George's Current Ramblings and Readlings

May I Suggest Knee Pads?

October 29th, 2019

   I knew it was going to be a tough job at my age moving eight cubic yards of mulch from my driveway up a 25-foot, 45-degree-angled bank in my new back yard.

Mulching this bank caused a case of prepatellar bursitis.

   I took my time, didn’t slip or fall, and got the job done by making about 160 trips up the hill over three days with five-gallon mulch buckets in each hand.

   So what went wrong this time? My right knee.

   I noticed the kneecap was a little sore the Saturday evening after finishing the job. I figured I probably bruised it on a rock or something.

   Three days of progressive swelling despite ice, rest, and copious ibuprofen landed me in yet another UPMC orthopedics office. The diagnosis: prepatellar bursitis.

   That’s a fancy way of saying I abused the padding (bursa) under the kneecap so much that it enflamed, leaked fluid, puffed up painfully, and made it almost impossible to walk.

   The ortho doc drained the knee with a rather large needle (which helped), but two days later, the whole leg was puffed up.

   A trip to urgent care generated a diagnosis of Lyme disease and a prescription for antibiotics. That didn’t turn out to be the case, but the antibiotics did fix what probably was the case — an infection in the leg related to the draining.

   Anyway, the swelling is almost gone, but I thought I’d mention my experience since prepatellar bursitis is something that apparently happens to gardeners more than “regular” people.

   It’s a common malady of anyone who kneels a lot… plumbers, roofers, carpet layers, coal miners, and gardeners, according to the OrthoInfo website. Runners and athletes who get whacked a lot in the knee also tend to get it.

   In my case, I didn’t do anything obviously or suddenly bad. There was no warning of impending trouble, no sudden stab of pain.

   The culprit was simply kneeling on the hard ground over and over again.

I’m No Lawn Nut, But…

October 22nd, 2019

   I’ve always thought that people lean too heavily on lawns, mainly because it’s the default choice when 1.) they can’t think of anything better to do with the space, or 2.) they’d rather not invest in the work and expense to do something else.

I didn’t think I’d ever be a riding-mower guy, but here I am.

   I have nothing against lawns, but unless we really want/need all of that green for play space or entertaining, there are better options (growing food, planting trees for shade, planting rain gardens to capture storm runoff, planting flowers for beauty and pollinators, etc.)

   That’s why the lawn in my Cumberland County yard served mainly as pathways through the garden beds.

   Now that my wife and I moved to the Pittsburgh area, we inherited an ocean of grass out front.

   We’re on a corner lot with the house atop a hill, so most of the lawn is on a slope. (Everything in Pittsburgh is on a slope… or cliff.)

   The magnitude of this space forced me and my rapidly aging legs to invest in a riding mower.

   That’s right. I’m now a lawn guy.

   If I were 35 or 40, I’d be digging up big chunks of the green to plant a Pittsburgh version of the Weigel Botanic Garden.

   It’d be glorious… curving beds of shrubs and massed perennials, specimen trees, maybe a rock garden, a collection of spring bulbs, pockets of annual flowers, roses, and a dwarf conifer garden to make my wife happy.

   Except for some trees and the dwarf conifer garden, that’s going to happen only in my imagination.

   One problem is that I went and got old. At 63 years and counting fast, I could probably manage to create everything (with help from Mr. Ibuprofen). But a big question mark is how long I’d be able to maintain it.

   A second problem is deer. The neighborhood’s four-legged, non-stop, eating machines would devour most plants as fast as I could plant them.

Read more on my new deer problem

   Other than a Kousa dogwood and a few scrubby shrubs around the front foundation, the only plant I inherited in the quarter-acre grassed front yard was a half-dead blue spruce, which I just had cut down.

Australia, New Zealand Trip Details Ready

October 15th, 2019

   If the Land Down Under is on your bucket list, you’ll have a chance next year to visit both Australia and New Zealand with fellow garden- and nature-lovers – including me.

Sydney’s skyline with its famous opera house.

   Lowee’s Group Tours, Collette Vacations, and I just finished details on a 17-day tour that’ll include gardens of those two countries, plus must-see highlights like the Great Barrier Reef, Sydney’s Opera House, New Zealand’s “Southern Alps,” and, of course, koalas, kangaroos, and penguins.

   The trip leaves Oct. 25, 2020, from Philadelphia and returns Nov. 10, 2020, from New Zealand.

   We’re going in the fall because that’s Australia’s spring, a time when we’ll catch the flowers and landscapes in peak form before the weather gets too hot.

   The trip price is $8,999 per person double (if you book before next April 29). That includes hotels, 24 meals, admissions, a tour manager, and all flights, both international and three that we’ll be taking during the trip.

   The “South Pacific Wonders” trip will be ready to book at the annual Travel Day that Lowee’s Group Tours and I are planning for Sat., Oct. 26, at 10 a.m. in the West Hanover Twp. Recreation Center, 628 Walnut Ave., Harrisburg. The West Hanover Rec Center is located just off Linglestown Road near Central Dauphin High School.

   We’ll have flyers at Travel Day with the full itineraries of our entire lineup of 2020 garden trips, and I’ll be doing a PowerPoint presentation showing you what all we’ll be seeing.

   It’s free, and you’re invited! Free refreshments will be served.

   You’ll have a shot at winning raffle prizes, including trip discounts and two of my gardening books. Register ahead of time, and you get an extra raffle ticket.

   If you haven’t registered yet, call Lowee’s Group Tours at 717-657-9658, email ckelly@lowees.com, or register online at Lowee’s website.

The Best Bulbs for Each Situation

October 8th, 2019

   We live in a part of the country where most spring-blooming flower bulbs do very well.

A “river of hyacinths” I once planted in my back yard.

   Southern gardeners salivate to grow the kind of stunning bulb masses we can do March through May, but their winters don’t provide the chill times bulbs need in winter.

   Unfortunately, not a lot of us take advantage of this benefit of Pennsylvania gardening.

   I think it’s a combination of work, expense, timing (people are more in fall mode than planting mode come October), the fact that you have to wait months to see the fruits of your labor, and frustration with animals, which is mainly an issue with tulips and sometimes hyacinths and crocuses.

   If you pick the right bulbs and get them in the right spots (like any plant), you’ll greatly improve your early-season yard color and reward yourself with flowers that come back year after year with relatively little work.

   I have favorites for each situation, if you’d like to give some of them a try. October is the best month for planting spring bulbs in Pennsylvania.

   For more ideas, check out my PennLive garden column on 12 out-of-the-ordinary ways to use spring-flowering bulbs.

Hardly anything ever eats daffodils.

   Where animals are lurking: Daffodils.

   Rabbits, deer, and rodents mainly feast on tulips, most crocuses, and sometimes hyacinths. So you’re safe with most anything else, although daffodils (Narcissus) are at the top of the bullet-proof list. (I’d pick alliums as a close second.)

   Daffodils are readily available choices with trumpet-shaped flowers that come in a variety of sizes, bloom times, and colors (gold, yellow, white, and peachy pastels).

   In shade: Siberian squill (Scilla siberica).

   Most of the small-flowered, early-emerging bulbs do fine with even with a few hours of sunlight.

I like the blue flowers of Siberian squill.

   I like Siberian squill for their vibrant blue bell-shaped blooms, which usually peak in early April. They grow only about four inches tall and usually spread like a groundcover, so long as they don’t rot in soggy soil.

   Early risers like these are able to absorb enough sunlight to recharge themselves before overhead trees (the leading cause of landscape shade) leaf out.

   A second good option here is striped squill (Puschkinia scilloides var. libanotica), which bloom in late April with blue-streaked white flowers on eight- to 10-inch plants.

12 Conifer Trees You Probably Won’t Kill

October 1st, 2019

   It’s been a rough last two years for conifers, those cone-bearing needled plants that people typically call “evergreens.”

Disease is killing a lot of spruce trees lately from the bottom up.

   The combination of hotter summers, bouts with polar vortexes in winter, excessive rains, our lousy soil, and increasing threats from assorted bugs and disease have killed a lot of pines, spruces, firs, hemlocks, arborvitae, and even the usually bullet-proof yew.

   Rather than any one plague being responsible for the conifer mayhem that’s been occurring throughout the Northeast and Midwest, the troubles are coming from a variety of sources.

   Some of them are more generalized, like the soggy soil and temperature-extreme issues.

   Others are more species-specific, such as woolly adelgids on hemlocks, bagworms on arborvitae, spider mites on dwarf Alberta spruce, sawflies on pines, and the increasing incidence of needlecast diseases on Douglas firs and Colorado blue spruce.

   All of this doesn’t mean it’s time to give up on conifers altogether. It does mean, though, that you’ll likely save work, money, and heartache by doing enough homework to pick the least trouble-prone species and to get them in good sites, which is generally lots of sun and excellent soil drainage.

   If you’re thinking of adding a conifer or two to your landscape this fall, here are 12 of my favorite tree-sized conifers:

Hinoki cypress ‘Nana Gracilis’

   1.) Hinoki cypress (Chamaecyparis obtusa)

   These come in all sorts of sizes and shapes, from two- to three-foot globes to 18-foot uprights. Some varieties have golden needles.

   Some of the most useful are the dwarf uprights ‘Nana Gracilis’ and ‘Gracilis Compacta,’ which grow slowly to six or eight feet tall and five to seven feet wide. Those are much better options than the mite-prone dwarf Alberta spruce.

   Hinoki cypresses seldom run into any bug or disease troubles, deer don’t care for them, and they’ll take a fair amount of shade.

   2.) Weeping Alaska-cedar (Xanthocyparis nootkatensis)

   This is my favorite specimen conifer. The habit is fairly narrow and upright (25-by-10 feet in 20-25 years) with gracefully arching limbs and soft needles.

   Not a true cedar, Alaska-cedar is extremely cold-hardy and rarely runs into any problems. ‘Green Arrow’ is a particularly skinny variety.