Wordless Wednesday: Japanese maple and spider web

Weeds

Spring is weed season in my garden. Well, if I'm really truthful I would have to admit that every season is weed season in my garden. I do have a lot of weeds.

But during spring, all those weeds that have been at least a little bit discouraged by winter cold are suddenly back with a vengeance. I spend a day pulling weeds and feel really good about what I've accomplished. Then, looking around two days later, it's hard to tell I did anything.

There are several really pernicious weeds that I have to deal with and although I occasionally win a battle against them, the war continues.


I've been taking major hostile actions against this weed for more than a month now. This is henbit. It infests many of the beds in my veggie/herb garden. I pull it out by the roots wherever I find it. Fortunately, it is pretty easy to pull, but to completely eradicate it, I need to pull every single sprig of the stuff before it reseeds itself to carry on another generation, and I always fail in that effort. Some will escape my notice and so the plant perpetuates itself and the war goes on.


I don't know the name of this plant. (A reader tells me it is Carolina geranium - which seems right to me.) It's just as pernicious and hard to get rid of as the henbit and it grows in some of the same places, as well as in many of my perennial beds. It, too, is fairly easy to pull, and that's the way I deal with it, but I have every reason to believe that this army of invasion will still be marching around my yard long after I'm gone from it.



This is "sticky weed," sometimes called "sticky Willy" as well as many other names, some of them very, very bad indeed. It grows rapidly and can overrun a bed in just a few days if it is overlooked. Its most annoying characteristic is its stickiness. It sticks to everything - Muck boots, garden gloves, skin, clothes, tools. Basically, it will stick to anything that it touches and attempt to hitch a ride. Many times, I've finished my garden chores and gone inside to sit on a chair of sofa, only to find when I stand up that the sticky weed that was hitching a ride on my butt is now attached to my chair. This weed, too, is easily pulled. Just be sure to wear gloves and then good luck on extracting weed from gloves.


This is the worst of the lot, a truly dangerous weed, and, again, I don't know its name. I just call it "stingeroo." (A helpful reader says it is called stinging nettle.) If you see it, DON'T TOUCH IT! Don't let it graze your skin anywhere. It stings like fire, much worse (for me) than fire ants. It may be that I am just excessively sensitive to it, but it has caused me not a few sleepless nights because it touched my feet or ankles and set them on fire. For this weed, I deploy the "nuclear option." I use an herbicide, either Round-up or a homemade mixture with vinegar. It can be easily pulled (wearing leather gauntlets), but with my sensitivity to it, I just prefer not to get close for any reason.



The little yellow flowers and beginnings of tiny red berries belong to mock strawberry. It's actually a pretty little weed and grows in several patches of my so-called lawn. In many places, like in this picture, it is thicker than the grass. When it is in the lawn, I just leave it. When it gets into my perennial planting beds, I pull it when it's obtrusive, but, on the whole, I find this weed to be benign and I practice my live and let live philosophy with it.



This is a weed that is famous in song and Southern folklore. It is 'poke sallet'. Remember "Poke Salad Annie"? You're probably too young, but that was actually the name of a popular song many years ago about a girl named Annie who ate poke sallet. It is not exactly a gourmet dish, but in many poverty-stricken areas of the South, especially during the Great Depression, people used the leaves of this plant as greens. Eating them was an adventure because if they were not prepared properly, they could be toxic. From the tender shoots that you see in the picture, this plant grows rapidly into a rangy shrubby plant that has masses of white blooms and, in the fall, it produces blue-black berries that the birds - especially mockingbirds - go absolutely wild for. I have this clump of the stuff near my back fence. It's in nobody's way there and I leave it alone for love of the birds. The more formal name of the plant is pokeweed.

These are only a few of the weeds that are doing their best to overrun my garden in this new season, and the war is on. As some famous gardener once said (or should have), "Eternal vigilance is the price of liberty from weeds!"

Shhh! Can you keep a secret?

Now that the season is fading fast, I have a guilty secret to share with you. I can trust you, right? I mean, we are friends and you would never use knowledge of my loathsome secret against me, would you? Okay, come a little closer and I will whisper it in your ear.

I LOVED THIS WINTER!!!

I hear your gasps and I feel your pain at my betrayal, but I have to come clean. Confession is good for the soul, and my soul needs all the help it can get.

Yes, it's true, for years now I have groused to everyone who would listen about the fact that we hadn't had a REAL winter in ten or fifteen years. A stray night or two under 32 degrees and that was it - nothing that anyone in Buffalo or Chicago would recognize as actual winter. To be honest, those folks probably still wouldn't recognize what we had this season as winter, but the people in Memphis and Nashville would and that's closer to home for me.

You see, I grew up in a place where there were four distinct seasons in the year. We had a real spring, summer, autumn, and winter and you could tell when one ended and the next one began. And that's the way my internal calendar was set from childhood. That's what I expected the seasons to be like. These last several years, I've been totally confused and cranky, because winter was completely left off our seasonal calendar. In reality, we had only two seasons: Seven months of Summer from April through October and five months of Not Summer from November through March.

It was downright depressing. Insect and weed pests flourished and the gardener and her plants flagged by about June 15. It was all downhill from there. And then, like a cool breeze on a hot August day, came the El Nino winter of 2009-2010 with its extended periods of below-freezing weather and occasional spurts of white, fluffy stuff falling from the sky. It was very refreshing.

Well, okay, I know it caused hardship and some heartache for some gardeners in the area and I am sorry about that. I lost a few plants, too, and I'm still waiting to see about some others, some of which I would be particularly sorry to lose. But you want to know the truth? Those plants that I lost probably shouldn't have been planted here in the first place. I pushed the envelope and the envelope pushed right back. A valuable lesson has been (re)learned.

It's not that I will be sorry to see winter go at 12:32 P.M. tomorrow, but I just wanted to say a kind word about the old season before it leaves. After all, we've griped and complained about it since that first freeze caught us by surprise early last December, but I, for one, wish to go on the record by stating that this is exactly the winter I had been wishing for these past several wimpy winter years and I want to thank Mother Nature for finally granting that wish. I feel sure that I will be a better and wiser gardener and that my garden will be a better balanced and more natural environment because of it.

Bugs

There are good bugs and bad bugs. These last few days I have been knocked for a loop by a very, very bad, vicious, nasty bug. It was the kind of bug that makes it impossible for you to raise your head off the pillow or to care much about anything. Finally, the "good bugs" of my body's defenses seem to have routed the bad bugs of the virus and I am on my feet and at my computer again.

I'm still not up to any heavy gardening, but at least I can get outside and feel the sun and breeze on my face and maybe even pull a weed or three. In the process, I can also visit with some of the "good bugs" that are an integral part of my garden.

Of the population of good bugs, none are more welcome and better allies of the gardener than the ladybug, and my vegetable/herb garden is full of them these days.

It may not be an entirely scientific observation, but anyone who has gardened for any length of time will have noticed that a plant in trouble will attract insect pests. It's as if the plant sends out a beacon call when it is sick or at the end of its natural life that tells all those hungry aphids and other munchers, "Come on down!" And they do. Hordes of them do.

And where aphids go, ladybugs quickly follow. That is what has happened in my garden. Many of the fall and winter vegetables have come to the end of their run and are ready to shuffle off the mortal coil and make room for new spring plantings, but not before feeding another generation of the insect life that depends on them. Predictably and right on schedule, the ladybugs have arrived to make sure that the bad bugs don't have it all their own way.


This ladybug, which is covered with spots (I counted 16), enjoys its lunch on a leaf of cilantro.


There were tens if not hundreds of the little critters around and the really interesting thing to me was that not all of them were the same species. You can see, for example, that this one preying on the pests that are preying on radish leaves has many fewer spots than the one in the previous picture. There were, in fact, ladybugs with many different patterns and combinations of spots. There were even some that I saw that were entirely orange with no spots. Unfortunately, I didn't get pictures of all of them, but you get the idea.


There was also a considerable amount of ladybug hanky-panky going on. More than one pair had found a sheltered spot to get on with the essentials of life.

Rock on, little ladybugs! Like the good bugs of my body's defenses, I need more of you to help me overcome all the bad bugs in my life. Come on down!

Garden Bloggers Bloom Day: March 2010

Bloomers rule in the plant world, but it wasn't always like that. Long ago, other methods of reproduction from spores to cones to asexual methods were the norm with plants. But 100 million years ago, give or take a year or two, flowering plants staged a revolt. They overwhelmed all other forms of plant reproduction, and, as Olivia Judson put it in her excellent column on the subject last week, "the Earth came into bloom."

There were many different kinds of blooms. Some plants set their caps to attract flies. Most of their blooms have an odor of rotting meat. Not something you would want to include in a bouquet for your dining room table.

The majority of plants, however, chose to attract some of the prettiest creatures in Nature - bees, butterflies, and small birds - as their partners in pollination. Their blooms were typically brightly colored and contained sweet smelling nectar, as well as the pollen that actually gets the job done for the plant.

In addition to attracting their tiny helpers, the gorgeous blooms of these plants attract big, lumbering, two-legged admirers, and it is these types of blossoms, rather than the fly-attracting ones, that most participants in Garden Bloggers' Bloom Day choose to share each month.

Here, then, without further ado, is what is blooming in my garden this March Bloom Day.


The planter by the front door now holds geraniums and Veronica peduncularis 'Georgia Blue' rather than the spent violas that lived there all winter.


Viburnum tinus, just added to the front bed, is beginning its bloom.


This anonymous camellia that lives in the front yard shade garden is a late winter bloomer and is still full of unopened buds.


Nearby, an equally anonymous miniature azalea has been in bloom off and on since November. It stopped and rested for a while after our big freeze in January, but now every twig on it has a bud at the end and this one is just ready to unfurl.


This little cyclamen, blooming next to a heuchera, is now on its third winter of bloom. Whoever said these plants were winter "annuals"?


Moving into the sunshine, the Osteospermum 'Sunny Henry' shows a happy face to the world.


These snapdragons are still snappy!


This daffodil is 'Ice Follies.' Recently, I misidentified for a reader, in response to a question, another little narcissus as 'Ice Follies.' I realized my mistake too late to correct it, so I'm correcting it now.


This is the narcissus I misidentified as 'Ice Follies.' It isn't, but I'm not entirely sure just what it is. Like many other plants in my garden, it will just have to be anonymous.


These leucojums live in the same bed with 'Ice Follies' and the anonymous narcissus and they have performed beautifully for me this winter. I do love these delicate looking little blossoms.


These little violas are still showering my world with their purple beauty.



This recently added variegated potato vine has opened many of these pretty little blossoms already.


The loropetalum weathered our winter freezes well and is now opening its fringy flowers in celebration that those freezes are past.


This little dianthus is just beginning its bloom. That's an agapanthus emerging behind it.


Fuchsia geraniums helped to brighten my winter days when practically nothing else was blooming in the garden.


The blueberries are in full bloom now.


The gerberas were another winter day brightener. They bloom for me in orange...


...and in sunny yellow.








'Blue Elf' aloe is beginning to open its flower spike in the xeric bed.






I've fallen in love with this sweet little trailing veronica and have added it to several spots around the garden.



March is apple blossom time in my garden.


This clump of Spanish lavender is where I saw my very first Ruby-thoated Hummingbird of the season today! The male was sipping from these blossoms when I saw him.


The 'Bleeding Heart' shows you why it was so named.

The pace of blooming is picking up and so is the number of pollinators in the yard. Bees, butterflies, and now at least one hummingbird are all here to do those jobs that they've been doing for 100 million years. Let spring begin!

A disaster for the monarchy

El Nino has struck hard in many places this winter and the area of Mexico where Monarch butterflies overwinter has been devastated by the effects of winter storms. This is tragic news for the people who live in these regions, but it has been a real disaster for the Monarch.

Unprecedented rainfall from late January through the first week of February led to flooding and landslides that resulted in the loss of many lives and in the near destruction of the towns of Angangueo and Ocampo, the two municipalities that serve as base for tourists who visit the Monarch colonies at Sierra Chincua and El Rosario. The community of El Rosario was also hit with a major landslide that buried more than a dozen residents and destroyed much infrastructure in the region. The consequences of this disaster will be felt by the residents of this area for years to come. But it wasn't only people who were affected.

The Monarch colonies were strongly impacted by the unprecedented rainfall. The final estimate on the mortality suffered by the butterflies is not yet complete, but it is already clear that more than 50% of the overwintering population died as a result of the harsh winter conditions. It is expected that the number of Monarchs returning north this spring will be fewer than at any time since the wintering colonies became known to science in 1975. These numbers are so low that they are sure to have a long term effect on the butterfly population and the number of Monarchs that will be available to make the flight back to Mexico next winter is likely to be substantially less than in recent years.

So what's to be done about all this? Do we just wring our hands and gnash our teeth over the vagaries of weather? Actually, there are things that can be done, and, as gardeners, we are perfectly positioned to do some of them.

Monarch Watch, an organization that tracks and monitors the butterfly, is launching a "Bring Back the Monarch" campaign in response to the tragedy. The center point of the campaign is the expansion of the Monarch Waystation Program and the planting of more milkweed on both private and public lands.

I know that many Southeast Texas gardeners and gardeners around the country already include milkweed in their gardens to attract the Monarchs and to feed their caterpillars. If you don't have any milkweed in your garden, this is the year to plant it! If you do already have the plants, consider planting even more.

We, of course, have no way of knowing how many of these marvelous insects will make their way back to us this spring, but when they get here, we want them to find the larder full and plenty of places to lay their eggs. We want, in short, to do everything possible to encourage and support the recovery of the beautiful fliers that represent both the fragility and the tenacity of life. Let's do all that we can to make our gardens a place of respite and refuge for these creatures that bring us so much joy.


Do it for the butterflies...


...and for their offspring.

Signs of life

As I work around my garden this week, I continue to encounter more signs of life in both expected and unexpected places. Today it was a hibiscus that I had given up for dead.



This hibiscus had bloomed beautifully for me last summer and into the fall. I had given it some protection during the winter freezes, but recently it has looked like nothing so much as a bouquet of dead sticks. Today I was mulching the bed where I had planted it after the last freeze and, thinking that the plant was dead, I reached to pull it out of the ground.

But, wait! There was something green there! Looking closer, I realized that there were tiny green shoots coming from the roots. So I pulled a layer of mulch around it instead and gave the plant a figurative pat on the head and my blessing. It may live to provide me with some of those lovely blooms once again.

On the other end of that bed, another hibiscus never lost all of its leaves during winter and it is now putting on new growth.


Perhaps the summer will bring me more of these yellow beauties as well.

In other nearby beds where I was also spreading mulch today, I found that the two brugmansias seem to be in a race to see which can first reach the ten foot height they had last summer. This wasn't a surprise. My brugs always die back in the winter and then go crazy with growth at the first touch of warmth in late winter.

The nearby esperanzas, though, not so much. They still look dead, but again they always die back to the roots in winter and then are very slow to get going again in the spring, so I'm still hopeful that they will green up within the next several weeks.

Further on, as I pulled the mulch around them, I noticed that five of the six milkweed plants have green growth now. I hope they will get busy growing so they will be ready when the first Monarchs turn up.

I haven't seen a Monarch butterfly in my garden since the December freeze. This is radically different from last winter when I had a population of Monarchs with me all season and they were producing babies all winter on my milkweed plants that stayed green and lush. What a difference a year makes.

In another part of the garden, two of the five split leaf philodendrons are growing now. These are the two that were on the south side of the house in the most protected spots. The other plants have not shown any life yet, but I know their roots are deep and wide, so I'm still looking for them to come back.

I'm not so sure any longer about my old lemon tree, though. The tree has died back all the way to the ground. Now, it has done this before and then come back from the roots, but I don't think it has ever had quite as cold temperatures to deal with as it had this winter. Once again, all I can do is wait and see. Otherwise, on the citrus front, my Satsuma is doing well and putting on new leaves.

It's not only the plants that are showing signs of life. Everywhere I turned today, I kept encountering green anoles. Well, actually they were more gray or brown than green, like this guy who was sunning himself on the brick wall under the hose hangar.
This is a popular spot for anoles. Whenever the weather is not too cold, I can almost always find one near this spot. But today they were all over the place.







And last night, as I went to the front porch to retrieve my cat Nicholas who was taking care of important cat business outside, a movement on the brick wall caught my eye. I turned to see a tiny Mediterranean gecko scurrying up the wall to find a hiding place under the siding.

If these guys are back on night patrol on my porches, then I think warmer weather must truly be here to stay.

Yes, I believe we've definitely turned the corner on winter. Time to get the rest of my veggie seeds into the ground. Time to get ready for more new life.