Cold Climate Gardening

Thumbs, toes, and baby toes up, Hawthorn Hill Farm daylily nursery is a winner. The setting is bucolic, the grounds are beautiful, the plants are well grown, and the pricing is good.

Beth and I planned our trip for a Saturday and wouldn’t you know it, rain again. But the sky water was mostly light showers that were intermittent so we decided to chance it. We followed the directions as advertised and, of course, got lost by taking an early turn, our mistake. But our turn circled back to the main road so we survived and enjoyed seeing an area we hadn’t been to before. We corrected our course and made it to Dick and Sandy deRosa’s nursery.

Popularity: 10% [?]

I’ve never hidden the fact that my garden lacks adequate maintenance. It all started innocently enough with a strip of land between the house and the driveway, dubbed the birthday garden because everything in it was a gift for my birthday. I seemed to have no trouble keeping that up, so I started another bed, and since that was going okay, I started another one. Then I got to the point where I promised myself I would catch up on whatever I was falling behind on, but at the moment I needed to do something else. And for a long time I persuaded myself that I would be able to get things back in shape, in no time at all–next week, next month, next season. Finally, I realized I was in way over my head, and however many years it took me to get into this mess, that’s how many it would take to get me out. (This parallels my experience in other areas of my life, coincidentally.)

Sometimes I regard the mess that is my garden with cheerful acceptance, other times with resignation, and sometimes with dark self-loathing. It depends on how much sleep I’ve been getting, whether or not the sun is shining, and how many other aspects of my life are making me feel incompetent at the moment.

Popularity: 6% [?]

International Kitchen Garden Day is an annual, decentralized celebration of food produced on a human-scale. It is an opportunity for people around the world to gather in their gardens with friends, family, and members of their local community to celebrate the multiple pleasures and benefits of home-grown, hand-made foods.

Have you ever met a child who didn’t know food was grown in the earth, but somehow magically appeared in the supermarket wrapped in plastic? Tragic, isn’t it?

Have you ever wondered where some of that food in the supermarket was grown, or what would happen if we couldn’t ship food from all over the world?

If so, you might want to help celebrate Kitchen Garden Day on August 27th. How, is up …

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The fields surrounding my house are turning yellow and I know it must be August. I experience the passing of the seasons by what plants are coming into bloom and now it is the goldenrods’ turn. Familiarity can bring indifference and my neighbors often ignore the flowers but I cannot. I can find at least three species with little effort and probably more close by.

I have sometimes overheard gardeners state that yellow is not allowed in their garden and I can’t understand why. What will freshen their border after midsummer, I wonder? I look forward to the arrival of old friends such as Heleniums, Helianthus, and Rudbeckias and wish their visit could be longer. I see yellow as a warm up to the traditional russets, golds, and burgundies of autumn.

A current favorite are Silphiums. I grew up in an urban area with a tiny yard so it isn’t a surprise that I am enamored with large plants and the Silphiums are certainly that. Some can be giants and I often experience the odd feeling that the plants are looking down at me, reversing the usual inspection. My garden is treeless, relentlessly windy, and often dry. This matches the Great Plains home of these American natives and they have thrived in my garden as few others have. These are long-lived plants and I look forward to growing older together. I have heard their towering stalks of yellow daisies can reseed with abandon but I have yet to discover seedlings from my four-year-old plantings. I am indifferent to deadheading and leave garden clean up for spring so I don’t know if I am doing something right or wrong.

Popularity: 12% [?]

Today is the first day of autumn if you garden in a cold climate in the Northern Hemisphere, that is. Just as spring comes much later than the supposed first day of spring (the vernal equinox), so the first day of autumn comes much earlier than the first day of autumn (the autumnal equinox). You have to go by what the weather and the plants tell you, not by what the calendar says.

It took me years to figure this out. All that good garden advice about planting perennials, shrubs, and …

Popularity: 12% [?]

It’s funny. What Rundy saw as futility, I see as preventing futility. There’s an old garden maxim, “One year’s seeding yields seven years’ weeding.” Well, the worst “weed” in this particular bed was one of the original flowers I planted here myself: Malva alcea ‘Fastigiata’, also known as hollyhock mallow. Wonderful pink flowers, and lots of them–and every blossom produces copious amounts of seed, all of which germinates, sooner or later. You might at first glance mistake the foliage pictured at left as a clump of coral bells. But these are mallow seedlings carpeting every available inch of soil. I was removing them from a good six feet of flower bed. In some places I could use a tool to cut them off just below the soil surface, but when they were growing close to the garden plants, I had to pull them out one by one. Where the ground had been recently cultivated I could grab them out by the handful with a sideways motion, but in areas that hadn’t been dug up and replanted in years I had to grip each tenacious seedling by its taproot and pull. It was an exercise in futility only if you forget that most of those seedlings would grow up, flower, and create an even worse problem if I didn’t pull them now.

Popularity: 12% [?]

We all have our preferences in futility. I have at various times made different forms of this observation, but today it struck me again as I watched my Mom weed her flower garden. I wouldn’t do that, I thought. It wasn’t because I thought weeding was too hard–weeding is easy. It wasn’t because I hate weeding–weeding is okay, and I actually enjoy the appearance of a weeded garden.

The futility of weeding is what gets to me. You spend a lot of time weeding a garden and a week later you need to do it all over again. And again. And again. It’s like running in place and never getting anywhere, or building castles in the sand only to have the …

Popularity: 5% [?]