Where Have I Been

It's been awhile, and maybe it shouldn't have been. As you can see by the square-formatted images below, I have been spending too much time working for Instagram. Much more of my warm weather time is spent repairing our house in the woods (prior post). Yet much of that work should be ending soon as we approach freezing.

I took a break -really forced myself to cease working on siding and house painting to make a visit to our neighbors, adjacent to our woods, on the southern edge along the powerline. Luck has given us great neighbors, a couple -half from Minnesota and the other half from eastern Pennsylvania. Their property was formerly part of a farm, as was ours, but ours was the woodlot and the wetland waste where old car parts, appliances, and other mysteries were dumped (ravines were farmers' dumping grounds).

 

We grow what vegetables we can in one hundred and forty square feet of raised beds in the sunniest portion of our front yard. The remainder of what we grow, including my garlic, happens at the neighbors' garden patch.  

 

  You’ll see some of my native and non native plants growing in rows here (for sale next spring!) and hard to believe -my first successful carrot (just one -is that success?).  

 

And the greenhouses -where I now have the pick of the last tomatoes which will be sauce as soon as I can get to it.

The balance created by visiting open space while spending much of my time within the woods is restorative. I grew up not far from the sea -I would go there whenever I needed that open space. The desert I lived in, now over twenty years ago, also provided it. Now, the neighbor’s cleared ten acres and garden patch does the same.

 

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.

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.

Sedges Have Edges, Rushes Are Round, Grasses have Nodes...

It all started with a blizzard that pushed us right into excessive heat of summer before May was out. We hadn't had more than a few hours rain over the month, so little that, with the heat, high sun, and drying wind, even succulents were bowing to the ground.

By Memorial Day, rising heat and moisture became the cauldron from which storms could manifest. 

 

Our woods and garden had accumulated three inches of rain by Tuesday. Another five eighths came later that day. This broke the drought, for now, and not everywhere, but in our woods. It also spared two climbing roses that we transplanted along with an arbor from a rapidly shading garden, on one of the hottest days, when rain looked immanent, but wasn't.

Was it the rain, or the freshly loosened soil under the trellis, that brought my first turtle sighting to our clearing in the woods? By early morning, this medium-large sized snapping turtle, Chelydra serpentina, made its way up the slope from one of many watery sites and began depositing her eggs directly beneath the newly moved rose trellis. By mid morning she was gone and around her clutch, Betsy installed a fence to keep out likely predation by raccoons (just steps away is a perma-puddle with not-so-little raccoon "hand" prints scrawled across the bottom). In fifty or one hundred and twenty five days the little ones may emerge from the nest.

The rain also gave a much needed boost to the garlic on both farms. Already stressed by the latest of winters, drought had begun to take its toll. The garlic is about the size it would normally be in early May, although the date is early June. The rain also gave boost to the mass of thistle, grass, and lambsquarters in this new plot, all weeded this past Sunday with one more weeding likely before harvest.

In the other plot, the weed profile is completely different: smartweed, bindweed, and purslane. The garlic is generally larger here, although still less vigorous than should be at this time, with many lost cloves of artichoke, turban, asiatic, and creole. In either of these two plots I picked up my first embedded tick, the wood type, as I wore shorts for the chore, something I have not done before. For all my traipsing around in the woods and elsewhere, I have yet, until this moment, to have a tick embed itself. In fact one would not anticipate that the garlic plots are where I would pick up ticks given how much time I spend in the woods.

In the year old savanna gardens a cool season grass has come up to fill the blanks readily and, although attractive, my suspicion is that it was unlikely to have been seeded with the shortgrass or savanna seed mixes broadcast in these sites a year and half ago. Nothing triggers plant weariness or all out blindness more than grass identification, but grass identification is often needed and difficult.

A last minute reprieve was handed out by the folks at Minnesota Wildflowers, a site dedicated to visual identification of native Minnesotan plants and those we find among them. In this instance, my picture post on their FB page lead to an ID a few days later, prompting me to immediately begin pulling. I hazarded the guess that it came with the poor quality straw purchased from a local farm supply. It was only in those areas where I had spread the straw for erosion control that the new weed, Cheatgrass, Bromus tectorum, as well as common oats had sprouted.

It's only then, after a positive ID, that traits of a weedy species appear to express themselves clearly. Each day since, I continue to find more inflorescence hidden among the other forbs and grasses. Like any impressive weed, this grass exhibits the ability to grow from the base of other plants and set seed at heights of only an inch. At the same time, this winter annual (cool season) grass can take advantage of rising CO², thereby increasing its biomass, indigestibility, and fire threat. Not long after, I begin to see other grasses that appear similar to Cheatgrass, but maybe taller or with smaller inflorescence, maybe smoother stems or less blue coloration in the leaves and stem. What then?

Can you tell the difference between these two grasses? Side by side, you may notice differences, but in the field grasses can blur together.

Spot the different grasses in there? From this picture, it looks to be all forbs, but it is likely 40 to 50% grasses. As the shortgrass mix I scattered here two winters back consisted of predominantly Side-oats Grama, Bouteloua curtipendula, and Little Bluestem, Schyzachyrium scoparium, a sensible guess would be that some of these grasses are present. Little bluestem is fairly easy to identify as a warm season, low growing, bluish bunch grass -not the predominant grass here.

Upon closer inspection, the grasses become more visible. Non-weed, perennial grasses tend to grow slower than annual weed grasses, but also slower than the annual forbs such as the first-year predominant black-eyed susan. In this second growth season, the grasses are making themselves known and the black-eyed susan are spread more evenly and less thickly. The site also has plants that I have cell-tray seeded and planted last summer and fall as well as more mature plants transplanted from other locations.

This grass, blooming now, is scattered through the site. It may be Fowl Manna Grass, Glyceria striata, but then again, I'm not sure. To become an expert in grass identification, one must make solid observations. The easy part is cool season, warm season or bunch or spreading, but in an ascending order of difficulty we have dull or shiny, pubescent parts or not, ligules formed this way or that, leaves folded or flat, sheaths fused or unfused, and on. It helps to know general things about a species, such as preferred habitat or weed status, but that only opens the door to more complex examination.

It is clear that the creatures appreciate these clearings repopulated with food and shelter. The milkweed planted two summers ago have begun to establish solidly among the grasses, monarda, goldenrod, asters, and much more.

These sites are a favorite of large and small dragonflies, monarchs, toads, and moths such as this Xanthotype species.

What's this? A new concept in contemporary landscape architecture? No, its a sheet of thick plastic designed to combat what was once grass, but now is one hundred percent creeping charlie, Glechoma hederacea.

It only took three years for it to go from sporadic lawn weed to total ground cover and the reason is largely due our garden choices. Putting vegetables in the lawn area, where we had our only sun, or making a hedgerow along the driveway edge created shade that charlie took advantage of. The wet weather over the last two years and our heavy clay soil worked well with our yard plans to bring us this new idea in lawns.

Why is it that a monoculture of grass is more desirable than a monoculture of charlie? After all, charlie feeds the bees and smells great when crushed (insert someone offering its medicinal value here). Is it a texture thing, a cultural, or visual thing? Lawn grasses, like charlie, are weeds around the world, but maybe we don't see grasses (remember grass blindness...). For us, a creeping charlie lawn comes down to at least three negatives: this "lawn" will always be the spring of more charlie invasions in the woods, the visual texture is off putting, and it's a pain to have to weed this out of every shady nook in the yard and garden.

Charlie hides out in the shady base of perennials, between stones, under dense shrubs, and just about anywhere there is shade and moisture. Its stolons spread in every direction, with a preference to run toward shade. At our place that means downhill, toward the woods, where it is becoming an increasingly problematic ground cover. Its seeds roll downhill in rainstorms and get stuck in clay-filled shoe treads, but worse is how its bits and pieces follow raked leaves onto slopes.

I have my eyes on several infestations, one of which looks not all that different from the lawn, but under the canopy of trees on a north facing woodland slope. In fact, charlie is giving garlic mustard that grows there a hard time, but the garlic mustard is much easier for me to eradicate, with or without its help.

After the plastic comes up this summer, the idea is to till the soil, add compost, and place thick sod in its place. It's a good idea if we do not grow vegetables here any longer. Maybe we should grow vegetables here, but add sand and brick between the raised beds? No matter what we do, charlie is instigating a lot more work and we've already plenty of that.

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.