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Thuj One and Two

I mentioned in my post on Sandy’s damage that a gardening friend had recommended Thujopsis dolobrata as an interesting and useful evergreen plant for my northern border. She said it was somewhat rare and I’d tried to find it at some of the bigger nursuries in the area, without success. Although they are slow growing and these will take a long time to mature, I decided to buy some small plants online from Evergreen Nursery. Buying small plants, I could easily afford a spare. They left Chattanooga, TN, on November 6 and were at my door last night when I got home from work.

They were strangely packaged in a box that originally seems to have held frozen salmon, wild-caught near China (thrifty nursery), and also strangely placed in the box horizontally, with their verticle stems folded. I guess that gave them less room to shift? One of them had a major branch broken off in shipment and they have some slight browning on some branches. But for being in a box and bouncing through several states in various trucks, they look pretty good. Here they are soaking on the deck.

I have named them Thuj One and Two. Thuj Two lost the branch and also has a second leader. He might make an excellent candidate for bosai, if only I knew anything about bonsai. I’ll let them dry out somewhat from their welcome home soak and let them get some weak afternoon sun. Then they will spend at least the winter with their pots submerged in the soil in one of my garden beds; maybe the summer, too. I still have a lot of cleanup and preparation to do for their final home and gardening season is pretty much done here.

This white pattern on the underside of their leaves is characteristic of the plant and one of the features that sets this evergreen apart.

Thujopsis dolobrata underleaf detail — Underleaf Detail

Sandy and Work in Progress

We were very fortunate that Sandy only gave us a glancing blow, however, I have my own little garden saga of destruction and hopefully next summer, renewal.

I thought that I and my all of neighbors had come through pretty much unscathed but when I backed my car out of the garage for work on Tuesday morning, I noticed a lot more light from the north where the property line and my driveway converge. A large ash tree had fallen and, fortunately for my house, chose to fall away from it. Unfortunately for my neighbors it hit the power line that runs from the street to their house and the pole on their lawn snapped off at the base. The gallery pictures start with pictures of that.

As I was looking for other signs of damage I noticed that the tree next to the fallen one had been snapped at the base, probably taken a glancing blow, and was leaning into yet a third, a huge three part maple. Despite my struggles to prevent it, these trees had been damaged some years ago and while they leaf out every year, I’d been getting more and more pesimistic about their survival. And the two trees together, one mostly detached from its roots had taken a serious lean toward the house. So worried calls to my insurance company over, I started calling tree services.

Tree service to the rescue. Although they tried to be considerate, I’m not sure which was more terrifying, the bite of Sandy’s lessser winds that hit us, or a yard full of men with chain saws. With sadness, I had them take one more three part ash that was in a similar shape. Still alive but losing the battle. Somebody got a lot of really nice hardwood out of this.

Trees down, I had to wait a few days for the logs to disappear. The car in the picture helps with scale. The last shot shows how much more cleanup work there is to do. Among other things, the wood pile and my three compost bins, instead of tucked under trees, are strangely out in the middle of an open area. I need to do more cleaning in another part of the yard to make a place for them. I confess, I’ve worked a lot more with the sunny parts of my yard; building and maintaining the roses, food garden and dahlia beds. This is the north side of my yard, on the north side of a wet slope and some of the landscaping challenges here are formidable.

But with suggestions from gardens friends, I’m already imagining new plantings, maybe even beauty and order, in what has been primarily a wild and difficult area. Opportunity for renewal is also what storms offer. I need a specimen tree that will also act as a windbreak and privacy screen, to anchor new plantings there. My Norwegian friend Arnhild suggested a Thujopsis dolobrata. From pictures it looks like a beautifully shaped evergreen with a white underside to its fleshy leaves . And after reading that they like moist conditions, I’m hot on the trail to buy one. That spot is low and gets runoff from the driveway so is often wet. It will go roughly on the right side of the last shot, although if I buy the one quart size which is all that I’ve found so far, it will take awhile to show up in pictures!

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Clowns Rule the Dahlia Bed

Dahlia Bodacious, still not as full as they should be but they definitely make me smile. The frequent rainy weather has caused most of the larger dahlias to hang their heads but since Bodacious is about seven feet tall, and the bed is on top of a slope, it doesn’t matter.

Clockwise, Bodacious, hy Mom (white cactus), Kidds Climax (pink/yellow blend), and Devonne Excel, which goes from lavender to pink for me. Devonne Excel has been a wonderful performer. The plant is covered in blossoms, which is the way a dahlia plant should be in October.

Another group shot from a different angle, more to the right of the camera shot above and toward the front of the bed. Clockwise again, Bodacious, Yvonne (peach waterlilly), a buried and underloved Twister (fuscia). I planted too close, especially for my sun conditions and some of the middle plants did not perform. The white blossoms, center front, are Gitt’s Perfection; they haven’t turned pink yet and should get much larger, too.

To the left are the same Devonne Excel, a small Croyden’s Masterpiece and up to hy Mom again.

Below is Gitts Perfection; starting to realize it’s pink.

Toledo Botanical Garden

On a recent mid-west trip, I met my Ohio friend at the Toledo Botanical Garden. Aside from their small dahlia garden, which I may cover in another post, the gallery below contains some of my favorite plants and pictures from the visit. The mixed bed with coppery, warm colors was adjacent to the parking lot. I’ve always had a hard time seeing how to use the very dark-leaved plants, everywhere I put them they just disappear, but not here! I recognized grasses, cannas and most of the flowering plants but I had to ask the garden for help with the tall, large-leafed copper variegated plant. It’s one of a number of varieties with the common name of Copperleaf Plant from the genus Acalypha. It’s a tropical plant that’s grown as an annual in the Midwest, or taken indoors. The first seven shots are all of the same bed.

The next shots are of a green and white variegated plant with large leaves that I admired in another part of the garden and it’s the same family. Still common name of Copperleaf Plant. I love the way that it picked up the light from the deeply angled sun.

The gallery ends in pictures of a gazebo planted in white and covered with autumn clematis.

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Should have caught this earlier

My Meyer Lemon tree was having a good summer on the deck. It liked our extra heat and put out a lot of new leaves. I bring it inside for the winter where it usually sulks and loses leaves but it does usually blossom a few times and I love the smell. One of the sweetest smells there is.

Other citrus trees that have gotten this treatment have had scale once I bought them indoors that I would have to fight. The last one gave up and died. But they’d never had scale outside and I blithely believed that with my healthy, bug-friendly back yard, they never would. They have a lot of predators to keep their numbers down. I saw the black spots, and went hmmm, will have to wash that off and procrastinated. Then I saw the ants; lots of them. Took a closer look and recognized my old citrus enemy, scale.

: Scale

Did some reading; the sooty mold and the ants should have told me right away what the problem was. They are both an indirect result of the sugary substance that the scale secrets. It drips on the leaves and feeds the mold and the ants love it. The ants may even have helped deter predators as part of their symbiotic relationship with the scales.

So first, my sources said, get rid of the ants. Before these pictures were taken, I sprinkled diatomaceous earth around the stem of the plant. It may have reduced the numbers but there were still some pretty happy ants a few days later. After losing the last plant, I’d determined to use a horticultural oil before bringing the plants indoors for the winter so, after some research, I decided to try Bonide’s All Season’s Horticultural Oil, now. The temperature range should be good for the next few, dry days. Too warm or too cold and it may not work or worse, further damage the plant. And it will wash off in rain.

I also pruned the plant and took out everything beyond the bad infestation in the picture, branches that were crossed or that had no leaves. The baby scale is so small that it may take multiple treatments to eliminate the population, if that’s even possible. The horticultural oil that I chose can be used on houseplants so I will be vigilant. I’d also planned to try the LED lights with some larger plants this year, just not sure about introducing a plant with pest problems into the environment where I grow things from seeds.

Dahlia Esther

This dahlia was mentioned in a few of my posts last summer, it’s so much prettier than the pictures that when I ordered it; I wasn’t planning to write about it this year. But it’s still my best performer in the warm colors end of the bed. The clump has been blossoming cheerfully for weeks now and with all of the buds, it looks like it keep blossoming until frost, like last year.

I also wanted to share this photo, taken by my Ohio friend. I sent her a couple of tubers and she’s growing them in a container, in full sun. The blossoms have almost twice the petals. I’m not even very jealous. Not very.

Beetle ID?

This and its friends are eating my beans. Do you know what it is? It has a black sheild like bean leaf beetles but I couldn’t find any pictures with this much black elswhere on them.

My biggest concern is whether it will damage the beans that I’m saving for seeds, like the bean that it’s on. And whether the damage will be obvious enough that I can discard them.

Dahlias Again and More

I do have more than just dahlias going on in the garden, still lots of food coming in, and today I planted hydrangea Pinky Winky in between the stumps of the arborvitae that was trying to eat the house. I had a landscaping service come out earlier this summer and clean them out along with layers and layers of vining plants that had filled in as undergrowth. Ivy competed with Perrywinkle and various other vining weeds. The worker spent all afternoon just clearing and clearing. He said he kept thinking he was at the bottom of it and then would find another layer of vines and roots. After he did as much as he could, I haunted the place where my Company puts computer boxes to be thrown away and brought home big boxes to cover the area and hopefully smother most of what’s left.

I’ve raised the hydrangea from a four inch pot and it’s still pretty small to make any impact in the area. But I visited a good nursery yesterday and looked at hydrangeas in larger pots and decided that I’d rather work with a small one, even if it takes longer to make an impact. So next I’ll cover the cardboard with maybe a little dirt and the last of this spring’s mulch pile and think about what, if anything else, I want in that space.

I started my morning gazing at the dahlia bed with a cup of coffee in my hand and soon shifted to cleaning and weeding. In addition to removing older browned leaves at the bottom, which develop on the bigger plants, I decided to take out some of the shortest branches that were badly shaded or leaning into other plants. I took them out at the stem. They wouldn’t have produced blossoms and it will open up the plant for better air circulation, but never having read about doing that, I’m a little apprehensive. Hope that it won’t damage the plants.

One thing I didn’t do is cull the bad plant of Harvey Koop; after months of babying it and wishing it healthy while worrying that it was virused and would affect the plants around it, I cannot believe that it’s not even the right color. Harvey Koop is variagated and this is a deep reddish purple. Because of the shape and because the darkest color in its variation may match this, I expect that the grower cloned a plant that was reverting. Reversion to a solid is often a problem with striped or variagated plants but when you buy from a reputable grower, you expect the plant to be true. It does such a nice job of bringing out the purple in Croydon’s Masterpiece, right behind it in the picture, I probably won’t pull and destroy until it’s done blossoming.

Another procrastination, Bodacious was not pinched back properly (my fault) and the blossoms, at the top of a too tall plant were first deformed (July heat was also a factor) and then the first one that I let blossom was single. This second one is fuller than the last but still not the dahlia that it should be. I should cut it off to give the blossoms lower on the plant a chance to develop properly. However, with it’s bright colors at the top of a slight slope up from the street and 7′ above the ground, it’s attracting attention from people on the street.

Dahlias make me smile.

Another Keeper – dahlia Binky

This is another well-performing dahlia that I’ll grow again next year. It has been blossoming consistently for weeks now and is still covered with buds.

However, if my plants are typical, once again Swan’s online catalogue picture was a little misleading. Showing a single blossom, they show a mostly white flower with touches of purple, even lighter than the photo above. My blossoms spend most of their life mostly purple with touches of white. Another very picky minus is the way that the blossoms open below and slightly obscured by the new buds.

But in my opinion it makes up for that with it’s compact size and exhuberance. Its dark stems add visual interest and the foliage is healthy right to the ground; without a touch of blight. It’s colors coordinate well with the bigger, darker purples like Patches and it’s just as early. This small, colorful, water lilly dahlia is perfect for the front of the bed.

: dahlia Binky

The One – Croydon’s Masterpiece

: Croydens Masterpiece

Although I’ve visited many exceptional dahlia gardens, the photo gallery below is about the dahlia that turned me into a (rank novice) grower, Croyden’s Masterpiece. Years ago, I started with a mixed bag from a Michigan grower, because my main reason was to have some tubers to show as I talked to garden clubs about the dahlia gardens that I’d visited in France. Spring came and I stuck the tubers in here and there, with poor success. Croyden’s Masterpiece, however, bloomed long enough and beautifully enough that I was hooked. Toward the end of the season, the plants that looked healthy one day wilted and died the next. I have come to understand that too much nitrogen can cause weak stems and rotted tubers and I now suspect this was the cause.

However, the urge sort of simmered in my heart for a few years in spite of my failures. With my full time job, it’s hard to get away to see dahlias in public gardens and I missed them. After success with a container dahlia, Art Deco, I decided last year to try growing dahlias again. This time in a small dedicated dahlia bed. Because the bed was small, Croyden’s Masterpiece was planted in the front of the nearby rose bed that I keep richly fertilized, and the plants never did well. I got a few blossoms that I thoroughly enjoyed but the color was weak and they were never the size they should be. The tubers may also have been planted too shallowly; they didn’t look good when I dug them. With all that, I decided to purchase new tubers for this year. Properly planted in the dedicated dahlia bed, I think you will agree that I have my reward.

You may ask about it’s true color and all I can tell you is that these photos are true. While it’s classified as an orange variety, it really does vary that much depending on the light and the age of the petals. The last shot probably shows that variation the best. It’s like watching a slow motion sunset.[oqeygallery id=32]

Showoff

A mostly mousy brown moth/butterfly found just the right flower to complement her subtle coloring, dahlia Pooh.

Early Dahlia Report

Although a number of the larger, later dahlias have not even bloomed yet, many of them are doing very nicely. Yes, I know some of the petals look a little chewed. I’ve had a bad problem with Japanese Beetles this year; I pick them daily but they can do a lot of damage before then. I have decided the chewed petals are a badge that proclaims I like bees.

Dahlia Patches was initially a disappointment to me. The colors were not at all what Swan’s website shows, and I expected a pink/purple blend. I planted it at the end of the bed with other pinks and instead it’s a white/purple blend with more contrast than I expected. But it’s beginning to grow on me. It is a good size, it is early and the mix of purple and white does vary from blossom to blossom. As the blossoms fade, the purple does get pinker and the white does get a little pink so that I can ALMOST see the dahlia I thought I purchased. Almost.

Hy Mom is just what I’d seen in other gardens and Yvonne is a lovely waterlilly variety that I hope to grow year after year.

Dahlias Esther, Kasasagi, lil Scotty and Ellen Houston, all from last year’s plants are very happy. And I think that’s my lesson learned, in year three of dahlia growing (with a few years off between year one and two), people who save seeds say that the plants that do well in your microclimate adapt and do better, year after year. That may be especially true with dahlias and the tubers that I save. One can hope.

Is What?

Does anyone know what this is? Just a grasshopper; should I have buried it in the soapy water with the Japanese Beetles? Or something better?

Swamp Thang and the Mrs

On Thursday, I flushed a huge frog out of the Swiss Chard when I was watering. My guess from his size is that it would be a Bull Frog. I do live near wetlands but seeing a frog this far away from water is rare. Toads used to be common but not frogs. Worried about him, I moved a container of water that I keep, hoping that if the chipmunks are thirsty they will drink water instead of eat on a tomato — don’t ask how that’s working, and topped it off from the hose.

On Friday, when I went out to try to water the chard, again, I heard a splash coming from the vicinity of the waterbowl. Expecting to see Swamp Thang, I looked around for the source and found this sweet young thing, about a third of his size. I also saw some black threads wiggling around in the water and got excited about the possibility of tadpoles. But the timing worried me; how long to go from eggs to tadpoles?

I googled a bit and was becoming more and more convinced that they probably weren’t tadpoles, but mosquito larvae. But that night after work she was suspended in the water, nose and eyes sticking out, along with a number of the small black things. Would she really hang about with mosquito larvae? But the next morning, I didn’t like the way she looked, now resting at the bottom of the container in water that was now pretty yucky. She had turned a dark black, too. I tipped her out to see if she was living and decided to clean out the bowl. By the time I went to work she was back in the clean water and had returned to a more normal froggy color.

So now I have a frog living in my garden bed in less than three cups of water. Finally watering the Swiss Chard, I also flushed out a toad, who seems to be hanging about, so I put down a couple more containers of water that I’m cleaning and filling with the hose when I water the garden.

I think what has happened is that our warm and dry summer has dried out the vernal pools nearby and these wetlands creatures are under preassure to find water.

Dahlia “Pooh”

The colors of this collarette dahlia remind me of when I was a child and dad bought home color chips to pick out colors for his potentially two-toned Cadilac. We were actually dirt poor at the time as we lived on a farm so dirt was most of what we owned. Dad’s day job was for Cadilac Motors in Detroit. At that time the employee discounts were so good that he could buy one from the new models and sell it a year later at a profit.

Yellow and red, about these shades of yellow and red, were my favorites and I couldn’t see why the rest of my family couldn’t see it. At my insistence, I do think someone tried to explain the meaning of “resale value” to me but I was pretty young and these two colors were the very best!

I may never have seen a car in these colors, and with my well-trained adult tastes I would probably think it ugly, but I do have dahlia “Pooh” to remind me what it is to be a child.

Daylillies and a Friend – Updated Gallery

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I promised that the next post would be pretty pictures, these come from a friend in Ohio. These were small pictures that she shared with me and the large gallery size makes some of them a bit fuzzy but still beautiful; we’ve been talking about working with bigger one for this blog for a week or two but I wanted to get this posted while it’s still daylilly season. I will swap out any larger ones when she sends them.

She says she’s not an expert in daylillies but she does have over thirty varieties in her garden. From a Daylilly Expo that she attended, she tells me:

There are 71,474 registered daylilies with about a thousand new ones being registered every year.

These are the basic daylily forms:

Round
Double
Polymerous (many more petals than typical) I think he said there have been up to 12 petals.
Unusual form. If each petal is four or more times longer than wide, it is called a “spider.”
Patterns
Miniature
Sculpted

pleated
relief
cristate – growth from or over one or more petals

Seven Sisters Pruning Question

I promise the next post will be pretty pictures but I’d like suggestions.

I am not sure how to prune Seven Sisters. I will be deadheading this, which was magnificent, and I’ll have to do some serious thinning, too. This rose is not prone to black spot but you wouldn’t know it from looking at these shots. Summer pruning will help. Here is my problem. I know that next years blossoms will grow off laterals from those new shoots but what about the old canes and laterals, do they produce blossoms again on the old laterals? Do old laterals produce new laterals with blossoms?

Comments and suggestions are welcome.

More Critter Wars

So I guess this kind of mesh doesn’t prevent chipmunks from eating tomatoes as they ripen. From a wine purchase, it was the easiest to apply. Just slip it on; no tying. I thought they might take advantage of the open ends. But no, they just ate through it.

Critter wars

I mentioned my problems with chipmunks and watching them eat almost all of last year’s tomato crop. They seem to have an uncanny ability to know when a tomato is going to turn color and demolish it the same day. When I stopped at one of our local farm stands for some 4th of July raspberries, the woman who took my cash suggested mesh bags, like the ones that onions are sold in, to protect my crop. It’s not really feasible for all of my crop, like the sprawling bunches of cherry tomatoes, but for some of my prized, large heirlooms, it may be.

I don’t honestly know if mesh will work. The woman who made the suggestion had actually used brown paper bags. She said that they’d worked well, even ripening the tomatoes more quickly, but she quickly learned that they had to be emptied and reset after every rain or they’d hold the water and rot the tomatoes.

The problem with mesh is that I know my little chipmunk friends can eat suet through the suet cage and I’ve seen them use their sharp little claws. They may be able to eat the suet through the mesh. Or maybe, the strangness of the stuff will deter, on its own. Although I doubt that. These are very tame chipmunks.

If a coarse mesh will work, the easiest to apply is the plastic mesh “jackets” that they use to separate bottles of wine when they are packed two to a bag. They don’t need to be tied, just slipped on. And their natural stretch settles in around the tomato and can easily expand as it grows.

I had a couple of different bags; the one that I purchased with limes in it had the smallest mesh. It’s all an experiment. I’ll let you know how it goes.

Tomatoes, 2012

It’s the time of year when most garden chores change from starting things to maintaining them. Mundane tasks like mowing and weeding have taken the place of dramatic decisions about what and when to plant.

And some harvesting. I’ve let the first year asparagus go weeks ago, to get more next year and I’m picking snow peas at the rate of a pound every few days. The tomatoes are at least a couple of weeks early, which is pretty much how this season has been going. Picking even a cherry tomato in June is almost unheard of and if you look carefully at the top, left of the picture above, you can see my second ripe tomato getting redder. The first one was picked slightly green and ripened inside.

I’m playing chicken with the chipmunks, who ate most of my crop last year. The sight of this one turning red untouched had me a little hopeful that the family who likes tomatoes moved on, but I see a quarter of a ripening Black Krim has been eaten, just as it was turning color. Last year I tried Coyote urine around the perimeter of the beds and all I got out of that was ruined shoes.

Focusing on happier things, a pretty shot at about eyesight where the last, slightly chewed, small Teasing Georgia blossoms made friends with the last few blossoms on a lavender foxglove stalk; making for a beautiful relationship.