First Harvest

 Guys, I made a salad from my indoor garden and it wasn’t tiny, it was lunch!

This is my harvest. You cut the outer leaves of lettuces,
leaving the interior rosette to keep growing.

Update to note: as of right now, my average cost per meal from indoor gardening is $99 per meal. Hopefully this will improve over time. 

Indoors

My Christmas cactus
bloomed when I brought it in
right before Thanksgiving

It's winter, and I can't go anywhere warm. I'm often swept along by trends (though I've avoided sourdough), and so I've upped my indoor garden game. 

I have a number of plants I take out and bring in each year. I had planned to try bringing in, digging up, or taking cuttings of some of the potted plants I had last summer, but never got around to it. 

Just cut back

However, I do have one big success story to report. I've had a tropical hibiscus, bought at Home Depot a number of years ago. I generally keep it inside the fence because it is apparently very tasty (according to the deer). Inside the fence means not quite enough sun. So it's been looking very sad for a few years.

This year, I put the hibiscus pot just outside the fence, snugged up against the porch, and there it got a lot more sun. It did well enough that I was emboldened to cut it way back when I brought it in. At first, it looked like a bunch of sticks with one huge anomalous blossom. But it has filled out from the lower branches, and I hope it will have a nicer shape this year. In the meantime, it brings lots of joy with many blossoms.

Hibiscus

I've also bought some new inside plants. I started by hitting a black Friday Amazon special, totally out of the blue and on impulse, which I was resolved not to do. I got 16 tiny succulents for $15 - what a deal! Now, with the additional purchase of special succulent potting soil and right-sized pots for them, I have 11 surviving succulents on my kitchen windowsill, a slightly less good deal. But I see them and cheer them on every time I use the sink, not such a bad thing.

Succulents

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

I also ventured into modern hydroponics with Aerogarden. I gave my boys one each for Christmas last year, and had reports of good success. My sister-in-law has many (apparently adding more and more is common). So I gave one to my girl for Christmas, and got one for myself as well. Then, I added a second for myself, almost right away.

Later this week, I'm going to have a (small) side salad of lettuce and basil from my kitchen counter garden! How cool is that!

One of my "Cousin It" palms

The other one

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:

Grass

 The most vigorous project I’ve been intermittently working on is trying to actually grow a lawn in the spaces where I mow. In my sunny side yard, I’ve got a vigorous zoysia lawn that could stand up to a soccer match. But in my back and front, I’ve mowed infrequently and done little to nothing to try to foster grass versus crabgrass and other weeds.

Lawns have a deservedly bad rap. A perfect traditional lawn requires both labor and chemical inputs. I will never do that. I take no pride in having a perfect lawn. What I want is a green cover that can take footsteps and not erode. My sunny zoysia side yard meets that criteria without a lot of work. It only gets mowed - but pretty much never more often than every two weeks (in spring) and I’ve gone six weeks or more in hot high summer or fall. Sometimes (rarely) I dig out weeds like dandelions, but it’s so dense they don’t get a lot of footholds.

But my front and back yards have been sad territories, where a succession of weeds also leads to bare, muddy spots, and I fear runoff into my neighbor’s yard and the street. This year, I’ve been hanging out in the yard a lot, with the dog, and it’s really been nagging at me. I’ve maximized the part of my yard that is not lawn, that doesn’t need mowing, but I want to have space in the back (inside the fence and private)for me and the dog to move around. As is not unusual with me, I almost accidentally started a small project that has turned into a major renovation.

It all started with wanting to get rid of the azalea outside my kitchen window. One of my legacy azaleas, it was right beside the kitchen door and was infested with english ivy and a vine known commonly and accurately as “tear thumb”. Like all Japanese azaleas, it looked terrific for a week or so in the spring, and the rest of the time just sat there. It’s only wildlife value was providing cover and perches to the birds - no insects or other food. Sitting on my patio I had contemplated pulling it out, and on a lovely, not too hot day at the end of August, when it had recently rained so the ground was soft, I started digging. It took several hours, but I got it, roots and all. I raked it smooth, opened the huge bag of grass seed I had bought and spread it by hand. I fenced it off from the dog, watered it three times a day per instructions, and about a week later tiny little grass plants had sprouted! I was so excited! Time to start the next phase.

When I started digging, I realized I had bitten off more than I could chew. The first small patch I had planted had first been dug up to get the bush out. This next section was hard work to fork up. I already knew I wanted to do most of the backyard, so I bought a rototiller. It’s electric, rated “medium duty”, and it cost only 2x what it would cost to rent for a single day. It is a little bit scary to use, but it gets the job done. So September 12 I planted section 2 (and over seeded the many bare spots of section 1) and a week later I had many cute baby grasses sprouting up. More success! Keep going!

But, as so often happens, I took a digression. I had been planning to clean out my two garden sheds, because I thought it was ridiculous to have two sheds. One is very ugly, and the other needs repair. Cleaning them out meant pulling all the crap out of both, and then thoughtfully deciding what to get rid of (crap left over from the basement reno, mostly) and what to keep, and how to store it. A fine stretch of fall weather gave me a few days without rain where stuff could be spread all over. I’m happy with the organization for tools and garden supplies I ended up with in the red wood shed, and I’m still contemplating what to do with the ugly plastic white shed. It has a very sturdy metal pipe frame, and I could use a place to sit outside out of the rain, and to store things out of the elements during winter. I’ll mull over the winter. 

So finally, I had cleared out enough of the back to start on the next logical but much larger section. It took me a couple of days to rototill, because I kept stopping to rake up the crab grass or bend over and pull it out by the roots. I’m afraid it’ll have gone to seed anyway, but I wanted to do at least a decent job, though I know it’s far from perfect.. I switched the dog-barrier to defend the new territory (because the first two patches were thick enough to walk on and even mow!) and broadcast the seeds towards the end of September. Again, in about a week, baby grasses appeared, and it is nearly at the mowing stage! Three to four weeks, but again I did some overseeding of bare spots a couple of weeks in. Now, the voles have really gone to town, tunneling through the new looser earth. I walk over their tunnels and push them down, but I don’t know how that will affect my baby grasses.

I’ve got one more backyard patch to plant, but I took some digressions. I turned over by hand a small place by the front door that was purely mud (where it had been dug up for the gas meter in June) and planted more grass seed. I also raked and pulled crabgrass and wild strawberry from an adjacent front patch, and planted grass seed in raked furrows, without turning it over completely. I’m not going to get to that spot with serious prep this year, so I’m curious to see if the overseeding will do anything. I’ve got some plants to plant elsewhere, and some structural issues to improve drainage. I haven’t completely decided whether the drainage solution will expand into my remaining back yard future lawn, so that’s a great excuse to avoid hauling out the rototiller again.

The clock is ticking on cold weather, however. There is a limited window to do this. I’d like to get it done this year. Just not right now.