SNAPSHOT OF MONDAY

            It’s a beautiful day here in southeastern North Carolina—sunny, warm but not too hot, not too humid, a steady southwesterly breeze. It’s too nice a day to sit at the computer, even if one does have a blog entry to post. So I wandered outside with my camera and took a picture (or 12: what did we do before digital photography?) of every plant that has flowers on it in my yard. Now, with a minimum of commentary, I’ll share them with you.

 

         
             I like blue (and blue-ish) flowers best of all, so I have lots. This is false hyssop, Agastache foeniculum ‘Blue Fortune.’ Bees and butterflies love it, deer disdain it because of its anise-scented foliage. It’s not reliably perennial for me, but I don’t care because Christine grows some every year.

            Our cat Fred thinks catmint—Nepeta x faassenii ‘Walkers Low’—might actually be catnip. He’s wrong, of course, although it’s aromatic enough that deer don’t bother it. While “Walkers Low” refers not to the height of the plant but to an English garden, Fred keeps ours well below the 30 inches gardeners without 18-pound pets can expect.

            The passionflowers I observe for the National PhenologyNetwork’s Nature’s Notebook bloomed early this year due to the mild winter. Which is nice.

            This blue-themed pot contains annual Phlox intensia ‘Blueberry’ and a selection of summer snapdragons, Angelonia angustifolia-Serena series.

            My poor aster. Not only is it stuck with a nasty botanical name—Symphyotrichum laevis—but deer uncharacteristically grazed it nearly down to the ground earlier in the season in a fit of pique over our fencing of the tomatoes. So now it’s blooming. Be interesting to see what happens this fall.

            My next favorite flower colors are the pinks, purples and magentas, so I have lots of those, too. Here is a clump of perennial petunias, Petunia integrifolia integrifolia. I have no idea why the specific epithet is repeated. One year I planted these free-flowering magenta beauties in a raised bed with chartreuse sweet-potato vine (Ipomoea batatas ‘Margarita’): the effect was stunning. Also not reliably perennial, it survived this year’s mild winter handily, never even dying back all the way.

          
            One of the mildew-resistant garden phloxes, Phlox paniculata ‘Bright Eyes,’ keeps large pink panicles coming for most of the season. ‘Laura’ is another cultivar I like, with blooms more on the purple side of pink, but she’s not blooming yet.

            This Liatris spicata, saddled with the dopey common name “blazing star,” is a specimen of the straight species, lankier and earlier than the stocky cultivar ‘Kobold’ that grows on the other side of the garden.

           
         
             My specimen of evergreen Serissa foetida started life as a tiny bonsai I rescued from the Philadelphia Flower Show in 2005. It certainly wouldn’t fit back into the two-inch-wide pot it came in anymore.

          
          This is rock rose, Pavonia lasiopetala. A shrubby little thing, it produces its cheerful cerise cup-shaped flowers steadily—if not prolifically—all summer.

            Another trouble-free sub-shrub that enjoyed the warm winter was my swamp mallow (Kosteletzkya virginica—see “Field Notes for the Weary” post of September 28, 2011). Its first bloom appeared ten days ago, weeks ahead of schedule.

            Christine spoiled plain ol’ squatty Gomphrena globosa by introducing me to G. haageana ‘Fireworks.’ The cerise flowers with yellow “sparks” certainly live up to their name, and keep coming from mid-spring into October.

          


         

            And how can any one have a garden without classic Zinnia elegans? This cultivar is called ‘Cut and Come Again’ for good reason.

            I depend on the black-eyed Susans for yellows in my gardens. Perennial Rudbeckia fulgida subspecies and cultivars provide the color in fall, but wonderful annual (but freely seeding) R. hirta ‘Indian Summer’ carries the torch until then.

          

             The sunflowers are blooming! The sunflowers are blooming! These are Helianthus annuus ‘Van Gogh.’

            When I lived up North, I loved nasturtiums. Over a season they’d grow into huge frothy mounds of neatly round foliage dotted with orange, yellow or red flowers. Not so in North Carolina, where the heat takes a toll. Regardless, I plant some every spring and enjoy them until they inevitably crash.

         
             I don’t have a lot of summertime whites in my garden, so for now, I’m grateful for the dainty blooms of my potato crop, Solanum tuberosum.

            So that’s what’s providing color out in my yard today. And that’s all I have to say, until next time.

            Thanks for dropping by.

                                                                                    Kathy

WORD COUNTS AND SUNFLOWERS

Jane Friedman
(Photo from www.vulture.com)

           The Garden Writers’ Association reminds me of Hotel California: you can check out any time you like, but you can never leave. Although I stopped paying dues some years ago (for the full story, see “A Blogging Crisis” from 22 October 2011), I’m still on their mailing list. The latest emailed GWA News Clippings contained a link to a blog post from Jane Friedman’s eponymous website (“Being human at electric speed: Exploring what it means to be a writer in the digital age.”) with an intriguing hook—“Top 10 Blog Traffic Killers.”

            Turns out GFTGU must plead guilty to two of Friedman’s no-nos: specifically, not posting often enough (in the aftermath of the aforementioned blogging crisis); and exceeding the optimum target of 500 words (all the damn time). People have changed the way they read, Ms. F tells us. Their fractured attention spans can handle only the briefest of scans before fluttering off to the next thing.

            Well, huh.

            Turns out Miss Jane (a former CEO of HarperCollins) turns out ebooks: hence her knowledge of cyber-readers’ inability to focus. Here in anti-electric-speed-land, however, most of us can and do read more than headlines and snippets. Then we actually think about what all those words mean, and use them to learn about the real world, where diverse views serve as stepping stones to expanded understanding.

            Be that as it may, adhering to word-counts does tend to tone up flabby writing. By way of experiment, here’s a 510-word piece on sunflowers for all length-challenged cyberians out there. Try to stick with it all the way to the end, okay?

***** 

  

         
            Sunflowers personify summer, in color, in stature, in fecundity. Beautiful yellow ray flowers attract butterflies and bees while sturdy stalks lend support to leaners like tomatoes and annual vines. Ripened seeds provide oil- and vitamin E-rich food for birds and mammals. Naturally vigorous plants, they’re easily started from seed.

Helianthus annuus 'Lemon Queen'

           The genus name, Helianthus, is an amalgam of ancient Greek words for sun (helios) and flower (anthos), referring to the way the flowers keep oriented to the sun’s position in the sky. The biological mechanisms behind this phenomenon, called heliotropism, are amazing. Motion happens when specialized potassium-pumping cells just below a flowerhead or in a stem detect blue light rays, causing potassium ions to alter the turgor pressure in nearby tissues. On the shady side, increased rigidity causes elongation of certain cells, causing the plant to “follow” the light.

"Vase with 15 Sunflowers"
by Vincent Van Gogh

            When anyone mentions sunflowers, the picture that springs to mind is of Helianthus annuus, glorified by personalities as varied as Vincent Van Gogh and Oscar Wilde, the enduring symbol of the Aesthetic Movement. In the Victorian era’s language of flowers, sunflowers signified “haughtiness” and “adoration.” In the 21^st century, the Great Sunflower (bee-counting) Project chose an annual cultivar, ‘Lemon Queen,’ to ensure uniform citizen-scientists’ observations. Annuals account for the bulk of edible seed harvests. A darling of breeders and florists, sunflowers are enjoying boom times. No longer confined to shades of yellow, lately reds, whites and bicolor versions abound. Heights vary too, from 12 inches (‘Elf,’ ‘Big Smile’) to over 12 feet (‘Mammoth Russian,’ ‘Sunzilla’).

            Helianthus contains other, perennial species. One of the best for southeastern North Carolina is H. angustifolius, or swamp sunflower. Flowering through October, its stalks can tower to ten feet or more. The two-to-three-inch-wide golden yellow rayed discs may not be a match in size to those of their annual cousins, but more than make up for it in numbers.

Helianthus angustifolius

Helianthus angustifolius
towers above Fitzes' back yard

     











         

Heliopsis helianthoides 'Sommesonne'

            Other sunflower relations include members of the genus Heliopsis (loosely translated, “like the sun”). A prolific ditch- and roadside brightener in wetter years (like this one), wild summer sunflower grabbed the attention of German and English breeders, who hybridized weedy-looking H. helianthoides with the more restrained subspecies scabra, resulting in garden-worthy cultivars like ‘Sommesonne’ (“Summer Sun”).

Helenium sp., common sneezeweed

                       
            Helenium is another perennial genus of sunflower, named not for the sun but—somewhat ambiguously—for Helen of Troy. Its common name is sneezeweed, an undeserved epithet deriving from the fact it blooms in the fall around the same time as ragweed.

            To grow sunflowers, all you need is a packet of seeds and a piece of ground that gets at least six hours of sunlight a day, has good drainage and access to supplemental water should rains fail to come. When cultivating sunflowers, be aware that, early on, birds or squirrels may eat freshly planted seeds; they are also partial to very young shoots with two to four leaves. At the other end of the season, competition for the mature seeds is brisk.

            It's not too late to plant. Pick up a packet of seeds this afternoon, and grow yourself some sunshine.

*****

            If you managed to get through the opening commentary and this conclusion, you’ll have read a total of 819 words. Those of us who think 819 words is merely a good beginning salute you.

            Thanks for dropping by.

                                                                                    Kathy

TRANSITIONS

            About two weeks ago here in southeastern North Carolina, a pleasantly unusual long spring transitioned into summer. I know that because there’s no longer any discussion chez Fitz if the nighttime temperatures and humidity levels might allow both open windows and comfortable sleep: they don’t. As much as I dislike the idea of air-conditioning—artificially controlled climate negating the realities of the natural world—I have to admit I’d really miss it, especially as age has made me less resilient in the heat.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

            (In case you’re wondering, I suffer less of a moral/psychic dilemma over central heating by picturing early man huddled around a smoky fire as the cave entrance fills with snow. And I have no qualms at all about plumbing and electricity—a ten-year tenure in the Girl Scouts taught me more than I absolutely needed to know about living without those particular luxuries. As Ralph Waldo Emerson once remarked, “A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds,” or something to that effect.)  

*****

Image of 2004's transit of Venus

            An astronomical note:  Venus passes between Earth and the sun on June 5th, causing a visible dot of a shadow to traverse the sun’s disk from west to east.  The first bit of Wednesday’s Transit of Venus can be witnessed from North America as the sun goes down (the entire seven-hour event will be visible from Alaska, where the sun never really sets this time of year). If you’re at all interested, grab this opportunity: your next chance--and I use the second person advisedly--won’t occur until December of 2117.

            Tim and I learned about the transit of Venus from an episode of the third series of BBC’s “Inspector Lewis,” in which a bon-vivant Oxford don learns he has an inoperable brain tumor, returns to Mother Church, and jilts his long-time mistress, who then accidentally pushes him down the observatory stairs. (It’s a good series, ’way better than the schlock aired on this side of the pond.)

Jeremiah Horrocks observes the transit of Venus

One subplot pivots around Jeremiah Horrocks, the 17^th-century British self-taught astronomer and wunderkind (he died at age 22, his best-known achievement a proof that the moon’s orbit around the earth is elliptical), who first systematically observed the transit.  Horrocks’ thumbnail biography on the University of Central Lancashire’s Transit of Venus website tells us “[h]e was able to make three measurements [before the sun set on the village of Much Hoole, near Liverpool] and hence calculate for Venus its Transit path, angular size, and orbital velocity. He derived a value for the solar parallax, smaller than previously recorded, and so concluded that the Sun was further away from the Earth than thought.” Those three measurements also led him to postulate that Venusian transits occur in pairs, eight years apart, and then not again for more than a century (1631 and 1639, 1761 and 1769, 1874 and 1882, 2004 and 2012, 2117and 2125…)  

Some 75 years later, Horrocks’ work led Edmund Halley to call upon the international scientific community to compile their observations of the upcoming 1769 transit so that a greater understanding of the size of the solar system could be reached. Astronomers everywhere heeded Halley’s plea, giving rise to the first ever global collaboration and establishing the foundations of modern science.

All that from watching a little dot float across the sun. Mind-blowing, isn’t it?

*****

Other transitions are happening closer to home. 

What comes to mind when you think of the Bronx? Paul Newman’s grim movie cop in Fort Apache? Miles of blighted urban landscape glimpsed from trains entering and exiting Manhattan’s Grand Central Station? You might want to think again. June 2’s Gardening Gone Wild post tells of an Education for Sustainability partnership between Discovery High School, Rockefeller Center, the Cloud Institute, and visionary George Irwin’s Green Living Technologies (GLTi) that has transformed lives.

I recommend watching the three-minute video of Bronx teenagers planting and installing a green wall at the NBC Experience Store in Rockefeller Center, inspiring stuff at a time educational institutions in this country have lost their compass. When the last school bell rings, where does the current curricular goal of universal but artificially high levels of self-esteem leave kids who can barely read, are innocent of the basic principles of mathematics and science, have only a nodding acquaintance with history, are accustomed to receiving trophies for just showing up, and seem surgically attached to electronic devices? Education for Sustainability (as opposed to education about sustainability) might lead our over-praised, under-educated youth to make visceral connections between themselves, learning and their responsibilities to as well as their rights in the real world.

George Irwin

Gardening Gone Wild quotes Mr. Irwin (who uses as many parentheticals as I do): “The natural progression into education has allowed us to use the Mobile Edible Wall Unit (MEWU) as an educational tool. Celebrity teacher Steve Ritz (Discovery High School, Bronx NY) used the MEWU to improve attendance and achieve close to 100% passing regents scores. He credits the Edible Wall for engaging his students for bell to bell instruction.”

That's good news. Everything else aside, though, I want some MEWUs of my own. They would make nice additions to Toadflax Farm.

*****

Last Thursday's harvest

Speaking of Toadflax Farm, it’s transitioning too. If it doesn’t rain, I have to water everything every other day, the containers daily. Harvests trickle in, a colander-full at a time—tomatoes, peppers, cucumbers, green and wax beans, blueberries, blackberries. The peas have finished, and alpine strawberry yields dwindled down to nothing. It's time to plant the second bean and curcubit crops (which is where those MEWUs would come in handy). The squash and melons I planted on the arbor in the New Bed languished: not enough sun, I believe. Haven’t gotten around to planting the heat-tolerant lettuces yet: if only I didn’t have gainful employment and all my other, decidedly-ungainful-but-fun writing projects requiring time and attention to deal with as well!

Toadflax Farm on May 31

But. The poison ivy rash and accompanying Benadryl-induced stupor are gone for the moment (although I just read about a product applied to exposed skin before going out that allegedly deters urushiol from penetrating skin: I hope it’s not made of tar or bear grease. If I can remember where I saw it, I’ll check it out and keep you posted.) When I move slowly—which is my wont anyway—and take lots of water breaks, I can keep going in the heat. Three of four design jobs are done, presented and paid for. Only two clients still need their summer containers changed out; they’re both on the schedule for this week. I’ve decided on the latest direction the back garden will take, a blue, white and yellow billowy theme, and have almost completed assembling the plant list. Tim bought me a set of Ball canning accessories (head-room gauge and air-bubble popper, wide-mouth funnel, magnetic boiling lid extractor), so my initiation to the wonderful world of air-conditioned hot-water-bath food preservation awaits. My first batches of strawberry and blueberry jams came out runny, but they make yummy ice-cream sauces. Best of all, this spate of activity is forging new neural pathways in my brain, staving off dementia.

It’s all good.

            By the way, if you do plan to watch the transit of Venus, use proper eye protection. Nobody needs burnt retinas.

Thanks for dropping by.

                                                            Kathy

WANDERING THROUGH CRAZY TIME, HAZILY

            Fitzgeralds Gardening is busy these days, too busy for me to keep all the balls I’m juggling up in the air. We’re supposed to be working for a client right now, digging up her winter gardens and containers and setting up the summer show; instead, here I sit, enjoying the air-conditioning, typing away.

            I’d like to tell myself it’s because Tim hasn’t brought me my second cup of coffee yet, but that’s pretty lame: I’m sitting as close to the coffeepot as he is. Besides, cup numero dos just arrived.

            Actually, the reason for the circuitous path this post is taking is the Benadryl I’m scarfing down like peanuts to take the edge off the itch of my first significant case of poison ivy this season. Unaccustomed as I am to popping pills, antihistamines make me even less focused (read “stupid”) than usual. Never a revved–up go-getter at the best of times, I’m currently reduced to the status of a muddy puddle. (Why a muddy puddle? Because I like the way the words sound, that lovely assonance. Have I mentioned I’m a poetry reader?)

            Anyway. In an effort to convey some useful information, I’ve copied and pasted, in its entirety, Chapter 20 of my excellent but sadly unpublished book, modestly titled The Best Gardening Book Ever. I find the strictures of mathematics and whimsy of doodled illustrations soothing in my current addled state. With no further ado…

CHAPTER 20: FIGURIN’ FORMULAS

In the course of gardening events, it often becomes necessary to ascertain the square footage of an area in order to accurately estimate the amount of mulch or soil amendments you need. Occasionally a familiarity with calculating perimeters helps too, like when your wife sends you to Lowe’s to get enough edging for that new bed you’re going to dig when you get back. Yes, ninth- and tenth-grade math classes recessed long ago, but you’d be surprised at what Mrs. Tillinghast and Mrs. Taback managed to brand on your brain.

Area, or square footage, of any rectangle is simply length times width: A[rea] = ab; P[erimeter] = 2a + 2b. In the real world, however, gardening projects are seldom rectilinear. One strategy is to roughly block the space into contiguous rectangles and add the various areas together. This works okay if pinpoint accuracy isn’t too crucial.

Circles are another common bed shape. Remember pi? A.k.a. 3.14…, symbol π? (My youngest son has pi memorized to about a hundred places. On our first trip to New Zealand, as the plane sat on the tarmac in Auckland, four persons in spacesuits entered the fuselage and emptied the aerosol cans they carried all around the passenger compartment as we sat there, stunned and trying not to breathe. It was not a particularly welcoming experience, although it may explain why Sam, who was three months old at the time, turned into a genius. He certainly didn’t get it from his parents.) It—pi, not the charming Kiwi disinfect-the-foreigners ritual—comes in handy here. Where r = the radius of the circle, A = πr² and P = π2r.  

            Triangles occasionally come into play as well. Where b = base of the triangle and h = the height, A = bh/2 and P = a + b + c.

Alas, most garden beds are actually kind of blobby. To get an excellent estimate of an amoeba-shaped space, try this formula I stumbled upon in an issue of Fine Gardening years ago and have been using ever since. It goes like this:

Make a drawing of the space you need to know the area of—to scale if you’re not outside taking on-the-ground measurements.

Draw a straight line through the longest dimension of the bed; label the end points A and B.

Divide AB into segments of equal length. In our example, AB = 27’. I divided it into 3-foot segments (you could also use 9-foot segments, but there will be three times as many three-footers, giving a more accurate picture of the bed).

Measure the width of your bed at each segment-point perpendicular to AB. Label the line running through point A as S₁ and continue on through to point B, which in our example is labeled S₁₀. I know this is confusing. Just look at the next sketch.

Now it’s formula time. L = the number you divided AB by and S = the length of the perpendicular lines through the segment points. The formula is:

Area = L/3 [(S_A + S_B) + 2(S_3,5,7…) + 4(S­_2,4,6,8…)]

            In our example, the area works out like this:

A = 3/3 [(3 + 5.5) + 2(10 +10.5 + 16 + 17) + 4(9 + 9.5 + 12.5 + 18.5)]

A = 1 [8.5 + 2(53.5) + 4(49.5)]

A = 1 [8.5 + 107 + 198]

A = 1 [313.5]

A = 313.5 square feet, round up to 314 square feet

I don’t know why, but this formula provides amazingly accurate results. And, after the first time you use it, you’ll know the area of that oddly shaped bed in less time than it took to read this explanation.

            Once you’ve figured out the area of your bed, divide it by the number of square feet a unit of mulch/soil amendment covers based on the estimates below:

·         a 3-cubic-foot bag of pine bark nuggets covers about 10 square feet to 3 inches deep; a 2-cubic-foot bag, about 7 square feet

·         a 3-cubic-foot bag of shredded hardwood covers about 15 square feet to 2½-3 inches deep; a two-cubic-foot bag, about 10 square feet

·         an average-size bale of pine straw covers about 40 square feet to 3-4 inches deep (it’s fluffy by nature)

·         a 50-pound bag of Black Kow covers about 20 square feet to 1-1½ inches deep

(To mulch the blobby bed example above, I’d need 55 2-cubic-foot bags of pine bark nuggets, or 314 ÷ 7. Always round up.)

When edging, the following approximations will help you determine how much material you’ll need once you’ve determined the perimeter:

·         For standing-brick edges: measure how many units comprise a linear foot (bricks are usually three inches wide; ergo, 4 bricks = 1 foot) and multiply by the number of linear feet in the perimeter.

Rough estimates for various other materials:

·         1 ton of rip-rap ≈ 85 linear feet of edging

·         1 ton of widely spaced flagstone ≈ 64 linear feet of two-foot-wide path

·         1 ton of closely spaced flagstone ≈ 46 linear feet of two-foot-wide path

·         1 ton of wall stone (I’m talking veneers here) ≈ 50 linear feet of wall to 8 inches high

Now get out there and make your high school math teacher proud.

[End of Chapter 20.]

            This is as helpful as I can be this week, under the circumstances. I’m going cold-turkey on the Benadryl: by next week it will have cycled out of my system.

            Thanks for dropping by. Itchily yours,

                                                                        Kathy

CHATTER FROM OG

Dozens of flats needing care

            Business is booming. I’m pooped. As detail man for Fitzgeralds Gardening, my brain is overtaxed by client container and garden designs with plant lists complicated by the onus of pulling inspired substitutions out of my hat when grower extraordinaire Christine tells me she’s out of this or that pivotal specimen. Other self-imposed duties include keeping the dozens of flats on the south side of our house watered, cut back and perky-looking, and ensuring we bring the right plants to the right job. These activities fall on top of the first three design jobs we’ve landed since the Great Recession, reminders of how out of practice I've become with vellum and templates. And then there’s Toadflax Farm, where the produce is beginning to drift in, as are the kudzu bugs and the imminent threat of pickleworms.

            Have I mentioned that multitasking is not among my character strengths?

            Have I mentioned that lickety-split is not my favorite speed?

            Have I mentioned my occasional melt-downs?

Innovative Organic Solutions

             Had one of the latter this past weekend. Took the whole two days off, to putz and stare into space. I ignored emails, only turning on the computer to collect weather data and blog statistics, and to ascertain I had emails to ignore. I didn’t dust, vacuum or mop. I didn’t look at the pile of work on the drafting table, which we’d cleverly relocated from office/studio to living room during the winter so it’s harder to forget. Instead, I called my mom and nattered for two hours. I did laundry, an enjoyably mindless task. I leisurely hose-end-sprayered the farm with Growers Secret emulsion, because watering is fun when you’re not in a hurry. I knitted. I played cards (Solitaire’s my game). And I read.

            

            One of the things I read, cover-to-cover, was the June-July issue of Organic Gardening (OG). Always informative, the little articles bracketing the features ended up more dog-eared than usual this month. After closing the magazine with a contented sigh, it occurred to me that the information on those marked pages would make a good, if scatter-shot, blog post. So here it is.

Where Cabarrus County is in NC

            Page 22:  In rural Cabarrus County, NC, northeast of Charlotte, wannabe farmers get a chance to practice organic agriculture at the Elma C. Lomax Incubator Farm. No, these novices aren’t making incubators: rather, Don Boekelheide informs us, they are incubating themselves into sustainable producers of food, livestock and flowers for local consumption.

            Unsurprisingly, the idea of incubator farms first took root (haha) in that hotbed of self-sufficiency, Burlington, Vermont, back in 1990. By 2001, it had crept across the continent to Salinas, California. The USDA belatedly joined the party in 2008 with its Beginning Farmer and Rancher Development Program. These projects build participants’ skills and confidence with access to on-the-job training; land; animals; equipment; greenhouse, storage and packing facilities; and agricultural and marketing mentoring.

            Many farms provide both educational and hands-on volunteer opportunities for home gardeners as well; others “…report unanticipated interest” from this group of dirt-diggers, including full-time enrollments in their programs. Brings to mind my brief brush with commune living back in the ‘70s, only cleaner. And possibly not as cold, if one elects not to incubate in Vermont.

            Page 26:  “Homemade preserves with half the sugar and none of the fuss” promises Sara Foster in the subtitle to her article on making freezer jam. Since berries of all types are pouring into our kitchen from Lewis Farms of Rocky Point, NC, and since horrible memories of pre-air-conditioning summertime hot canning marathons make freezing my preservation method of choice, I’m going to give this one a go. Sara swears all you need is fruit, a potato masher, pectin, sugar, jars and freezer space.

            Page 62:  In the “Ask Organic Gardener” feature, Rose Rogers of Cary, NC, wonders if using some of her home-grown compost will improve her scraggly lawn. Well, sure, replies Cary Oshins of the U.S. Composting Council. It’s calling top-dressing, he says, and putting down a quarter-inch or so of screened organic matter benefits the grass by benefiting the soil. In the time-honored way of mavens, he goes on to outline the proper, officially sanctioned application procedure, and tacks on a recipe for compost tea that “… delivers some of compost’s benefits.” (Emphasis mine: seems like a whole lot of trouble to brew enough poo-water to drench an entire lawn area for only a fraction of the value of the exercise.) If you want to calculate how much compost you’d need, check out the compost calculator at the Composting Council’s website.

            Page 66:  Jessica Walliser, author of Good Bug, Bad Bug, offers a primer on the family of beneficial parasitoid tachinid flies. (Parasitoids end up killing their hosts in particularly gruesome ways, whereas your basic parasites don’t. Just in case you didn’t already know.) We differentiate these flying good guys (“good,” that is, if you’re not a host) from their ickier kin, the houseflies, by a) the dark, bristly hairs on the their abdomens should you manage to observe them up close; and b) the fact that they live in the garden as opposed to the house. While their cousins prefer garbage or whatever you’re having, all tachinid species eat nectar. So in addition to laying eggs on or in common pestiferous insects like grasshoppers, Japanese beetle grubs, gypsy moth caterpillars, cabbageworms, etc., tachinids also pollinate their food sources in the carrot and aster families. What’s not to love?

Hedera helix could kill your cat

           

           Page 68:  Did you know most pets only chew on plants when they’re bored? Did you know some plants that merely inconvenience dogs will kill cats? And vice-versa? Yew, on the third hand, is fatally toxic to dogs and cats, but not deer or birds. It’s a dangerous world out there for Spot, Kitty  and Flicka, says Ilene Sternberg, so check out the ASPCA’s website for a list of potential pet poisons.

            

That's one Red Admiral...

            Page 70:  Attention, citizen scientists—it’s time to count butterflies! Cristina Santiestevan lists five websites for Americans and Brits to access for getting involved.

Death to plastic nursery pots!

                        Page 76:  Finally, Katie Walker profiles five commercially available biodegradable garden pots. Made of materials varying from cow poop, ground-up spruce mixed with peat moss, and coir to rice hulls, bamboo, and newspaper, many can be planted directly into the soil, minimizing both transplant and landfill stress. Is that cool or what?

            So maybe you ought to go pick up a copy of the June-July Organic Gardening, if only to see what it was I didn’t dog-ear. 

            Thanks for dropping by.

                                                                                    Kathy

GETTING EDGY

May 5th's "supermoon"

            Speaking of edgy, try translating Sky-Guy’s sentence about May 5th's “supermoon” into words of two or fewer syllables: “This particular Full Moon occurs one minute after lunar perigee, and since perigee coincides with a Sun/Earth/Moon syzygy, it is the closest perigee for the year.” Here’s a hint: astronomically speaking, a syzygy (SIZ-ih-gee) is either of two opposing points in the orbit of a celestial body—specifically the moon—at which it is in conjunction with or in opposition to the sun.

            Did that help?

If There Is Something to Desire cover

            Syzygy, a word that looks Hungarian or Polish to me, actually derives from the Greek for “yoke.” It is also a term poetry scholars use for “a measure of two feet, as a dipody.” Because they don’t just say dipody (DIP-oh-dee, reminiscent of dippidydoodah), whose meaning is easier to ferret out (di=two, pod=foot), explains why nobody reads poetry. And nobody and his brother read poetic criticism. Who else but jargon-loving elitists would call the spaces between lines or stanzas “lacunae”? The wonderful Russian poet Vera Pavlova (whose first collection in English—If There Is Something to Desire—was published by Knopf in 2010) once wrote that postmodern poetry is merely “vulgarity trying to pass for irony.”

            Seems I’m a tad edgy myself today. Blame it on syzygy.

*****

Nothing makes a garden look more garden-ish than crisp edges. My favorite material for edging is the eight-inch-high, heavy-duty steel stuff botanical gardens use—five inches underground, three above, hunter green or chocolate brown, understated yet effective. The only place I’ve ever found it for sale is by mail-order. Each twelve-foot long section weighs in excess of a hundred pounds: prohibitive shipping costs as well as respect for UPS drivers make it entirely unaffordable unless you are, in fact, a botanical garden with a healthy endowment.

Over the years, Tim and I have tried a variety of less expensive products offered by home improvement stores and gardening catalogs. Most (excuse my French) suck. Pound-in plastic panels balk at obstructions in the soil and shatter should you pound too vigorously. The plastic coils (with the rolled edge to differentiate the top edge from the bottom, reminding me of how some old ladies at the Baptist Home used to wear their stockings) are a pain in the butt to straighten for installation. They also develop irremediable kinks, and heave out of the ground in places, making it look like you hired Mayberry’s Otis to do the job. (Our sympathy to Goober’s family, by the way.) Plastic also invariably deteriorates in the presence of ultraviolet rays, of which we have lots and lots here in southeastern North Carolina.

See what I mean?

 Moving on from plastic, those foot-long sections of cast concrete with the scalloped tops look doofy. I’m sorry, but it’s true. Because they sit on the surface of the ground, they tend to lean or fall over. Because they’re cast, the sides never join tightly. Even though curved sections are available, your ability to deviate from the rectangular is severely curtailed.

Next up—the wood blocks/pickets/faux stones stapled to rubber-like strips and the flimsy folding metal pretend-fence sections. These you might consider for a quick cosmetic fix when your more critical relatives descend on your homestead, but won’t last in the long run.

Okay, then, what’s more substantial? When Tim and I started in the business, we stacked a lot of landscape timbers. Pressure-treated to resist damp-rot and termites, when they lay flush against one another (once the rebar made it through the slightly misaligned pre-drilled holes and we’d wrestled the worst of the torques into temporary submission), the result didn’t look too bad. At least for the first two or three years. That is, if you don’t mind straight-ish eight-foot sections, curves remaining problematic.

(Some years ago, the Perfectly Safe lobby successfully applied pressure to prohibit the pressure-treating industry from using arsenic chromate as termite-icide. "What if our children chew on the playground equipment?" they cried. Like there aren't any other issues at work there. So now your timber edging only lasts five years instead of ten.)

For keeping poisonous substances from leaching into the ground—assuming you don’t consider lime toxic—and for preventing stoloniferous warm-season grasses from creeping into places they are not wanted, I like the extruded concrete that resembles curbing. Designed so lawn mowers can do their thing right up to the, um, edge, it is not exactly a subtle touch in the landscape. At upwards of eight dollars a linear foot, you also pay a premium for permanence. Back when we had a lawn, Tim and I defined the beds fronting the house and our big island this way. It saved me hours of pulling centipedegrass out of those areas, but it is awfully white.

Extruded concrete, fancy

Extruded concrete, plain

            Natural stone edging materials include granite rip-rap irregulars, smooth river rock (we used evocatively named turtle-backs at Gen and Ed’s house—see March 17th's "The End of Deer Is Near.") and Belgian block. I covered low formed-concrete-block walls as edging on April 21, in “The Great Wall.” Dry-laid veneer stone walls are another option, but only if you have a great deal of time and patience or the wherewithal to hire a mason.

Granite rip-rap

Turtle-back river rock

Dry-laid veneer stone wall

Neat, unobtrusive standing bricks

               Lately Tim and I have become enamored of standing-brick edgings, a relatively simple, unobtrusive and not-too-expensive technique. You dig a six-inch-deep trench, stand the bricks in it vertically, and backfill. For this dry-lay method, it helps to have: 1) a climate where the ground doesn’t freeze and heave; 2) sandy soil, which is marvelous for compacting itself around stationary intruders, such as fence posts, pergola legs and bricks; and/or 3) a hard edge to work against. If you lack any approximation of these conditions, consider mortar.

Client projects always result in leftovers, which, as reigning Recycling Queen of North Carolina, I bring home for domestic use. Tim used to call the messy pile of bricks and blocks my “snake house,” but he can’t say that anymore because I’m using them to make an eclectic edge around the New Bed.

I never claimed to be an artist, y'all

Everywhere else in our yard,  the Fitzes edge beds with English trenches, a labor-intensive-because-oft-repeated method with the signal advantage of costing only time. (English trenching means shoveling straight down around the outer edge your border, then making an angled cut from inside the bed toward the bottom of the straight cut, resulting in a V with a starboard list. See dinky illustration.) 

Eclectic recycled edging materials

With so many options to inspire us, gardeners needn’t allow their ornamental borders to wallow over into the lawn and vice-versa. Edging decreases weeding time, increases definition of that which you’d like defined, and imparts an air of caring and elegance to a landscape. If you’ll excuse me, I want to add a few more pieces from the snake house to crisp up the New Bed.

Thanks for dropping by.

                                                                   Kathy