Garden Rant

You Can Plant It day? Safe to Plant day? Plant Now day? Got a better idea?

There should be a catchy name for it, like Super Tuesday or Black Friday. Isn’t the day when it’s safe to plant out annual flowers and young vegetables just as important as a primary that may or may not mean anything, or a day when shopping is like fighting for the last seat on the last Titanic lifeboat?

But there isn’t a name. Perhaps the fact that this date changes from zone to zone—and in some zones does not even exist—has something to do with it. I don’t know about you, but the day when we can plant feeling relatively secure from frost is a pretty big deal around here. The nurseries have great fun teasing us, filling their indoor spaces with diascia, pelargoniums, ipomoea, coleus, heliotrope, and petunia. “Look but don’t touch,” they say, “Don’t even think of buying these before … drumroll … MAY 15!” Out of sheer frustration, we end up buying about 6 flats too many of the short-lived pansies that are the only annuals they’ll sell (see above).

Meanwhile, it’s even scarier for our little tiny seedlings. When to risk exposing those to a possible 35-or-under night?

It used to be later. Memorial Day was the wisdom. But now, May 15 seems fine—as far as recent experience goes—and none too soon in terms of the seedlings I have from my mail order purchases. These really seem to detest their cramped black plastic quarters. Worse yet, I have colacasia from Bent and Becky’s that have been sitting in a sunny room for maybe three weeks.

Dates are so ridiculous and arbitrary in this context; anything can happen at any time. Yet, I feel absurdly comforted by the oft-repeated mantra of May 15. I know I will be planting on that day.

It should have a name.

WEIRD weather

We've broken all the records in Buffalo (it got up to 90 in some areas of WNY yesterday) and I wonder if others are experiencing some of the dryest, hottest days in April they've ever known.

It's difficult to rant about such a thing—aside from the pleasure of being outside, I'm a month ahead on most gardening tasks—but it is disturbing.

The scene above depicts one of the few times I have ever seen daffodils standing upright in my front yard. Normally, these would be bending low with broken stalks or just laying face down in the mud, having succumbed to freezing rain or whatever. So this is the way they're supposed to look—interesting.

Tom Spencer on the soul of the gardener

by Susan
One of many highlights of the Gardenblogger Spring Fling in Austin was the talk by the beloved local gardening guru Tom Spencer.  (Here's my rave about Tom's site, Soul of the Garden, which won the 2007 Mousie for Gardening Site of the Year.) The talk, "Gathered Stones: Garden Memories," took us to a higher plane, and considering that we were already high as kites on the natural beauty of the Lady Bird Johnson Wildflower Center, that plane's an awfully nice place to hang out.  My frantic note-taking yields these snippets:

Gardens are human creations, not acts of nature.  Gardeners are creative people, who "try to do good by our little patch of earth."  (Great explanation of what I call "eco-gardening".)   

We're taught to discount miracles and wonder, and Tom sees even 7-year-olds who are jaded. For kids to develop spiritually, they NEED connections with nature.

Gardening is a spiritual activity and gardeners make the world a better place (no argument there).

He's a "follower of Christ, but not a Christian; a follower of Buddha, but not a Buddhist."

Paying attention is central to spirituality, though in our culture it's a "countercultural activity."

Tom recommended to us: "Ordinarily Sacred" by Linda Sexton, Last Child in the Woods by Richard Louv (a friend of his), and the poems of Mary Oliver.  He didn't just recommend Oliver's poems, though.  He read - with a lot of heart - her "Summer Day," my favorite line of which is "I don't know what a prayer is.  I do know how to pay attention."

And Tom got no disagreement from this crowd of gardenbloggers when he asserted that gardeners make the world a more beautiful place - something that's not to be discounted - and that gardenbloggers then go and share it all on the Web.  Lord knows we try.

__________________________
Pam Penick's posted our big group photo with Tom just after his talk.  Here's the link - notice how serene we all look?

Does The World Need 318 Pages on Compost?

My approach to compost:

1.  Chop the stuff up as best you can.

2.  Put it in a pile.

3.  Wait.

So when The Complete Compost Gardening Guide arrived from Storey last week, I wondered:  Is composting really this difficult?  Do we actually need 318 pages--printed, by the way, on glossy, probably-not-recycled paper--to tell us how to compost?

I'm not so sure.  If you are a complete novice, and you're going to jump right in and plant a very large, ambitious garden, you probably need to school up on compost quick. This book will tell you everything you will ever want to know, but it might overwhelm you, too.  We are talking about rotting muck, after all.

The book, written by garden writers Barbara Pleasant and Deborah Martin  (no blog, exactly, although there is a blog-ish update page here) covers the basics: the benefits of compost, how to build a bin, what goes in a pile, worm composting, compost tea, cover crops, soil biology, etc.

There's not much new here, and it seems like the authors, realizing that, came up with new names for familiar techniques. Sheet composting (already re-branded as Lasagna Gardening ten years ago) becomes "Comforter Compost"; worm composting is called "Catch-and-Release Vermicompost", and a hot compost pile is called a Hospital Heap.  There are lots of other names:  Pits-of-Plenty, Composter's Conduit, Cathole Compost, Honey Hole (no jokes, please),  Pampered Pit (OK, now you've got me doing it), and so on.  There are chapters on tools--it even covers buckets--and on plants that grow especially well in compost (tomatoes, beans, etc), but those chapters feel like filler.  It's not enough information to make this a comprehensive guide to gardening, but more than a book on compost really needs.

As a person who felt perfectly justified in giving the world 223 pages on earthworms, I feel a little funny  suggesting that this hefty compost guide is overkill.  It's reasonably priced at $19.95 and it really and truly will be the only book on compost you'll ever need.  But I could do without the gimmicky names, and if some of those extraneous chapters had been tossed on the compost pile, it could have been whittled down to an even more reasonable $14.95 for a smaller, less overwhelming treatise on what has always been, for me, the most simple, rewarding, and interesting part of the garden.

Plant Amnesty: the crazy plant people of Seattle have banded together - to teach

by Susan
Here's how it happened.  I asked for good regional websites and you recommended Plant Amnesty in the Seattle area.  Turns out it's way more than a website - it's a whole damn movement, so naturally I got caught up in it. (Hey, gang, let's have a march on Washington - you can all crash at my place!)

WHAT THE HECK IS PLANT AMNESTY?
It's the brain child of a very cool missionary for better pruning named Cass Turnbull.  She's listed on that link as "Our Founder" but it takes more than organizational skills to start a group with this mission: "To end the senseless torture & mutilation of trees & shrubs."  (What else does it take?  A big, crazy personality, I'm guessing.)

But just like any normal nonprofit, Plant Amnesty has actual staff, officers, and a quarterly newsletter. Upon joining, they'll start calling you a Photosynthesizer Sympathesizer (as in "Welcome, you're a...!") and you'll have access to the members-only info on their website.  Members who are local to Seattle can also attend their workshops and use their referral service to find landscape professionals who've passed the Plant Amnesty test about horticulture and pruning.  Currently there are over 900 members in 46 states. 

THE DVD
Located as I am on the opposite coast from Cass and her gang, my favorite thing about joining was receiving Cass's DVD "Six Solutions to the Overgrown Yard," aka "Pruning Horrors and the Pruning Micro-Course." I watched all 111 minutes of it because she's a hoot, and a damn good teacher.  Sure, the video includes those little drawings that demonstrate correct pruning practices but the fun part is Cass's photo collection of the worst abuses in pruning, some of which you see here. 

WHAT CASS HAS TO SAY
I managed to catch Cass indoors long enough to ask about her certification and referral program for landscape professionals.  Anyone questioning the need for it might be surprised by her sober assessment that "80 percent of the people in the business of gardening don't know what they're talking about."  Ooh, that's bad.  And Seattle homeowners have a way to find the other 20 percent but what about everywhere else?

Another reason to use compost

Those of you who regularly read Waste Management and Research already know this, but it was news to me that compost can reduce greenhouse gas emissions if applied to agricultural soil. The compost would increase the carbon in the soil, and, as the article, which I found via Science Daily, says

Carbon sequestration in soil has been recognized by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change and the European Commission as one of the possible measures through which greenhouse gas emissions can be mitigated.

Although I don’t have enough arable land for my gardening to be considered agricultural use, some of us are growing a lot of vegetables, and just as creating mini-native-habitats can help with biodiversity, perhaps capturing these small plots of carbon may help mitigate emissions.

Not that I need to be convinced about compost, but it's interesting.

Substitutes

My view of humanity is not terribly lofty, maybe because I've spent so much of the last fifteen years staring downwards at the juncture of shovel and soil.  But I'm convinced we're mostly animal and driven by instinct to do a few essential things, like eat well, have sex, chatter, and garden. 

Unable to do any one of these, my theory of human nature continues, we get slightly tweaked and seek out alternatives that are generally unsatisfying and sometimes full-blown self-destructive.

The problem is, if you're like me and believe gardening is entirely necessary to the proper functioning of both mind and body, how do you replace it in a climate where from December through most of April gardening is impossible?

1. Bitterness and craziness is one alternative.  I do enjoy some of this in winter.  I spend a certain amount of time walking around and fuming about the unfairness of life and the futility of all effort, before recalling that nobody in my immediate family is sick, my children are sweet, my husband's still good for a few laughs, and there's always shopping for antique light fixtures on eBay.

2.  Hibernation.  A really appealing alternative that doesn't work for me, since there is always somebody in my house yelling for a sandwich or wanting to know where their socks are.  Life has not allowed me a nap since I was four.  I think I'm okay with that.

3.  Chickens. I loved having them in the backyard because shoveling out their coop was the only January activity that felt actually gardening-like.  I got rid of them because of a problematic neighbor, who then divorced, sold his house, and disappeared into the sands of history.  Must get that chicken operation going again.

4.  Winter sports.  The New York Times recently ran the ultimate "just do it" piece that argued there is simply no reason not to get out and move, even in the coldest weather.  I'm not a skier, though I can see that that's coming, since my older kids are avid downhillers.  But in middle age I have become a wildly enthusiastic ice skater.  I have no idea what I'm doing--hated skating as a kid and never learned--so I can't stop, can't skate backwards, can't always avoid crashing when there's a child down in front of me.  But I can go happily forwards and around a rink for hours at a time, and since I apparently have the depth of mind of a goldfish, that's exhilarating.

5.  Dreaming about moving to Portland, Oregon.  I've never been there, but it looms large in my imagination, as a kind of year-round gardening Valhalla.  The problem is, I love my part of upstate New York, which manages to combine tons of culture with tremendous natural beauty, wonderful people, and cheap but charming real estate. 

6.  Getting out of the house.  The New York Times also ran a piece last week about a winter-blues-fighting program at the Brooklyn Botanic Garden.  The psychotherapist who leads it does NOT instantly bring the legions of Northeastern depressives into the greenhouses--which seems like the obvious choice to me--but instead forces them to stay outside and notice things in the open air, on the theory that lack of sun contributes to foul winter moods.

Still, all this stuff is plastic spoons and naugahyde, barely enough to keep a person on the straight and narrow.  It really is a wonder more of us cold-climate gardeners don't commit crimes or bundle subprime mortgages or get large tattoos. 

I hate being a gardener in winter.  But it's better than not being a gardener at all, because most of those poor souls suffer from the winter blues all year long.

A green cube of one’s own

It’s one thing to play about with indoor gardening when you know the real thing will be outside your back door in a couple months. It’s quite another to deal with the year-round, day-in, day-out sterility of the office cubicle. Yesterday, Victory Garden, the PBS stalwart that's been around long before any of the HGTV crap we like to complain about here, had a short segment on how to green-up a standard office workspace. I took note, because, unlike some of our luckier readers and Ranters, I actually have to report to such a gulag (an office with a door, thank god) five days a week for at least eight hours a day.

Many plants seem to do quite well in office spaces. I wonder if it’s all the fluorescents; certainly the cultivars in my home plant room seem to be thriving under them. The Victory Garden segment was about a makeover of a typical—well, worse than typical—cubicle, all white resin, or plastic or whatever they make these modules out of. The plants chosen were sansevieria (mother-in-law’s tongue), schefflera (umbrella plant), bromeliads, ficus elastica (rubber plant), and some other smaller cultivars, including phalaenopsis orchids. Then they added photographs and lined the cube with some fake turf, which looked pretty good, though it wouldn’t be my choice. They also demonstrated some nifty watering devices to handle the plants during vacations and other absences.

In my view, the best plant for an office space should be somewhat large—really, any inside plant needs to be imposing to make an impact. (I realize smaller flowering plants like African violets and cyclamen end up looking prissy, though I still like them.) The large sansevieria and schefflera in the segment were effective. Even philodendron can be fun; I have a couple that actually attach and crawl up the walls of my office until impeded.

One way to pull it all together—and they did this very nicely on the show—is to include photographs or paintings of plant subjects. They had close-ups of veined leaves. I have mixed media paintings of trees. You have to look at it this way: many of us spend a hell of lot of time in these self-selected prisons. Filling a cube with plants might be one of the cheaper and easier ways to make it livable and healthy. I've been gardening in my workspace for eight years now. How about you?

The image above is from the Sensevieria Films website. Nothing much to do with plants per se, but they seem a cool indie group.

What the well-dressed farmer in Japan will be wearing

Hey, all you creaky-jointed boomer gardeners out there. Scientists in Japan have you covered. Literally. This robot suit includes 8 motors in a rigid resin frame that give a power assist to farmers trying to pull huge daikons out of the ground or performing other chores that cause strain on the back, waist, hips, and arms. They also refer to it as a robotic exoskelton.

Ok, that’s all I know. Most of the info seems to be in Japanese.

Via Boing Boing and (who else) mentee/much-time-on-hands Ron.

Crazy gardeners in Buffalo spotted planting bulbs in January

This will surely be the test of the theory that bulbs planted too late in the season—or, really, after the season is well over—will have difficulty settling in for a spring bloom Our local über-gardener Gordon Ballard took advantage of two days of 60-degree-temps last week (I had to work, dammit) to plant a half dozen perennials, replant a climbing rose, and plant well over 300 bulbs. That brings his bulb count well into the four-figure range.

Sadly, the warm spell had receded by Wednesday, but it was enough to get rid of the snow and we’re still in the high 30s. Makes me want to get out there and at least throw some mulch down. Or something.

That's quite some bulb auger he's got there.