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Garden journal

June 28, 2009. Yeah, it's that time of year again when insect sightings get to be just about as interesting as new plants coming into bloom. Not that these little flies are anything out of the ordinary - but I was still pleasantly surprised to find them as I set up my camera to take a picture of the interestingly twisted buds of Phlox 'Natascha'. The more interesting insect find was yesterday, but unfortunately the fierce-looking creature (probably an ambush bug of sorts) flew away before I properly trained my camera on it.

June 18, 2009. Ladybugs for father's day, how cool is that? My dear wife, unsatisfied with the mundane gift suggestions I came up with when asked what the kids should get me for dad's day, decided that 1500 ladybugs was just the ticket. They arrived a few days early, so yesterday evening I got to walk all around the garden, dropping a few of the colorful beetles here and there. According to the instructions, I was to deposit a dozen or so at the base of each aphid-infested plant - but I neither knew of over a hundred such plants, nor did I have the patience for careful bug deposition, so I just strolled around, shaking the mesh bag wherever the mood struck me. They didn't seem to mind the treatment, and went about their ways exploring their new environment without looking back. I hope they stick around, and build up a new community in our garden. These "convergent ladybugs" (Hippodamia convergens) are a different species from the ones we typically find in our garden (mostly Harmonia axyridis, the Asian lady beetle), with a narrower body, duller darker red coloration, and more consistent spot pattern.
I noticed a few today on a little walk through the garden - so with some luck, this will be a gift that keeps on giving!

June 14, 2009. Last spring, I overhauled our rock garden to have more elevation differences, and provide room for a larger number of different plants. My efforts paid off - I've been quite pleased this spring with the overall look and sequence of bloom, even though the garden isn't filled in yet as much as I hope it eventually will. It's been especially nice this first half of June, with aethionema, helianthemum, dianthus, linum, penstemon and others all flowering simultaneously for a lovely patchwork effect.

June 10, 2009. Our damselfly population has exploded! Everywhere in the garden I look, I they are hovering and dancing, in their graceful ways. I credit our large pond with associated bog filter, which has given their larvae a place to hatch (my boys have found several newly-emerged, wet-winged damsels in recent weeks, to their great delight). This morning, as I was taking photos around the rock garden, one alighted on a penstemon bud, still laden with dew. I didn't notice until later that it had brought along some prey - damselflies feast on small flying insects. Go get them no-see-ums, ladies!

May 29, 2009. I just learned about an event put on by the Historic Bethlehem Partnership on June 6th - a day of garden tours, lectures, and horticultural VIPs. Read more about it here.

May 27, 2009. We returned from about two weeks vacation yesterday - it rained all morning on our day of departure, and it was drizzling when we returned. According to our local sources, it rained quite a bit in between too, which would explain why the grass had grown to a verdantly billowing meadow, and the rest of the garden exploded into a rich lush growth. I managed to mow the lawn today (painfully slowly), and also took plenty of pictures of the new blooms. Some of which belonged to the kousa dogwood pictured here - after many years in our garden, following a rescue from the torture of a discount nursery and attacks by rabbits in subsequent years, it finally did its thing. Still more of a squat shrub than a tree, but I'll be working on that later this year.

Dryopteris marginalis: leather wood fern
May 04, 2009. Until recently our garden, in a new development reclaimed from corn fields, was sunny just about everywhere. The shade area was confined to one corner in a northern nook of the house, and it was one crowded place. Now that some of our trees have reached a mature size, more areas get at least part day shade. That takes some getting used to - I still make the mistake of planting sun-loving perennials in some areas that are no longer optimal for them, thinking of what used to grow there. But on the whole, this is a good development - finally some more space for plants that burn in the sun's rays. For me, that includes ferns (finally!). Since I'm a Johnny-come-lately to the fern thing, I'm not yet attuned to their growth habits. Just a couple weeks ago, I walked past the area where two of them grow and thought to myself "Hmmm. Not looking too hot, are they? I hope they survive". Of course they were just shedding last year's fronds, to make room for the new ones. I've always admired the photos of fiddleheads from other people's gardens, so I count myself lucky to be among the ferned.

May 03, 2009. Excuse my yawn - I'm rather tired. It's the end of a long weekend. Yesterday was my annual plant sale, an event that takes up most of my free time (and a few vacation days) each April, and once again it was a mad dash getting everything ready. Anticipating a crowd, Amy dusted off her cash register - and it was a good thing she did. Lots of people arrived to rush in right at 8am, and for the next two hours it was a bit of a madhouse. Next thing I knew, the plant tables looked kind of empty, and the crowds thinned out. Amazingly, some fellow gardeners had made treks from far-flung places (Rhode Island, would you believe it?) - I hope everybody left with new favorites. The afternoon, and all of today, were spent in the aftermath - dealing with the left-over plants, of course; but also tending to the back yard which had turned into a meadow with neglect, and all the tall weeds that were starting to take over the garden areas. It was lovely drizzly weather today - perfect for weeding, and just observing all the new growth in the garden. Like the rapidly unfurling new leaves of Rhus typhina 'Bailtiger'. Just a few days ago, I'd been more than a little concerned that it hadn't made it through winter. Now I'm looking forward to seeing it through its first full year in our garden. Ah, if only mid-spring could last a little longer...

I should have captured Amy at work, but I was too busy setting out seedlings
April 25, 2009. Our "cutting garden": the scene of much activity today and yesterday. Even though it's not actually a cutting garden in the real sense of the word, this does tend to be a border where annuals play the lead role. Some years it looks nice, other years it suffers from neglect, rampant volunteer plants, and haphazard plant placement. Last year wasn't one of its better ones, so I cleaned house big time yesterday, to set the stage for Amy's work today (pssst: a little secret - when I want Amy to join me in the garden, I need to have a good, long-overdue job waiting). Between annual seeds, some annuals purchased at the local big-lot store, a few annuals contributed from my seedling stash, and a cherry tomato, the beginnings of a colorful border are in place. Stay tuned for updates...

April 24, 2009. The first of several warm days (it's supposed to get real hot over the weekend), so I took the afternoon off to wage war on the list of garden tasks that need doing. I'm slowing down in the area of potting up plants for the sale - nearly there now. But many hundreds of seedlings are waiting to be planted, the vegetable garden needs to be started for the year, and the cutting garden needed a good spring cleanup. I almost forgot to walk around and look at what's blooming! But of course I did, and I was particularly enamored of this combination of Virginia bluebells and grape hyacinths. As usual, I claim no credit (nor blame) for this arrangement - in our garden, plant combinations just kind of happen.

April 19, 2009. Wonderful weekend, sunny and warm! After a full Saturday getting trained on the ins and outs of Cub Scout outdoor activities, I put Sunday to good use getting the orchard nursery area organized to accept the hundreds of new seedlings that will soon be itching for a spot in the outdoors. A few of the hardier varieties already got planted there. Today also marked the first mowing of the lawn this year. And in between all of that, I found some time to walk around the garden with my camera and take snapshots of what's emerging and what's already in bloom. One of the photos was of this fritillaria, proudly flowering in our front lane garden. But what I didn't recognize till I looked at this photo was that it was surrounded by little bright-blue flowers. Wildflowers ("weeds"), of course - but still eyepopping when you look at them up close.

April 09, 2009. Venturing out after dinner this evening to take a quick snapshot of a hellebore that bloomed for the first time this year, I was surprised (and charmed) to find a cabbage white butterfly, already asleep on one of its flowers. The last few days have been good for gardening, although the overnight dip into the 20s one night surprised me, the meteorologists, and my tender seedlings already hardening off outside. Luckily, most of them survived just fine.

April 05, 2009. What a difference a day makes! Yesterday I had to retreat indoors every hour or so to recharge, today was T-shirt (and sunburn!) weather. Lots of plants potted up for the sale, but I also found some time to just stroll around the garden and look at what's popping up. By now I'm used to seeing the star magnolia and apricot in bloom around this time of year, but the Corylopsis sinensis is newer to our garden, and this year its bloom is more exuberant than its first attempt last year. So that one gets the honor of today's photo.

primitivist art by Ben
April 04, 2009. A windy, chilly day - which made for a good excuse to make my almost-annual mushroom soil run, out to a farm near Kutztown. I need the stinky stuff for soil improvement in all kinds of places, including the veggie garden, to be applied over the course of early spring. But I had an immediate use in mind: the kids had been asking for larger garden plots, and no garden can be dug or enlarged without a large helping of organic matter. So I spent the afternoon stripping sod and digging to extend their garden areas. They each have about a four-foot section along our side fence; until yesterday, these were only about two feet wide, not enough to do much with. Now they're closer to square, nice blank slates for the new season. So what did my dear 7-year-old Ben do first? Make a mud decoration, that's what he did! Then he stuck in a lamb's ear, some chocolate mint, and a money plant for good measure.

March 30, 2009. I must be getting better at timing my seed-starting activities. Most years, I have at least one variety that decides it's time to bloom under the lights when we're still in early February. Charming, but not particularly helpful, when they still have weeks to go before making their way outside. In following years, I make sure to start the species in question a few weeks later. This year, my first inside blooms didn't arrive until late March. They came courtesy of Impatiens scabrida, which I'm growing for the first time this year. The creamy yellow flowers are cheerful, but the plants are clearly not too happy about living inside - their stems are already stocky, and they're a bit squashed between the many seedlings nearby that don't grow quite so fast. Needless to say, I'll shift the seed start date backwards for these, too.
In other news, this past weekend, besides featuring a fierce hail-and-thunderstorm, marked the start of the outside gardening season. All the cutting back dead growth and other cleanup, even when it occurs in March, still mostly belongs with the previous season in my mind. But when I start to pot up plants for my annual plant sale, I know that spring is here! As usual, I'm keeping a running tally of species potted up. Pretty soon, I'll be spending my every spare daylight hour in the garden...

March 14, 2009. It's so predictable - the first few mild days of late winter arrive, and my hands are a mess! It's too early to do anything with live plants, but the weather is perfect to cut or lop down all of last season's dead stalks. I leave them up through winter, preferring their presence to a barren garden look - but it's a big job to take care of throughout the whole garden. The stubble left behind (from this year's cuts, as well as previous years') is sharp enough that my hands, with baby skin from months without gardening, invariably emerge thoroughly cut and scraped from the operation. It's an annual rite of passage!
Meanwhile, only a few plants are exerting themselves in the garden. It's the usual suspects: snowdrops, rock irises, crocus, and of course hellebores. Some hellebores have fully open flowers, but I was particularly taken by this beautiful bud with its fresh green accompaniment.

March 07, 2009. I get all kinds of requests for use of photos on my site. Usually I'm happy to allow free use for informational or personal purposes. A recent request, from artist T.L. Baumhardt, was especially intriguing: she had seen my journal entry for August 23, 2008, and wanted to use the picture as a basis for a painting. I happily obliged, and was especially pleased to see the result a few weeks later - shown here in a reduced version of its full glory. For more of T.L. Baumhardt's work, visit her new Snow Fairy Farm website.

February 15, 2009. Ah, it's that winter garden journal slump again. Not much to report on out in the garden recently. But of course I've not been slacking altogether. It goes without saying that seed-starting is a full-blown operation by now - the last few weeks brought big seed exchange shipments from NARGS and HPS/MAG; combined with seeds from earlier trades and collected from the garden, that makes for hundreds of varieties started already, and many more to come. Of course I've been keeping notes of my germination results on my plant profile pages. But there's other activity on robsplants.com as well: over the past few weeks I've started a new experiment called PlantLinks. It's an attempt to collect and organize links to many quality information pages about plants all in one place. So far, I've added links to many of my favorite garden information websites (at the time of this writing, 24453 links to 15293 species in 2685 genera), and I hope to continue the effort (at a slower pace) in months to come. It will only become truly useful if I tap many more sources, but do take a look and tell me what you think.

January 17, 2009. My first journal entry of the new year, to honor the cold snap we're experiencing - the temperature was -2°F when I woke up this morning, colder than I remember seeing in recent years. So we'll see how well marginally hardy plants fare this winter. Meanwhile, the big pond is going through interesting ice patterns. We leave the circulation from the main pond through the filtration bog going year-round; ordinarily the flow comes across a pebbly ford, but the entire surface of the ford is now covered in ice, with water and air bubbles performing shadow puppetry underneath. I took this picture standing on the middle of the main pond - the ice cover felt nice and solid!