An irreverent take on gardening in the Midwest by a frequently disgruntled gardener.

Wednesday, October 26, 2011

Institutional Landscaping of the Damned (An Ongoing Series)

This just leaves me asking why.  Why not just put in a decorative rock or something?  What is the point of a brutally pruned shrub entombed in a desert of rock mulch and accompanied by an air conditioning unit? In fact, accompanied is exactly the right word; they haven't tried to obscure the unit with a riot of bushes, they've placed them in perfect balance.  Neither element of the design is more or less important.




It's alive and green, but really looks dead and lifeless.  Ironically, the completely untended weeds along the bike path a mere 20 feet away look much better (if you can block out the chain link fence).




I get that people want low-maintenance landscaping, but I think some well-adapted native plants would actually require less work--they must be spraying weedkiller regularly to keep this space free of interlopers that might detract from their bush/air conditioner composition.

Tuesday, October 25, 2011

Who Decided to Sex Up Irises?

So I bought some dutch iris corms at Home Despot and I'm ashamed to admit that I succumbed to a really tacky marketing ploy.  Some marketing geniuses somewhere have decided that the one thing buyers of irises are looking for is more sex appeal.  I bought three types of irises, and their names are (I'm not joking) Rock Star, Aggressively Forward, and Dangerous Mood.

The colors look fun and a bit wild, but are they serious?  Have they really done some sort of focus group of iris buyers and determined that what they really want is some sexytime?  I mean, I bought them because it cracked me up in the store, but these names really seem geared towards a teen market, and unless teens have changed a lot since I was one, they're usually not interested in irises.  In fact, it's the rare teen who's interested in plants at all.  I'm guessing that even for teens with green thumbs, irises are not high on their list of edgy and exciting plants.

I could maybe see sexing up the names of already alluring tropicals and exotics, but irises just do not seem like an ideal subject for this particular tactic.  Maybe you could create cool names for new colors of fritillaria--that name already seems kind of dirty to me, and it's an awesome and dramatic looking plant in the garden.  But irises are like lilacs and delphiniums--very nice, but also very old fashioned plants that really don't need names better suited to cheap nail polish.  What's next, hostas with names like Hey There Hot Stuff or begonias in new shades ranging from Garter Belt to Heaving Bosom?

Saturday, October 22, 2011

The Smell of Death

There are a lot of nice things about fall--pumpkin pie, jack o'lanterns, candy corn, the fresh smell of new school supplies, fall fashion...  For some reason, though, my yard really smells like ass.  I think it's all the rotting foliage.  It's just awful, and it lingers until we have a really good hard frost.

Sunday, October 16, 2011

World's Cutest Dwag


We lost our dog this month--he was older, and had a lengthy history of health problems.  In fact, the autopsy report came back and he was in startlingly bad shape.  Dogs just do not complain, and no matter how bad they feel they find pleasure in walks, ear scratches, and new smells.

I ordered this online in the midst of my worst grief.  Next time I lose a loved one I might need to put my credit cards away for a few weeks.  Ordering a custom engraved memorial rock seemed really essential at the time; now, it seems a bit silly and I can't seem to find the right place in the garden for it.  Plus, I'm kind of worried that over the years my garden might start looking a bit like that Steven King novel that I'm never going to read.  However, I do want to remember him.  I did love having him out with me in the garden or on the porch on nice, not too hot, days.


Here's Mack enjoying the packaging from something else I must have bought online at some point.  You'd never guess from this photo that he had all kinds of plush bedding of his own.




Saturday, October 15, 2011

The Under Gardener at Work


Slinky provides moral support while I work on some weeding in the bed beneath the window.

Happiness is a Clean Shed


I did one thing right this summer--I cleaned out my shed, which was a complete and utter disaster.  I didn't think to photograph it in its "before" state, but basically you couldn't see the floor or the back wall.  Most teens have more organized rooms than my shed in its previous state.

Another Satisfied Customer


Stumpy enjoys our new porch furniture, though she's a little concerned about the lack of food on the table.

Compostable "Plastic" (or do I mean "Compostable" Plastic?)


I use those cornstarch compost bags to make our compost pail a bit easier to clean, but I'm not convinced they are actually compostable.  Maybe it's my horrible non-cooking compost, but this bag has been in the pile for quite some time and seems to be in pretty good shape.  I fear that it's not going to break down for another year or two.  I suppose that's better than the hundreds of years that some scientists think it would take for plastic to degrade.

Someone sent me a book in biodegradable bubble wrap last May and I dutifully brought it (the bubble wrap, not the textbook) home from work and threw it on the compost.  I found it, in pristine shape, last week when I redid my compost.  I'm afraid the manufacturers of bio plastic worry too much about performance and not enough about degradability.  Which reminds me of a great book, Alan Weisman's The World Without Us, which describes how long all our crap would continue mucking up the earth if human beings disappeared tomorrow.  Highly recommended.

Wednesday, October 12, 2011

Oh My God I Hate Fall


What a mess.  A couple of years ago my neighbor and I were raking and chatting and we came up with a brilliant plan to hang nets underneath all of our trees, like aerial condoms, that would gather all the leaves together and which we could then neatly deposit into a massive compost pile all at once.  Somehow this never seemed practicable--I so wish I'd majored in something useful like engineering.

I want to just let the leaves do what leaves naturally do in my perennial gardens, except that they mess up my self-seeding annuals.  I've had moss roses coming back in one spot for years, and then last fall I was lazy, so this spring I had to plant new starter plants.  Besides that little issue, however, doesn't it seem like the leaves should just be allowed to break down and enrich the soil where they fall?  Last spring I actually bought partially composted leaves to put on the gardens!  How does it make sense to spend a lot of time removing leaves, only to reapply them later?


Monday, October 10, 2011

Thinking Spring in October

Just planted a few bulbs--some giant alliums (christophii), dwarf irises, daffodils ("cheerfulness" and "barrett browning") and something called Mediterranean Bells (nectaroscordum)--and a bit of garlic.  Planting bulbs is seriously unsatisfying.  It's a lot of work digging all the holes to the correct depths--yes, I've tried the drill attachment, no, it doesn't work in clay soil with lots of roots--and there's no payoff for months and months.  It's also really difficult to know exactly where to plant them.  Last spring I cleverly put white golf tees out to mark where I wanted to put groupings of 5 or 7 bulbs.  Today when I went to plant I couldn't find a single tee anywhere.  I did, however, find a long-lost dandelion digger that I hadn't seen since July.

Sunday, October 9, 2011

Yard "Butler"


So I bought this thing called a Yard Butler that is supposed to help you mix your compost, and it does the job, but after just a few minutes of the rather backbreaking labor involved, I just want to protest against the name.  It is in no way like having a yard butler, which evokes images of swanning about the garden in a long white dress snipping deadheads off the roses in a desultory fashion while a team of under-gardeners performs the manual labor and there's an absinthe cocktail waiting on the veranda for when you get tired.

Using the yard butler is the opposite of that.  It's like doing bench rows from an awkward standing position.  You shove the thing into the compost, which is easy enough, but when you pull it out these little wings pop out, which is what mixes the compost.  However, unless your compost is already done, the little wings hit a number of snags and it requires quite a bit of brute force to get it out while dragging up whatever solids are lurking at the bottom of your pile.  I think it should be called the Sadistic and Not At All Ergonomic Upper Body Garden Trainer that Will, Incidentally, Mix Your Compost If You Really Apply Yourself.

Update:  Well, it turns out it's NOT called the Yard Butler, it's a compost aerator made by the fine people at Yard Butler.  However, I stand by my rant.  No matter how many products I buy from Yard Butler, I still won't be living like the landed classes in an Agatha Christie novel and there won't be anyone standing about with trays of cocktails waiting to convey my instructions to the head gardener.


Composting Update


How gorgeous is this?  This fills me with really unutterable joy.  This is what it used to look like:


And now here's the view from our upstairs landing:


How totally fabulous is that?  And, there's room to expand.  I've got my eye on one of those roly-spinny composters that makes compost tea in the bottom.

Wednesday, October 5, 2011

Just Plain Godawful


So, this is probably the ugliest part of my yard, and it's right next to the front door.  As you can see, we've paired the sturdy greenery of hostas and day lilies (the invasive orange kind, of course) with assorted objets d'plastic and a severely pruned arbor vita.  Probably the out of season sleds could go somewhere else, but there's really nowhere else to keep the trash and recycling bins.  This is my number one priority next spring, but how to fix it?

I Am the World's Worst Composter


Yes, this is my compost.  It has weeds growing in it, and the chicken wire is falling down, and it's generally a wretched sight.  Naturally, I put it where it's visible from one entire side of the house all year round, including the living room.  It's also directly underneath the black walnut tree, so even if I happened, purely by accident, to produce compost, it would be poisonous to a long list of plants.  However, last week I got paid and inspired and I started to redo it.  This makes me so happy:


There's more work to be done, but it already looks a lot better, and with covered compost that isn't full of toxic black walnuts I might even be able to use it for something someday.

I Hate Gardening



I think I can say that this was a pretty disastrous gardening year.  The tomatoes grew a thousand feet tall, produced bushels of green tomatoes, but never really ripened up to their full potential.  As soon as they started ripening in earnest we had a patch of cooler weather and they just stayed where they were, refusing to die, but also refusing to produce tomatoes.  Maybe next year I'll try out some floating row covers and see if I can keep them warmer on any cool August nights.

The okra have pretty good potential, but, as I already mentioned, they mostly came while we were away.

The zucchini failed completely, which is a terrible sign.  What idiot can't grow zucchini?  But, I tried to keep them from taking over and trimmed them back and they never forgave me.

I don't even know what happened to my cucumber plant.  One day it was threatening to break out of its bed with vigorous growth, the next day the entire vine was a shriveled, pathetic wreck.  It still produced a few cukes, but they weren't really any better than grocery store cucumbers, so I don't really see the point.

Were there any successes?  I'm hoping that maybe the brussels sprouts will work out, and I suppose the basil did alright, as did the hot peppers.  Hot peppers are the easiest thing in the world to grow.

Early in the season I had some decent lettuce and spinach but I failed to keep seeding it and so that ran out as soon as it got too hot.  I tossed around some lettuce seeds at the end of August, hoping to have a few respectable leaves for sandwiches, but it's still not even at the baby greens stage.  It's like embryonic greens even now.  Ironically, I grow lettuce not because we eat a lot of it but because we eat so little--I just like it on sandwiches that I pack for lunches and it's annoying to buy a new head of lettuce every week when you just need a few leaves.

So, that's about it.  Gardening sucks.  But there's always next year....

Saturday, October 1, 2011

Oppressed Garden Helper


Slinky is determined to sneak out and help with the garden.  Unfortunately, I just don't trust her to be sensible around cars, other cats, anti-freeze, songbirds, etc.  I'm tempted to get her one of the new cat holsters, which promises to be a harness they can't slink out of, and stake her out while I get work done, but I haven't done it yet.  If nothing else, it will make for some amusing pictures.  Here's a promotional picture of a supposedly happy cat wearing the holster: