Summer

Minimally sprawling, open pollinated cucumbers named Little Leaf -from Fedco Seeds. Well, they sprawl less than the Burpee cukes that went in last year, but if it weren't for some clever trellising, the would certainly have sprawled into the paths. They are now supplying about ten cucumbers (picklers) a day. In front, peppers and eggplant; both late producers. Behind, trashy solutions.

The plastic is in place to take out the creeping charlie. It will be removed in late August (late August is so close!) to put down sod. Why sod? The mat keeps out the weeds and minimizes a return of charlie. Here, where the planters were last year, we've had many seedlings of last year's vegetables. Growing up in a cool, moist winter climate, I'd never seen tomatoes sprout from last year's fallen, but in Minnesota's freezer like conditions -the seeds don't rot. We've got several of these in the plastic zone and many more were planted out at the neighbor's farm (where I keep the garlic -which is nearly all harvested).

Adjacent to the tomato is a snapping turtle's nest of eggs to be hatched, we hope, sooner than later. Betsy wants to leave a patch of soil for the mother turtle to return to yearly -but I'd rather it not be in the middle of the grass I'm about to plant. I suspect she'll find the bare patch of soil if I leave it nearby. Funny thing is that I never see any turtles around our place -yet I know there is a giant snapper living out there, somewhere, and then two dozen or so babies head towards the wetlands in fall.

The hydrangea -floppy top. Heavy, as soon as the first real rain hits them, over they go. This year they have been eaten by the deer, pom poms and all. Sometimes they enter the vegetable garden for a second course, should they not get their fill on hydrangea. They've also eaten down the thorny, climbing rose on the trellis -leaving only a full top above their reach. They eat tomato vines, cucumber vines, even buckthorn this year. At my neighbor's garden, they've not only pruned my tomatoes to an even sixteen inches and peppers to eight, they've consumed his giant pumpkin plant -spines and all, a first. They haven't touch the dino kale, potatoes, and garlic.

In summer, gardens do their thing -as do we. This year it is a medley of siding, painting, customer projects, teaching, and exhibitions. I see the work to be done in the garden and it must wait. Seedlings in trays suffer my inattention -yet I keep my eye on these things just enough for them to tug at my desire to do more than is humanly possible.

The front garden is being encroached on by the woods, particularly younger maples that quickly shade out sun loving plants. Oaks and ironwoods do not do this. It's hard to take down living creatures, but the maples will likely meet the chainsaw come late autumn -after I pick up a new chainsaw. The old Stihl croaked last year as I cleared a fallen maple from a path.

Around that front garden is a retaining wall into which I have been ever so slowly moving large stones. The soil is miserable under road bed stuff from last year's gravel driveway rehab. I've got compost to add to the mix, over there, in the shade, now two years old, waiting for my attention and a shovel. Afterward, maybe in autumn, plants will be re-organized to deal with the expanded garden.

One of two woodland edge prairie-savanna hardly-gardens I planted after the studio was finished. These change every year. Without a supply of fresh black-eyed susan seed, it looks rather green. Prairie seed mixes can be rudbekia lush, but the plant tends to diminish once shaded out by perennial grasses and forbs. It's a biennial, so the third season the profusion is limited to small, fuzzy leaves -often at the edge of where they showed up en masse the year before. Each season different plants dominate -this year will no doubt be asters and goldenrod, to the point at which I will likely be thinning them out. Lavender-colored Monarda fistulosa in the background.

The second prairie-savanna garden has a dumpster in front of it, so no pictures of that this summer. The dumpster takes in insulation, wood, old rotting siding and a window or two. I've been replacing siding, piecemeal, every warm season as I convert the house from the pukey-pink paint you can see in the background, above, to the umber-magenta grey visible in the foreground. This garden, along a path from a back door to the studio, is hosta-heavy, magically invisible to the deer thus far.




The brilliant, but less prolific (in these drier conditions ) than I wish American Bellflower, Campanulastrum americanum, is blue-purple in the background. To the left, the very prolific Blue Lobelia, Lobelia siphilitica, about to bloom and a black-eyed susan that found a way to full form.

Momento Vivere

Forty five days beyond the solstice in this coldest of states...

 ...buds form on plants dug up this past October.

The sun's elevation is high enough to energize plants placed below the sills of windows; the salvias and pelargoniums, the capsicum and rosmarinus.

In the long winter everyone has their coping strategy, but a good dose of sunlit snow, long blue shadows, and eager plants are a reminder at five degrees below zero.

 Pelargonium, otherwise known as geranium, will go into its third outdoor season, late this May.

Three weeks back, this pepper plant was profuse with blooms. Now it is, as far as overwintering peppers that were dug from the garden can be, profuse with fruit.

 The petals stick to the fruit without wind to shake or rain to wash them toward the ground.

Last year, this jalapeno, a thick and woody stemmed specimen twice ripped from its raised bed, produced winter flowers but no February fruit. It is now getting ready to produce flowers again. Time will tell if it is as up to the task as its cousin across the room. Two summers running, this pepper has produced a fine crop of jalapenos.

A long raceme of indigo blue flowers emerge from near-black calyxes seen in the second image above.

Salvia elegans, or pineapple sage, pushed into perenniality in my New York City garden, is now pushed into houseplant duty every October. We usually get a week or so of blooms in the garden beds before a freeze forces it into a pot, then into the greenhouse, then into the studio, and finally resting in the sunny south window, where it blooms in February, once again.

Blazing Star

Passing through the landscape planting at the entrance to the new Bell Museum, I was struck by the persistently pink among a tawny sea -the blazing star, possibly Liatris aspera -rough blazing star. 

Here, at age 18, is another persistently blazing star who brought to my young world wonderfully scented tea roses, cloches, lavender and hardy ageratum, spring tulips and daffodils, dunking (not spraying) for a nickle a critter, garden flowers not florists, cuttings and rooting, weigelas and azaleas, cinnamon and chocolate.

At 99 she confessed to me that she did not love my grandfather as much as he loved her, but had a good life nonetheless, and that was all she ever said of it. Life is always more complex than we let on, but why go on about it? She the flower gardener, he the vegetable "farmer," each had their spaces, their gendered roles distinct, yet the young me watched them work together, modeling togetherness, a value she held higher than her own contentment. At 100, Anna's first selfie, above.

Anna Steinert Meuschke (1915-2019) died on New Year's Day at the age of 103. 

In Stillness and Warmth There is Mosquito

On an unusual summer day I come to fully appreciate how little I venture into the hot season woods. Like winter, or maybe more so than winter, the summer time woods belongs to others. But on those two days, when temperatures plummeted into the fifties by night, only the sixties by day, with a supplementary breeze from the northwest, the woods invited my eyes and skin as if it were a day in early May or mid October.

Few mosquitoes made a stroll of getting to this laetiporous in the once wet middle slough.

How little I experience the woods in summer dictates my familiarity with its cycles of growth and senescence. On this walk I was thrilled to find plant species I have yet to see here, more vigorous growth than in the past, and less encroachment by aggressive species in some places. This could have been my own doing, attributable to three years of pulling garlic mustard, or was it the longer, cold winter that favors those that have evolved with it?

What I have experienced this year, one too busy with other activities to commit to the two month long pull, is roughly a ninety percent reduction in garlic mustard seedlings and a nearly one hundred percent reduction in second year rosettes. Why is this? Although it is tempting to enjoy the reprieve, it is more helpful to understand the process. Has our pulling had an effect? Or was it the temperature and frozen ground through out April (garlic mustard is some of the earliest of greens)? Is there a natural rhythm to biennial growth that gives way to an unproductive season?

This is not to say that there is no more garlic mustard in the woods, there is. A few lush, large-leafed specimens grow around the water line among large patches of Pilea pumila, clearweed, a native annual that sprouts in the heat of summer. Without the garlic mustard cover, it has been able to rise up from its own large bank of seeds in areas dominated by garlic mustard for years. Even the small patches of first year seedlings on barren slopes seem to be the exception proving the rule.

The swamp in the back has largely drained for the first time in three or more years. It is now a topography of muck covered in still-green duckweed shifting toward brown, nearly perfect growing conditions at the old waterline. The low water means we do not host wood ducks that have been in residence since we've moved here. The changing shoreline, three years wet, another dry, has created challenging conditions for almost anything, trees included, that isn't the nearly ineradicable reed canary grass, Phalaris arundinacea. If you do not know this plant, then it is likely not in your neck to the woods, yet. In the upper Midwest, where it is likely there are more pothole wetlands than anywhere else in the nation, it is still being planted as a wetland "forage" grass to make "useful" what was once too wet to grow anything a farmer might describe as useful.

Growing on the edge of the swamp: Pilea pumila, Leersia virginica, a few Bidens spp and Impatiens capensis

I was delighted to see these patches of healthy growth along the eastern swamp edge where the water line has receded. Now that the trees have died from inundation, more light enters here, giving a greater diversity of plants a shot at growing.

One of those plants is mad-dog skullcap, Scutellaria lateriflora.

Only a few stems and rhizomes at the edge of high water late last season, this mint is now such a prolific grower that, if I knew less, would think it could compete with reed canary grass. It is known to take advantage of disturbed sites, whether made or naturally occurring (this site is arguably human-altered). Although some have nosed out above the mad-dog, it has handily out-competed last autumn's planting of joe pye, iris versicolor, big bluestem, cardinal flower and verbena. Yet I accept this because, pause...it is a native.

 

Why is that? After all, ignorant of its origins, I might think this grass is doing a great job of greening up a mucky swamp of dead trees. It's the analysis that triggers concern, the conceptualization of homogeneous communities that also send up red flags, and maybe an aesthetics of bio-diversity that has me lurch into action.

That action can take the absurd form of a twenty by ten foot plastic sheet. Placed last summer to smother the reed canary grass, yet appears to have only made it stronger. Once the grass takes on these proportions it is impossible to eradicate by hand pulling. The dense mat of roots and rhizomes have such a tenacious grip that standing in the muck pulling on it produces a feeling of futility and a frustrating clump of leaves in hand. In placing my efforts elsewhere I may have to accept that what was once a forested vernal swamp is now, in wetter times, a clearing, an occasional pond, and quite soon a reed canary wet meadow.



Just up slope from the reed canary grass and mad-dog skullcap is a mighty patch of the weedy Canada thistle, Cirsium arvense. Whereas reed canary grass provides little support for other creatures, Canada thistle at least offers food for pollinators and birds. 

Despite the near drought conditions (you can still have one even when there are occasional heavy thunderstorm rains) that led to drying of the back swamp, water is flowing more heavily than is typical from the spring tree. Why is that? I have seen high water in the swamp with much less flow from this seep, only fifty feet from the swamp and about the same elevation, if not a few inches lower.

The spring tree seep is the only year-round flowing water in our woods, typically runs orange with oxidized iron fixed by iron consuming bacteria. Perfectly natural.


For us "coasters," where certain introduced insects, aquatic organisms, and plants have been around for generations, our relationship to them is different. Can you imagine the idea that Queen Anne's lace is an upcoming threat? How about the notion that your garden is suffering a never seen before invasion of Japanese beetles? Although some species are new to the area, plants like buckthorn have been spreading from yards and nurseries for long enough that a generation or two do not know what the woods looked like without it. In this slippage change becomes fixed and the concept of paradise is born as a way to process that faint, nearly imperceptible loss of the unknown.

Some images from around the new plantings...

American Bellflower, Campanulastrum americanum, tall, short, welcome.

Bottle Brush Grass, Elymus hystrix, great medium height grass in the shade.

Royal Catchfly, Silene regia, a red like the Scarlet Tanager, loved by humming birds, although not native to Minnesota, it does okay, if a little sickly in the leaf by flowering time.

We've had countless monarchs this year. They love the new plantings, as do swallowtails and more.

For about a month she rebuilt the web daily outside our kitchen window. Spider watching and dish washing -it's all the rage.

Side Oats Grama, Bouteloua curtipendula, or as I like to call it: Grandma.

The warm season grasses, unlike those of the lawn, have colorful flowers.

June

When something unexpected shows up I greet it with guarded curiosity. I peered and poked at the newly appeared grass in the year-old savanna garden, appreciating its attractive features with enough skepticism to keep me on the hunt for its identity. In a last ditch attempt to narrow down the genus (Bromus) to a species, I pestered the hard working folks at Minnesota Wildflowers with an uploaded picture to their Facebook page. Three days later I had an ID, Cheatgrass, Bromus tectorum. You may have noticed the Bromes - medium height, cool season grasses whose often gracefully drooping flower arrives in late May to early July. There are many Bromes, many have been introduced to North America as forage grasses, and some are likely to be willing hybridizers.

Grass identification may be the perfect activity to teach the art of observation. Multiple points of focus are defined to aid grass identification, but most of these (too many parts, too many names, too small a detail...) induce a foggy brain and willful blindness. And, as any skilled observer knows, one day you're sharp and another blurred. Impatient, I pulled all brome grasses, concerned that they could also be Cheatgrass. To end this craze, I plucked one specimen out and potted it up, placing it in the greenhouse. If allowed to go to seed, I thought, I may be able to see the difference in the details.

As it went, close observation of the object, once detached from its environment, allowed me to see difference that I had been blind to. Cheatgrass, Bromus tectorum, has long awns -the long, thin, pointed thread extending from the lemma while other Bromus in my savanna plantings have short awns or none at all.

This trait now clear, I was able to distinguish Cheatgrass from the Prairie Brome (Kalm's Brome), above, I seeded and planted last summer. Unfortunately, my blindness had likely led to the removal of many Prairie Brome plants before I nailed down this difference.

Pitcher Plant (flower), Sarracenia purpurea, in the bog at Cedar Creek Ecosystem Science Reserve.

Another tough identification was a new, singular plant with angular stem, tall stature, unusually-colored, small flowers that insects went wild for. Again, after being narrowed down by the folks at Minnesota Wildflowers, I could ID Early Figwort, Crophularia lanceolata, a potent pollinator attractant that is likely to return by self seeding.

This sloppy fellow caught my eye as it slowly climbed the remains of a Monarch-chomped Whorled Milkweed. I had seen several of these, earlier, at the base of irises and milkweeds being weeded in the front garden. Were they Japanese Beetle instars (but I hadn't seen these last year when there were so many JB) or had Colorado Potato Beetles finally discovered our potato patch (but there were no potatoes growing here, the eyes are black and the spots double on a potato beetle instar, plenty of which are available to see at a neighbors garden)? 

This picture, uploaded to Bugguide, helped identify a large lady beetle-like insect I'd seen in May. Swamp Milkweed Beetle, Labidomera clivicollis, was a good fit -that's the plant on which the beetles had been hosted. Further clicking led to an image of its instar -an exact match of my juicy milkweed climber.

Milkweed growing has been paying off this season, both in Milkweed Beetles and Monarchs.

When transplanting from another garden, especially one untended by a gardener, and doubly so when the specimen is surrounded by invasive Goutweed, Aegopodium podagraria, it isn't wise to plant with its original root ball soil. Several aggressively-spreading plants intertwine their roots or rhizomes with the roots of our favored plants and the strategy ensures their persistence by creating a home base for developing roots and shoots safely hidden beneath your favorite garden plants.

If you do rescue something, like this large Cimicifuga, from an invasive patch about to be sprayed with glyphosate, use a hose to spray out all soil from the root mass, combing through for anything that looks like it belongs to the weed you don't want to introduce. The roots, above, only partially cleared of soil, show an entangled rhizome of the offending Aegopodium -small, but enough to regenerate. Before I planted it, I thoroughly washed away any remaining soil, then disposed any foreign root or rhizome. Despite my effort, I question my choice to remove a plant so crowded by goutweed for planting at our place (although Aegopodium does already exist in our woods, introduced accidentally or planted I cannot say).

In other news, lots of ticks in the garlic plots.

Do The Right Thing...

...and plant some goldenrod, Solidago species, somewhere on your grounds. As I painted this portion of the house a few weeks ago, creatures of all stripes feasted. 

The bumble.

Sweat Bee, Augochlora pura (Pure Green Augochlora). I used to call them Christmas ball bees.

No pollinating insects ever seen on the mums. Is it because of the frog? I don't think so.

After the Solidago species decline, the asters, or what used to be called asters, take over where the goldenrod left off to provide insects with their last great bounty of pollen for the season. Here in the woods we have lots of, err, asters. I purchased Sky Blue or Azure Aster, Symphyotrichum oolentangiense, to add to the intense yellows of the mini prairie/savannah I planted at north eastern edge of the new studio building. I tray seeded Short's Aster, Symphyotrichum shortii, for shaded to partly shaded areas south of the building but under a large basswood tree. Then there are the many that grow quite naturally in the woods and more commonly, at its edges. I was close to naming them all, until they changed the names! 

Although a well-blooming sedum will give asters and goldenrod a run for their money. There was a record Painted Lady, Vanessa cardui, migration this year. A September day with sun could easily show dozens in the garden.

Sadly, not all Monarchs make the transition. This one had its wing in dried in a coil.

As I write we are well into autumn. This yellow leaf landing on the still immature iceberg lettuce nearly three weeks ago.

And my single summer sprouted green bean is producing a bounty -just one plant has provided plenty.