I broke a couple little bones in my foot this spring, which prevented me from doing much of anything in the way of breaking and preparing new ground for flowerbeds. In early summer, I was wholly preoccupied with planting my vegetable garden. By late summer, the foot had healed completely, but my energy for gardening had entirely run out, as it does every year about that time. Early fall was taken up with marathons of harvesting and canning and freezing.
So I've only in the last few weeks turned my attention back to flowerbeds, only to discover that much of my prime area for perennial beds on the south side of the house is builder's sand! It looks as if at some point in the past, to accommodate either the coming of the municipal water line or a new septic system or both, what must once have been a steep slope between the house and the drive was filled in and built up to a level surface extending maybe 30 or 40 feet with builder's sand.
There's good loam a few feet wide extending along part of the side of the house, but everything else is sand covered by thick grass turf. This is wonderful irony, since most of the rest of the property has clay soil to one degree or another.
So I'm trying several different things to see what might work. In one place, I've dug out some of the sand and mixed in a large amount of fluffy composted manure and odds and ends of potting soil and planted a few standard garden perennials. In a couple others, I've transplanted a variety of strong weedy wildflowers dug up from roadsides-- NE asters, goldenrod, chickory, butter-and-eggs, etc. -- without amending the sand at all. I've also put in a few clumps from the giant bed of those ubiquitous semi-wild orange daylilies in the front of the house to sink or swim, and a clump of ornamental grass just arrived by mail order.
I was hoping to put in a few small shrubs around the edges of this sort of platform at the side of the house as a windbreak, and even a small ornamental-type tree in the middle for a bit of noontime shade in summer, but I think unless I get somebody to come and replace rather a large amount of the sand with topsoil, that won't be possible.
Drat!
Thursday, October 25, 2007
Saturday, September 29, 2007
Fall in the east
Hi, this is Deborah. I have a pocket-sized garden in East Arlington and I'm grateful to Alan for letting me join this blog.
Not much happening in my garden this time of year; mostly it's the fall crop of yellow raspberries; always a lovely harvest. My tomatoes ended early, so there'll be no green tomato pie. My late peas got planted too late, so unless we have another unending fall like last year's, they'll be eaten as pea tendrils before frost -- but my early peas are still producing, and even flowering! At least, they are a little. One of my strawberries beds took a beating in the August drought, and the everbearings I hung in baskets did miserably. Maybe I can build them a bed before frost? My soil here is very leady, so I don't like planting food outside of raised beds.
My main concern is giving enough water to the periwinkle I've planted on the side of my garden devestated by that evilest of all trees which the Town of Arlington has bequeathed us. It's the only thing we water from sprinklers; everything else we have can be watered from rain barrels, but we've now had two entire summers where the periwinkle won't take and maybe excessive watering will help.
Not much happening in my garden this time of year; mostly it's the fall crop of yellow raspberries; always a lovely harvest. My tomatoes ended early, so there'll be no green tomato pie. My late peas got planted too late, so unless we have another unending fall like last year's, they'll be eaten as pea tendrils before frost -- but my early peas are still producing, and even flowering! At least, they are a little. One of my strawberries beds took a beating in the August drought, and the everbearings I hung in baskets did miserably. Maybe I can build them a bed before frost? My soil here is very leady, so I don't like planting food outside of raised beds.
My main concern is giving enough water to the periwinkle I've planted on the side of my garden devestated by that evilest of all trees which the Town of Arlington has bequeathed us. It's the only thing we water from sprinklers; everything else we have can be watered from rain barrels, but we've now had two entire summers where the periwinkle won't take and maybe excessive watering will help.
Monday, September 24, 2007
Apples!
Oh, a small dream come true. I just made a marvelous apple pie out of apples from one of my own apple trees! There are two on my small property. One is clearly McIntosh, and that's the one I made the pie from. These are the old-fashioned, wonderfully crisp and tart-sweet flavorful kind that big commercial growers long ago seem to have ruined. Not the best pie apple for its texture, but what the heck.
The other tree I think is cortland, but it got blown down in a nasty windstorm early this summer. Although one small part of it continues to have green leaves and ripening apples, there's probably no way of saving it.
I assumed when I bought the property last year that these trees (as well as two lovely pears) were purely decorative, since apples aren't supposed to grow well without lots of chemical pesticides and fertilizers, etc. That's turned out to be true of the pears. But the apple trees, with no treatment at all by me except for some fertilizer spikes I pounded in around them last fall, and surely no treatment in years by the previous owners of my house, are producing lots of small and somewhat deformed but otherwise mostly pest-free and wonderfully tasty apples.
This part of Vermont is serious apple-growing territory, with many small to medium-size orchard operations, two that I know of in my town, and apple trees in lots of yards and even along roadsides.
So I'm off to study up on organic apple growing... I'd greatly welcome any advice on the subject in comments to this post.
The other tree I think is cortland, but it got blown down in a nasty windstorm early this summer. Although one small part of it continues to have green leaves and ripening apples, there's probably no way of saving it.
I assumed when I bought the property last year that these trees (as well as two lovely pears) were purely decorative, since apples aren't supposed to grow well without lots of chemical pesticides and fertilizers, etc. That's turned out to be true of the pears. But the apple trees, with no treatment at all by me except for some fertilizer spikes I pounded in around them last fall, and surely no treatment in years by the previous owners of my house, are producing lots of small and somewhat deformed but otherwise mostly pest-free and wonderfully tasty apples.
This part of Vermont is serious apple-growing territory, with many small to medium-size orchard operations, two that I know of in my town, and apple trees in lots of yards and even along roadsides.
So I'm off to study up on organic apple growing... I'd greatly welcome any advice on the subject in comments to this post.
Tuesday, September 18, 2007
Weeds
My late mother, Isabel, a demon gardener with a magic touch, was what Meg calls a lazy gardener. She never raked fall leaves from flowerbeds and ground covers, and they made a great free mulch over the winter and then gradually decomposed into the soil. Once in a while, a mat of wet leaves stifled something in spring, but not as often as the conventional wisdom of gardening would have you believe.
She did the same thing with weeds-- once she was sure they were weeds and not wildflowers, the definition of which is a matter largely of attitude. I mentioned to Meg in a comment to her first post that Isabel's philosophy about unidentifiable plants was, "Watch it and see what it does." If it has attractive foliage, pretty flowers, and isn't too aggressive, why not cultive it instead of yanking it, even if most people would call it a weed?
But familiar weeds -- and those maddening Norway maple seedlings -- she pulled from time to time when she was in the mood, and unless they were near going to seed, just dropped them where she pulled them. One more bit of organic matter to contribute to the soil. That won't do in a formal planting, I suppose. But if your taste, like mine and Isabel's, runs to what we euphemistically call "naturalized" gardens, crowded with mostly native plants that are allowed to spread cheek by jowel and flop prettily according to their nature, you'll never see the little bunches of nicely decomposing weeds underneath.
With what feels like unlimited space in my vegetable garden now, I'm even lazier and only pull big ugly weeds that take up lots of room and look like they're sucking up a good bit of water and nutrients. I mostly let them be, though, and trade the slightly lowered vegetable production for, once again, free mulch. Once you can get over wincing at the unruly sight of them in among your peas and tomatoes and most other large vegetable plants, you'll find it's a perfectly reasonable trade-off if your soil is in good condition and your plants are getting the sun and water they need.
Heresy!
She did the same thing with weeds-- once she was sure they were weeds and not wildflowers, the definition of which is a matter largely of attitude. I mentioned to Meg in a comment to her first post that Isabel's philosophy about unidentifiable plants was, "Watch it and see what it does." If it has attractive foliage, pretty flowers, and isn't too aggressive, why not cultive it instead of yanking it, even if most people would call it a weed?
But familiar weeds -- and those maddening Norway maple seedlings -- she pulled from time to time when she was in the mood, and unless they were near going to seed, just dropped them where she pulled them. One more bit of organic matter to contribute to the soil. That won't do in a formal planting, I suppose. But if your taste, like mine and Isabel's, runs to what we euphemistically call "naturalized" gardens, crowded with mostly native plants that are allowed to spread cheek by jowel and flop prettily according to their nature, you'll never see the little bunches of nicely decomposing weeds underneath.
With what feels like unlimited space in my vegetable garden now, I'm even lazier and only pull big ugly weeds that take up lots of room and look like they're sucking up a good bit of water and nutrients. I mostly let them be, though, and trade the slightly lowered vegetable production for, once again, free mulch. Once you can get over wincing at the unruly sight of them in among your peas and tomatoes and most other large vegetable plants, you'll find it's a perfectly reasonable trade-off if your soil is in good condition and your plants are getting the sun and water they need.
Heresy!
Instant *Sustainable* Landscapes
Somehow - I'm not sure why - I ended up on the Greenscapes E-Newsletter list. To quote the little box at the bottom of the newsletter, "The 2007 Greenscapes program is a multi-partner outreach effort sponsored by the Massachusetts Bay Estuary Association, Massachusetts Bays Program, North and South Rivers Watershed Association, Eight Towns & the Bay Committee, Salem Sound Coastwatch, Ipswich River Watershed Association, and many other sponsors and supporters." You can find out all this - and more! - at the Greenscapes home page.
Now, every month or so I get a nifty little newsletter about how not to water your plants. Today's little water-miser guide featured links to two nifty tools: the town of Concord, MA's "Water Smart" program, which has landscape plans - with pictures! - of low-water gardens for full-sun and shady sites; and the National Wildlife Federation's American Beauties plans for wildlife-friendly gardens with native plants- which, yes, require less water than foreign beauties.
Did I mention that Boston got one-quarter the usual amount of rain in August?
Meg
Now, every month or so I get a nifty little newsletter about how not to water your plants. Today's little water-miser guide featured links to two nifty tools: the town of Concord, MA's "Water Smart" program, which has landscape plans - with pictures! - of low-water gardens for full-sun and shady sites; and the National Wildlife Federation's American Beauties plans for wildlife-friendly gardens with native plants- which, yes, require less water than foreign beauties.
Did I mention that Boston got one-quarter the usual amount of rain in August?
Meg
Gardening in Vermont
Last summer, after having lived in Arlington since childhood, I was finally able to follow a long-held dream and move to the Vermont countryside, in sunny farm country where gardening couldn't be much different from shady Arlington.
The soil is different-- moderate to heavy clay. The critters are different-- red, not gray squirrels, rabbits and mice, not racoons. The bugs are different-- millions of Japanese beetles and cabbage loopers, but no lily leaf beetles or, so far, aphids. Even the water is different-- cheap municipal water drawn from nearby Lake Champlain, not the wildly expensive MWRA liquid. On the up side, you can drink and bathe in the MWRA stuff without feeling like you're drinking swimming pool water from the heavy cholorination, as I do here. The cats won't touch it, but the plants don't seem to mind.
The climate zone, at least, where I am in the Champlain Valley, isn't much different from my former cold corner of Arlington. I figure I was 6A there, and 5B here.
The previous owners of my 1860s house (for 50 years!) weren't much for gardening and my two acres of property, though separated from the adjacent farm fields by sugar maples, a couple of elms, a nice stand of white spruce and other trees, are mostly golf-course-like lawn. So I'm struggling to figure out how and where to transform at least some of this property into the kind of flower/shrub gardens I like. I haven't been proceeding in a very organized way at all, just thrown in a shrub or two and experimented with some perennials in a couple of hard-dug beds around the house. I've really got to get organized this winter!
I've put much more of my gardening energy this first summer season into establishing a large vegetable garden, with mostly terrific results this first year in the virgin soil, and learning how to manage the very fertile clay and the 10 or 12 hours of sun a day. Now I'm plunging into canning my overload of tomatoes, freezing beans and corn, and figuring out how to store my potatoes and beets so the mice don't eat them before I can.
One of the few things I regret about moving here is the absence of anything resembling the kind of on-line community Arlington has. Most people here have Internet service of one kind or another (my tiny local telco has DSL that reaches all the way out to my house-- nowhere near as speedy as Comcast or RCN cable broadband, but good enough), but the concept of on-line community groups is only beginning to catch on in Vermont's "cities" -- Burlington, the biggest, is 30,000 population, and it goes rapidly down from there -- and hasn't reached the rural areas at all.
So the community of Menotomygardeners looms large for me as a resource, an outlet, and a connection back to the town that was my home for so many years, and this blog should be a fun extension of it.
The soil is different-- moderate to heavy clay. The critters are different-- red, not gray squirrels, rabbits and mice, not racoons. The bugs are different-- millions of Japanese beetles and cabbage loopers, but no lily leaf beetles or, so far, aphids. Even the water is different-- cheap municipal water drawn from nearby Lake Champlain, not the wildly expensive MWRA liquid. On the up side, you can drink and bathe in the MWRA stuff without feeling like you're drinking swimming pool water from the heavy cholorination, as I do here. The cats won't touch it, but the plants don't seem to mind.
The climate zone, at least, where I am in the Champlain Valley, isn't much different from my former cold corner of Arlington. I figure I was 6A there, and 5B here.
The previous owners of my 1860s house (for 50 years!) weren't much for gardening and my two acres of property, though separated from the adjacent farm fields by sugar maples, a couple of elms, a nice stand of white spruce and other trees, are mostly golf-course-like lawn. So I'm struggling to figure out how and where to transform at least some of this property into the kind of flower/shrub gardens I like. I haven't been proceeding in a very organized way at all, just thrown in a shrub or two and experimented with some perennials in a couple of hard-dug beds around the house. I've really got to get organized this winter!
I've put much more of my gardening energy this first summer season into establishing a large vegetable garden, with mostly terrific results this first year in the virgin soil, and learning how to manage the very fertile clay and the 10 or 12 hours of sun a day. Now I'm plunging into canning my overload of tomatoes, freezing beans and corn, and figuring out how to store my potatoes and beets so the mice don't eat them before I can.
One of the few things I regret about moving here is the absence of anything resembling the kind of on-line community Arlington has. Most people here have Internet service of one kind or another (my tiny local telco has DSL that reaches all the way out to my house-- nowhere near as speedy as Comcast or RCN cable broadband, but good enough), but the concept of on-line community groups is only beginning to catch on in Vermont's "cities" -- Burlington, the biggest, is 30,000 population, and it goes rapidly down from there -- and hasn't reached the rural areas at all.
So the community of Menotomygardeners looms large for me as a resource, an outlet, and a connection back to the town that was my home for so many years, and this blog should be a fun extension of it.
Inadvertent Gardening
Hello all. I am one of the more northerly Menotomy Gardeners, struggling to grow tomatoes on a shady hillside in Lexington. In earlier times, I watched pumpkins meander through yards in Somerville and Arlington before moving about a half-zone away.
I've always been a bit lax about weeding- some would say downright lazy - partly because I am, well, lazy, and partly because I'm intrigued by seedlings. If I can't tell right off that something is asiatic bittersweet or poison ivy, I like to let it grow a bit, to see how it develops as it grows. Sometimes, I end up with a yard full of 4-foot-tall beggar's tick, but sometimes I am rewarded for my sloth.
Today, I noticed the enormous lady's thumb knotweed that I had let go earlier in the season down at the bottom of the driveway has lovely nodding strings of tiny pale pink flowers that beautifully complement the deep pink flowers on my squat round-leaved Autumn Joy sedums, which were planted on purpose, really. Thirsty monarch butterflies have been flitting around my unidentifiable goldenrod, tall and lovely with spark-bright bursts of yellow buds at their tips.
My watery September tomatoes are green, my New England asters are covered with runty brown leaves, and the blackberries are insinuating themselves between the deck rails - but I am watching butterflies, and I am content.
meg
I've always been a bit lax about weeding- some would say downright lazy - partly because I am, well, lazy, and partly because I'm intrigued by seedlings. If I can't tell right off that something is asiatic bittersweet or poison ivy, I like to let it grow a bit, to see how it develops as it grows. Sometimes, I end up with a yard full of 4-foot-tall beggar's tick, but sometimes I am rewarded for my sloth.
Today, I noticed the enormous lady's thumb knotweed that I had let go earlier in the season down at the bottom of the driveway has lovely nodding strings of tiny pale pink flowers that beautifully complement the deep pink flowers on my squat round-leaved Autumn Joy sedums, which were planted on purpose, really. Thirsty monarch butterflies have been flitting around my unidentifiable goldenrod, tall and lovely with spark-bright bursts of yellow buds at their tips.
My watery September tomatoes are green, my New England asters are covered with runty brown leaves, and the blackberries are insinuating themselves between the deck rails - but I am watching butterflies, and I am content.
meg
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)