Correcting gardening mistakes

(Originally posted here March 6, 2009.)

I estimate that, over the years, I have made just about every mistake that it is possible for a gardener to make. In the process, I have killed an awful lot of perfectly good plants.

During the last four or five years, I have set about trying to rectify some of my earlier errors. Those were landscaping mistakes that were made in the late ‘80s and the ‘90s. During that time, my job and my kids took just about all the energy I had and any time left over for gardening was very hurried. The resulting landscaping was particularly slapdash.

Without proper planning, I used a lot of plants that shouldn’t have been used and that I would never use if I were doing the whole thing over again today. A lot of those plants are still in my yard. They are perfectly good plants and it isn’t their fault that they were misused.

As you may surmise, I get very sentimental about my plants, even the bad boys, and I find it hard to let them go. So, instead of “sunning their roots,” I have employed the strategy of moving them to other areas of the yard. As it happens, most of these inappropriate plants are in my front yard and I’ve been moving them to the backyard.

I did actually manage to say goodbye to two old crape myrtles that I had in the front yard. They were too big to move and they were misplaced and interfering with my plans for the future, so they had to go. We (and when I say “we” I mean my husband) did sun their roots, but all the other shrubs, no matter how big, are getting dug up and relocated.

I’ve written here before about the bed I’ve been building along the chain link fence that separates our yard from the neighbors. It is a big bed, approximately 80 feet long, and it takes a lot of plants to fill it. Fortunately, I have a lot of plants; they are just in the wrong place.

So far, I’ve filled about half the bed with transplants from other parts of the yard and with that passalong banana I got from my neighbor. Today, it was time to move the variegated privet from the front yard.

Yes, I admit it. At some point in the ’90s, I actually thought it would be a good idea to place two variegated privet shrubs on either side of our bedroom window and on either side of the azalea that was planted directly under the window. What was I thinking?

Well, obviously I wasn’t thinking about how big these little shrubs would grow some day. In time, they towered about ten feet tall and almost that wide, crowding out other plants in the bed. I had to keep whacking them back to maintain any semblance of control, but nothing slowed them down for long. These are very hardy plants!

In addition, I think they are attractive plants. That’s probably why I bought them in the first place. Evergreen, or at least ever-gray with that variegated foliage, they seemed like perfect screening plants for the area that I’m trying to hide with my new bed. So today, out came the shovels, and we started digging these huge shrubs up so they could be moved.

I expected resistance, but, in fact, it was surprisingly easy. They have relatively shallow root systems, although the roots stretch over a wide area. In practically no time, they were out of the ground and on their way to their new home.

This afternoon, I tucked them into their new bed and gave them a nice long drink of water. They were SO dry and thirsty.

Afterwards, I stood back and admired them. I like the way they look in their new spots. Now if I can just manage to keep them alive until their roots settle in and start delivering sustenance to the new growth, they will reward me by screening a very big portion of that ugly fence.

Another gardening mistake corrected. I knew there was a reason I bought these plants.

Now, about that azalea under my bedroom window…

The migration of the plants

Migration season continues in my garden. Plants are "migrating" from one bed to another just about as fast as I can get my shovel into the ground!

Today it was the 'Big Momma' Turk's cap, 'Old Blush' rose bush, and two hibiscus plants that had been living in pots which took flight from their old homes to new spaces. I trust they will all be happier in their new digs.

This is the time of year when it is most efficacious to move many plants. The plants are in their dormancy and the weather is cool to cold, which reduces the stress on them when they are moved.

The weather forecast for the coming week promises cold nights and cool days all week. Moreover, the moon is waning which is considered to be a good time to do transplanting. What more encouragement does an inveterate plant mover like myself need? None!

So, tomorrow, I plan to be out in the garden early with my shovel moving things hither and thither. And possibly even yon!

As we all know, a garden is never finished. There are always improvements to be made, and, in my garden, very often those improvements involve moving a plant to a bed where it will be happier. I have admitted here before that I almost always seem to get it wrong the first time 'round. Usually, on the second or third move, if I haven't killed it by then, I manage to actually get the plant where I want it to be.

What must it be like to be such an accomplished gardener that you actually know immediately where a plant should go in the landscape? You dig a hole, drop the plant in, and it lives there for the rest of its life. Yes, what must that be like? It is beyond my wildest imaginings!

The halcyon days of late winter

(Originally posted here on February 2, 2009.)

As I walked into my yard early this morning, I saw a giant moving shadow. No, it wasn't a groundhog. It was the shadow of a flock of hundreds of blackbirds that rose up from my lawn and flew off down the street.

Never mind that I don't have a groundhog - the blackbirds are a more reliable predictor of mid-winter and the coming of spring. When they start gathering in huge flocks and descending on our yards to scrounge birdseed or whatever else they can find to eat, we know that winter has reached its peak and it is all downhill toward spring from here.

And now, as we head into this downhill sprint over the next six weeks, we gardeners will be in a race with the sun, as it heads back north along the horizon after a winter in the southern skies. As our planet's wobbling orbit slowly begins to tilt the northern hemisphere toward the sun, our days get longer and warmer and one morning we will wake up and open our front door to a blast of hot air. Then we'll know that summer is here - probably around April Fool's Day!

But from Groundhog Day until April Fool's Day, we gardeners of Southeast Texas have a window of opportunity. These are the halcyon days of pleasant and calm weather when we hurry to try to get our major projects of the year completed before we are immobilized by the summer heat.

It is the busiest and, in many ways, the best time of the year to be in the garden. The days are mostly of tolerable temperatures and humidity except when a chill wind blows, or we are wrapped in a foggy mist for much of the day. It is a time when it is possible to work hard in the garden for most of the day without being uncomfortably drenched in sweat and perhaps having to change your tee shirt a couple of times during the day. It is a time to just enjoy being outside and playing in the dirt.

Working outside today, I could hear the sounds of spring coming all around me. Cardinals, mockingbirds, wrens, chickadees, and robins were all practicing their spring songs. And the woodpeckers were practicing their drumming.

Once, as I was transplanting some foxtail asparagus fern to a bed under the red oak tree, I heard a very faint sound of a woodpecker drumming. It sounded as if it were coming from a great distance and yet the sound seemed to be emanating from somewhere on my tree.

I squinted up through the bare branches and finally located the source - a tiny Downy Woodpecker drumming very gently, almost as if he were humming to himself, practicing his chops before the big show. Very soon, he'll be onstage for real and will be drumming hard to attract a lady woodpecker and to proclaim his territory, but today he just seemed to be playing, enjoying himself in the sun.

It made me smile to see him there, and especially, it made me glad that I was there to see him. On days like this, it is good to be a gardener.

"Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants."

"If it came from a plant, eat it. If it was made in a plant, don't."
"Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants." - Michael Pollan

I have long admired Michael Pollan's practical, common-sense approach to food and gardening and, in fact, to most things on which I've heard him express an opinion. He has, of course, long been a champion of whole foods (the actual foods, not the grocery store), growing one's own foods when possible, and shopping at local farmers' markets when it isn't possible. He's also a champion of home cooking - cooking those real foods you have raised or purchased rather than popping a frozen, preservative-laden dinner into the microwave. The bottom line is if we all followed Michael Pollan's common-sense advice we would be a much healthier society.

As it stands, statistics will show that societies that rely on the so-called Western diet of processed foods, added fat, sugar and refined grains and heavy on the meat suffer from high rates of the so-called Western diseases: Type 2 diabetes, obesity, cancer and cardiovascular disease. On the other hand, people who consume traditional diets that are not full of such foods do not suffer these diseases at such a high rate.

Recently, Pollan has boiled all of his rules of healthy eating down to their essence and has published them in a thin volume called Food Rules: An Eater's Manual. It lists 64 principles of good eating in a easy to follow and understand format.

Pollan's rules are deceptively simple - things like doing all of your eating at a table and paying attention to what you are eating. In fact, one of the biggest expanders of the American waistline may be our habit of eating while working at our desk, watching television, or driving. Multi-tasking, of which many of us are so proud, is not really conducive to doing any one task well, and that includes eating.

And what did your mother always tell you about eating? "Eat slowly and chew carefully." Pollan agrees. He adds that we should practice portion control and eat to the point of satiation, not fullness.

At the same time, Pollan says that "Special occasion foods offer some of the great pleasures of life, so we shouldn't deprive ourselves of them, but the sense of occasion needs to be restored." In other words, every day is not an "occasion." Not every day calls for chocolate-covered cherries. In fact, Pollan is a proponent of the so-called S policy: "No snacks, no seconds, no sweets - except on days that begin with the letter S."

Over the years, Pollan's previous books on food and nutrition, In Defense of Food: an Eater's Manifesto and The Omnivore's Dilemma have contributed to the popularity of the "slow food" and "locavore" movements, as well as given added impetus to the growing popularity of backyard vegetable gardens. With any luck, this new book of his may add to that momentum.

This little book is only 139 pages long and it only costs $11, but if you read it and adopt its principles, it could have a very big impact on your life and your health. It could turn out to be about the best $11 you ever spent. I get no commission, kickback, or remuneration for saying that. Just the satisfaction of having steered you, dear reader, onto a healthier path through life.

Groundhog day plus one

What did your own personal groundhog have to say about the prospects for an early spring on his big "coming out" day yesterday? Well, I can tell you if there were any of the furry rodents poking their heads out of their hibernation dens yesterday in my area, they most definitely did NOT see their shadow or any other shadow. The sun that would have caused such a shadow to be cast has been in hibernation itself for many days now.

All the same, good old Punxsutawney Phil, the official groundhog of the nation, apparently did see his shadow yesterday, dooming us to six more weeks of winter. His prediction was further confirmed by Big Al the Alligator of Gator Country. Big Al refused to break his hibernation by eating, thus indicating that winter isn't nearly over yet.

It seems to me that every year ol' Phil sees his shadow and scampers back into his den. I ran this theory by AKH (All-knowing Husband) who snorted, "Of course, he does! It's just like the movie Groundhog Day. Where do you think they got that name? It's the same thing every year, over and over and over again. We're in an endless loop."

Of course, AKH is a skeptic when it comes to animals predicting weather - or anybody predicting weather, for that matter. (In fact, come to think of it, he's a skeptic about most things.) After living with him for all these years, I'm afraid a bit of his skepticism has rubbed off on me.

You see, I don't really think it matters what Big Al or PP or the Channel 13 weatherman says. The SUN says that the vernal equinox will come on March 20 this year, and the sun rules. That is the date that winter will end and spring will begin here in the northern hemisphere of our "big blue marble." And that is about six weeks from now.

Hmmm...I guess maybe Phil and Al weren't so far off, after all.

If you can't be a marigold, be a daisy. Or, whatever...

(Originally posted here on February 19, 2009.)

"It is not a bad thing for plants to express individualism. Not everyone can be a marigold." - Our Life in Gardens by Joe Eck and Wayne Winterrowd

My husband, the non-gardener, gave me this really thoughtful gift. It is a book called Our Life in Gardens by Joe Eck and Wayne Winterrowd.

I'm in the midst of reading another book at the moment, and since I'm a one-book-at-a-time kind of reader, I haven't actually started my official reading of this book yet, but it looked so interesting, I couldn't keep from dipping into it. Once I started dipping, it was hard to put it down.

It seems to be the love story of the authors and of the gardens they have created and loved together. Their joint history starts in the 70s in Boston where they created a garden in their apartment. They even had chickens!

Later they moved out into the countryside where they could spread their roots as gardeners, and, a couple of years after that, they found some property in Vermont which they bought. They built their house and started their garden, and they live and garden there still.

Their garden is called North Hill and it is on some lists as one of the best gardens in North America. This book seems to be mostly about what that garden has taught them - about gardening and about life.

After a brief introductory chapter, the remaining chapters of the book are arranged alphabetically from agapanthus to Xanthorrhoea quadrangulata, a rare and endangered plant from Australia that the pair had luckily acquired before it was designated "rare and endangered." It seems an imminently sensible way to arrange a book about gardening or a book about life. It imposes order on what is essentially a disorderly process.

So what could a garden located in the Vermont of long and brutal winters have to teach me, a gardener in subtropical Southeast Texas? The plants are different, the climate is different, and the lives of the gardeners are very different from my own. And yet from my brief introduction to their book so far, I feel a real kinship.

Maybe gardeners really are the same all over the world, no matter what their different circumstances. We all worry about too much rain or too little rain, too much cold or too much heat, insect pests, and, of course, weeds.

In the end, we are all attempting to create something of beauty in our gardens and in our lives. I think that's the central lesson that Our Life in Gardens has to teach. Just like the flowers at North Hill, we can't "all be marigolds." But we can be ourselves and that's even better.

National Bird Feeding Month

Do you know what the second most popular hobby in America is? If you guessed bird feeding, you are absolutely correct. We spend $3 billion per year on bird seed. That is a lot of bird seed!

Some of us keep our feeders stocked twelve months of the year, but there is no month when those feeders are more relied upon by the birds than in February. For that reason, February has been named as National Bird Feeding Month.

In February, we are reaching the mid-point of winter and most of the wild food that many seed-eating birds depend upon has been exhausted, at a time when much of the country is still facing harsh weather conditions. While harsh weather is not a serious obstacle for most birds, lack of food certainly is, so it is now more important than ever that those bird feeders be kept stocked with high nutrition food.

Some of the best foods include suet, peanut butter, peanuts, sunflower seeds (especially black oil), and safflower seeds. Add thistle seeds for the finches and you've got a smorgasbord to which seed-eating birds will flock from all over your neighborhood.

When I open the door to my backyard early in the morning on these winter days, literally hundreds of birds fly up from the feeders and the ground under the feeders. A majority of these are goldfinches, but there are also sparrows, warblers, and doves. It is a most gratifying sight and all the encouragement I need to keep the bird seed flowing.

I hope that you are keeping your birdfeeders well stocked, also, or if you haven't put up a feeder yet, there's no better month than this, National Bird Feeding Month, to do so. The birds will thank you for it.


A male Red-bellied Woodpecker has a snack at one of my backyard feeders.