the genetics are strong and I've almost never had a seed not germinate.
Though I understand $60 for a 4 pack of seeds can be a lot of money upfront if you are just starting and not sure about it. Shopping for seeds can be overwhelming too because their are hundreds of breeders and thousands of strains.
You're right on all fronts: The seeds do pay for themselves, and it is overwhelming to shop! Last time I looked, I was looking for seeds that were not feminized, as I wanted both male and female plants. Many of the sites I looked at, I couldn't sort out the feminized seeds. Where are you buying your seeds from?
Got some tomatoes, beets, lettuce, spinach, and various herbs going. Blueberries are in bloom again.
How many blueberry bushes do you have, and do you think it's enough for your blueberry needs?
Three, and definitely not enough. Also, they are in containers, which limits them some.
Too much to tell. OR coast range here so we get to grow lots of neat stuff. Great time of year for perennial digging and dividing. We try to grow lots of natives so recently I've been expanding Potentilla, Viola odorata, Sidelcea, and a rare Erythronium. My established Treacle berries started throwing out offspring so I planted them in small pots to plant on the walkway to the house this autumn. Their blossoms are extremely fragrant and perfumes.
Early stuff is up and flowing like Spring Queen and Osoberry. The Almonds are blooming, just in time for the Rufus hummingbirds to pollinate therm. The birds are going nuts with their fight and fuck calls. Coopers hawks and screech owls are consistent lately. A cacophony of tree frogs are calling at night from our grey water pond. And the first large bumblebees are dipping their proboscis into the Vinca flowers.
I don't really use the word weeds anymore as most plants are friendly additions. But as I expand the native groups I slowly diminish the non natives over time. Or I simply chop and drop them as mulch on the annual beds.
This year we're only growing beans and potatoes as that's our preferred foods and they're staples. And the older I get I only really want to grow native American crops like potatoes. Tomatoes, peppers, beans, squash, and if I had open space I'd do corn. Call me elitist I know. But makes sense.
Anyway there's always lots to talk about with plants.
Most of the time I don't to think of weeds in the traditional sense either. I have plenty of plants that many consider weeds in my garden that I've cultivated and made room for. Many started out as volunteers like happy little accidents.
I like our native food also! I As much as I love corn I can never justify the space it takes to grow. I do have an are that I've been clearing of Japanese knotweed and morning glory, that when it stops coming back, I plan to plant our native hazelnut (Corylus cornuta). The area isn't full sun, and since the hazelnut doesn't need full sun, it seems like a perfect use for that area.
That's the truth!
I've got loads of native hazelnut. It's a treat! Also I'd highly recommend Oemlaria cerasiformis, they complement each other very well. Though it is dioecious so you'd need both sexes for fruit set. They're both very active plants when everything else is slumbering.
I also have been starting to grow Monarda, Two species. I spent last weekend dividing and scattering M didyma throughout the garden. The hummingbirds sure adore it and it has lovely splashes of crimson mid season.
At any rate, since it's the full moon I'm going to grab a shovel and do some transplanting!
Do you get a good crop of hazelnuts, and if you do, do you do anything special to keep the squirrels out of it? I have one hazelnut tree (not sure of variety) that I've never gotten a single nut from.
Thank you for putting Oemlaria cerasiformis on my radar! It does look like the perfect companion to the the hazelnut. It's a suckering type bush, do you find that it competes at all with the hazelnuts? Do you have plantings intermingled, or do they each have their sides?
I have Monarda in my garden. It's my favorite flower! I have M. didyma too, planted right next to a bush fuchsia. The hummingbirds always feed from the Monarda first. I have some Monarda fistulosa in pots that need to go out, but I first want to divide the didyma, since it really spread last year. The only problem I have with my Monarda is that after a rain it falls over. Do you have that problem? This year I plan to give it support, but I hate when I have to get fussy over things in the garden and feel like I should just let things do what they do.
It is! I call this moon Stinging Nettle Moon. This is when I start harvesting stinging nettle. But it's been raining hard all day, so I'm just daydreaming about what to do when the rains end.
I've been experimenting with nets using poly pipe hoops for structures with some level of success.
At the moment I've got silverbeet, a tonne of broccoli, sweet potato, a mandarin tree, two passionfruit vines, radish, turnip, beetroot eggplant, coffee, carrots and butternut pumpkin has totally taken over my smaller veggie bed (which I'm not complaining about, I ate the first one yesterday and it was delicious!)
I've got raspberries in a pot but as the only thing not on automatic irrigation they definitely didn't survive the summer so they're just in recovery at the moment.
Do you use the nets for pest control, shade, or something else?
Mainly pest control at the moment. I find if I don't have nets birds will just destroy any small seedlings I plant in a couple of days.
Next summer I want to do some experimentation with shade cloth because it gets extremely hot and I don't have a lot of room for trees so my main garden bed cops a lot of heat