Hydrangea: 95 years at my house

Today, I pulled up or hacked off a forest of baby maple trees, masses of nightshade vines, and a bramble thicket. The only thing that was supposed to be in the spot at the end of my driveway was a hydrangea.

Our elderly neighbor tells us that the hydrangea out front was planted when the original family moved in. We bought our house from the daughter of the family that built it in 1917.
I think that's so cool, to have a nearly 100-year-old flower bloom, welcoming everyone who passes by our driveway.

Sadly, I had neglected weeding for the past several years. The poor plant was hardly even visible. Instead of masses of platter-sized white blossom clusters, this year we had just a few clusters the size of a hand.

It's not exactly New Year's, but here is my resolution: stay on top of my yard a little better, so we can enjoy the show for many decades to come.

Happy flowers

Three years ago, I moved my panther lilies. They were one of the many flowers that had come with our house, and had probably been in the same location for decades. Every year, they would lean away from the house until they fell over. Looking for sunlight, I guessed.

So I moved them to the edge of our yard: the neighbor's yard is much sunnier. The new flower location is more along a deer "trail". Now the panther lilies provide more mouthfuls for our local cervine population. The past couple of years, we've been lucky to have one flower escape the mouths of deer. I have wondered if my move was a good choice.

Now, the panther lilies are blooming. And not - as was the case every year near the house - just one flower to one plant. They have two, three, even four flowers on just one plant. These are happy flowers. Sunlight beats deer.

A red fox in my yard

For the past week, I have seen movement of a small-dog-sized animal. A tail, a quick movement as it ran behind the garage. Racoons are common in my neighborhood, and woodchuck (groundhog) sightings are common in my yard. The flashes of fur seemed a little too orange to be woodchuck or racoon. But what else, I thought, could it be? Surely not a fox.

Well, yes. It surely was. The fox is, right now, asleep about four feet from my living room window. Apparently that pile of leaves makes a nice fox-bed.

It was an exciting sight: I woke my husband up and made him come downstairs. The fox woke up when a bird flew by, looked around, and went right back to sleep.

And I'm not alone: the Illinois Department of Natural Resources has a bulletin from 2004 about foxes in cities. The bulletin says they eat mainly rabbits and mice (and can survive on insects and nuts if needed) and do not attack cats or dogs. Sounds like a useful animal.

Welcome to my yard, fox.

I cut a corm

Yesterday, I divided my cyclamen plant. I've had it for six years; it was time. Yesterday was a warm day; most of the snow had melted overnight and in the morning. My compost pile was easy to work in, and I dug up a potful of soil. I sat on the porch (no coat! so warm!) with my supplies, and mixed the compost with perlite and coconut fiber.

Time for the cyclamen to come out: I turned the pot upside down and started shaking. Shake, shake. Shake, shake. No movement. I stared at the roots coming out of the bottom of the pot, wondering if they were stuck inside. I was afraid to pull on the plant top: cyclamen stems are fragile. Shake, shake - it was loose!

I eased the rootball out of the pot and started prying it apart. I think I was expecting bulblets that would peel off. What I actually found was a solid mass, about the size and shape of a small donut. What was this? Could it be divided? Off to the internet.

Cyclamens have corms, which can be divided, but not by pulling apart with fingers. They require a sharp knife. So, paring knife fetched from the kitchen. I cut the tuber like a cheese wheel. Each wedge into a pot, add my prepared potting mix. All done - plants back to the kitchen window with a fresh watering, supplies put back away.

And wait. Plants don't always take well to having their roots messed with. Taking a sharp knife to a living thing and cutting it into pieces seems an illogical way to promote its health.

I come downstairs this morning, into the kitchen for breakfast: the windowsill has four perky-looking plants. They seem happy in their new homes. I'm happy I could do that for them.

Now I have four cyclamen plants, only one of which I intend to keep. All with flower buds. Three to give away. So, who needs a new houseplant?

Lack of taste

Tuesday, I was eating grape tomatoes, picked off my own tomato plant. It is really rewarding to have a successful vegetable after so many disappointing years. And they taste good, too... just as good as the store-bought ones.

I remembered all I'd read about home-grown tomatoes. About the extra flavor that vine-ripening gives, how the more delicate varieties for home gardens taste better than the bred-for-storage-and-mass-transportation commercial brands. People are driven to write songs about this wonderful flavor experienced by the successful tomato gardener. I'm not seeing it in my tomatoes.

Perhaps the brand I chose is the culprit. Or perhaps my gardening: my plant had a rough start and took about 80 days to produce its first fruit: much longer than the rated 60 days. It may not be getting all the sun and fertilizer it needs to reach its full flavor potential.

Then again... the people who rave about homegrown tomatoes also rave against refrigerating tomatoes. Not just the homegrown ones, but any tomato. The cold can break down important flavor compounds. They say. But not for me: I have done experiments, and cannot detect any taste difference between refrigerated and non-refrigerated tomatoes. Maybe it's me.

Last summer, my sister came to visit. Our conversation drifted to her college classes. She talked about her food science class, and shared how it had improved her appreciation of flavor. Not as much as her classmates, though: some of the things they could smell, she could not detect. This struck a chord with me. I cannot count the number of times friends, family, and coworkers have complained of a smell I cannot detect. "It must be genetic," I told her. Our sense of smell is sub-par.

Perhaps my poor sense of smell comes with a poor sense of taste. I think this calls for further research. Today, I'm going to a tomato tasting festival. Will they all taste alike to me? Or will I discover what I've been missing? Let the experiment begin!

Update: OK, so the partner's not up to a 3 hour roadtrip this morning. Maybe next year?

Tomato plant: 1 Gardening advice: 0

In May, I planted one cherry tomato plant. I tried a new location this year and hoped to get more than a handful of tomatoes. And at first, my plant seemed to really take off.

At the end of May, I went to check on my plant. Most of it was gone: one or two deer mouthfuls, I suspect. All my hopes wavered. The plant did sprout new stems, and I staked them. All I could do was hope for the best.

I was worried, though: my first gardening book, Bountiful Countainers, warns against secondary stems: it says they only make leaves. It recommends pruning away everything but the main stem, where all the fruit would be produced. My main stem was pretty much wiped away. I wondered, had that been my only hope for fruit?

Yesterday, I was ecstatic to find blossom buds on my plant, on all four stems. And so I have learned: there is more than one way to prune a tomato.

Ripening berries

The mulberries are ripe. We have at least three trees in our yard: no matter where I am doing yardwork, I can stop and snack on a few mulberries.

The gooseberries are ripe. My neighbor helped me cut down a bunch of smallish elm trees last year, and the gooseberries really like the extra sunlight. It looks like I'll get several dozen berries, up from less than five in previous years.

The raspberries are ripe. This is about on-time from our 2006 and 2007 experiences. But it surprised me, because we didn't get berries until July in 2008 and 2009.

I won't do any formal berry harvesting this year because of my work schedule. I will enjoy seeing these reminder of summer every time I walk through my yard.

Botanical aid

I complained this spring about an invasive vine threatening my raspberries. I spent a significant amount of time this summer removing the vine from most of my brambles. I was curious about exactly what it was, and took a flowering sample to my local botanical center.

It took several months, but the diligent research of the master gardener paid off: the vine is an American Hog Peanut. Turns out, it's technically a native plant, not an invasive one.

Native plants support significantly more wildlife than imported species. The wildlife in my yard is one of the things I enjoy most about it. So now I don't feel as negatively toward the vine as I did this spring.

I feel lucky to have access to a botanical center with such a helpful master gardener.

Raspberries, yum

I harvested about a cup of raspberries yesterday. They have been bearing for a little over a week, but we had neglected to harvest any before yesterday. Everyone in my household enjoyed some of the berries I picked, including the parrots. (The cockatiel still has red stains on his beak.)

This harvest is a little later than normal (our raspberries are a June-bearing variety that typically bears in, well, June). But we have had mild temperatures, like last year, and the raspberries are actually fruiting a little earlier than during last year's harvest.

Our raspberry patch in the front yard is going gangbusters: almost all of my cup was taken from there. Our patch in the back, however, has been largely overcome by some kind of invasive ivy. Removing the ivy and keeping it in check looks like a large, labor-intensive project. I hope I'm up to it; losing those raspberry bushes would make me very sad.

Garlic: high hopes

After a few years of replanting garlic that hadn't grown very well, last fall I bought new stock from a seed catalog. Unfortunately there's no perspective in my picture, but the garlic is mid-thigh on me. I'd forgotten how big garlic gets when you start with big cloves!

My plan is to use Miracle Grow on it once a week until the summer solstice. (Garlic is day-length sensitive and won't grow any once the solstice is past.) With the remodeling and my chemotherapy treatments, the garlic is the only gardening I'm doing this year. I hope those bulbs get as big as their green tops!

We have a roof!

Well, OK, the roof on our south living room was up two weeks ago. But I just now got around to posting the pictures, so here they are:

In the lower picture, the sunny spot to the left is our new back door (we won't have to go through the kitchen to get to the back yard!). The middle area will house a woodburning stove, and the room to the right is a competitor for world's smallest 3/4 bath.

Our porch rebuild is also still in the framing stage:


And we have a bay window in the kitchen:

I had the azalea (in back of the photo) for not quite three months before I killed it. Let me recommend the cyclamen (the one with flowers) to fellow brown-thumbs, though: it has managed to not only survive my ministrations the past five years, but bloom through them.

Back to the topic of roofs: our contractor has now fixed the damage from a tree falling on our house last summer (broken eaves, mangled gutters, damaged shingles). Since it rained all day yesterday, I was very appreciative of having gutters that worked.

I'm quite happy with how far our contractor has come in the six weeks they've been working. Maybe six more weeks and they'll be done? I guess I'll just have to wait and see!

Fall colors

My community has a lot of burning bushes - shrubs with leaves that turn red in the fall. This year I keep seeing bushes all over with this beautiful dark hue on their leaves. They've held the leaves for many weeks after they turned color, too; I've been just amazed as how great they look.

I commented on this to a member in the Bible study I go to. He said it was appropriate: after finishing our reading of Genesis, we've just started studying the book of Exodus.

A long fall

We had two nights last week where the temperature dropped below freezing. But it has warmed up, and today's weather was beautiful for working outside. Further, when I opened my garlic package, the planting instructions said it was actually best to plant after a light frost. I don't feel so bad for procrastinating now.

In between my two naps, I helped the partner clear our lawn of leaves (into the ravine at the back of our property) and of a small truckload of brush (to the yard waste facility). In the evening, I dug a garden plot: about four feet by four feet. It rained last week but not recently, and the dirt was the perfect consistency for digging. This spring, my mother in law had accidentally bought some compost, and gave it to me; I worked that into the plot. I planted my garlic. I put mulch (leaves) over the plot like the planting instructions said to.

I'm bothered that I felt so tired that I took two ninety-minute naps today; this three weeks plus is the longest I ever remember feeling under the weather. But I'm happy that I felt just fine doing yardwork, which would not have been the case even last week. And excited that I got the garlic planted, and that the instructions even say November is still a good time to plant. So overall, a very good fall day.

Procrastinating past first frost

Tonight is forecast to be the first frost of the season. This is a few weeks later than average, which should have helped my fall gardening plans work out.

But, I haven't planted any of my bulbs. Not the new garlic that I bought after being encouraged by this summer's harvest. Not the tiger lily bulbs or daffodils that I dug up planning on moving to a new location.

Partly from having my weekends and my last few days of vacation more scheduled up than I expected. Partly from this bug that hit me two weeks ago. Partly because I kinda expected to plant the garlic in September, but the weird weather this year pushed back the harvest and the company didn't mail it until the first part of October.

This coming weekend is looking good, though. Hopefully being planted November first will still work out for my bulbs.

Experiment: Compost a tree stump

A storm several weeks ago knocked down two large trees on our property, one in the front yard and one in the back yard. We now have large tree stumps there. It would be several hundred dollars to have someone come in with a stump grinder, so for now, we're just leaving them.

I try to start a new compost pile about every six months; I have three piles going, so each one gets about eighteen months to "finish". Today, I spread most of my oldest pile around our two small apple trees (maybe they'll make apples next year - that would be exciting). The rest of it, I spread around our tree trunk in back. And I've started a new pile there, with food scraps covered by leaves.

I know the stump will compost eventually. It will be interesting to see if it happens on a reasonable time frame, though (less than a year). If this experiment in the back is successful, we might look into some of the "make a compost pile look sightly" advice, and do the same thing in the front yard.

Garlic in the shade

The numerous trees are one of the major reasons we like our property. They're not all positive, though: I've had to move away from most attempts at food growing because our lot is so shady. When I attempted to grow potatoes, for example, I dug up less potatoes in the fall than I had planted in the spring. But garlic and multiplier onions seem to have promise: they do most of their growing in the spring, before the trees have completely leafed out.

I have no idea how the multiplier onions did: they have all died back, and I can't find where to dig for them (they'll just have to grow next year where they are now). But I dug up 3.2 oz of garlic today. To me, this is really exciting, because I planted 2.5 oz of garlic in the fall last year.

This is my fifth summer of attempted gardening. I had wondered if my food production would be limited to indoor pots of greens for my parrots. Now, I'm encouraged that perhaps I can grow a little something on a human scale, too.

Moist, cool berries

I harvested about a cup of raspberries today. I got about a cup on the first of July, also, with only a handful earlier than that. There is probably another pint or so still ripening. Which is odd: these are June-bearing raspberries. In 2006, I harvested two cups on the twentieth of June; in 2007 we had a late frost and our total crop for the year was about a cup - almost all harvested by the seventeenth of June.

I suppose that's what happens when it rains so much (my state broke a record for most precipitation in the first six months of a year). Lack of sunlight, perhaps? Lack of high temperatures, maybe, too: to date, we haven't had a single high above 89ºF.

There is a lot of new growth in the bramble patches, however. Our plants bear on two-year-old canes, so next year (if we don't have a last frost, or a drought) might be a repeat of the bumper crop in 2006: I think we harvested over a gallon of berries.

What a blessing the previous owner gave us when they planted the original raspberry plants here. I doubt they knew these plants would establish so well and produce so abundantly with so little care.

A strawberry and a book report

That's what I've been doing recently, eating a home-grown strawberry and writing what amounts to a book report.

Walking around my yard admiring the dogwoods in bloom, I found a ripe strawberry, on a plant I grew from seed two and a half years ago. I feel a little silly being excited about a plant probably past its prime producing one berry, but it was delicious.

My book on condom history is due back at the library on Monday, and I've already used my allowed renewal. So the Wikipedia article is seeing a lot of additions in the history section. I hadn't intended to put myself under a deadline like this, but it is exciting to watch the article grow as I work on it. I keep giving my partner updates: "I made it through the eighteenth century!" "I've written up through World War I!" Only ninety years left to go - not too much for a week, I don't think.

My plants are growing, but my compost is not done

I took a tour around my yard today, and found many plants coming up. The onions and garlic I planted in the fall I expected. I was happy to see a couple of strawberry plants looking healthy already; I'm doubtful they'll make any berries, but they're pretty plants. My chives are looking sickly already; this might be their last year. Chives must need more sunlight than strawberries.

I was especially excited to see a lot of belladonna lilies coming up. These do better than any other flower in my yard because their leaves come up now - when it's still sunny before the trees leaf out and shade everything - and make and store all their energy for the year. The flowers come up by themselves in the fall ("Naked Ladies" since it's just the flower stalk, no leaves then). I divided a huge clump of them last fall: over thirty bulbs, about ten pounds worth! Only about eight plants had bloomed the last two years we lived here, so I was quite surprised to find so many bulbs there. I mailed half to my mother, but am still hoping to at least double the number of flowers I get this year.

I planted cuttings from my indoor Wandering Jew plant in two containers between our door and driveway. I really enjoy coming home to that bright splash of purple on the path between my car and house.

I was disappointed to see that my compost pile from last year was not finished. I didn't turn it at all; previous successful piles I had turned once in the fall. This is what I get for being lazy. I'll probably pick out some finished soil for my houseplants; the apple trees will just have to do without until the fall. My new plan is to start a third compost pile; this way each pile will have eighteen months to finish, and I'll get a finished pile every six months instead of once a year. So hopefully it will work out to be better in the long run.

Bridge graft

In the three years we've had our house, I've attempted to grow a variety of fruits and vegetables. Most have died in short order. As a result, I've become very attached to the plants that remain. These include three apple trees we planted two years ago.

I put compost and mulch around them, maintain the fencing to protect them from deer, prune them and put spreaders on their branches. Although our yard is shady and full of tree roots competing for nutrients, the trees have grown a little every year, and it means a lot to me that they seem to respond to my care.

My heart just sunk last fall when I saw that one tree had been girdled: some woodsy creature had eaten the bark in a six-inch-tall swath all around the tree. Worse, my apple tree book had warned about this, and instructed me to put wire mesh around the tree in the fall to protect it against just such an occurrence. I had known my tree was at risk, not acted, and now my neglect might have killed it.

Spring is coming here, and soon the trees will come out of dormancy. It seems like a good time to attempt to put the tree in a position to heal itself. Armed with instructions from Five Acres And Independence by M.G. Kains, a few long twigs from pruning the trees, and wax from a wax toilet ring, today I attempted to bridge graft the girdled area. I felt bad for the tree cutting long sections of its bark wide open to stick the twigs into, and I'm not sure about my skill in shaping the twig ends.

I'll be ecstatic if the tree leafs out and looks healthy this spring. Last year, the apple trees leafed out at the end of April. So here's to some hopeful watching and waiting.