George's Current Ramblings and Readlings

All We Gardeners Want for Christmas Is…

December 3rd, 2024

   If Santa Claus could work his magic in the garden like he does in the toy shop, what would gardeners want him to deliver?

If only Santa’s magic could work for gardeners…

   Better weather would certainly be high on the wish list. Who else gripes more about the weather (too wet, too dry, too hot, too cold, too humid, etc.) than gardeners?

   I personally would like to see an “average” year that really acts like an average year. Instead of most of our 40 inches of precipitation coming in two summer thunderstorms and a January blizzard spread over three days total, I’d like to see an inch of rain every week during the growing season.

   Rain every Monday would be great, but never on Saturday or Sunday… unless there’s a Monday holiday, in which case rain all day Tuesday would be fine.

   A slightly longer growing season also would be nice. About three weeks of winter would be plenty – enough time to order seeds, read a gardening magazine, sketch out a new garden plan, and catch a little rest. Then get back to brighter, warmer weather.

   I’ll bet good, old Santa could do something about the assorted bugs, animals, diseases, and other foes that we do battle with each year.

   I’d like to see a fence that keeps deer from going over, groundhogs from going under, and voles from going through – all while not being an eyesore and being cheap, of course.

   Instead of ever-more-troublesome new pests like spotted lanternflies and emerald ash borers, wouldn’t it be great if Santa could bring us a James Bond kind of helpful bug?

   This good-guy bug would wipe out our worst pests and also feed on weeds instead of roses, dogwoods, and ash trees. I’m thinking here of, say, a saw-toothed wasp that would polish off every Japanese beetle in creation… or maybe a “debagger beetle” that feeds on those deadly bagworms that devour our arborvitae.

   While Santa’s at it, maybe his magic could change the diets of a few animal pests. Wouldn’t it work out better if deer preferred voles over leaves? Or if groundhogs ate rabbits and rabbits ate groundhogs. Then the two of them could scare each other away.

   At the very least, I’d be happy to see a few new tasty vegetables that WE like but that animals and bugs don’t. How comes we always seem to like the same things?

How’s Your “Bounce-Backability?”

November 19th, 2024

   As another growing season has come to a close, I have to confess I’m ready for a break.

   On the one hand, I’ll really miss the fresh veggies, the flowers, and the walks around the yard to see what new developments are going on. But on the other, I’m tired.

Mixing up your garden jobs can help with your “bounce-backability.”

   I guess that comes with Medicare territory.  I knew I was heading there about a dozen years ago when I found myself thinking twice before bending over to pull a weed.  My mind decided to assess whether the weed was worth the wear-and-tear on my back… and whether there was something else I could get done while down there to make the most out of the groan.

   So it goes with aging gardeners. The “golden years” are great when it comes to more time to garden, but the acts of getting it all done keep getting more and more “challenging.”

   Toni Gattone knows the feeling. Like many gardeners who put way more bending mileage on their bodies than couch potatoes, her back was a loud reminder that she wasn’t 30 or even 40 years old anymore.

   Rather than give up her beloved hobby, this California gardener read, learned, and tried everything she could to beef up her resiliency – the ability to adapt to and quickly recover from setbacks and challenges.

   “When you have more resilience, you’re never going to give up,” Gattone said in a Great Grow Along webinar. “Instead, you’re going to develop what I call ‘bounce-backability.’”

   Gattone distilled her gardening bounce-backability plan into three main strategies – 1.) adapt yourself, 2.) adapt your garden, and 3.) adapt your tool arsenal.

   She goes into detail in her book “The Lifelong Gardener” (Timber Press, $19.99, 2019).

   Here’s the short version:

Landscape Improving, Stage Three

November 5th, 2024

   A landscape is never ever really “done,” as any experienced gardener will tell you.

George looking for a spot to cram in a to-be-moved plant.

   However, the never-ending waltz of caring for a yard – and especially the amply landscaped variety – fits into one of three stages.

   Stage one is the beginning of the line – or the end of the line, as the case may be, for the previous “landscape.” This is when you’re taking out plantings that are hopelessly overgrown, just not doing well, or outright putrid (often one that a gardener has inherited from a non-gardener).

   This work can range from surgical removals, weeding, and selected whack-backs to the wholesale clearing of a bed.

   Stage one can also include tackling a new garden or landscape from scratch, which usually involves getting rid of grass or a weed-infested area.

   Stage two is the re-do part – the phase where novices think the project is done. In reality, it’s just the initial phase of the re-do – a time of getting your best guesses in place and then watching to see what happens.

   Stage three is the longest phase and involves ongoing reaction to the changes that inevitably take place. To use a writing metaphor, it’s the editing stage.

   No matter how well you or your designer knows plants and how well the phase-two planting was done, you’re going to have do at least some editing… and re-editing and re-editing.

   That’s because a lot can go wrong.

   Weather insults are a big one, such as the spot drought that kills water-wimpy selections or the wind storm that blows down a tree just as it was coming into prime.

Here’s what a new Cornelian cherry dogwood tree looked like the day after a deer found it.

   Animal damage is another big problem, especially if deer are lurking anywhere nearby. They might eat anything when the food supply dwindles, including plants low on their preference list and ones they’ve left untouched for years.

   Other times a plant that was supposed to be a winner (or is a winner in most yards) just doesn’t like your yard or the specific soil or spot you gave it.

   Sometimes a bug or a disease comes along to wipe all or part of a particular planting.

   Sometimes a plant gets bigger (or smaller) than you thought.

   Sometimes the conditions for which you plant-selected change, such as when a nearby tree grows enough to create expanded shade or when a big tree comes down to turn shade into sudden sun.

   These are the kinds of things that continue to happen over time, causing gardeners to have to rethink beds or areas of them. In other words, stage three is an ongoing phase of “spot re-do’s.”

   This is the stage that drives non-gardeners (and non-gardening spouses) crazy.

   “Isn’t this garden ever going to be done!?!?” they ask.

   For the rabid gardener, though, stage three is the best phase.

   It’s a time of fine-tuning, of being creative, of making the garden better and better as the failures and also-runs morph into successes.

   Besides, what would rabid gardeners do if the landscape work were ever completely gone?

Keep An Eye on Those Boxwoods

October 22nd, 2024

   If you’re growing any boxwoods in your yard, you might want to make a note to check them starting next spring for the latest deadly threat facing our top-selling shrub.

Here’s a box tree moth caterpillar in action on a boxwood.
Credit: Hannah Nadel, USDA

   A new bug called the box tree moth officially entered Pennsylvania this fall.

   The state Agriculture Department confirmed reports of the bug’s find in two cemeteries in Erie County and promptly put a quarantine on boxwood sales in an effort to contain the bug to that county.

   The caterpillars of this east-Asian species are potential boxwood killers, as most of Europe has been finding out since their arrival there in 2006. They can chew leaves to the point where there’s little left but bare twigs – “see-through boxwoods” as Ohio State Extension entomologist Joe Boggs calls the remnants.

   According to the U.S. Department of Agriculture, the first box tree moths showed up on this side of the Atlantic in Toronto, Canada, in 2018. Sometime between August 2020 and April 2021, a nursery in St. Catharines, Ontario, inadvertently shipped infested plants to six U.S. states – Connecticut, Massachusetts, Michigan, New York, Ohio, and South Carolina.

   New York was the first state to confirm the moth there, followed by Michigan, Massachusetts, and Ohio. September’s Erie cemetery find was the first evidence that the moth had spread into Pennsylvania.

   So far there’s no evidence the bug has made its way into south-central Pennsylvania, but Ag Department officials are asking gardeners to be on the lookout and to report any sightings.

   If you see any caterpillars feeding on boxwoods between April and October, report it to the state’s Bad Bug program by emailing badbug@pa.gov or by calling toll-free 888-253-7189. Or sightings can be reported to any county Penn State Extension office.

   “Box tree moth caterpillars are green and yellow with white, yellow, and black stripes and black spots,” says Penn State University entomologist Dr. Michael Skvarla in an Extension Service post. “They are the only caterpillars in the region that feed on boxwood, so finding them on the host plant is distinctive.”

   The caterpillars are about an inch-and-a-half long and have shiny black heads.

   Skvarla says box tree moths likely will have two generations a year across most of Pennsylvania – possibly three in the warmer Philadelphia area.

The Mini-Meadow Flourishes… Then Flops

October 8th, 2024

   For a while there in late spring, my backyard mini-meadow looked like it was hitting the reputed third-year charm.

The mini-meadow the third week of May 2024.

   About half of this six-by-20-foot experimental plot on my sunny back bank was in color for about three weeks in late May to mid-June.

   It was splendid and by far the best performance since I seeded the bed in May 2022 with a mix of mostly native species from the American Meadows seed company.

   Then the Shasta daisies and sweet williams that were looking so good finished blooming. The blossoms and flower stalks browned and flopped over.

   Worse yet, nothing was filling in to pick up the slack from the fallen neighbors.

   With the goutweed and assorted other weeds underneath that had elbowed into the planting, it turned into a mess by early July. It stayed pretty forlorn the rest of the summer, too.

   If this garden had been out front, I probably would have got a cut-the-weeds notice from the local code enforcement officer.

   After the three weeks of spring glory, that was it for the 2024 show.

The mini-meadow the third week of June 2024.

   The cosmos that gave a fair performance in the second half of 2023 was a total no-show this year. Even though I left last year’s cosmos plants alone to reseed themselves, not a one sprouted.

   Neither did the melampodium that I planted into the bed last summer. Those reseed themselves in my front-yard and mailbox beds, but none reappeared in the mini-meadow.

   And I got no-shows from the sunflowers and butterfly milkweed seeds that I scattered this spring in an effort to beef up the original seeding.

   Granted, it was a hot, dry summer, but watering and weeding to baby things along goes against the idea of a meadow in the first place – a bed that’s supposed to care for itself.

   After three full growing seasons, I’m beginning to verify what a lot of gardeners told me from their own experiences – that most of the original seeded-in plants disappear to leave just one or two dominant species and that weeds eventually win the battle.