George's Current Ramblings and Readlings

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.

10 End-of-Season Yard Jobs

October 19th, 2021

   As the curtain closes on a wet and buggy 2021 gardening season, it’s time to do a few things that fall under the category of so-called “putting your yard to bed.”

There’s no need to remove every last leaf from the yard in fall.

   If you don’t already have your own list, here are 10 season-ending, winter-prepping yard jobs.

   1.) Clean but don’t “sanitize.” It makes sense to get rid of diseased or bug-ridden foliage and excessive leaves that threaten to smother the lawn and groundcover beds, but you don’t have to remove every last bit of organic debris from the yard.

   Consider leaving the leaves at the base of trees and shrubs, around dormant perennials, and over top of bare annual-flower and vegetable gardens.

   Mow light layers of leaves right into the lawn.

   And for heavier leaf layers that threaten to mat down the lawn or evergreen groundcovers, gather them, chop them, and add them to your compost pile.

Read George’s past leaf post on “Love ‘em and leave ‘em”

   2.) Yank the dead stuff. Frost-killed annuals and vegetables can be pulled and composted – if they’re not diseased. If they are diseased, bag and toss them.

   3.) Clip the browned-out perennial flowers. Perennials that have died back can be cut and the foliage composted as well.

   However, consider leaving some plants stand that provide food for birds over winter, such as black-eyed susans, coneflowers, liatris, sedum, and sunflowers.

A Carpet of Sedum

October 12th, 2021

   I don’t normally buy plants at box stores, but back in the spring when I was walking through the nursery at Lowe’s, a display caught my eye.

Garden Tiles trays look like this, priced at $21.98.

   Colorful trays of mixed creeping sedum varieties were stacked on an end cap with tags reading, “Garden Tiles.”

   I’d seen this idea – sometimes called “sedum carpet” – in a few garden centers and catalogs lately, too, so I decided to give a tray a try.

   The sedums were growing in standard-sized, 10-by-20-inch, hard-plastic black trays but ones that were unusually shallow – only about an inch deep.

   The mix had at least five different varieties of creeping sedum – some golden and ferny (‘Angelina?’), some more succulent and blue-tinted, and some with pinky-nail-sized green and/or burgundy-tinted foliage.

   The label said the plants were growing in an inch-thick coco-fiber mat and could be planted as one whole, 10-by-20-inch carpet or torn apart into five-inch pieces and planted separately.

   Figuring these were going to spread quickly, I decided to go with the tear-apart option.

The mats are only an inch thick.

   I used a garden knife to slice the mat into eight, five-by-five-inch pieces, then pressed the pieces 10 inches apart in front of my mailbox and in the front of a roadside rock garden.

   At a cost of $21.98, getting eight good-sized clumps of creeping sedum is a good price – especially if all or most of the varieties are perennial types. I think they are – from the looks of them and from the indication that the plants were grown by Corso’s Perennials of Sandusky, Ohio – but the label doesn’t specify hardiness zone.

   The label did say, “No digging required,” but also mentioned that planting into “loose” or “recently tilled” soil gives the best results.

   I loosened my soil a few inches, pressed the pieces into the surface, firmed around the edges, and gave the plants a good watering.

   Then I left them to fend for themselves – watering just twice over the summer when the weather got hot and dry for more than a week.