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.

My Back Yard

 More “aerial” photos of my yard. They show my newly planted-from-seed grass out to my driveway and the street; my crowded and cluttered concrete patio; and my utilitarian cut-through side yard. Each of these areas is going through some degree of renovation and upgrade, but they are fairly unlovely right now. For example, the colorful mats are killing my crabgrass in anticipation of planting new grass from seed. As the back and side are the dog’s domain, I couldn’t have them both closed off to him at the same time. 

My Front Yard

 Playing with my toy drone, “aerial” photos of my front yard (taken from below the roof line of my house). The pix show off my wonderful fence to good advantage.

Vegetable Wrap-Up

 I cleaned up my single vegetable bed this week. I had planted broccoli, zucchini, cucumbers, beans, and chard. 

The broccoli was the star for the year. I had it tried once before, but the deer got to it and it was never appetizing. But this year, it was beautiful. I planted it in March, because it was the most interesting vegetable offered at Home Depot in my last shopping spree before locking down. After I harvested the main heads on each of the six plants, side shoots kept coming until sometime in  late July when I left it alone and the plants started to rot and die in the moisture and heat. I pulled the sad remnants out and tossed them.

The beans were a success, I guess. I planted two varieties from seed, and made three good harvests. Many of the plants were looking barely alive when I pulled them out just now, but I did get a sparse harvest off the dwindling plants. I’m not terribly enthusiastic because, unlike the broccoli, it wasn’t such a treat to eat them. I’m not sure I’ll give space to beans next year.

The cucumber was squeezed in where there really wasn’t room. I grew it up a trellis, and got one fruit. Then the plant died, possibly from my longtime and apparently still active zucchini curse. 

I squeezed the chard in between the broccoli and the zucchini, and got a meal‘s worth of leaves before they were overwhelmed by their neighbors. Definitely worth it. 

I planted maybe three different varieties of zucchini, both from plants and from seeds.  So far, I’ve harvested one single small zucchini. I have had a plethora of beautiful orange male zucchini blossoms, and few female ones. When I crawled around on the ground cleaning up the bed, several dead plants came away as I simply moved my hand along the ground. I tried to clean up all the dead and rotting matter, and it appears I may have a couple of actually (apparently) healthy zucchini plants in there. Except for some smallish basil plants on the edges, they are the only plants left in the bed and they seemed happy to be cleaned up and able to breathe freely. I discovered a female flower on one of the vines, and performed sex on it by dismembering a male blossom and smearing the pollen from the stamen on the hopefully receptive pistils. So maybe I’ll get a second zucchini! 

The dead squash and cucumbers probably were suffering from the squash vine borer- a drab moth that lays  its eggs on cucurbit vines. The caterpillars snack their way through the main stems of the plants, usually but not always killing the plant on their way. This has been the bane of my squash attempts, and I have never yet suffered from a surplus of zucchini. 

I have two cherry tomato plants in pots, and I continue to get a steady trickle of tomatoes. It would be more, but the deer have nibbled at them more than once, and they do not set fruit in the hottest weather. 

My Favorite Flower

 Love love love this dinner-plate hibiscus. I’ve yearned for this, and planted it four times. This one is a winner. It is a variety derived from a native, but there is noting natural about the proportions- I think it’s been bred for huge flowers on a relatively stocky plant. This is its second, bonus, flush of blooms and I’m totally smitten. 

Wildlife in the Garden

 Besides the usual deer and rabbits, there have been a host of interesting small critters in the garden.

This is a June Bug

The honeycomb left by my yellowjackets

Skipper 

Eastern Swallowtail Butterfly

A katydid. I thought it was just a “common” but then
some expert brandishing his credentials including a shiny new PhD
said it was something much more obscure.

The dark form of the Eastern Swallowtail

Pollinators, including bees, totally adore this verbesina.
I weeded a bunch of it out today, and bees rode it down into the 
Trash bag and came out later, startling me. 

Wet

It feels, right now, like it's been nothing but wet and grey for a long time. But, actually, if I cast my mind back just one weekend, last weekend was terrific - sunny, low humidity, cool enough to keep the air conditioning off and windows open.

However, it's not an illusion that it's been awfully wet this summer. We are currently neck-and-neck with 2018, our previous record holder for hyper-local precipitation. And, like that year, we're getting more and more huge events, rather than steady, consistent, precipitation. These downpours are much harder on our ground and systems. This week we had a really record-setting event. Our local gauge saw almost 3.5" in two hours. Other gauges around the region found even more - as much as 5.5"! Roads were flooded and closed, including the parkway just below my house.

All of this has led to huge growth of weeds everywhere. Right now, gardening feels like simply ripping things out. More on that later.

Late Summer Blooms

The garden is poking along during the dog days. Well, poking isn't the right word, because weeds are exploding, as we continue to have record-setting rainfall. But the blooms in the front shady garden (what I see most often out the window) are sparser and require a more refined esthetic than in the exuberant spring. But they are there!  And, the sunny parts are prolific and buzzing with pollinators. Soon, goldenrod will be the main thing, but not quite yet.

Garden phlox - surprisingly long-lived

Cardinal flower - I've seen hummingbirds here!

This is called "turtlehead" - can you see it?

This blue mistflower is something that just spreads itself,
sun and shade alike

Ironweed - nothing refined about this brawny guy

The white is a wild clematis that spreads itself -
I put this one on a pillar, but there is too much of it elsewhere

Miscellany.

The latest crop of garden porn

I spent yesterday's rainy day with a bunch of new garden books. Big gorgeous books I still buy in physical form and luxuriate in their size and heft. I don't read every word in these books - I read some, and generally flip every page and admire most of the pictures. Then they go on the shelf, and are referred back to fairly often.

The bee guy came back for another shot at my yellow jackets. They are now fairly unhappy, meaning maybe another day mostly inside.

Dead girls flying? I hope!

The rainy weather has kept things moving along in the garden. I have a small forest of mushrooms (possibly brought in by the mulch?) and my favorite huge "dinner plate" hibiscus.

It's actually redder (less pink) than this photo shows.

How Much Rain Have We Had?

Because I can, I've accessed very local rainfall records and drawn a picture. One of my neighbors, about a quarter-mile away, participates in the Community Collaborative Rain, Hail, and Snow network. Every day, since the middle of 2006, she posts the previous day's precipitation totals into a website created for the purpose. There are thousands of people doing this around the country, and it provides a database for researchers looking for hyper-local effects, on daily weather and on climate. There are about 20 reporting stations in our very large county. Having this fairly granular data is especially helpful in thunderstorm country where idiosyncratic effects lead to big differences. (For example, a couple of years ago, National Airport a mere 12 miles away, received six inches of rain IN AN HOUR, but we got about two. We got a lot of rain, but not the record.

The main thing I use this data for is deciding when to water my own garden. But, looking at the graph of cumulative rainfall for every year since 2007 leads to some interesting musings about patterns of rainfall here.

For starters, most rainfall totals cluster around the average. But we've had two years that very much stand out from the pack: 2007 was by far the driest year since 2006 (and would have been even drier had it not been for an October storm dumping a few inches at once). On the high end, 2019 takes the cake by a lot. It doesn't really stick out in my mind as being that rainy, but I guess it was.

More interestingly, when a year diverges from the average makes a difference. Our record dry year, 2007, was average through the beginning of May. Our wet year, 2018, was only slightly above average in mid-July. And then it took off! Last year, 2019, was average until early July, and then the rain turned off for nearly three months. But we finished the year well within the average band we see in the greyed out history.

This year (bright red) has had above average precipitation right out of the starting gate. Even our spring was wetter than average. My observation has been that for my garden, full of spring wildflowers and shady natives, the early rain is important for the whole year. So that's good news. But lately, the rain has come in some big huge dumps, resulting in the stair-step look of the line. We got 1.75" in rain in two hours one night! One issue of these huge dumps is that much of the water isn't absorbed locally, because it comes down too fast. It just runs off, frequently taking some of the soil with it.

We do things to capture and retain both the water and the soil, to some effect. The single biggest thing is to avoid having any bare dirt. Plant, plant, plant, especially on slopes. Mulch in the places the plants haven't filled yet. I have some steep slopes at the edges of my yard, because my house sits on a relatively level plot created by scooping the top end and building up the bottom portion, and the street was left at almost natural steep grade.

This view of the steps to my front door
also shows the steep slope of the street.

My whole neighborhood, built on steep slopes above a creek, has rain gardens to retain even more water, built by the county to try to improve Chesapeake Bay water quality. They dug out more than eight feet down, filled the bottom six feet with what looked like plastic giant egg crates, then put rocks, gravel, soil on top, leaving the spot below grade and with drain pipes leading in from uphill and out from downhill. The soil is planted with an attractive variety of native plants that are well equipped to handle flood/drought stages repeatedly. After a big rainfall, the below-ground areas store water, which then slowly leaches out through the soil, leaving behind various contaminants. Each site requires significant maintenance of the plantings - weeds are ready and able to move in and take over.

The big climate question is volatility. Will we continue to see these huge, record-setting storms?

Apples!

I have an apple tree (I used to have two but I got rid of one this winter because it was too big too close to the house) and I've never eaten an apple from it. I've watched it bloom, I've watched tiny apples form, I've watched them grow,  and slowly, slowly, I've watched small amounts of red creep across them. Just when I've thought it's time to try picking, they all disappear. I've known it's deer and squirrels - the highest apples are well above the reach of deer. But I've always timed it wrong. This year, I've been able to watch it much more closely than in other years, and the apples are growing bigger, slowly. Few have any red - interestingly, the reddest ones are the smallest.

Earlier this week, Rocky and I came back from our stroll around the block to find a deer grazing on the tree. Grrr! She was very bold and hard to shoo away. (I should note that Rocky's only interest in deer is their poop they leave behind - yummy!) "Shoo!" made no difference to her. "Woof woof!" (from me) made no difference to her. She seemed very big when we got close. She sidled a few feet away, and she kept an eye on Rocky, but she decided to sample the dahlias and mums that were closer. I grabbed my deer-chaser I keep on my front porch: a metal coffee can with a few nuts and bolts inside. I shook it at her, and finally she wandered across the street to eat Betty's flowers. Hat-tip to my neighbor Bill for suggesting that was a noise that was likely to work - I've used it several times this year, to good affect.

A couple of nights ago, I was down in my basement gym (yay me!), flat on my back, and I looked up and out the huge window well there, and I saw a squirrel on the tree. What he seemed to be doing was sampling every apple by taking a single bite! Grrrr! I finished up the workout briskly instead of lingering over my stretches, and went out there. The squirrel was not in sight, and I took the moment to harvest a few apples even though they are still green. I carefully positioned them for the photo with best side forward, because they all have flaws (but no actual squirrel bites). The largest one is about the size of a peach, small for an apple.

I'm contemplating my next move.  Will the picked green apples ripen or rot? Harvesting a lot more apples requires hauling out the ladder. I want to delay that as long as possible, in the hope they will continue to grow and eventually ripen. But will they all be gone by then? Yesterday, I saw a squirrel perched atop my fence enjoying one.

In other news, the yellow jackets are not gone. They have opened a new nest entrance about six inches from the old one. The specialist says he'll be back Saturday. Grrrr!

ATTACKED!! 2020: This Time, It's Personal!

On Sunday, one of the hottest days of the year (so far), I was moving hoses around, preparing to water my garden. Suddenly, an intense sharp pain on my knee made me aware of several buzzing yellow jackets! The back of the other knee got nailed! My shin! I started to flee, and I noticed the dog had gone full Eeyore on me: head down, ears down, tail down, feet firmly rooted in one spot, at least a half dozen yellow jackets buzzing him.

Doomed! The white dust is from the exterminator.
The lower nest is blocked, and the entrance is full of poison.

In an incredible act of courage, I hobbled over to Rocky, and grabbed his collar. The back of my hand got nailed by a stinger. I shrieked at the sad dog, terrified of the numerous persistent pursuing insects, and Rocky planted his feet more solidly and refused to move. I dragged him by the collar, out the gate and halfway around the house, brushing yellow jackets off him and then me as we went. Poor Rocky was stumbling and almost falling, perhaps as terrified by me as by the stingers.

I got us inside, verified we had left all pursuers outside, and assessed the damage. I had at least six stings on arms and legs, and they were already incredibly painful and swelling up fast. Rocky was still in Eeyore mode, but didn't flinch when I patted him.

I've never been particularly bothered by bees. When I've been stung before, it hurts, it swells, and in an hour or two it looks and feels itchy like most people's mosquito bites. (I am even more indifferent to mosquitoes, usually.)  But I am aware that many stings can bring on anaphylactic shock, and I'd never felt anything as painful as this. I raided the medicine cabinet, first for Rocky, then for me - antihistamines and painkillers all round. I texted my BIL to keep checking back with me for the next couple of hours, to make sure I hadn't started gasping for breath.

Of course then I took to the internet to figure out what these infernal pests were, studying the nest through the window. Clearly territorial yellow jackets, not bees. There were DIY solutions for getting rid of ground nests on the internet, but neighbors strongly recommended a local one-man specialty service. With my left hand already swollen so it was hardly functional, I decided to wimp out and go with the expert.

The stings continued to swell, reaching a good six inches in angry painful diameter each. Monday was worse than Sunday, but then they started to recede and now, five days later, they are roughly mosquito-bite itchy, not painful, but still large and red. I have a new healthy respect for all things stinging.

The "Bee-Be-Gone" guy has just left, noting the nest had taken advantage of tunneling mammals - probably voles - so the nest was very deep and long. He had to go with poison, not just mechanical means, to get rid of them. So now the front yard is filled with extremely perturbed angry flying things with nasty pointy ends that pack a poison of their own. It will take up to three days for the activity to die down, and if there is any residual flying activity in a week my guy will come back and do it again.

Bad Nature! Bad bad nature!

BTW, this is only a few feet from where I had a welcome distanced outdoor chat with Liz last week. Luckily, we didn't inadvertently bother the nest, and they didn't bother us then. What a debacle that would have been!

How my Corner has Evolved

If you are not looking at this on a phone, you may have noticed I finally updated the cover photo. Here is how my corner has evolved over the years:

2004: Before I had the stone wall built.

2007: Wall is new and I'm gaga for tropicals in pots

2010: This is what I was using as the blog top photo

2014: The tree behind the "no outlet" sign is small

2020: The shade from the tree, and losing the spruce, has totally transformed the corner