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.

 

How Do We Go From Here

The plants know, nine times out of ten, the right time to leaf out.  As warm as it is, as many days as it has been, those plants ill-equipped to fight off a hard freeze have survived by delayed emergence.

Many plants developed strategies for managing cold at emergence; the delicate appears tough. A dose of anthocyanin may (or may not) inhibit freezing water within young leaves of columbine.

Garlic mustard in the lowlands, where the soils are wet, show significant purple coloration where the mesic, upland colonies do not. Those in the lowlands are often frost heaved, repeatedly, as the late winter progresses to early spring. This is the best time to pull lowland garlic mustard as the frost heave aerates the underfoot, easily compressed wet soil.

There is no shortage of venturesome Old World garden plants. Besides England's Creeping Charlie, which appears to grow at length under the snow, there is Russia's loved Siberian Squill, above. Lamium maculatum is found in all corners of the world and our woods. Later in our season, the European Bellflower and Eurasian oxeye daisy. The problem isn't from whom or where these came, but how to manage what we must live with, now that it is here.

Iris reticulata, planted last November. Could these little beauties be just as versatile and productive as those already mentioned? Does the mature gardener ask why certain plants are necessary; do they seek out only those from a New World palette? How do convenience, apathy, desire, culture inform our choices? For each choice there are positive and negative consequences, understood and misunderstood. What strategy do we have for making good decisions among so many emotionally ambivalent and intellectually challenging choices?

We have choices, but can make only one decision. Who's in that four jet plane, traveling well above my head? Are there five people aboard, or three hundred? Do we need to fly, should we tour the world? Who are we if we stop? We won't stop.

The sun sets late now. It has been dry, very dry, with no appreciable rain in weeks. I notice the sunlight on an oak twig shaken free by windy days.

Plastic laid on the septic slope to solarize the weed field it has become.

I take a lap around the house, stopping to notice the lattice rehab I recently completed. Framed by the rose trellis, I do not see the house as much as I see all the projects I have done.

1. Railing rehab 2. Build new railing 3. Jack up porch to attach new posts to concrete piers 4. Rebuild lattice 5. Replace sheathing, reside and paint 6. Build new, but lower, deck 7. Replace rotten door sill and and rotten door 8. Solarize creeping charlie, regrade, and install sod 9. Move climbing roses out of shade 10. Remove hydrangeas from south side of house and replant as a hedge along the driveway 11. Frame raised beds with cedar boards and add chips 12. Remove and replace rotted deck boards.

The house lapped, I pause to look at the lattice rebuild in the back. The setting sun warms the old pink still present under the porch, setting off the grey we chose to replace it.

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.

The Slough

A busy life, the return of mosquitoes and then the ever more aggravating deer fly, have kept me from the woods -through which I must pass to get to the back slough. The slough, a small natural woodland basin bordered on its west by an old gravel pit, has become wetter over the last decade. Prior owners of the neighboring pit decided it would be more useful filled and so introduced a stream of trucks dumping their fill.  We believe this raised the water table and is the reason our woodland vernal pond supporting silver maples and green ash has become a permanent swamp; one that has dried, only temporarily, a couple of years out of ten. The last of the trees within its bounds has died and the aggressively spreading, wet soil tolerant canary reed grass has taken hold in the newly sunny slough.

Yesterday morning a meso-scale storm passing just to our north provided a strong draft and mosquito-free window to pass through the woods. The last time I gazed upon this rapidly changing two acres it was a pond pushing beyond its bounds. Now, the lower water table of summer has changed it to a burgeoning meadow; the remains of duckweed sitting on a crust of drying muck.

Canary Reed Grass, Phalaris arundinacea

Although I seeded a portion of the slough in December with what is called a detention mix, I'm not surprised to see an abundance of human-bred, hybrid canary reed grass, Phalaris arundinacea.

It is a surprise to see the blue flag, Iris versicolor, I planted two years ago continuing to bulk up, maybe even thrive, despite the competition from so much mad dog skullcap, Scutellaria lateriflora.

This sedge, "weeded" out of a wetland edge of a nearby lakefront residence, has begun to transform the northwestern edge of the slough. I hope to see it "make a stand" against the encroachment of canary reed grass.

I purchased seeds of another grass, prairie cord grass, but have been hesitant to distribute the seeds. It is a native, warm season slough grass that I intended to use as a foil to the cool season canary reed grass. Like canary, it spreads by rhizomes and can be aggressive. Although it grows all over Minnesota, further reading led me to think that the six to eight foot grass may not be the right choice. I'd rather be out ten dollars in seed than dealing with another grass, not currently present, that then spreads too widely. My curiosity, however, gets the best of me -I have tray-seeded a few to see how they grow.

As more storms approached from the north, I pressed on toward the little wetland to see how it has changed since the high water of late spring. Water sheds from the surrounding moraine, draining through two gullies, then filters through two wetlands to pool at the bottleneck that leads to our driveway culvert. Earlier this spring I cleared the growing stand of buckthorn from the floodplain surrounding the bottleneck. Dying ash and falling box elder have opened the canopy here, letting in more sun.

In early June I made an attempt to slow the spread of canary reed grass weakened by five weeks of flood waters. Wearing knee high rubber boots, I cut any grass growing along the perimeter of the open water with a weed trimmer. Although it has come back now that the water has receded, it has done so less vigorously -a rather minor victory. If I want to maintain open water here, or better yet, introduce sedge and other wetland plants, I'll need to continue to fight back the canary reed grass which has a stranglehold on much of the small wetland.

Last Saturday I spent an hour at a nearby natural landscape contractor's end of season native plant sale. Most of my purchases (only $2.50 per plant!) were infill for my prairie plantings, but I did buy a couple of wetland plants. Above, ironweed, Vernonia fasciculata, has a wetland indicator status of facultative (FACW). This means it usually occurs in wetlands -66 to 99 percent of the time. This wetland status and my failure to grow it successfully in my dry Brooklyn garden led me to choose the flood plain as its new home.

My other purchase, broad-leaved arrowhead, Sagittaria latifolia, has a wetland status of obligate wetland (OBL) which means that it occurs in wetlands nearly 100 percent of the time. This plant prefers standing water and at least partial sun, so I placed in the pool that collects at the bottleneck, a stones throw from the ironweed.

We've been in a very wet period, receiving several inches of rain over the last two weeks. The tropical air and daily storms are expected to last through the week. Over the last 24 hours we've received over 3 inches of rain, and another three plus within the last ten days, bringing the water table back up to where it was in late May. This morning, braving the mosquitoes, I ventured to see the arrowhead I planted two days back -but it is missing, most likely it has tipped over into the muck under the rising water.

Winter Seeding

Our first snowstorm was brewing on top of an inch that had fallen two days prior. Although there was much to do, I paused to get out to the back swale, once wet, now dry, to scatter the seeds I had collected.

The roughly two acre swale, either artificially created by gravel mining just over the property line or an artifact of the terminal moraine on its northern flank, used to dry up each summer, enough so that tree species accustomed to periods of water logged soil could still grow to sixty or seventy feet tall. These trees have now died, the largest within the last three years, because of permanent inundation.

This year, another change had taken place -the swale dried down. The spring tree which drains the area continues to flow and a walk through the swale could still leave you suctioned to its wet bottom, but the hummocky surface is dry, the duckweed a gray mat. With that had come an incredible explosion of canary reed grass, the cool season, hybrid grass created for just this type of environment. In two short months the grass multiplied its square footage by ten and left little room for intervention by this woods gardener.

Canary reed grass or reed canary grass, Phalaris arundinacea, is terribly hard to remove -more so than garlic mustard, buckthorn, and creeping charlie combined -for its wet soil, its nearly impenetrable mat of fibrous roots, its rhizomes and seeds. Although developed for haying wet ground, wild animals do not care for it. Yet here, it is clipped, but I cannot recall whether I clipped it in preparation for some type of management or it has been grazed by deer this late autumn. If it was deer, that would be unusual.

I will not be able to remove the reed grass, nor do I intend to spray glyphosate on it. I've tried plastic tarps, but there are now too many woody obstructions over a region much too large for that. My plan is to seed this open area, ahead of the advancing grass, in hopes of some species gaining a foothold. Only if the pond does return, to its last maximum, will the open water push the mat of grass back to its edges.

If the pond does not return, this wet meadow may have a limited number of species capable of growing alongside canary reed grass. I've seeded blue vervain, Verbena hastata, common milkweed, Asclepias syriaca, swamp milkweed, Asclepias incarnata, various asters and goldenrod, and a bit of big blustem. I had two dozen blue lobelia, Lobelia siphilitica, starts remaining from the late summer planting, roots still alive, that I dropped in the hummocks under the snow. And in late September I planted dozens of Spotted Joe Pye, Eutrochium maculatum, more blue lobelia, and several other species I cannot recall at the moment along the more shaded swale edges where the canary reed grass had yet to overtake.

City House Country House

When I lived in NYC, which has been most of my adult life, there was gardening to talk about. This may have been due to how little gardening was truly going on. There was time for talk, for idle thoughts, for chit chat. There was standing on the corner, taking waves and how you doin', little to the garden footprint but such large human imprint. There were complaints that people could relate to (really, diapers on the hydrangea, again?). Glitter faced prostitutes offering assistance, Russian emigres with effortless tongues, kids who saw onions in tulip bulbs, landlords with teeth to gnash, unskilled laborers who knew how to dance in a garden, familiar weeds, oceans and peas, garlic and sand, and the sticky, salted skin when the onshore turned in for the evening. There were myriad plots across countless yards, tree pits, sidewalk strips, and undeveloped dreams. People have a passion for growing things in the city because the passion is on parade, is persistently evident from the walk to the subway, from overtures to our agrarian past on highrise rooftops to the panacea of the hyper-local, from the artist-led food garden to that curious moment when enthusiasm ran wildly into a business growing food in your backyard. The city a counterpose to the garden, an architecture for the gardening posture, a context that convinces us that a garden is the cure when it is merely a salve.

I now garden in a different context, one that is younger to the white man, but has seen its share of rapaciousness. With enough trees around even I can convince myself that my place is not an island in a sea of suburban plant homogeneity and millions of acres of either corn or soy. The optimist will extend the metaphor to an archipelago, but little more. To garden on the scale of fifteen, even thirty acres is an arrogance, and so me at my most arrogant goes about gardening the woods, weeding the woods, fretting over the rising and falling water levels in various swamps and wetlands, watching opportunistic plants move rapidly into space available, making plans and haphazardly executing them. This is to say nothing of the vegetable growing, the cultivated gardens or lawn and shrubbery that make up much of the country house.

Despite all that is going on, all that there is left to do, I have come to accept that there is not much time to talk about it. Exposition is the garden work of the city house.

In defiance of this conceit, I offer a picture of the country house -its autumnal prairie-ish planting east and north of the studio. Now in its second summer, many new plants have begun to mature. The pollinating and predatory insects love it, although the birds enjoy the much simpler savanna-ish planting on the building's south side. The deer all too much love the woodland planting on the west side of the building, now under revision. 

This week I'm in the middle of expanding the prairie-ish as I restore our one thousand foot gravel driveway, a process that includes digging drainage swales alongside the drive, loose soil slopes covered in burlap, winter seeding and fall planting of woodland natives I'd started last spring, moving boulders to shore up one or two hundred square feet of new cultivated garden space, and a whole hell of a lot of 3/4" minus crushed red limestone spread by myself in a track loader that will then be compacted by Betsy with a vibratory plate.

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.