A Gardener's Notebook

Archive for the ‘Plants’ Category

Link: Gutter Gardens

I am always looking for great ideas for the garden and this one showed up in my RSS feeds a few days ago. What a great way of making use of those small, yet sunny, area of the garden. I even have an unused piece of gutter lying around that I just might put to use. Ideas like this give even apartment dwellers some interesting possibilities. Not everyone needs to have an expansive, 1/2 acre garden to grow some of their own food or flowers.

Originally found on DigginFood via Gutter Gardens.

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A short video taken while harvesting some lavender in the garden today. I haven’t harvested these plants before, so they became very woody. I cut them back hard and will do a better job harvesting to try to keep them more green and herbaceous instead of letting them get woody again.

Foxglove in Kensington Gardens, originally uploaded by dewelch.

A shot from our recent trip to the UK. The white foxglove was growing in Kensington Gardens immediately adjacent to Kensington Palace. The palace ground are undergoing a large renovation at the moment.

Update: I have renamed this. I couldn’t think of “foxglove” when I posted this and had the name all wrong. I meant Foxglove from the very start. Oh well.

Nasturiums have sprouted!, originally uploaded by dewelch.

Almost to the time listed on the seed package I see that most of the nasturtiums I planted have sprouted. A quick count shows around 80-90% germination.

It is good to see them come up. I can only imagine what they will look like when we return from our 10 day trip to the UK. We have friends housesitting while we are gone, so I will instruct them to pay special attention to this area.

One thing I am looking to do is grab some audio and video with allotment gardeners in the UK. I hear so much about allotments and the various reasons people garden there and I want to take some time to talk with them and get their thoughts and advice.

I am scanning the maps and satellite pictures of the UK cities we are visiting and think I have found several allotments. Now I just need to take the time to go there and see what is happening. If you have any advice on places I might visit, please pass along a note in the comments.

I am on a kick to green up the garden this season, even if we are entering the hot part of the year.

To that end, I have recently upgraded some irrigation using soaker hoses and today, on a whim, I planted some nasturtiums (seed packet in picture) in the patio bed outside the back door. It is probably not the best time of the year, but I am running forward full speed ahead. My watering costs are usually not the largest part of my utility bill, so I am ok with a bit more watering this summer as I try to make some changes. That said, I don’t mainly use sprinklers. Every thing is on soaker hoses at the moment, so that helps make the watering as effective as possible.

So, I took a few minutes this evening to carefully plant the seeds. Unlike my typical, sloppy planting methods, I took note of depth and spacing and really tried to make sure I gave them the best chance possible. 9-12 days should show if that was truly the case.

The previous owners planted a large series of geometric beds with azalea and juniper in the front garden long before we owned the property. Over the course of a year, these plantings can get quite shaggy. Typically I use the hedge trimmers on them, due to their geometric shapes and size. It isn’t the preferred method of pruning azaleas, but more of a “make do” arrangement.

The azaleas need to be trimmed after they bloom, but before they set new growth and buds for the next flowering season. Several times in the past, including last year, I have missed this window and been forced to wait another year before pruning. This makes the job more difficult, but it still has to be done.

We are slowly reworking all of these beds to change the character of the front yard The junipers inter-planted with the azaleas are all dying. As we remove them, I am either clearing the entire bed, as we did with the lavender bed in the foreground of the photos or “naturalizing” the beds by removing any juniper and a few of the azaleas and then letting the remaining azaleas grow into a more naturals shape and size.

I took advantage of a beautiful, cool day yesterday to work through these beds. It is hard to tell in the photo, since all the green blends together, but all the geometric beds are now neatly trimmed, except for a few stragglers along the bottom. These I will have to clean up by hand, one at a time. I was lucky to get some time yesterday, as this project really needed to be done before we leave on a trip to the UK in mid-June. I probably would have still been within my window of time, but the temperatures here were sure to be a lot hotter and make the job a lot more uncomfortable.

Finally, there are a series of large azaleas which grow against the front of the house. These have been spared the hedge trimmer and, to my eye, look much more appealing and natural in their habits. Still, they need to be pruned every so often, lest they consume the front of the house. I hand prune each of these plants, working to maintain a low, somewhat weeping habit. They seem to like this treatment as they never fail to bloom amazingly each year. That job will have to wait until we return from our trip, unfortunately.

Along with that job, I also hand prune the small (although growing larger) pines in the front garden. I describe it as “bonsai in place”. My goal is to keep them small and then prune them in a way that encourages a twisted/gnarled arrangement to the limbs. It seems to be working, so far, although right now they appear more like fuzzy pom-poms instead of the bonsai I prefer. This requires quit a bit of time, although I describe the process as particularly zen-like. I look, I think, I prune, look, think, prune and then repeat again and again until I have what I am looking for. I think this feeds my artistic sensibilities much as painting would.

Stay tuned here for more projects to come this summer!

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Today, I was finally able to transplant 4 large Cast Iron Plants (Aspidistra elatior) that my landscape designer friend gave me a few weeks ago. They had sat in plastic compost bags with nothing but a little bit of water, but looked none the worse for wear. I think this points to why they are named Cast Iron Plant and also points out their hardiness, something that will be required in this particular part of my garden.

I am trying to “green up” things in the back garden, as it can look a little brown and dusty during the heat of Summer.

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I took some time to finally transplant these Cast Iron Plants (Aspidistra elatior) I got from a landscape designer friend several weeks ago. Here are some pictures. Video coming soon!

As always, click for a larger version

It has been far longer than I really like to admit since I last trimmed up the purple fountain grass (Pennisetum setaceum) in the center of the front garden. I planted it years ago to fill in a a bed that once held a sizable pine tree that died soon after we moved into the house. It has thrived with little attention beyond raking out some dead stems and leaves.

The last few weeks, though, I have been frowning every time I pulled out of the driveway. It really needed some work. Finally, today, after doing 2 client calls, I took the time to clean it up. First, I picked up each plant (there are 4 in all) and brought it upright so I could get a better idea of the actual size of the clump. Due to some heavy shade conditions throughout the garden, all of the clumps had leaned towards the southwest, where the sun reaches under the large elm tree each day.

Next, I used my fingers to rake out any lose, dead growth on each plant, much like you would run your fingers through your hair. This brought out much of the obvious dead growth. Then I took my manual hedge trimmers and gave each plant a quick trim — quite a bit off the the top and a little off the sides. This allowed them to stand upright again, opened up the space between each plant and gave them some space to grow upwards.

The trouble with such care-free plants like grasses is that they are waaaaaay to easy to ignore. They are a perfect fit for my “benign neglect” garden, but I need to neaten them up each year to keep them healthy and nice looking.

I don’t have any picture to show for all my work today as I did it at the spur of the moment and by the time I finished it was too dark to take any pictures. I have included a generic picture from Wikipedia above to give you small idea what it looks like.