Spring is Springing

This is my favorite time of year, before the leaves are fully out. I love the way colors creep out slowly until the whole world turns green and shady. For now, my back yard is still in the sun. Within just a few days, it'll be all shade, and darker than in winter.

Green

 With the full flush of spring, leaves popping out, everywhere I look it is SO GREEN!

This is a pagoda dogwood in front of a fringe tree
Green with white-ish flowers both

This pagoda dogwood fills my front window with green

The red columbine and the pink geranium
stand out against the green

Not all greens are the same -
this hosta really stands out!

This very peculiar flower is known as
Dutchman's Pipevine, and is host to the
(wait for it...) Pipevine Swallowtail Caterpillar!

For context, this is the pipevine on the fence behind the chairs

Spa Day

The weather climbed up into the seventies this week, and I decided it was time to give all my houseplants a bath. I’ve had a minor spider mite infestation, and wanted to tackle it before it became major. Many houseplant books recommend washing plants regularly to remove dust and pests. I’ve seen instagrams of folks taking a shower with their plants (check out urban jungle blog). My shower was broken and too small anyway, so the window of warmth allowed me to proceed. 

First they all went outside, then they all got hosed down. After a brief drying period, they all got sprayed with neem oil and went back inside.

Bixby has a thing for spraying water. He goes nuts chasing the stream and has to jump and bite it. So he participated in the plant wash, and proceeded to roll in the dirt to dry off, and so he got a dog wash in the kitchen sink. I bought the only bottle of dog shampoo at CVS, and the advanced oatmeal formula has made him fluffy and nicely fresh smelling.

I completed my spa day by fixing my broken shower and cleaning myself off. My old shower knobs used to leak, were fixed by a plumber and replaced with ugly plastic knobs, which only lasted a couple of years. Another trip by the plumber gave me a new set of plastic, and when they started to spin freely this year, I decided to tackle it myself. But matching old parts is hard. I ended up, after three visits, with metal inside but plastic outside “universal” knobs, that don’t match but work. This is clearly a temporary fix, but “temporary” could be a couple of months or a few years. The joy of old houses!

Indoor Gardening

This west-facing window also has some lights

Since I always ride the trends about half a beat behind the wave, I'm now fully into indoor gardening. Some of the plants I'm raising inside will be planted outside in the summer, some will move with their pots outside and then come back in, and some will stay inside. Most of the ones to go outside were bought mail order from a specialty place. They came in four inch pots, and they will turn into giant bananas and brugmansias and blooming ginger and bouganvillea and other delights, I hope. Some are vegetables that were started in the hydroponics systems, and will be moved to pots and eventually outside.

There is a constant balancing act here - I buy plants, then need to buy furniture to put them on, and supplemental lights to help them grow. Now, with leftover pots, maybe I need some more plants? I'll be starting more seeds in the hydroponic gardens - those work really well - but then they will need to move to pots.

The cozy corner

My updated sun room lends itself to plants. I've decided I like concentrating them in that bright room, and I've also festooned the room with supplemental lights to make the growing days longer and bright every single day (even when blizzarding like right now). I spend the middle of the day out there, and in the evenings if I'm going to watch TV. It definitely has calming impacts on me to see the greenery everywhere. And, I'm enough into the mindset of the grower than I don't really see the plant itself when I look at it; I see what it could come to be when it gets bigger, puts out more branches, starts blooming.

The south window; palms and basil and cyclamen

 

The development section in the east window
Sad looking lemon and lime trees, a very bad Christmas cactus,
a cherry tomato in a hydroponic milk jug and some paperwhite bulb starts

 

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. 

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

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

Signs of Spring

My girl made street signs for me.
I'm hoping to help decrease wrong deliveries.

We've had a stretch of not-terrible weather - including some actual nice days. At this time of year, a "nice" day is one where it gets up to at least 50 in the sun, there is sun, and little wind. More sun and less wind allows the temperature to sag downwards from 50, as long as I dress for it. 

I've spent a couple of days in the yard, either finishing my fall cleanup or starting the spring cleanup, depending on how self-critical I'm feeling at the moment.  I'm also very focused on house-training Bixby - it's going really well - and we step outside for a few minutes nearly every hour we are home. This time outside allows me to search for and find even the tiniest hints of spring.

It feels like we've had no actual winter  though we did have one short-lived minor snow. These nice days make me long for spring, but it's really too soon.

Daffodil and crocus foliage tips are emerging, as they do every year at this time. My winter-blooming plants have not really come on yet. My witchhazel does have some buds but no blooms. My hellebores were all transplanted last year and I'm seeing some healthy foliage of some of them (and some died) but nothing that looks like the beginning of blooms. My winter jasmine, which hangs over the wall at the corner, has just a few little blooms and may come on stronger soon. 

Daffodil tips by the back entrance

There are several plants with green foliage year round, and these stand out. One gardening tip I heard but didn't act on as well as I would have liked last year is about how to use that to your advantage. Because certain weeds (onion grass, english ivy, vinca) are green when most plants around them are not, you can target them more easily for weeding right now. Because of the mildness of this winter, there are more things green than normal, but the principle still holds. 

This plant, golden groundsel, is NOT supposed
to be blooming yet, but it should be green

I successfully killed a lot of grass in my very back in the fall, and didn't get to planting the new grass. Therefore, there is a big mudpit waiting for me. I'm going to look up about how warm it has to be to plant new grass, and look for a 2-3 day window for taking on the big job.

Late Fall

 

Oak leaf hydrangea

A gardening book I just finished noted that almost any Fall foliage looks terrific when backlit. So true! And, a reason for planting good foliage plants on the west side of the yard, where the late Fall sun will be at a low angle and highlight it nicely. 

Almost all of the tree leaves are down - except for those that cling all winter like the pin oak on the corner. I've raked / blown / composted in the back a lot, but not so much in the front. I wanted to be sure to keep leaves off the new baby grass I planted. I do need to do a cleanup on the front, however, or they will mat down and smother things. 

NOT backlit - but still good -
St John's Wort

Aside from that, I may need to do some work on closing off the fenced part of my yard more securely, due to smaller, livelier dogs being able to escape.

Extraordinary Weather

My View for my Nap

We’ve had an unparalleled stretch of phenomenal fall weather. I’ve been able to be outside a lot, and am really soaking in the details of how the season is changing. Sunday, I was blessed with a brief outdoor nap, with sights of the trees lulling me off and welcoming me back when I woke. Now, I’m struck with the constant flurry of oak leaves coming down. They come down in thick bursts, with clear pauses. I don’t recall ever seeing the fall in action - perhaps in previous years, I’ve either been gone or focused indoors. 

Can you see the constant flurry?

I don’t rake the front until the white oak leaves are down - traditionally around Thanksgiving weekend. It seems on track for that, or maybe a little ahead.

 

Also, there is a random daylily blooming now.
Probably an artifact of warm weather.

 

Fall Color

 I never really got the term “Fall” (versus “autumn”) until I moved to Maryland. My house is surrounded by oaks, and for three months every year I am constantly bombarded with falling acorns, hitting the roof and patio with intermittent, random, bangs. The squirrels are drunk on the acorns, busily planting new oak trees all over the yard (including in my new grass). So Fall is coming on hard right now. Here are a few vignettes from the past month:

Harpooned

Very sparse and lacy, hard to capture

I was weeding the sunny slope by my front steps when I felt a prickle. The prickle quickly turned into a myriad of little stabs. Every time I moved, more stabs. I realized that some new bunches of fairly ornamental grass that had sprung up spontaneously were festooning my pants and t-shirt. Ugh.

So the first thing I did, standing up in my bedroom to change my clothes, was to identify it. Blackseed needlegrass, Stipa avenaceum (Piptochaetium avenaceum), says iNaturalist, the coolest app around. Snap a pick and ask for an identification. It has been spot on when I’ve tried it locally. And “needlegrass” is exactly what it is. It’s native to much of the United States east of the Rockies.

I pulled about a 100 spears out of my clothes before tossing them in the laundry. I had to carefully pull each one out and then run my fingers around the inside of the fabric to see if any spearheads got left behind. Then I studied more about this odd pest. It has perfect little harpoons. It launches them, and they bury themselves in clothes (and presumably animal fur). They are really miraculous. Take a look at how well designed for the purpose they are.

This also gave me a chance to get out my specialized macro lens for an extreme closeup.

Look at the hooks behind the point!

I’ve been turning my mind to how to control this without getting stabbed by a thousand tiny cuts. I think hard surface tight weave clothes, as opposed to the soft cotton knits I wore yesterday, might be more resistant to the stabs.








And then this morning, I found some more spears on my sneakers. I was able to capture what the harpoon looks like when it’s buried in the target. What an admirably persistent and well adapted plant this is. Despite its capabilities, it is listed as disappearing in Indiana, Ohio, and Pennsylvania.

Seasonal Change of Wardrobe

My pin oak on the corner does not enjoy being naked. Its leaves cling until the last moment, when the new leaves are ready to come out. I had figured out last year it was happening around the first week of April, but this year I was in a position to document the change more closely.

Left to right, top to bottom: March 29; April 8, after a big wind storm; just three days later on April 11, almost naked; it took eleven days for the new leaves to start to really show April 22.

Top to bottom, left to right again: May 2, those beautiful early days of lacy sun and shade; May 8, beginning to fill out; May 14, nearly there; and yesterday, May 17, full shade.

So about six weeks for the complete change over.