Cold Climate Gardening

It all started when Jenn said my new bird bath needed some phlox. “Gosh, she’s right,” I mused. “And I have some bright pink phlox in the front bed that I want to move out before I dig out the goldenrod infestation. Those pink phlox would look perfect by the bird bath.”

Bird bath transforms septic lid
The bird bath rests on the lid to our septic tank. The septic lid was a level and stable place to put the bird bath. But it also disguises the septic lid, and incorporates it into the garden. When you look at it, you don’t think, “Oh, look, they put a bird bath on their septic lid.” Instead, your mind sees a bird bath resting on a concrete base. But without plants around it, the bird bath still looked like it was just plopped down.

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If you are short on time, energy, and money, but notably the first two, be conservative. You’ll be more pleased with one fair-sized, well-composed, well-maintained bed than with a half-dozen large beds that are choked with quack grass and creeping Charlie.

That’s excellent advice from The Complete Flower Gardener by Karan Davis Cutler and Barbara W. Ellis. Too bad their book wasn’t written in 1993, when I started work on my second flower bed. On second thought, it’s not at all certain that I would have recognized that advice as applying to me. I was keeping up on my first bed–The Birthday Garden–and there were neglected irises elsewhere in the yard that needed lifting and dividing, and then, of course, I’d have to make a bed to plant them in. Yes, there was always a good reason for creating yet another bed, and I was always confident that next year everything would be under control.

It was just two years ago that it finally started to dawn on me that I was in over my head. Something more drastic than triage weeding was called for. I had to think about eliminating entire beds.

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Remember the forsythia I pruned so that I could force some branches? It doesn’t look so floriferous out in the open, does it? (For comparison, check out the forsythias here.)

When I’m faced with a plant that’s not doing as well as expected, I try to analyze the situation before taking action. In the case of the forsythia, I observed that the flowers were only on the ends of the branches. If it were cold damage, I would expect the flowers below the snowline to bloom, and the ones exposed to the cold higher up on the shrub to be missing. That’s not the case, and besides, this variety of forsythia is supposed to be bud-hardy to 30 below zero Fahrenheit, and it didn’t get that cold this winter.

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In part 3 I showed how to put the finishing touches on a spreadsheet that calculated the potential cost of a plant order in progress. But because of its tabular format, a spreadsheet is often used in situations where a lot of information needs to be organized, even if no calculations are made. Below are several examples of other ways a spreadsheet can be used in garden planning, but none of them makes use of the mathematical abilities of the spreadsheet program. Still, I hope even you hardened Excel veterans out there will pick up an idea you can use this year. And if you have other implementations of your own, by all means share them in the comments. All of the following examples were created as additional sheets of our previous workbook, Demo3.

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In our last part we had finished entering data and were getting ready to sum up. Actually it’s best to create this autosumming Subtotal before you enter much data. That way, you have a good idea how much your wishlist is costing you as you go along.

Creating a Subtotal
The first thing you need to do is make an educated guess as to how many items you’re going to be wanting from this particular merchant. The Subtotal formula will be constructed in a similar fashion to the one calculating total price for an item.

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In part 1 we logged into Google Spreadsheets and got things set up. Now let’s get this thing to do some work for us.
Creating the Formula
We’re going to teach this worksheet to multiply the price of a plant by the number of plants we want to give us the total price. The end result will make us gasp and reconsider if we really want that many. In following posts we will also teach it to add up all the total prices to give us the order subtotal. Then we’ll look at other ways to use spreadsheets.

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I mentioned in a recent post that I use a spreadsheet to plan my garden purchases. Others have mentioned using a spreadsheet to track their seed sowing. But that doesn’t help you much if you don’t know a spreadsheet from a tablecloth, so let’s start right there: a spreadsheet is a computer program that arranges numbers in a table and allows you to make calculations in the cells of the table. When you change the number in one cell used in a calculation (called a formula), it recalculates the formula and updates the answer. Very handy.

The most common spreadsheet program is Excel, made by Microsoft. Most people get it included in Microsoft Office, or the less powerful version, Microsoft Works. Many home computers come with one or the other of these, but not all. A free alternative would be Calc, but that involves a huge download and a lot of disk space. Another alternative is Google Docs and Spreadsheets, which is what I am going to use for my tutorial.

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