The Harvest Keeps Coming

 

Before snipping (bottom) and after. 
The unit on the right has lettuce leaf basil,
Thai basil, and thyme

Today, I pulled out the scissors to cut a couple of lettuce leaves off the countertop garden to garnish my breakfast. As has happened before, the snipping continued and I ended up getting a bigger bowl, and then finally my big salad spinner to put the lettuce in. 

This countertop garden makes me so happy! I normally buy boxes of lettuce leaves at the supermarket, but lately I’ve been disappointed at how quickly they start to slime. Once some of the leaves have slimed, the whole remaining container goes in the compost pile. I suspect if I bought heads of loose leaf lettuce and washed and stored them properly I would have better luck. But I’m all about convenience. And what could be more convenient than snip-snip right there in my kitchen!

My View

 There was an unusual sky on Saturday. Also, please note not all the leaves are down so it would be silly to start raking yet. 

Indoor Gardening

Just after planting. This also provides a
handy under-cabinet light down at the dark end of the kitchen

Two weeks ago I started up my automated hydroponic countertop garden again. I planted lettuce in the unit on the left, and herbs (mostly basil) in the unit on the right. Now, just two weeks later, I ate my first lettuce! I love this!

One of the online gardening groups I belong to had a memorable (to me) post from a woman who lives on one of the Arctic islands in the Canadian archipelago that is in the Northwest Territories. She was so excited to be able to grow fresh vegetables year round! In her tiny village, they will go weeks at a time with no flights in the winter, when they are icebound and isolated. How cool is this!

Ripe for first picking! Two weeks!

Ready to stuff into my pita sandwich

Final Harvest

I finally harvested my chard today. I had let it go, and many of the outer leaves had fallen over. But there was lots of good stuff in there! I cut leaves individually and left the innermost small ones, in case we continue to have mild weather - it could continue to grow for another month! There were some spiders and slugs in there, but I carefully washed each leaf one at a time.

Chard is ridiculously good looking. The dish I made with it was actually kind of bland, just braised with rice and good olive oil. It loses most (but not all) of the color when it cooks. But it made a good substantial side for the other five things I made for dinner (I pretty much spent the whole day cooking). 

Red Blooms

 Still blooming in my front yard, roses and chrysanthemums. I have a predilection for red blooms!

Lilies

 The glory of my June garden is the patch of lilies i planted in the fall of 2018. It was a set of 25 bulbs sold by White Flower Farm called Strawberries and Cream. (WFF are masters of marketing.) They bloomed for the first time my first month of retirement, June 2019. Sadly, in 2020, I had to dig up most of them because of the gas company requirements. I put them back, and most but not all survived. I missed the peak this year by being away the first 10 days of June. They were still lovely!

I decided to refresh the patch with an infusion of new bulbs- again, the same mix from the same source. The bulbs arrived today, and went into the ground right away. I often aspire to this promptness, but rarely execute it, so yay me! Here’s hoping for a great display next year!

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Unintended Consequences?

I love my fence and how it’s enabled my garden to thrive in the absence of deer and greatly reduced rabbits. It’s even possibly reduced the number of cats visitors, which makes the birds happy. A lot of the fence’s effectiveness at its specified role of “deer-out; dogs in” comes from having closed up the gaps along the bottom. 

Bixby's first turtle

The very first time little Sadie came over after the fence was built, she squeezed under it and was off like a flash! The day Bixby came here to live, I spent a lot of time reviewing the bottom edge of the while fence, plugging gaps with rocks, logs and soil. The fence is built on my sloping yard, so there were sometimes sizable gaps, too small for clunky Rocky but plenty small enough for an eight-pound dog to fit through.

So maybe I was too effective? Bixby has found turtles, or possibly a turtle, on and off all year. He found a smallish one back by my shed—the closest corner to the park and creek below. It was gone in a few hours.  All summer, he has found one in my shady and damp front yard, excellent box turtle habitat. When he spots a turtle, he barks at it, jumps forward and back near it, but I never saw him try to touch it with either his paw or nose.

Dogs just wanna have fun!

This week, he spotted one cruising the perimeter fence heading in the direction of the creek. But as I watched the handsome fellow, he seemed to be foiled by the fence. Finally I picked him up and cruised the whole edge. I never found a place I was sure he could fit through. So I went around to my neighbor and put him down just outside the part of the fence he had been cruising, facing in the same direction. I’ve read that turtles have a strong urge to go where they want to go, so if you rescue one crossing a road, for example, you need to put him down on the side he was heading to. Otherwise, if you put him back where he came from, he’ll just venture back across. Hopefully, this guy will get where he wants to be. 

What a handsome fellow!
But apparently stymied by the fence

 

More Plants!

 

I took my girl plant shopping for her less-than-2-weeks-away birthday. I ended up with a sizeable haul myself! Everything needs to be repotted and then I need to find places for them. I'm pleased! More green! Bring that outdoors in!

Needle Drop

In the last 48 hours all the brown needles fell off the white pine at the end of the driveway, leaving an inch of debris in a big circle around the tree.

This almost looks like a brown snowfall.

Vacation is Over

My morning room

I woke up yesterday to a temperature of 48 degrees. I knew it was going to get cold, but I thought I had a few more days! Fifty degrees is my cutoff for the summer vacation for my indoor plants (and that is pushing it). I just remembered I go warmer for putting them outside in the spring, more like 55 or 60, and it seemed to take forever to get there this year. I think it was May before they went outside. But as always, they really thrive when out there in the warm weather.

With the weather forecast stay as cold or colder for the next week, yesterday was devoted to bringing in the jungle. I expanded my houseplant collection last winter, so I had to spend some time deciding where these plants would go.(I did lose a couple as well.) I didn't have stands or places for many of them. 

I decided to put most of the plants into the TV room (formerly known as the dog's room, sometimes referred to as the South Wing), rather than scatter them throughout the house. This is a small room off the main house with big windows on three sides. I had to wash several outdoor pieces of furniture, and even saw off the feet of several small wooden Ikea tables that had rotted a bit from sitting on damp earth. Several of the plants also needed repotting. So this turned into a most-of-the-day project, not a bad way to spend the day. And I think I like the idea of a garden room. I've noticed the increased light in there from lower angles and fewer leaves, and I gravitate towards it.

The South Wing

Now, I think I need more plants! There is a hip spot in downtown DC for houseplants I could visit. There is the internet. But I think I may start with Home Depot and Lowes. As I recall from this spring, Lowes had better plants, but Home Depot had wider choices for pots. 

I had been very big into palm trees when I first got the house and realized the possibilities of my TV room. Here's a moody photo taken from inside November, 2001.

November 2001

Opening Up

There is an extra satisfaction in garden clean-up in the fall because plants are done growing for the most part, so things pulled out or cut back stay gone. My front entrance was way overgrown. It wasn’t possible to get to the front door without brushing against some plants. This included long tendrils from a thorny rose bush! 

I like having a wide, easy-to-navigate entrance, so I spent a couple of hours on this. Here are before and after shots. It’s honestly kind of subtle, but it creates so much more of an open and welcoming feeling. Bonus: it’ll be easier to shovel snow, without the plants growing over the sides, should that become necessary.

Another Rain Garden

I've had a big problem with drainage on my side yard. This isn't a problem for my basement, but after big rains the water has pooled there for some time. Last winter we had a stint of snow, warming to thaw it, followed by several days of a deep freeze, and that section of my yard turned into a skating rink. 

First iteration of rain basin, perking acceptably

Yards on my street tend to be mostly level, little plateaus created by bulldozers. But then there are steep slopes before the ground levels out to the next yard. This side of my yard is deeply shady, and slopes gradually to the fence, after which it drops down a whole story of a house. My ground is level with my next door neighbor's roof. This is great for privacy. It seemed, however, to be a bad idea to solve my drainage problem by sending it all down the slope to the foundation of the house next door - especially when I know they already have problems with water in their basement. Besides, I'm pretty sure water coursing down that steep hill will drive significant erosion in the slope, resulting eventually in my lovely fence toppling over down the hill. Deluges are becoming more frequent, and they drive much more erosion than the same amount of water spread out over a longer time.

Beginning of the trench

After some years of studying the problem, watching the movement of water through my yard, measuring slopes with a laser level, I decided to run french drains along the side to the front, where I have a small space far enough from trees, my house, and the drop-off to put in another rain garden. The natural slope of the land is from back to front so this working with gravity in my favor. I have a downspout off the roof gutters at the back side corner of my house which would feed directly into the drains. I have another downspout along the back of my house, and I would allow that to drain on the surface, where it should run down across my grass to the low ground in the yard where the porous french drains would channel it out of the area.

This was going to be a much bigger project than my front rain garden, because I would be starting from scratch. I don't think I would have had the gumption to tackle it without the boost from challenging myself in my vacations this summer.

First, I dug up and set aside the large stepping stones that made a path along the side from the back to the front. I needed the wheeled dolly to move many of the huge stones. Then, I laid out the drainage basin area in front, and dug it out with a shovel to about 18". I used most of the displaced soil to bank up the sides of the basin, especially towards the down slope. It dug fairly easily, but where I stopped the looser top soil had yielded to some hard clay. I dug down further into that hard-packed area, and mixed with the clay several bags of locally-generated compost, filling the basin partially back up. I filled the basin with water, and watched it drain - it took about an hour to perk through the clay and soil. That seemed promising.

The trench gets deeper

I trenched backwards from the basin along the house to the back yard. The first layer of the trench was done solely by hand, but there were only 2"-4" of topsoil there before I reached clay (I just put it to the side as I went). I have an electric roto-tiller, and so I got into a routine of running through the trench with the rototiller, loosening the clay. Then I would come back with a spade and remove the loosened soil for a couple of inches, tossing stones to the downside and dirt to the upside. There were some roots that required sawing by hand. (I didn't worry too much about damage to any trees, as the trench is about ten feet from the house, so the roots couldn't have traveled much further than where I cut them off.)  

This was a very big undertaking. It took me maybe five or six days of two hour stints of rototilling and digging to get the trench as deep as I was willing to go. This includes one day of rototiller repair, when I got it too close to a metal mesh fence and the blades got stuck in the fence. I had to pretty much disassemble the whole machine to disentangle it from the fence, and then put it back together again. 

During the deluge. See the drain pipe sticking out

Before I was all the way done with the trenching, we had a big rain - about 1.4" of rain in a few hours. I hooked the drain pipes together in advance of the rain, and watched how it worked. The good news is water ran nicely along the system as planned. The bad news is the rain garden basin wasn't nearly big enough, and it overflowed. The water that was collected there took over 18 hours to drain away - I figure that long time was because the ground was saturated and there was no place for it to perk to. So after it had dried out some, I resumed digging and made it bigger in circumference. I also worked on the berm and tried to slope the sides so that overflow would move in the direction of my main front garden, not over the edge.

Finally I declared the trench as deep as it was going to go. I lined it with landscape fabric, put down pond stones in the bottom of the trench, laid in the porous drain pipes, wrapped the landscape fabric around it like a blanket, and covered it over with the displaced dirt. Hooray!

Bixby digging

I set the stepping stones back on the surface. I still need to sink and seat them properly, on the to-do list. But I want to make sure everything has settled in place before I expend too much effort leveling them out. I should note that I have voles actively tunneling around and between the stepping stones. When I dug my trench I apparently cut through a major passageway, and they have been rebuilding. Bixby entertained himself going after them - it seems he can smell and hear them from the surface. So sometimes I would rake an area smooth, only to have to step and smash new vole tunnels, and rake dirt back into the holes Bixby had dug.

Stepping stones and plants in place

 

 

 

I planted white turtleheads into the rain basin, along with transplanting a single existing pink turtlehead that had popped up away from my main patch.  Along the side of the house - very deeply shady - I put in a grand total of about 30 plants - three kinds of ferns and three kinds of sedges. I planted them pretty densely and I have hopes of a green area with contrasting shades, heights and textures, that needs only minimal management. 

In the rest of the back / side yard, a flat open area, I planned to plant grass. I dug up the biggest weeds by hand. Then I rototilled the whole area to loosen the hard packed soil. Then, I distributed compost over the whole area, and rototilled it again to mix it in. Next I raked the whole area smooth, and tamped it down with my feet. Lastly, I spread bags of special "lawn soil" over the top, raking again, and finally, in advance of the first anticipated rain for several days, seeded it by hand. 

Baby grass! (I have to blow the leaves out-no raking yet)

Yay, ten days later, I've got baby grasses coming along! Last fall, when I planted grass inside the fenced yard, I felt I needed to protect it from Rocky's big feet and questing mouth. Now, I'm not too worried about little Bixby dancing across the tender shoots, but I monitor him and don't let him start digging for voles.

Whew! All told, over a month has elapsed. And as I said, it was years in the planning. We haven't had a downpour since the once that overflowed, (before I was finished) so I don't know how well it will do, but I'm fairly confident it will make a substantial difference.

Faded Glory

Goldenrod, purple aster, bicycle

Certainly, the garden is well past its prime. But there are still things to appreciate in it, new blossoms as well as distinctive seedheads. Most of the foliage has not started to change color yet; the newspaper warns the mild fall may keep all the colors muted this year. It requires some effort to look past the weeds and brown foliage to find the gems, but they are there if I look for them.

Pink turtleheads

The red winterberries are great this year!

Asters and goldenrods (and a weedy vine)

White mistflower, goldenrod, joe pye weed seedheads

The "blue" aster (color looks pretty true-to-life on my computer)

A carefully framed vignette of (front to back):
dahlia, chrysanthemums, zinnias, butterfly bush

Another framed vignette of mistflower, plumbago,
and my little fir tree, all by the front door

Milkweeds Doing Their Job

Milkweeds, of course, are the food source for monarch butterfly caterpillars. The several species of milkweed are pretty weedy. I've planted one of the least ugly, Asclepias tuberosa, the orange "butterfly weed". I've never seen any monarch caterpillars on them, however. 

But I've also had the weedier common milkweed, Asclepias syriaca, crop up as a volunteer on my shady, steep bank along the road in front. It would prefer more sun than that location has, and so it is only on the edges, leaning over the road and the steps to my front door. It is quite unattractive, even in bloom. This year, it really went to town, and I was pleased to see an excellent crop of monarch caterpillars on the plants. The plants were completely stripped, and I hope there were enough of them to feed the caterpillars all the way through pupating - this is probably why it's recommended a butterfly garden have a sizeable patch, not just one or two plants. Encouraged, when the caterpillars were gone, I cut off some of the seed pods and tossed them further up the bank, hopefully to see more plants.

Vegetable Wrap-Up

Not a good year on the food-growing front. My tomatoes were a disappointment, with both deer damage and virus damage and rain damage. For a couple of weeks, one of the cherry tomato plants had recovered from the deer chomping long enough to produce some ripened fruit - enough to keep me in salads. One other plant never produced anything, and the third gave me two ripe medium-sized tomatoes. I don't buy grocery store tomatoes, but farmer's market tomatoes carried me through.

Giant zucchini

My zucchini got a great start, but then died, as did the pumpkin plants I started from seed. But after I had given up on them, the zucchinis produced two actual fruits that got huge before they were picked. Like baseball bat sized! My girl thought we should try to cook them - but when I did, they pretty much tasted like wood. Sigh.

I wrote earlier how the broccoli and cauliflower failed early and often, and the onions just melted away.

But the star of the garden has been my chard! I've had a surfeit - I've eaten more than my fill multiple times, and allowed it to keep going and going. Unlike other vegetables, it doesn't go to seed.

Chard and marigolds behind the deer / rabbit barrier

Right now, the chard and the marigolds are fairly attractive, some consolation.

I wonder if I'll be beating my head against a brick wall if I try tomatoes again next year?

Hummingbird Magnet

By the back door, twined together

I planted cardinal climber and moonflower plants from seed. I planted the cardinal climber by the back door, the moon flowers by the back and front doors both, as well as in a pot on the side of the house. None of them bloomed until September. The cardinal climber is frequented by a hummingbird - I can see the vine as I go about my daily business, and have often stopped to admire the flitting tiny scrap of a bird. The moonflowers are supposed to attract giant luna moths, but I haven't seen any yet. 

I would consider this a highly successful venture!

I caught the first moonflower as I went out at night

I only planted the cardinal climber in one place
because it can really take over.
It's likely to seed and come back next year.

Rain Garden

 Much of my gardening is driven by changing light conditions - trees grow, trees fall, buildings are built, and the light changes. When the giant spruce fell in my yard in March 2018, conditions changed substantially and the ripple effect continues. 

Peculiar blossoms and fruits

I had a Carolina sweetshrub bush, bought and planted in the waning days of the last century, in front of my house. It was one of several bushes planted in a little thicket beside the walk to my front door, deliberately to create privacy and block views from the street into my house and yard. I only put in shade-adapted natives: the sweetshrub, several blueberries, shadbush, dogwood, oakleaf hydrangea, arrowwood viburnum and cranberry viburnum. For almost two decades the Norway spruce overtopped them and provided shade from deep to dappled, and so they all poked along, establishing roots, growing slowly, intertwining as they way. When the spruce fell, the brakes came off! Now, it is a thriving deep dense thicket, ripe with berries and caterpillars and thus a prime bird habitat.

The sweetshrub, planted at the end of the thicket, was a real winner in the light-and-water sweepstakes. It turns out, this bush can spread by sending out underground suckers, creating a thicket all its own encroaching both on the other bushes and the lawn in the other direction. I realized by the year after the tree fell that it was dominating the space and might have to go. As I thought about it, I grew enamored of the idea of making prime full-sun space available for a rain garden. But it would be a considerable project. 

I dove into the thicket periodically to methodically dig out suckers, beginning with the ones farthest from the main bush. A few of the suckers I transplanted to the opposite end of my yard where there is currently deep shade. Last year, I got the size of the bush down to maybe three feet in diameter, and cut it all off to about four feet high. I kept eying the standing corpse and dreading the task of digging it out.

It's ripe for the plucking!

Houseguests to the rescue! Last October my boat partner and her husband vacationed in my basement for a week (almost as nice as their aborted trip to the Azores, no?)  And one lovely day while they were staying, my sailing partner and I indulged ourselves with weekday sailing, leaving her prone-to-seasickness husband to stay behind and work on his book. But, he asked for anything that needed doing outside. I suspect he wanted to mow the grass, but I pointed out the bush and where the tools were kept, kind of as a joke. But we came home to find the bush gone, all of its sticks bundled for removal and the roots out of the ground, a tidy hole in the ground left behind.

Waiting for next steps

All spring I worried over what to do next. I had spoken to a local contractor about doing a rain garden project, but he never pursued me and I'm past begging for folks to come do work I could do myself. I knew I had to dig out the space, connect to a buried drain from the roof gutters, modify the soil, buy lots of plants. It seemed a big and daunting project, and I did nothing about it. Every time I walked past the scar left behind it gnawed at me.

But, the kedge (planning a big difficult trip to make myself get in better shape) worked! In fact, not only am I in better physical shape, but mentally I'm more ready to tackle difficult things. And, once I got into it, making the rain garden was very manageable.

So, I dug out the space.

I modified the soil.

 

I bought some plants and put them in. It needs more plants, but July is not a great time to acquire plants - spring ones are gone, fall ones are not in. Some things I wanted are not available, and I may end up shopping my yard to move some things from elsewhere. Fall is a great time to do this.

I mulched the heck out of it.

Finally, we had some rain and I was able to watch as rain from the roof drained through the pipe and into the garden, where it filled up and then drained slowly over the course of some hours just as planned!

The one sad thing is this is still the deer highway where they come from the creek into my yard (to eat all my apples). So far, that hasn't been an issue with what I've put in. I'll continue to look for less appetizing plants.

EDIT: As it turns out, last night (evening of the day I wrote this) we got 1.5” of rain in 25 minutes! Towards the end of the downpour (when I thought it was safe) I went out to look. There were a good 6” of water in the rain garden throughout the bowl, with active draining from the roof. When I went out about three hours later, it had all drained away. Exactly the way it’s supposed to work!