A Peony for Your Thoughts

Good things come to those who wait, they say. Case in point: we planted two Peony 'Double Dinner Plate' plants in 2008, and eagerly awaited blooms the following spring. We got one. It was a very nice flower, but I was kinda hoping for a few more.

This year, the plants rewarded our patience with a boatload of buds...

...that turned into magnificent eight-inch blooms!

The biggest problem with herbaceous peonies is that their heavy flowers tend to end up on the ground—a ring of pink around the base of the bushy green plant. One of my neighbors addressed the issue by planting her peonies between her house and a low evergreen hedge—the blooms end up resting on the hedge, but from a distance, you can't really tell that they're not upright. My own peonies are at the end of a border, and the adjacent spirea do hold some of them up a little, but I try to assist with a plant support that consists of a wire circle criss-crossed with a grid. It works in that the flowers end up drooping only halfway down rather than all the way to the ground, but I'm thinking that if I really want the blossoms to be held upright, I'm going to have to provide some kind of support for each individual stem. I might try that next year.

If we had to be patient to see 'Double Dinner Plate' flourish, we had no such wait with our tree peony, 'Shima Nishiki'. I got that for my husband for Father's Day last year, and we really didn't expect to see any flowers from it for another year or two. We were pleasantly surprised when it formed three buds this spring. Two of the flowers were red and white (which is what we expected), but one was solid red.

My husband liked the bicolors...

...but I thought the solid red had a better form.

And of course, with tree peonies, the woody stems hold the flowers much better. No staking needed!

Community Garden Update

I finally got around to getting stuff planted in my plot at the Miami Township Community Garden. This was the first time I had been back since that rainy Saturday morning several weeks ago when I joined more than a dozen other volunteers to help spread wood chips for the paths between the beds. I was amazed at how good it looks, and pleased to see so many other people there this evening, watering and planting! No point in sharing photos of the dirt in which I stuck my Fordhook lima beans, 'Black Turtle' black beans, and garbanzo beans (along with four extra 'Park's Razzleberry' tomato plants that won't fit into my home bed), but here are a few shots of other people's more established plots.

You really don't get a sense of the scope of the garden from just these pictures, however, so here's a panoramic video of the whole thing. About a half acre is under cultivation, and I'm thrilled at how many gardeners are participating!

Rose Parade

In spite of the recent deer damage, our 'Constance Spry' rose is putting on quite a show for us. She's not a rebloomer, so it's a good thing the critters didn't eat all her buds, 'cause that would have been the end of it for the year!

'Constance Spry' is a rambler, so by tying her long branches horizontally along the fence, I was able to get her to produce lots of upright stems with buds and blooms.

We're getting a similar effect alongside the screened porch with the climber 'Iceberg'.

And although 'Blanc Double de Coubert' is a hedge rose rather than a rambler or climber, she has gotten tall enough that her flowers also frame the view from the porch.

It's amazing how much she has grown in just two years! Here's how she looked in 2008...

...and here's how she looks now!

Tub o' Spuds

Growing potatoes in containers seems to be all the rage these days, and I have to admit that we've jumped on the bandwagon. We could have just started some "eyes" from store-bought potatoes, but opted to buy some organic seed potatoes from Gardener's Supply. (I think the thing that convinced my husband to buy them was their pretty flowers!)

I can't fault him for succumbing to marketing, though. I was completely charmed by the packaging—the six different potato varieties were neatly nestled in a box of brightly colored, crinkled paper strips, accompanied by picture postcards describing each variety, growing instructions, and more. It was like getting a present!

We didn't splurge on a potato bag, but instead decided to use a self-watering container that we've had around for several years. It's probably a little too small for all of these spuds, but we'll see how it works out.

The collection includes 'All-Blue', 'Butte', 'Carola', 'Cranberry Red', 'Onaway', and 'Red Cloud'. I didn't write out a chart of what I planted where, so hopefully when harvest time comes, I'll be able to identify everything using the postcards. Can't wait to try 'em!

Oh, Deer!

I am playing maitre d' to a most unwelcome patron in my yard.

He started with a nice appetizer of Geranium Victor Reiter Jr....

...followed by an delectable mixed salad of Arrowwood Viburnum...

...a sumptuous entree of Clematis Arabella...

...and a dainty daylily dessert. (The one Hemerocallis Bitsy managed to bloom, but there would have been three or four others to the left there, if not for my visitor.)

The garlic that I planted around the roses has flourished...

...but it's clearly no deterrent, as there are just stumps where buds once were!

I've put down more Deer Scram, and am going to spray a blend of eggs, garlic, and hot sauce on some of the plants. I don't know how else to tell my guests that the kitchen is closed!

Herding the Hesperis

When we grew Hesperis matronalis 'Alba' in New York, I knew from experience that it needed some support to keep it from flopping around willy-nilly in the bed. And yet when the compact clump that I started from seed last year here in Ohio seemed to be hanging together nicely, denial set it. "Maybe it won't need staking after all," I thought to myself.

Wrong!

Once they started blooming, the tall stems stayed upright until the first good rain, and then down they went! Still in denial, I thought they might bounce back once the sun warmed them up.

Wrong again!

Let me tell you (and myself!), it's much easier install supports before the plant has gone all flopsy than it is to try to prop the stalks up with one arm and wrangle support around them with the other. Somehow our linking stakes stayed in New York, so I ended up putting an unused pea fence around the perimeter of the Hesperis. It worked well enough, but it would have been much better if I had done it while the clump was still developing.

Still, it doesn't look bad from a distance, and up close, I'm just looking at the flowers anyway (and enjoying their spicy fragrance!).

It's been blooming for almost four weeks now, and is just now starting to slow down. I seem to have (unintentionally!) set up a sequence of white bloomers along the back of the house—first the lilac, then the Blanc Double de Coubert and Iceberg roses, and now the Hesperis. I love all these plants, but I'm ready for some color back there (besides the faithful wallflower)!

Pruning: (Wo)Man v. Machine

Last fall, we rationalized that we didn't want to cut back the buddleia (butterfly bush) because we thought the dried flowers would provide winter interest and perhaps seeds for the birds. Then in the early spring we hemmed and hawed about how far back to cut our nine bushes, and then when they leafed out so very nicely, it looked like we really didn't need to cut them back at all.

Except that they were still covered with hundreds of dead flowers.

Sigh.

So one evening a few weeks ago I went out with clippers in hand and proceeded to remove the spent blooms. I later told my husband that it was like trying to paint an entire house with a three-inch paint brush. It took forever, but I finally finished.

We were likewise negligent with the Itea 'Little Henry' (aka Virginia sweetspire) and the Spirea japonica 'Shirobana', and so a few days ago I deadheaded those as well. We only have five of each of those, and they're not nearly as big as the buddleia, so that was only like using a three-inch brush to paint a room rather than an entire house.

And now, as I watch the lilac flowers fade, I realize I'm going to have to go out there and do it again. (Incidentally, this was a fabulous year for the lilac, so I'm going to stick a few pictures in here showing it in full magnificent bloom. If I could embed the fragrance, I would do that, too, because this year the scent was intoxicating!)

But I digress.

For all my complaints about hand-pruning, 'tis a far, far better thing I do than whack at the poor shrubs with an electric trimmer. I will admit that I used to use one on the yews, but it stopped working a couple years ago, and I really haven't felt the impulse to repair or replace it. It addition to the ratcheting hand pruner from Florian that I absolutely could not live without, we did pick up some hedge shears for the yews and ornamental grasses, and that takes care of our needs.

It's just hard to argue with the results. With an electric trimmer, it's really difficult to produce anything other than a box or a globe or some other shape that really doesn't occur in nature. (And yes, you can create that effect with hedge shears, too.) But when you trim by hand, you get rid of all the icky parts, but the plant still looks like it's growing the way it was meant to.

And there's also something to be said for not contributing to suburban noise pollution, or using up finite available energy (other than my own, which is available some days more than others).

So when the lilac is ready, I'll go out there with my hand pruners and clip off the dead stuff. And then later in the season I'll do the same with the roses. And the echinacea. And the...

The Apple of My Iris

I've got several different types of Iris in the yard—bearded Iris, Siberian Iris, and Iris reticulata—and I'm pleased to have another blooming for the first time. It's a type of bearded Iris, but considerably shorter (about the height of a tulip), and it started flowering before any of my other bearded Iris.

It was a gift from a friend, so I don't know the species, but I couldn't be more pleased with it. It's a cheery lemon color, which provides a little yellow in the garden after the Narcissus have faded. I positioned it between a creeping juniper and the boxwood shrubs that are part of the foundation plantings,and it provides such a nice greeting for folks walking up to the front door.

Although I did plant two rows, it doesn't give quite the impression of depth that I would like, but I'm not complaining! I think they're lovely!

And Then There Were Three

Many years ago, I read an article by Mel Bartholomew on square-foot gardening, and I heartily embraced the idea. The premise is basically that you can plant one large plant—a tomato, a pepper, an eggplant, a broccoli, a cabbage—in each square foot of your garden. (And smaller plants, like beans and spinach and whatnot, can be planted more closely than the package might suggest.) So a 4x4' raised bed, for instance, should be able to hold 16 large plants.

But last year I had many more eggplants than I could use, and didn't get as many tomatoes as I thought I should have, so I decided to scale back from 16 plants per bed to just nine. (The rationale that I could get more tomatoes from fewer plants was that I figured each plant would get more sunlight if it weren't so crowded, and wouldn't be fighting its very close neighbors for nutrients.)

Since I had nine on the brain, I planted only nine 'Small Miracle' broccoli this year, and at first they appeared to be very happy.

I chose 'Small Miracle' from Park Seed for a couple reasons. One was that it was supposed to mature in only 55 days, which was the fastest of the varieties offered, and I always feel like my spring garden takes way too long and my summer garden gets in late. The other is that it's supposed to produce full-size heads on small plants, which meant I could have done 16 in my 4x4' bed with no problem, but like I said, I had nine on the brain, so nine is what I planted.

I have to wonder now if it would have worked out better if I had planted the 16. Shortly after planting, I noticed that one of the nine was looking rather withered, and closer examination showed that the stem was broken—not sure if it got snapped during transplanting, or if cutworms were at work. But in any case, that was just one, so I still had eight broccoli left to look forward to.

We've had a typical Ohio spring this year—temperatures fluctuating widely, some hard rains, the usual fal-de-rah. And then one day I went out to look at the beds, and another five of the broccoli looked withered, like the one that had been broken. These seemed to have intact stems, but most of the leaves had turned brown. However, the remaining three seemed to be just fine. You'd think that if it were a matter of weather, they all would have been affected. Why would five bite the dust and three seem to thrive, all in the same space?

I left the sad-looking ones in the bed for another week or so, hoping they would bounce back, but they never did. When I pulled them, they seemed to have almost no root system at all—one narrow little tap root, and that was about it.

So I still don't know what caused the problem, but I do know that it'll take a small miracle for me to plant 'Small Miracle' again.

But on the bright side, I will get the green beans in early.