George's Current Ramblings and Readlings

Is It Too Late To…

November 14th, 2023

   Most of the gardening questions I get this time of year begin with the words, “Is it too late to…” or “Can I still…”

   Mid-fall is a confusing, kinda-over/kinda-not time in the garden.

November isn’t the best month to plant, but it’s not impossible either.

   It’s a time when frost usually has killed the summer vegetables and annuals and slowed the growth of everything else, yet we can still string together some very nice November days in the 60s and 70s. That’s when it seems as if we could/should do something other than erect burlap barriers and go hunting for lanternfly eggs.

   Here’s a rundown to help you figure out what can still go on the November honey-do list.

   Q: Is it too late to plant trees and shrubs?

   A: No, but your odds of success go down in November.

   Cornell University did some ground-breaking experiments (har-har) on this question years ago and concluded that fall-planted plants survive best when they go in the ground at least six weeks before the soil temperature hits a root-stopping 40 degrees at the root level.

   In our area, that normally translates into late October.

   If the weather stays warm and damp in the coming weeks, your odds go up. If it gets very cold soon or the soil is dry when freeze time arrives, the odds go down.

   I’d definitely wait until spring to plant winter-tender fare such as crape myrtle, nandina, hardy camellia, and cherry laurel. But if you get a great end-of-season bargain on a reliably cold-hardy plant, that may be worth the risk. (You probably will sacrifice any warranty, though.) Keep the soil damp until it freezes if rain isn’t doing the deed for you.

   Q: How about perennial flowers?

   A: Same deal. Hardy ones? Decent odds. Borderline ones? Spring is better.

   We’re in USDA Winter Hardiness Zones 6B and 7A, so anything on labels rated for Zone 5 or lower is plenty cold-tough.

   Watch November-planted perennials over the winter for “heaving.” Since your plants won’t be well rooted planting this late, the root balls are more susceptible to getting pushed up by freezes and thaws.

   You don’t want the tops of the root balls sticking up, where cold winter wind can kill the unprotected roots.

   Tamp heaved plants back down ASAP, and surround the plant with two inches of bark or wood chips if you didn’t already do that at planting.

   Q: Can I still plant grass seed?

Giving Up Already? Not So Fast…

October 31st, 2023

   Are you one of those gardeners who already has buzzed everything to the ground and packed away the trowels for the season?

Lots of life and color is possible in the fall garden… if you plan for it.

   Not so fast.

   As the sage philosopher Yogi Berra once pointed out, “It ain’t over till it’s over.”

   And in the garden, it ain’t over until it’s really cold and the ice and snow are flying. Regularly.

   Diehard gardeners know that some of the year’s best times in the garden are in mid fall – especially those warm days that inevitably pop up after the season’s first killing frost.

   The way our weather has been going these last 10 or 20 years, the so-called “gardening season” now can stretch into mid-November.

   The season’s first frost might knock out the summer vegetables and annual flowers, but many perennials bloom on, the trees and shrubs are holding fall-foliage color later than ever, and early-November temperatures typically reach into the 50s – if not higher.

   Yet a lot of gardeners do a “fall cleanup” when the first leaves turn, set out the obligatory mums, pumpkins, and straw bales, then call it a year.

My Mini-Meadow Year 2: The Weeds Are Winning

October 17th, 2023

   I planted a small meadow on a bank in my back yard for two main reasons:

George’s mini-meadow as it looked in “peak form” of July 2023.

   1.) I was looking for a low-care, low-cost way to cover a tough site that’s not easy to work.

   2.) I liked the idea of adding diversity to encourage pollinators and beneficial insects. That’s why I picked a seed mix of 27 mostly native species – one specially geared to thriving in the Northeast.

   Two growing seasons are now in the bag from my May 2022 planting, and the result is what I was afraid would happen – the weeds are winning.

   Despite my extensive effort to clear the bed of existing seeds and then cultivate new ones before seeding the meadow, my second-year mini-meadow has been about a 50-50 mix of weeds of wildflowers.

Read more on how George planted the mini-meadow

   I’m dealing with some real thugs, too – mostly aggressive perennials like thistle, hawkweed, mugwort, tawny daylilies, and oxalis. These are stalwart enough to squelch most of the fledgling meadow species that came up from my seed mix.

   The worst of the bunch, though, has been goutweed (Aegopodium podograria).

   If you’re not familiar with this one, it’s a carrot-family spreading clumper with toothed, green leaves that form in groups of three. It typically grows about a foot tall but can reach up to three feet tall when given a few years of unchecked spread.

   Goutweed (sometimes called ground elder or bishop’s weed) was one of the perennial weeds that had been growing for at least 10 years on the six-by-20-foot bank section that I’m trying to tame.

   I grubbed out every piece of it that I could find with a mattock and trowel before planting… as I did with the many other villainous squatters that I inherited.

   But the problem with goutweed is that, like thistle, it’s a plant that seems to retaliate with vengeance when you attack it.

   Just yank off the leaves, and the super-powered roots send up multiple new shoots all along the radiating rhizomes.

   If you dig and leave behind even a tiny root fragment, that fragment gets aggravated enough to prove to you what a big mistake you just made.

The One Piece of Gardening Advice I Don’t Agree With

October 3rd, 2023

   I’m generally a believer in following what research reveals, especially if it’s solid research and backed up by multiple sources.

Research notwithstanding, I’m still a believer in working compost into my soil before planting.

   But the one bit of gardening advice that I still just can’t buy is the one about not improving the soil before planting.

   This fairly widespread guidance comes from findings that plant roots can rot from a so-called “bathtub effect” when the soil is improved.

   The premise goes that when you give a new plant a generous helping of compost or similar organic amendment in the backfill mix, water will drain well through it. But when the water hits the wall of undug, compacted soil under and around it, it can’t drain as fast.

   That’s when water can back up in the planting hole, where it fills the small air pockets in the soil, suffocating and rotting the plant to death.

   The experts arrived at a rule of thumb that planters should never mix more than a 10-percent improvement into existing soil (i.e. add no more than one bucket of compost to nine buckets of dug-up, loosened native soil).

   I don’t question that logic and believe that’s definitely one of the many ways to kill a plant.

   The disagreement I have is that I’ve seen way, way more plants struggle and die because roots can’t penetrate the soil that gardeners haven’t improved.

   The basic problem is that most of us here are trying to garden in heavy clay, packed shale, and worst of all, subsoil – that farther-down, compacted medium that was on its way to becoming rock before earth-moving equipment dug it up in the home-construction process.

   I’ve seen first-hand how gardeners are set up for failure as a result of how building sites are prepared.

Gardeners Are Not Normal

September 19th, 2023

   It occurred to me one day while inspecting the butt hairs of a lawn grub that gardeners are not normal people.

Who but an obsessed gardener can be found outside mulching in the rain?

   We gardeners tend to pay attention to things that “regular” people don’t, we don’t notice odors that regular people do, and we often engage in activities that would curl the skin of Miss Manners.

   The results might be pretty, but getting there usually isn’t.

   A gardener on a mission is apt to soil any clothing, strain any muscle, and endure any squeamishness to get the job done.

   Take those grub hairs, for instance.

   I’m as grossed out as anyone by grubs – those fat, white, C-shaped, wormy-looking critters that feast on our lawn roots. But the only sure-fire way to tell whether they’re Japanese beetle grubs or masked chafer beetle grubs is to inspect the arrangement of tiny hairs on their “rasters” (the polite word for butt).

   This is important because the organic treatment that works for one doesn’t work for the other.

   So you see it’s perfectly sensible to look at grub butts under a hand lens.

   OK, maybe not.

   But we didn’t start out this way, you know. Gardening has a way of gradually distorting sensibilities to the point where one day you realize that you consider a bag of dried cow manure to be a really thoughtful birthday present.

   I remember Erica Shaffer, the former chief plant geek at Highland Gardens in Lower Allen Twp., telling me how she, too, once was revolted by adult Japanese beetles.

   As she got braver, she’d pick the beetles off her plants with a gloved hand.

   Then she graduated into bare-handed squish-as-you-go. Who needs gloves?

   Distorted sensibilities are the logical result of being obsessed.

   How do you know when you’re heading down that road?

   Here’s a 12-point test to see where you stand on the obsessed-gardener scale: