George's Current Ramblings and Readlings

The 10 Most Important Things I’ve Learned about Gardening

November 23rd, 2021

   I’ve been digging and planting and caring for plants for more than 40 years now, and in that time I’ve managed to learn a few things about gardening.

For good or bad, a garden is never done.

   I thought I’d share the 10 most important…

   1.) A garden is never done. Just about the time you think you have a garden exactly the way you want it, along comes a deer, an ice storm, a new bug, or any of a train-load of issues that can derail everything.

   I’ve learned to expect the unexpected, roll with the punches, and look at “re-do’s” as part of the ongoing equation. Besides, if everything were done and perfect, what would we do out there?

   2.) Know that plants are going to die. We all kill plants. That’s also part of the equation and will happen for various reasons no matter how much we know or how many “right” things we do.

   I’ve come to look at dead plants as a great source of learning to do better next year.

   3.) Be patient. Gardening isn’t a good match for those who like instant results.

   Plants take time to grow to their prime, and that’s usually measured in years… and in the case of trees, decades.

   I’ve learned that gardening is more about the process than the results. When you look at it that way, it’s much more enjoyable.

Woody Plants in Winter Pots?

November 16th, 2021

   Most people use their pots for posies – primarily petunias, geraniums, coleus, and other annuals that get planted each May and yanked each October.

Here’s a grouping of dwarf conifers growing in concrete pots.

   Then the pots get tucked away for winter until frost stops knocking at the door the following spring.

   Hardly anyone uses pots to grow woody plants – i.e. evergreens, shrubs, and small trees – even though most of these do fine in pots and sometimes even better than in the ground.

   You just need to address a couple of issues.

   One is pot size. Err on the big side when it comes to that.

   Woody plants are going to grow bigger than flowers and have more extensive root systems, so they’ll need more elbow room than the 14- or 16-inch containers that can support a typical annual or perennial.

   Go with the biggest pot or planter-box sizes you can find (or accommodate), or go the recycling route and convert another container, such as a trash can, a half whiskey barrel, a feeding trough, a plastic tub, even an old bath tub.

   Just be sure you’ve got ample drainage holes in the bottom.

   Also go with sturdy containers that are resistant to cracking and able to take freezing in winter.

   Plastic, foam, concrete, wood, and metal are better materials than ceramic or terra-cotta if you’re letting your pots out all winter.

   Most plants hardy to our area withstand winters outside in pots without protection. All they need is occasional water during dry, thawed-out spells. That’s especially important for potted evergreens, which continue to lose moisture through their foliage over winter.

   Iffier choices are borderline-hardy woody plants, such as nandina, crape myrtle, camellia, Arizona cypress, cherry laurel, and osmanthus.

Lessons from the 2021 Gardening Season

November 9th, 2021

   Buggy and wet.

Soggy spells this summer led to some of this…

   That sort of sums up the 2021 gardening season, although there were enough nice days and sunshine rays to rate it at least a “decent” on the scale of growing fitness.

   Here’s a look at six key take-aways and lessons to be learned from the 2021 season:

Get used to the “new normal”

   This year was a model of what climate scientists say we ought to get used to as our climate continues to change – earlier springs, hotter summers, increasingly erratic changes in temperature, and more weather extremes that alternate between ever-heavier rain dumpings and “flash droughts.”

   January, March, and April all were at least three degrees warmer than usual, and by April 23, we were done with frost in Harrisburg.

   That continued our trend of generally earlier last spring frost dates, although never count out the possibility of a one-off frozen night even into mid-May (as happened May 10, 2020).

   According to the most recent frost data from the National Weather Service, the median last freeze date now for Adams, Cumberland, Dauphin, Franklin, Lancaster, Lebanon, and York counties is April 11. That means that in half the years, nighttime freezes are done by that date in those counties. (Note that median is different from average last spring frost dates and is very different from the all-time latest freeze, which remains May 12 for Harrisburg and is what cautious gardeners go by when planting their summer vegetables and annual flowers).

   The median date for fall’s first freeze is now Oct. 21 for most of south-central Pennsylvania but Nov. 1 for Adams, Lancaster, and York counties, according to NWS data.

   March, April, May, and June gave us a drier-than-usual start to the growing season (all had less-than-normal rainfall), but then someone turned on the faucet.

   Harrisburg got a three-inch dumping July 11 and 12, nearly six inches of rain in August (two more than normal), then the Ida dumping plus three more inch-plus rains to put the area nearly a foot of rain above what we usually get in July, August, and September.

   It was hot, too. June, July, August, and September all registered above-normal monthly average temperatures.

   Including May, Harrisburg ended up with 34 days of 90-degree or higher temperatures this growing season.

   The upshot of all of this for gardeners is that we’re now able to grow plants we couldn’t just a decade or two ago (crape myrtles, osmanthus, laurels, figs, etc.) while plants on the fringe of their northern range here are beginning to suffer (Colorado blue spruce, sugar maple, heather, American beech, etc.)

   We also should consider using more plants that can take our increasingly hotter summers.

Read George’s 2020 post on gardening in our changing local climate

See George’s list on 10 trees that can take our future heat

See George’s list on 12 annual flowers that can take high heat

Dropped Leaves Don’t Always Mean Dead Trees

November 2nd, 2021

   Tree leaves that brown around the edges, develop spots, shrivel, and even drop prematurely worry a lot of gardeners.

Crabapples were a particular species hit hard by leaf disease in 2021.

   After all, healthy leaves are supposed to stay on our trees until they turn color in fall and drop naturally, right?

   When that doesn’t happen – as it did in a lot of cases this past warm and wet growing season – it’s no wonder gardeners fear the worst and think their tree has died.

   The good news is that disfigured and damaged leaves – and even total premature leaf drops – usually don’t mean a tree is doomed.

   This is a problem that looks and seems worse than it really is.

   So long as the roots and woody parts of the tree are intact, there’s a very good chance that your leaf-troubled tree will produce a new and healthy round of foliage next spring.

   Sometimes, denuded trees even grow a second set of leaves the same season.

   Sycamores are notorious for that after dropping their first set of leaves in early summer following all-too-common outbreaks of a fungal disease called anthracnose.

   Damaged and/or lost leaves can weaken a tree, but unless the problem is severe and repeated, trees usually grow through these setbacks.

   The main issue is that damaged or missing leaves short-change the tree of chlorophyll, which, if you remember from high school biology, is the green pigment that plants combine with water and sunlight to manufacture the fuel (sugars) that plants use to grow.

   Besides that loss of energy, growing two sets of leaves in one season is an energy drain.

   While that’s not good, it’s not nearly as threatening as root-level problems, such as soggy or compacted soil, root-rot diseases, boring insects (like birch borers and the dreaded emerald ash borer), and “operator errors” such as planting too deeply, over-mulching, and whiplashing bark with string trimmers.

   All of those are much more fatal than leaf issues, which are by and large cosmetic and temporary.

   So what can cause leaves to go bad and/or drop early?

Before and After: Dejungling My Almost Landscape

October 26th, 2021

   It’s hard to believe three years have gone by since my wife and I moved from our long-time home (and gardens) in Cumberland County to the suburbs of Pittsburgh.

Me “dejungling” the inherited “landscaping.”

   The house we bought was in worse shape than it looked, and we’ve spent a ton of money and sweat equity fixing everything.

   The outside has been just as much of an uphill battle, but at least we could see what we got ourselves into there.

   After three years of pulling weeds, cutting down dead trees, scratching poison-ivy rashes, lugging wall stones, putting up fences, shooing deer, digging drainage ditches, working compost into Play-Doh-like “soil,” moving mountains of mulch, and finally, planting, I can say the yard is starting to look almost like a landscape now instead of a jungle.

   Also that I’m tired. And frequently sore.  The good news, though, is that I accomplished all of the above with only one trip to the emergency room.

   Things are far enough along now that I thought I’d give you a sort of “before and after” rundown of what I did and why – both to help with any re-do’s you might have in the works as well as for your general amusement (and/or horror, as the case may be).

   I should mention right off the bat that the neighbors told us that the previous owners were scarcely outside in the eight years they lived there. They had moved out altogether for the two years before we bought.

   I was suspicious about their yard-care acumen the one time I met the previous owner-guy. As we were walking around the yard, I asked him what was under that 4-by-8-foot timber-lined box that was next to the shed and covered with a well-worn sheet of plywood.

   He said, “I don’t know,” which I found to be a strange answer for someone who’d been living there for eight years.

   It turns out the mystery box was a sandbox from two owners ago. That was clue No. 1 that maybe the recent owners weren’t spending a lot of time out in the yard.

   Anyway, let’s start at the driveway leading up to the house…

   The steps to the back door split a pair of brick-supported, terraced beds that probably went up when the house was built in the 1950s. When we got there, both beds were overtaken with floppy grasses, seeded-in euonymus, and rose-of-sharons that had grown into a mini-forest, and lots of weeds.

   My solution (after first clearing out all of the junky vegetation) was to install a fence (above). One reason was to draw a boundary between the driveway beds and the back yard. Another one was to give some privacy to the back yard. And a third reason was to keep the herds of local deer out of the back yard.

   We went with a low-maintenance, white-vinyl fence and used a wooden, gated arbor we brought with us from Cumberland County as the “doorway” into the back yard. We painted it white to match the fence.