There's a Rebel in Every Pack

The new seeds were supposed to look like this....

It's true for people as well as plants - there's a rebel in every pack! Thanks to my friend Lisa Ritchie for the title for my essay today written for Main Line Gardening, in which I celebrate the surprise of a new and different Gaillardia among the 100 seeds that were supposed to be alike.

When I bought the seeds, I expected 100 identical plants. But nature had another thing in mind and provided me with one unique plant. I have choices; I could rip it up and insist on my little pink border being "perfect," or I can celebrate the unique and different. I can rejoice in the new and exciting.

I choose to rejoice. Celebrate with me!

...but I got a little of this...and that....lemon yellow REBEL Gaillardia

And if I get seeds? Yes, I'll share...but I can't guarantee they'll grow true. Maybe yours will yield surprises, too!

Please enjoy my essay on Main Line Gardening's website - There's a Rebel in Every Pack.

And yes, the picture is of my latest rebel...

Petunia Pizzazz

I managed to score a whole bunch of "Wave" petunias as well as many other types at Lowe's yesterday, each for 50 cents a pot. They're going to need some TLC, but I think they will recover quite nicely.  Below are photos of the last batch I rescued from Lowe's discount rack. A little water, a little talking to and some love, and lo and behold, abundant flowers!

With 3 inches of rain this past week, my garden is green and glorious just when Virginia's hottest summer weather rolls around.  Thank God for rain!


Enjoy the petunias...once the stragglers recover, I'll photograph them too.

Last petunias 'rescued' from the discount rack, and looking good!

Start Thinking Spring: Squirrel and Deer Proof Your Tulip Bulbs

Think spring! My latest article provides several humane ways to discourage deer, squirrels and rabbits from destroying your tulips bulbs.  And if all else fails? Plant daffodils!

Please click the link below to read the full article: Gardening Tips-Critter Proof Your Spring Flower Bulbs

What? Are You Crazy Adding Plants to the Garden Now?

Yup. Totally crazy. Actually....no.

Adding plants in July is fine IF you commit to watering twice a day and sometimes even shading them during heat waves.  I wrote an essay today for Main Line Gardening, the online gardening community hosted by Giverny Gardens, and talked about all the great reasons for adding plants to the garden in midsummer. Yes, there are reasons - great ones!

Please click the link to enjoy my essay:  Adding Plants to the Garden Now

The Experience of Fresh Peaches

Last night, my husband came into the living room with a small plate.  On the plate was a peach sliced into quarters.

"Here," he said. "From the garden."

Gingerly, I picked up a slice. It dripped with juice. I bit into it. The initial flavor burst was a fresh, light peach taste, followed by an aftertaste of vanilla.

It was heavenly.

"This one was pretty good!" he said, happily munching on the rest of the slices.

We have four ripe peaches from the trees this year, a minor miracle considering:

• We were told that the young trees would take several years to establish before bearing fruit.
• The wet spring, followed by a hot and dry summer, seemed less than ideal for peaches.
• We remembered to use the organic spray only twice - once in February, once after blossoms formed. I think the ideal is every two weeks. (But only one insect found in four peaches. Pretty good!)
• Most of the peaches on the tree became moldy before ripening and fell off.
• Some critter got hold of most of what was left and disappeared with them overnight.
• Japanese beetles feast on the tree leaves every year.

But if this is a hint of things to come, I am glad we planted the fruit orchard. We have 27 trees total right now - apples including Golden Delicious, Stayman Winesap, Lodi and Jonathan; four Elberta peach trees;  Methly and Burbank plum trees, Bing and Black Tartanian cherry trees, Moorpark and Early Golden apricot trees.

When we see fresh fruit now, we rejoice. We sample it and marvel that we can actually pick fruit right from a tree in our yard.  I'm a city kid at heart, and nobody I knew in Floral Park had fruit trees. My grandma's Bellerose Long Island garden, with its apple and pear trees and European kitchen garden, was considered an oddity in our suburban area. If people grew food at all, they grew a few tomatoes, since everybody knows that fresh tomatoes always trump store bought ones!

Once the trees produce fully, I'll can the fruit, and we have plans to purchase a dehydrator so that I can dehydrate as much fresh fruit and fruit leathers as possible.  But that taste of amazing peach flavor was a taste of achieving a dream, one step closer to producing even more food right here on our own land.

Three Native Perennials for Southern Gardens

Butterfly Bush

A weekend spent moving buckets of rocks and slates for the paths gave me quite the workout. I also weeded and spent time noticing which among the flowers growing on the hot, sunny slope of the flowers beds thrived, and which struggled. Hands-down, the winners are always native perennials here in the garden at Seven Oaks.

What are native perennials, and why do they do so well? First, you have to understand that not all flowers are created equal (neither are trees, shrubs or vegetables, for that matter.)  Before people planted gardens, all sorts of plants flourished on their own. Time and natural selection ensured that the healthiest, hardiest plants survived in whatever conditions they lived. If you live in a northern climate, for example, anything growing in the wild can survive your coldest winters. If you live in the south, native plants thrive in the heat. And so on and so forth.

Gaillarida, "Punch Bowl" hybrid

This is a very simple way of describing native plants, but it gives new gardeners a clue as to why native plants are so great for the garden. First, they're uniquely adapted to whatever the climate in your area throws their way - heat, drought, snow, rain, ice, whatever. In my part of the world here in south central Virginia, the climate varies from hot and dry to mild and rainy (or snowy).  Our town is at the foothills of the Blue Ridge Mountain and the climate can vary a lot from year to year.

I've noticed that the flowers that flourish in my garden are those that are native to the United States, and especially to the hot, dry plains regions of the USA.  My soil is different, but the heat and drought conditions are the same.

Native plants that love my southern garden include:

• Gaillardia - I've talked about the hardiness of these beautiful flowers, but when you see seeds sprouting in hard-packed, blistering hot gravel driveways, you know the stuff is tough. It seeds freely and you can easily transplant the babies.  
• Echinacea - Purple coneflower is the old standby, but bet you didn't know Echinacea comes in other colors? There are purple variations such as my Cherry Brandy Echinacea, with chocolatey-rich center and bright red-purple petals.  But there's White Swan, with white flowers, and a yellow one too. They all flourish in the garden here in southern Virginia. 
• Buddleia or Butterfly Bush - there are species native to both the New World and the Old World.  These towering, fragrant and freely flowering shrubs attract bees, butterflies and hummingbirds, and provide such welcome color in the garden. They are also so hardy that they seed wherever and whenever they can. I pick seedlings out of the walkways, the driveways, and even a pile of rocks we had delivered.  I just keep moving offspring of my main butterfly bushes into other parts of the garden or pot them up and give them away.  They don't mind heat and drought once they're established, and they bloom throughout the summer.

There are many other fine native plants for southern gardens - too many to list in one spot, really.  These three are my favorites for the garden here at Seven Oaks. What are yours?

Conserving Water in the Garden

This week we changed the irrigation sprinkler out in the vegetable garden for soaker hoses. We added soakers just to two beds, both tomato beds.  The other plants got a little thunderstorm shower last night.  What I was finding was that the heavy duty irrigation sprinkler - the kind that goes "ch-chc-chhhhhhhh" as it spins around and shoots water at you like a water cannon was also watering the grass between the garden beds. I don't want to water the grass, just my vegetables.  So we tried a little experiment with the soaker hoses and so far it seems to be working out just fine.

I did, however, manage to douse myself with our old soaker hose.  We stopped using it in the garden in Long Island, and neither of us could remember why. Oh, I remember why now. It's got some sort of crazy flaw; the last 7 feet don't work and water doesn't flow out of it, but it SHOOTS out of the tiny holes along the rest of the hose length. I made the mistake of standing over it while I turned on the spigot. Use your imagination. I looked like I wet myself.  I may have too, since I was laughing so hard....

Water is a precious commodity and I never appreciated it until I moved to the country and we had to pay to install a water well.  If the well runs dry or a problem develops, I also have to pay to fix it. Water doesn't flow into the house when the electricity goes off, either. Back on Long Island, if you lose the electricity in a hurricane, it didn't matter, you still had flushing toilets and water to wash the dinner dishes.  Not here.  That's why I keep a stockpile of bottled water in the house at all times and old plastic milk containers filled with water to use for other necessities.  And if we heard of a snowstorm or hurricane coming, we have about half a dozen big pails that we fill with water and line up in the garage for toilet duty.  Plus the creek out back, which in a pinch I could do the old fashioned thing; haul water up to the house for the sanitary system should the need arise.

It's all so important, yet we take running water for granted. Then you look at the news and the south, the big states that raise a lot of food such as Texas, Oklahoma and the like have such bad droughts that their farm wells are running dry and their creeks and ponds too. 

Water conservation was on my mind this morning when I sat down to write an entry for Hub Pages' summer article content. I hope you will click through the link and enjoy my article. Give it a comment or a vote if you feel so inclined and share the links, please - the more the merrier!

Here is my article on: Be Water Wise: Water Conservation in the Garden

Is a Garden Ever Really Finished?

Last night after supper, and after the sun ducked low enough so that the pines could provide shade, John and I finished cementing the stones together to complete the paths. The landscape fabric is down. We'll haul pails of pebbles from the pile where the truck dumped them onto the pathways, but the hardest part of creating the garden is complete The hardscapes are in place.  My dream of no longer weeding pathways is complete...or at least weeding them once every few weeks, instead of every weekend!

To celebrate, I found a picture of the original garden, taken April 2008.  I had mapped out the paths that March using rocks.  Do you see the little pink phlox planted on the hillside? That and a handful of daffodils were the only plants in place.  The trellis at the entrance was added that month, too.

Flower garden, April 2008

And now today, three years later -

Flower garden, May 2011...from a slightly different angle, but this is the same slope.

Is a garden ever really finished? Do you ever put down the trowel and say, "Glad that's over, now I can go back to watching reruns of the Andy Griffith Show on TV Land?"

We completed the main pathways this weekend. But we now plan to extend the pathway, clear a bit more into the woods, and I have already mentioned - loudly, repeatedly - that I want a huge statue of the Blessed Mother. I want to build her a grotto, actually, a la Lourdes. In my imagination, I see water splashing through a grotto or a rill.  Maybe if I win the lottery and can afford some workers to dig it for me....!

But in all seriousness, gardens are never finished.  My beautiful garden took three years to coax from the hard clay soil. It was so damaged from years of tobacco growing and pines...so acidic the laboratory who did the soil analysis called me and asked me where the soil came from (I'd taken the sample in Virginia but brought it back to where I was living in New York to have it tested; the poor lab guys wondered where the heck it came from!) It was so devoid of life I couldn't find a single earthworm in the soil for years.

Today I watered the petunias with the garden hose and out hopped toads - several of them - a mad scramble of amphibians dancing under the hose. Mockingbirds, kinglets, goldfinches, hummingbirds and cardinals play among the flowers, landing on the larger bushes and on the trellis. Bees of all types hum among the flowers and butterflies are busy sipping nectar from the butterfly bushes.

I don't have a magic touch and I don't have a magic wand. I don't spend hours out there every day, either.  If I could tell you anything at all about gardening, it is this; nature is forgiving.  Flowers add joy.  Don't hesitate to try something, anything, to get your garden growing!  It is the most worthwhile thing in the whole wide world.

No, gardens are never done as long as there is a gardener who loves the garden.

Summer Gladiolus in the Garden

Do you love gladiolus - or hate them? They do tend to elicit that kind of reaction. I personally love them. Sure, part of that is the nostalgia factor. My mother grew them underneath her bedroom window in a small, narrow spit of dirt next to the screened in porch, where it formed a sort of L-shape with the house. My dad ripped them all out and planted a yucky leucothoe shrub instead. I'd much rather have flowers than shrubs.

The glads I have growing here at Seven Oaks came from the good old dollar store. Each spring they sell little packages of 5 tiny corms for $1 and I'm a sucker whenever they get gardening stuff in.  I'm always amazed that they grow - and seem to multiple each year.  I found out that the trick to growing them so that they don't topple over is to plant them very deeply, something I'm terrible at, which uses soil to support the stem as the flower grows. That's probably why most of mine are flopping this way and that in the garden.

I have gladiolus growing alongside the shed and under my kitchen windows. They take over after the daffodils complete their blooming cycle in the early spring.  I had so many flopping this way and that I was forced to snip a bunch for cut flowers, and now I love having a vase of them in my kitchen.  If you do grow gladiolus, don't be afraid to bring a bouquet indoors. Why grow flowers if you can't enjoy them?

And speaking of enjoying flowers, I've discovered something new with gladiolus too; hummingbirds love them.  When I sit out on my back deck, I always catch a glimpse of a whir of iridescent green as the hummingbirds find the peach and orange colored gladiolus.

Please enjoy my latest article on Growing Gladiolus as Cut Flowers here on Hub Pages. 

Homesteading and Self Sufficient Living

Tomatoes and green beans from the garden

 Last night I tackled some vegetable garden chores and reflected on both homesteading and self sufficient living.  I pulled up the insect infested squash, cucumbers and zucchini; they're ruined, but I do have a bowl full of cucumbers begging to be made into cold cucumber soup, a delicacy I love each summer.

Dried beans

 
I harvested dried bean pods and thought about what it would take to grow food for completely self sufficient living. I planted one 4' x 8' bed with beans solely for drying - Dutch Brown and Jacob's Cattle.  Dutch browns make baked beans, and Jacob's Cattle supposedly keep very well.  After all my hard work, this is what I have so far -


Maybe enough for one meal?






Then I dug spuds. Potatoes. This is the first year I've grown potatoes. After a spring of plentiful rain, the drought and heat came.  I grew Yukon Gold potatoes from seed potatoes my neighbor Mel gave me and Russets from a $2.50 bag purchased at the local discount store, Roses.


Here's what I harvested so far - about 10 pounds of potatoes. The biggest ones are the size of baseballs, but most are the size of ping pong balls.  There are about a dozen plants still green and living in the potato bed, so I left them there.

First potato harvest on drying tray

I harvested herbs last night and placed a tray of catnip in the garage to dry. Pierre doesn't like fresh nip, so it's safe until dried. Then all bets are off.

Herbs solar drying

Here's what I realized from spending two hours last night harvesting and shelling beans, harvesting onions and cucumbers, weeding vegetable beds, throwing tomatoes with blossom end rot over the fence, pulling up bolted lettuce, and digging potatoes until it got too dark to see: homesteading is hard work.

Yeah, I know: "Duh!"  But seriously, did you ever consider as you pile your shopping cart full of Bush's baked beans, canned peas, plastic-wrapped loaves of bread and cartons of milk the sheer WORK that went into producing the food you buy so casually?

Self sufficient living sounds great on paper, but what do you do about droughts? I have a garden sprinkler on a tripod, but I don't like tapping into the household well too much. When you realize that if you drain your well you're going to have to pay thousands and thousands of dollars for a new one, not to mention dig up your lawn and garden, you treat water like the precious commodity it is.

Vegetables pickled for the pantry

I look at the beans and think about our pioneer ancestors for whom homesteading was a necessity, not a luxury.  Those dried beans formed the winter staple diet. The beets I pickled and canned last month, the peppers waiting to be canned along with things like the onions and potatoes dug last night, the beans drying in the kitchen - if I were truly homesteading, I would have to survive on this. Those herbs that looks so picturesque in the garden would be my medicine; the flowers I love to look at would supply medicine too, the Echinacea roots. The peaches in the orchard would need to be canned, dried, preserved to feed my family.

Not just a pretty face; if I were homesteading, this would be my medicine.

Could I actually feed my family from the garden like a pioneer woman? Yes, I could...but it's true; our ancestors did indeed work sunup to sundown. Think about tending the gardening, harvest, drying, canning, preserving the food. Think about sewing clothing and cleaning the house by hand.  Think about it.

Peach in our orchard today. The mesh keeps deer from the lower part of the tree.

As I consider the work needed to produce the scant vegetables, fruits and herbs I've managed to grow this year, I wonder how difficult true homesteading is in reality. We play at self sufficient living; we play at homesteading. Gardening is a hobby, albeit a passionate hobby for me.  What if I had to live only on what I could grow? What then?

And Baby Makes Three Plus an Egg

On July 4th, John found a mockingbird's nest in an apple tree in the orchard. There were four beautiful blue speckled eggs.

July 4th - four eggs

Today he was watering the trees and realized we have three delightful new fuzzy additions - plus one who's still hiding in his shell! Look very carefully into the nest - they have dark, fuzzy feathers and are a bit hard to see, but they're there. One poked his head up and opened his beak wide, probably hoping my camera would drop a worm or something to him.

July 6 - three babies and one egg left!

Surprises in the Fruit Tree Orchard

We have 17 acres total here at Seven Oaks, but only 3 are cleared, and of the three acres that are cleared, about 1/2 an acre is dedicated to the fruit orchard. We ordered and planted 26 trees from the Arbor Day Society, carefully noting which varieties needed pollinators and how far to space them and what not.  We have 10 apple trees, 4 pears, 4 peaches, 4 plums, 2 cherries and 2 apricots.  One peach tree that looked as if it was dying was moved to an ornamental flower bed behind the house; we expected it to die, but were astonished when it regained its vigor. Now it's the largest peach tree on the entire property.

One lonely pear, but it's a start!

Peaches starting to ripen

When we planted the trees, we knew we were in for a long wait before we'd harvest the first fruits. All of the gardening books said that standard size trees (which the apples are, for example) and semi dwarf and dwarf (all the rest) take 5 to 7 years before reaching a size capable of bearing fruit. So we wait, and tend them lovingly. Each year we spray them with organic oil sprays and weed around the bases. We trim off the suckers growing near the base and we trim up the branches.  John hauls the hose out to each one during the annual summer drought, watering them carefully.  It was while watering the apple trees this weekend that he noticed a lovely surprise visitor; a bird's nest in the lower branches of the apple tree.  A quick search online and putting two and two together identified the eggs as mockingbird eggs.

In the mornings when I sit on the front porch with Shadow, I often see the mockingbirds fly from the flower garden on my right across the empty field to the orchard on the left.  We've heard crows and mockingbirds battling near the orchard, but I assumed the mockingbirds had nested among the pines.  They've chosen the apple tree to raise their young, and this morning, the mother bird was guarding the nest.  John was careful not to disturb her; the poor apple tree will have to wait and let nature water it.

Another lovely surprise was finding fruit on the trees!  Given all that we'd read, we were ready to wait another year or two before looking for fruit, but we have one pear maturing on a tree; about 6 odd looking peaches on another; and 2 peaches on the tree in the back of the house. The peaches seem to be exuding some kind of sap, and one is rotted at the bottom, but the others are turning peachy-shades; I have no idea if we'll get to enjoy them or if the squirrels and deer will beat us to them.  My sister has an apple tree growing in a pot on her back deck and waited patiently for the lone apple to mature, but just as it turned ripe, she found it abandoned on the deck with telltale teethmarks and one chomp taken out of it. The squirrels had found it.

One of the joys of living in the country now is finding wildlife like the bird's nest.  Oh sure, you can see birds' nests in suburbia; my friend Janet, whose apartment is near Central Park, even had hawks nesting on a door lintel near her apartment building, and she used binoculars to watch them. You can find birds everywhere! My brother on Long Island had cardinals nesting in his front bushes, and when my brother and sister were little, they watched a robin raise her young on a maple tree branch right outside their bedroom window.   But I love attracting birds to the garden, and it is finding little surprises, like the nest in the orchard and the few first fruits of the season, that make country living so much fun.

Growing Sunflowers

I couldn't resist! I woke up this morning feeling the urge to do some creative non fiction writing, and my thoughts immediately turned to gardening. I feel like I haven't written a gardening article for publication in quite some time. As I drove down the driveway this morning, I saw a cloud of goldfinches rise from the towering sunflowers along the southern side of the house, and thus an article was born. Researching this topic was a lot of fun, too; I learned that the sunflower is one of the most popular flowers to grow, and did you know it actually removes arsenic, lead and other horrible stuff from the soil? Japan is now encouraging farmers around the site of the Fukushima nuclear disaster to plant sunflowers, and sunflower helped reclaim land spoiled by the Chernobyl disaster because they actually remove cessium and uranium from the soil (all of this from Wikipedia and the National Sunflower Association.)

Truly magnificent plants and now beloved additions to my garden every year. I grow them for their beauty and to feed the birds; do you grow them? Do you eat the seeds or save them for the birds?

Please enjoy my latest article here: About Sunflowers-Grow Sunflower Plants

(All of the photos today are ones I took of plants in my garden.)