Might as well start blogging again...

Seeing as we are all stuck at home for the foreseeable future, I thought I'd start writing again. Truth be told, I've been writing this whole time. I just haven't been posting.  But now that everyone is stuck at home, I figure, it's a good time to post my drivel.

I realize that most people do not like to be on lockdown.
I don't like it either, in theory.
But I do sort of like it.

Let's be real. Given the choice I don't actually leave my property unless I'm going to Maine, running with my club, going out to dinner with Andy, or doing something for or with my kids. I've been social distancing for like twenty years at this point. I'm kind of an expert at this.

Under the circumstances I'm not going to Maine, but I'm still running (though not with my club), still eating dinner with Andy (though usually it's frozen dinners), and I'm spending more time with my kids than I have in .... a long time. Because they can't leave. Poor little suckers.

Here are the reasons I actually sort of dig lockdown:

• I can work outside in the garden (Thank you Jesus for any early spring) literally all day and my children do not call me to pick them up, or drop them off, or go to the store to get them xyz or fill in the blank here, because they are home and cannot leave. (Insert maniacal chuckle...)
• I can go on super long runs and no one looks at me like I have three heads. When I see people when I'm out running they give me six feet (awesome!) and nod like, I get it. Of course, my running has nothing to do with social distancing, but you know, whatever. I'll take an I get it look over a WTF, didn't I see you out running yesterday?--you overachieving, skinny, do-gooder, which is the look I generally get -- or got up until a few weeks ago.)
• I have an excuse to have hair that needs cutting and dying, nails that need manicuring, and clothing that needs updating. I always have these things, of course. It's the *excuse* part that works for me.
• I can order take out and it's viewed as a support of local establishments as opposed to the fact that I freaking hate to cook.
• My kids! My kids are home! They are miserable, but (completely selfishly) I like having them around. I feel like some higher power granted me this last span of time to be with them. Mothers of older teenagers, I bet you know what I mean.
• I have read (or listened to) 21 books so far this calendar year, and that's because I can't leave home, right? (Lockdown is definitely good in terms of attempting to achieve my 2020 Good Reads Challenge goal.)
• I have an excuse to spend time on Facebook since I can't see these people in real life. (Not that I see anyone in real life normally, but again, whatever.) Also, people are not posting as much political shit because they are too busy posting funny videos of life stuck at home. 
• My dogs are loving this time. They are in heaven. Every one of their humans is home 24/7 and ready to snuggle down. 

There are a lot of reasons to dislike what is happening right now--like people are dying and many more will die going forward and our health care workers are over-stressed and exhausted and as a country we were totally unprepared for this pandemic, despite that experts warned over and over again that this would likely happen eventually. But I'm trying not to focus on those things, and I don't plan to write about them here. I plan to write about my ongoing daylily project, my gardening, my observations of the birds at my feeder and the behavior of the animals and insects in my landscape. 

and other stuff, too. Other stuff will probably comprise the bulk of my writing. I have trouble staying on topic.

I will leave you with some pictures: 

I've mostly been raking and (re) labeling my lilies this week. I still have a very, very long way to go. I usually allow things to get messy in the fall going into the winter. I don't do a lot of cutting back of my perennials because I find that old foliage and leaf cover insulate my plants when we don't have snow cover. I still lose many daylilies every winter do to frost heave. I also lose daylilies I've purchased from southern growers. Still, I keep buying the southern varieties. My goal is to create hybrids that are southern patterned, ornate and lush, but that still survive in the north. I often use southern daylilies as breeding stock, so I take the chance on them each spring, and accept that I lose quite a few each winter. 

The pictures are now and then. The now is (obviously) the brown, leafy, half raked March garden. The then are photos of the same areas in July. I post these before and after pictures-- or after and before -- mostly for me. I have to keep the faith that someday the property will be gorgeous again-- and all spring work is worth it. 

This is a space I call the "butterfly" garden. I've been clearing it and planting gradually for a few years now. I think this summer it will finally come into its own.

I have to figure out what to do with my lovely compost bins. hmmm

 This is Henry searching for chipmunks. He's a voracious chipmunk/mouse hunter.

In my raking I found this nest. It's so sturdy! I can't figure out what the exterior is made out of. There is some Easter grass in there--or maybe it's not Easter grass, but that's what it reminds me of. You can see the designer made a pouch for the eggs, and that the exterior is made from different materials than the inside. There was still some downy fur inside the nest from the chicks.
Amazing construction.

 A rare shot of three of the four dogs (Henry, Hazel, Ernie) of Four Dog Farm, all sniffing around for whatever dogs sniff around for. Missing is Chica. She's an old girl and spends most of her time inside.

The final pictures are taken from the basement of the new 2019 seedling stock. It will be time to harden these plants off very soon. I use tree pots to grow my seedlings. They are quite space efficient. I have about 500 seedlings growing from my 2019 seeds. Many will not make it when brought into the garden. I don't coddle my plants. It is a survival of the fittest type of game. You have to be strong, or you will be culled! I have about 400 survivors from my 2018 seeds, and many of those will bloom this summer. I honestly cannot wait. This will also be the summer that I start culling the 2017 seedlings. I wanted to give them at least two seasons of flowering before deciding whether to keep or throw away. Sometimes a plant just needs a bit more time to show its stuff. 

Okay, I'm off for a run. 

I hope everyone reading is surviving this pandemic. If you are a fellow daylily enthusiast, I suspect that like me you are using this time as you always have--on your plants!  

End of the Summer Gardening

The conundrum with keeping a gardening blog is that during the months I want most to record and share my gardening thoughts, I'm actually spending all of my time gardening and hence find no time to write!

The garden on Labor Day weekend:

The brightly colored, immature petunias I used to fill in garden gaps early in the season now crawl like flowerless green snakes over everything.  My battle against pokeweed, bindweed and black swallow-wort have been fought and lost. Crabgrass and carpetweed blanket the garden paths I so carefully cleared and maintained early in the summer. Perennials at their prime in July look haggard and worn, brow-beaten by the sun and ready to call it quits for the season. Alas, the garden officially look like a very-tired, very brown jungle. 

Sigh.

A few perennials keep up the good fight. For example, the black-eyed susans, pictured here, just keep on kicking. They basically comprise the whole garden at this point. The purple bush in this picture is, I think, a butterfly bush of some sort. I thought for the longest time it was giant hyssop... but sadly, I'm really not sure what it is. Why do I not label things when I buy them?! I only label my daylilies, reasoning that I just need to remember the most general things about my other plants--like their common names. For example, this is black-eyed susan, yes, but it is a black-eyed susan that blooms only in the late summer, is 6 ft tall, has delicate branching and petit flowers and spreads like nobody's business. But the specific cultivar name? No idea. I'm not even sure it's a cultivar. But with the big purple plant I can't even remember the most basic thing... its common name.

Here is a close-up of the purple plant . Anyone able to identify it?  It know it looks a bit like loosestrife, but it's not that. Its base is woody.

Onward.

Although my gardens are a mess and currently dominated only by black-eyed susans, my daylily seedling bed, though still mostly green and flowerless, now sports a few blooms.  Some of these blooms are quite pedestrian, but some have also been surprisingly gorgeous. I tend to value those (still un-bloomed) seedlings with parental lineages that are new, edgy and cut-throat.  Oh la la! What kind of bloom will I see if I crossed this 2017 crazy spider with this 2016 luscious, petit beauty? Those pairings that include one or both parents from older lineages thrill me less. Yet... it's often those pairings that surprise me in terms of their elegance and beauty. I think that the newer daylilies I use in my hybridizing are often so gorgeous and unique already that it's hard to top them. Right now I'm talking strictly blooms. These plants are still too much in their infancy to know habit--and, of course, it's possible even the blooms will change between now and next season.

Because I'm new to hybridizing (I've really only been hybridizing in earnest for the last two years), everything about it still surprises and fascinates me. For example, I find it so interesting how you can have seeds from the same exact pod create such different looking flowers. It makes me think about children (human children, I mean) and how one parental combination can create such different looking progeny. It's also fascinating how when pairing dayliles (or humans, or dogs... or anything) beautiful + beautiful doesn't always equal beautiful, and common/boring + common/boring can create something exceptionally unique and gorgeous. Most fascinating of all--sometimes a seedling looks nothing like either parent and you think, Where did THAT come from? In instances like those I then feel the need to check out the parents' parents, and then the parents' parents' parents to see if I can find evidence that I didn't actually mislabel the cross, and that's why the seedling look nothing like either parent.

For example, this seedling just bloomed yesterday.

Very pretty! It's a cross between Kansas City Kicker (Stamile 2005) and Doma Knaresborough (Petit '94). Frankly, it doesn't look at all like either parent-- at all.

Here' a pictorial family tree: 

X 

Betty Warren Woods                     X  Shisado                                  =   Doma Knaresborough

 =

French Cavilier                        X   Sabine Bauer                      =       Kansas City Kicker

                                               

                Doma Knaresborough                 x                      Kansas City Kicker        =                           

                                                          New Seedling  bloomed 8/31

Bizzare, huh? The real question is whether my labeling is off. Kansas City Kicker is right next to Sparks Heir to a Kingdom in my garden.

Sparks Heir to A Kingdom

Might it, in fact, be the pod parent? But I don't think so. I label each cross immediately after I have make it, and so it's unlikely that I would label the pod parent incorrectly. But still....

This is the problem I have with hybridizing right now. I trust myself and my labeling, but not 100%. I need to develop a labeling system that is fail-proof.  You'd think it wouldn't be laborious or complicated, but it is, at least for me. I must be so diligent to place a label on the bloom immediately after I make a cross, because I forget or mix things up if I make several crosses and then expect myself to remember them.

I also have trouble making sure I use a label medium that will not allow the written words to fade in the sun. I always label with a black Sharpie, but some tags hold Sharpie better than other over time. This is even more a problem with seedlings. I like the idea of having the label under the ground, attached to the fan of the plant, but when I first transplant the seedlings they are too small to have a label attached in this way.  I find that often I won't catch that a label has faded until it's too late, and I find myself holding the label to the light, desperately hoping to be able to decipher what it said!

I hope to write a bit more consistently now late summer has arrived. Even if no one reads my drivel it's great to have a record of my gardening thoughts. I leave you with a picture of Hazel, who has been playing in the pokeweed.

Dogs Eating Fertilizer and Other Gardening Conundrums

As I write, my Boston Terrier is farting incessantly at my feet. Or maybe it's my lab. She's resting at my feet as well. The culprit: fertilizer. My dogs decided 10-10-10 fertilizer is delectable. You might remember that in my last post I mentioned my daylily seedlings appeared to have stalled in their growth.  I decided fertilizer and more watering might be the answer.  So yesterday I spent the day spreading fertilizer carefully in the daylily seedling beds. My dogs watched me intently. I just thought they wanted to hang out near me because they love me so much. Apparently, however, they were watching and waiting for me to leave, so they could get into the garden and lick up all the fertilizer I had just put down. 

It smells so badly in this room that I have opened all the windows to let out the noxiousness, but my dogs are outpacing the air circulation in this room. I cannot describe how foul the smell is. It's literally burning my nostrils.  Ernie, the terrier, keeps letting out little, wet toots, and then turning to look at his butt, puzzled, as if questioning who is creating this constant and funny noise. The smell does not appear to bother him, or the other dogs. They are quite happy snoozing in this fertilizer-farting hell that is my dining room. 

Call the vet! Is that what you are thinking? I know, I'm a terrible dog owner, but they (and I) are just going to have to suffer until this has passed through them. I'm assured by poison control that they will not die from the ingestion. They will just fart, poop black poops, maybe barf, drool a bit and drink a lot of water. In any case, my dogs, especially the lab and the sharpei, appear to have iron constitutions. My sharpei ate half a bottle of iron tablets a few weeks ago and showed no signs of discomfort -- just kept on moving and barking as always. We actually thought it was the lab who had eaten the tablets, and so we tried to induce vomiting in her by giving her 3 tsps of hydrogen peroxide. She didn't even bat an eyelash. No vomiting at all. She also has eaten two full bags of Hershey kisses in the past with no ill effect. It's quite astonishing. I could go on and on with stories about what my dogs have eaten that should have killed them but miraculously, did not.

 But back to gardening! 

I finally have some blooming flowers! I'm in the north, so no blooming daylilies yet, but the lupine, iris and peony look quite nice.

I'm not sure I like these hot pink peony, but they are dramatic-- I will say that.

The garden below needs some rethinking. It will look quite lovely in three weeks, but I clearly didn't think about late May flowering when I designed it. As I moved things around last fall, I remember thinking that I could just put some annuals out front to provide color in May. I do have annuals out front, but I grew them from seed and they are not yet blooming. Sigh. Maybe I will give in and pick up a few six packs of petunias at Shaw's.

Speaking of Shaw's...
Do you suppose it's a risk to buy plants at supermarkets in terms of insecticide exposure? I mean, how do I know whether they have been treated with neonicotinoids or not? I'm truly obsessed with bringing pollinators to my garden, and naturally I fear killing them off once they come. 

A consequence of being insecticide free is that I cannot control evil creatures like Gypsy Moth caterpillars. They have destroyed my cherry tree and they are fast destroying my roses. Does anyone have any experience with this? I would like nothing more than to kill them all in some incredibly cruel and painful way, burn them alive, blast them with poison, squeeze the green slimey caterpillar guts out of each one of them, but I don't know how to do so without affecting the plants--and hence my pollinators.  In the picture below you can witness my defoliated cherry tree. So sad. 

On another note, you will notice that there are stripes of gray on our house. We are going to paint it this summer, and we are deciding on a gray. Feel free to weigh in. I'm undecided.

Here is yet another question I have for this audience:

When you plant a new daylily and it immediately puts out scapes, do you allow the flowers to bloom, or cut the scape? I fear the plant being too taxed if it flowers. Is this unreasonable?

In other news, I continue to work on my butterfly garden. Unfortunately it doesn't look any better than the last time I wrote and posted a picture.

You can see we still have to clean up the mess of dead trees that my husband cut down so I could plant this garden. I read Gyspy Moths love to make their nests in dead wood. They are probably making nests in the mess as I write. argh.

I think I mentioned that in order to make this garden I have done a lot of digging / excavating. The pine needle layer is six inches deep, and so I have to dig and add soil repeatedly so I can actually plant.  I've determined that in the past this area was definitely treated as a trash heap. I have found so many bizarre things. Here's a list:

Not so bizarre:

• plastic plant labels
• the head of a large spade
• rusty nails and screws
• piles of rocks
• an old wooden trellis, rotting beneath the earth
• old soda and beer cans
• old patio stones
• bricks

VERY BIZARRE:

• a Barbie doll's arm
• a decorative hair barrette
• the remains of a swingset
• pieces of artist clay
• shards of actual pottery
• a piece of a dog leash
• a marble

and...
drumroll....
you really will not believe this...

• a jock strap. 

I KID YOU NOT!

I actually didn't even understand what it was until I showed it to my husband, who laughed, and then told me.


As I finish writing this I am watching a squirrel perform an incredible act of body contoration and strength in order to get seed from our bird feeder. I would shoo him away, except I'm so impressed by his prowess that I will allow him his fill. Truth be told, I like squirrels. They are funny, probably soft, although I have never actually pet one, and they are both incredibly smart and strong (witness the bird feeder display) and also incredibly stupid (roadkill... when will they learn?) Kind of like dogs. Hence, I like them.

All right, time to stop procrastinating and to start gardening!

Spring Time Fervor

First, here is a picture of my beautiful daughter (and me) before her junior prom. Just had to share... You know how proud we moms get over our gorgeous daughters!

On to gardening.
I can't do it all.
And it's just wrankling me. I realize wrankle isn't actually a word, but it still captures my feelings of late.

We moved to this home three years ago and took over its essentially overgrown and uncultivated two acres.  Of that acreage, I'd say half of is house/driveway and cul-de-sac, and a quarter lawn. The last quarter (maybe even more than a quarter) I've cultivated into garden. A portion of that is devoted to vegetables, raspberries, strawberries and apple trees. Those areas don't require much work. They need to be watered and weeded and occasionally fertilized (esp the vegetables), but mostly they just grow and produce and are satisfying. Maybe not the raspberries, actually.  I love having fresh raspberries, but the plants are piggy and aggressive. So are the strawberries, but they are easier to manage. The raspberries want to spread, and they are winning. In fact, they are spreading into my neighbor's lawn, which eventually is really, really not going to be good for neighborly relations. But I digress.

Photographed below are two of my new gardens. You can see the mailbox garden below isn't quite finished. Or, more accurately, it isn't close to being finished. It's the edging in that back that kills me. It's so damn messy and yet the thought of ripping out the pachysandra and the weeds over there makes me want to cry. I need a bulldozer or a tractor, or at the very least a tiller. But I don't have these things. (Bring out the violins. She has two acres but no tiller! JK.)

Below is another new garden. Last year there was pachysandra surrounding this small dogwood. I ripped that out last fall and planted tulips and daffs. Of course, the problem with tulips and daffs is that they look like horrible after the blooms fade, and if you cut back the foliage they don't bloom well the following year. Actually, the tulips never bloom well the next year anyway, so I may start treating them as annuals. Opinions out there? Tulips as annuals? Anyway. I have to deal with the daff and tulip foliage problem now.  I have about four daylilies in there currently. I could use the daylilies to cover the daff foliage, but you know that never actually works without looking super messy and crowded.

The picture below reveals probably my biggest undertaking this spring.  I had my husband chop out a bunch of dead pine trees this spring so I could create a butterfly garden here. Of course, this has proved 80 billion times harder than I thought it would be. Because this was a woodland area, the pine and leaf layer is at least a 1/2 a foot deep. Also, there is pokeweed EVERYWHERE. I have broken my back trying to dig it out. I left some all the way in the back because I know the birds like the berries in the fall, but that weed is seriously annoying. Ditto with the Black Swallwort. Man that stuff is persistent! Sometimes I fantasize about having a futuristic laser gun that I could point at the weed and zap it out of existence. Wouldn't that be amazing? And it would be so satisfying...Zap Zap Zap. Take that Pokeweed! Die Die Die!

 

Shockingly, most of this above area gets eight hours of sun a day, so I have been able to put in some good butterfly/bee plants--specifically a lot of Joe Pye Weed, various milkweeds, salvias, autumn sedum and agastache. Unfortunately, weeding this area is proving totally overwhelming. Now that the trees are gone and it has full sun the weeds are psyched! It's killing me. Can you tell I'm a bit overwhelmed and disheartened this morning? I'm hoping I will be rewarded by some good growth this summer, so it doesn't look like such a sloppy wasteland.

Here are pictures of areas that desperately need work. I walk by these areas a million times a day and think, What a mess! Argh! I have to deal with that! Below is actually a tiny bit okay right now. I like how the white azalea, pruned early this spring so it might look a little better, looks with the blue hosta. However, this area is overgrown and completely weedy and needs to be re-thought.

Don't even get me started about this area. That vinca... help me!

or this. I'm sure it was a lovely garden at some point (witness the hosta) but it is such a mess right now.

Here are areas that will look nice in a few weeks when things start to bloom.  (The weedy green mat below is foxglove. I have to get down on my hands and knees and thin it.) I find late May a frustrating time for perennial gardening in Massachusetts. The earliest blooms have passed, and the June blooms are yet to come. Nothing blooms right now. Any NE gardeners have suggestions? 

 

Pictured below are my daylily seedlings. I examine them everyday. They seem stalled in their growth. I'm sure this is because I'm watching them too carefully.  I started some of these babies under lights in the basement in October of last year, so I secretly hope some might bloom this summer. I know that is unlikely. But you never know... 

 

I find what is hardest about gardening on such a large scale is that even though you might have one area look amazing. another area is always in need of work. It never looks perfect all at once. Not even close! And yet it seems some achieve this. Is it because I am a one-woman operation who has taken on too much and doesn't have key equipment like a tiller or a tractor or a weeding robot? Man I wish weeding robots existed...

The other frustrating thing about my gardening right now is that I am really the only one who sees it. My kids are teenagers. Need I say more? My husband notices sort of and he also helps me a great deal, but he doesn't really SEE it. For example, he loves ground phlox. We have ground phlox everywhere, and yet when we are out and he sees a patch he comments on how pretty that blue flower is, and couldn't we grow that? And I'm like....but we do grow that!!!! It's everywhere!

Okay, a few more items to mention before I get back outside and wrestle with cultivation:

1. I was digging a hole yesterday and I found the BIGGEST grub I have ever seen. I researched online and discovered it must have been a Staghorn Beetle grub. It was gigantic--we're talking like three inches long and  an inch think. Ewwwwww. On that note, I like to kill lawn grubs when I happen upon them digging, and the other day I smushed one between my fingers and grub guts sprayed onto my face. Isn't that THE MOST DISGUSTING THING you can imagine? It was truly horrifying.

2. There was a huge green frog in my little pond, and now he's gone. Where did he go? I have other smaller frogs, but I'm missing that king daddy frog. (I think he is a green frog but maybe he's a bullfrog? His croak sounded like a green frog, though...)

3. There is a robin nesting in my weeping cherry in front of the house. :)

4. I keep observing birds carrying twigs and I want to follow them so I can figure out where they are nesting so I can spy on them. Earlier this spring we had mourning doves nest close to the house in a pine. Aren't those little snugglers cute?

As I finish this post I am looking out the window. A Red-Tailed hawk is at my birdbath drinking water! Holy moly he's an impressive bird. I wonder if he's checking out the hunting scene? I've never seen a hawk drink from a bird bath... but that does appear to be what he is doing. There is a robin atop a tree close by going absolutely bananas chirping. I wonder if he is warning birds to stay away?  He's still there and it's been five minutes.  

Okay, he just flew away. Watching a hawk close up is very interesting and cool. 

And now I need to get outside. Thanks for reading!

It's beautiful here in the north.
It's like Narnia when Lucy first enters through the wardrobe.
Still, I'm annoyed that the White Witch stills holds my gardens in her icy grip. She's had her seasonal reign. Enough already.

Sunrise over the back gardens.

Today it was blustery and 30 degrees, so no melting yet. My smallest dog, Henry, a doxie/chihuahua mix, got stuck in a drift this morning and I had to pull him out. 

I have a little pond in my yard. It's frozen right now, but in the summer it has a waterfall and it used to have koi in it. Unfortunately, the UV filter we had running in the pond broke last winter, unbeknowst to us, and subsequently green algae took over the pond in early spring and killed off the koi. It was sad and also made me feel extremely guilty. For a long time we did not fix the UV filter. Why bother? We had no fish to keep alive anymore. Weep.

And then the frogs moved in. Oh man did we have frogs! They loved that algae. We mostly had American Bullfrogs, Green Frogs, and Leopard Frogs. My husband and children seemed relatively nonplussed about these wonderful amphibians (my kids are teenagers...), but I became smitten! At one point my husband (Andy) cleaned the pond and replaced the UV filter. The pond returned to its pristine loveliness, but I did not spy quite so many frogs after that point, which worried me. Where had they gone? Were they suffering since we had disrupted their home? Gradually, the frogs returned. I think they might have just been horrified that Andy had emptied and refilled the pond, and they took off for several weeks before daring to return.

Green Frog

Northern Leopard Frog. These little dudes are super cool looking. They are iridescent in the sun.

American Bull Frog

Andy turned the UV filter off for the winter, and before the last snow storm I noted the green algae had begun to grow. It got me thinking about my frogs. I so want them to return this summer. So, this morning I researched how to best create an attractive environment for frogs so that they will come.

It turns out the reason my pond became a frog mecca last summer was because we had inadvertently already created the perfect frog environs. They love algae (no surprise there), they like small ponds in areas that have plenty of bugs to eat (check), and they like ponds that have gradual, shallow entries into them. The one area in which I had been remiss is that I didn't have any little frog getaways--pots turned sideways and half buried and other little crevices that serve as cool, damp hiding places. I'm on it. I'm going to make some fab frog hide-a-ways and place them around the pond--just as soon as the foot of snow surrounding it melts....

Onto daylilies.

Yesterday I moved a hundred or so daylilies from the basement to the first floor of the house and placed them on a card table close to a sunny window. The goal was to free up some downstairs space to place a few heated mats and get some annuals and vegetables going before it's too late. I'm worried these daylilies will not do well by the window, but I also can't figure out another solution.

In just a few weeks, even if there is snow still on the ground, I plan to start hardening  my infant daylilies off.
Our last freeze is usually in late April. When do those of you hybridizing in the north start to harden off your babies?