Drpught, dry, dry, dry, cracked earth, and hot temperatures

What a great time to be a gardener, it gives us something to do that is pretty low risk for us senior citizens.  Our gardens need water, lots of water, and the lily pond too.  Oh, things that can be easily watered are doing well enough like boxed, caged tomatoes.  But the Phactors do not waste water on lawn, which is on its own.  Everything is wilting to some degree, and if it doesn't recover over night then it really needs to be watered the next day.  Plants like the big-leafed Magnolias have a lot of surface area and can lose a lot of water.  And other things are rather new and as yet don't have extensive root systems, like our newest plum yew and an Abelia, and a white snake root.  So a good deal of TPP's daily activity is pulling hoses around to ward off the worst on the drought. Gave an older hose and a soaker hose to the F1 because her whole garden is new.  Even now a timer is telling TPP to get going and move the sprinkler to a new area in an attempt to rejuvenate a double-file Viburnum, that is trying to recover from a winter die-back. Already lost a dwarf  Metasequoia from the Japanese garden; it has never been a happy camper, so no surprise really.  In a real surprise, the prairie nursery TPP has inherieted had some bunchflower blooming (Melanthium virginicum), which TPP has never seen before. Quite handsome.  Hope to propagate some more this coming year.

On average, USA doing OK

Florida nearly got washed away, as did Houston; the west is burning; and what passes for TPP's lawn is crunchy and dry.  So, on average we doing OK.  And of course your choice when  dealing with new plants is simple, water it or let it die.  Both cost you money.  The other problem is that just dragging the hoses around is quite a bit of work, sorry, exercise.  Lots of leaves dropping even from well established old trees, so mowing generated so much dust, TPP thought he was going to stop breathing, oh, actually he sort of did because lawn dust is one of the things he's sensitive to. It's snot like he had a choice.  Maybe the tail end of Irma will wander far enough north to bring us a drop or two of rain.

Summer gardening - parched, water, water!

June is beginning with some rather warm weather accompanied by a drought.  Our gardens are parched and newly planted plants get the most attention out of necessity.  TPP has already killed way too many hemlocks, a species he loves, but they seem to take a lot of TLC to get one established.  Our last rhododendron (wait for tomorrow) and our last magnolia are in flower, the former looks fabulous but the latter smells amazing.  TPP spent the day spreading water around some newly planted herbs and perennials, and giving Mrs. Phactor's perennial bed a good start on summer and most of our post-May Flowering.  Speaking of dry, last weekend we were tourists at a couple of sand prairies along the Mississippi River, part of the entertainment for the Illinois Native Plant Society (we be members) annual gathering.  The prairies were lovely even if one of them was mostly prickly pear cactus (who in their right mind would disk them up to plant watermelons - think Mickey Mouse and brooms in the sorcerer's apprentice). They were almost confluent coverage and not quite time for them to flower which would be lovely.  More later about an excellent talk about the services lost to agricultural mechanization and a book recommendation.  But it was hot out there in the open, and sandy.

Joys of gardening - late fall edition

It's late October here in Lincolnland, and lots of trees are still green because this has been a late fall. The low temps have only flirted with a frost, and petunias in the window boxes are still flowering. TPP thought that he had finally triumphed by catching a wary groundhog that had been living under the garden pavilion all summer (the second one). Fencing had been installed around the base of the pavilion, except in one area, which was exploited, and a second small breach.  After the relocation of the groundhog, the fencing was fixed and completed to prevent or minimize future colonization. However much to his dismay, there is now new evidence of another egress! Groundhog number 3?  This was not pleasing news, and to add insult to injury, TPP got a few new chigger bites.  Never had them remain this late in the season before, which promises more good things to come from climate change. Hope some rain last night and today is enough to ameliorate the mild October drought.  Farmers have really loved the dry weather and most of the maize and soybean fields are harvested; good yields should yield lower prices emphasizing the you-can't-win nature of modern farming. Finally decided to start bringing the tropical plants (orchids, cacti, bromeliads, gesneriads, a croton, the bonsai trees, etc.) inside.  Everything appears to have done well this year.

Mini-drought over?

It's a wet one here in the upper mid-west today.  It was slow to get going, just light over cast and a light drizzle.  But then after Mrs. Phactor bad mouthed the weather, it's been raining quite hard ever since.  This is the same system coming up from the south that drowned Baton Rouge, poor Baton Rouge. TPP has seen rain falls like that, measured in feet rather than inches, and he's been flooded out of a study site, but that was in the wet tropics. Here in the upper midwest, there are times when living in the Highland neighborhood is a good thing. Soil that was parched and cracked a week ago is now forming puddles around our yard. This usually translates into at least 2 inches of rain, so this mini-drought, about a 2.5 week dry spell, typical enough for August, is over for now.  Now prior to the drought this area had gotten some 4+ inches of rain, and now another heavy rain. It never seems to come just an inch at a time, and unfortunately this is something we may have to learn to live with as climate change models predict bigger weather systems of longer duration.  The leaves in the maize fields had curled, a sign the plants need some watering; the leaves will be uncurling now.  
The summer has  been quite wet so far because the rhododendrons have not needed their irrigation system, the pond hasn't needed any topping up and in fact has needed some draining, so our water bills have remained within reasonable limits.

Treacherous rainfall & garden watering

Things have been dry here abouts for a month now.  A few days ago storms passed through over night and in the morning everything looked wet and fresh.  Great!  Actually not so great with another week of dry, seasonally hot weather in the forecast.  Do you have a rain gauge?  If so, you would have recorded barely 1/4" of rainfall, and you need at least 1/2" of rain a week to keep a garden going, but in a dry spell, 1/4" just wets the surface.  This is exactly the type of situation where amateurs make the mistake of thinking it rained more than it did, or that the rain did more go than it did, and they get behind in watering.  So get out there and keep watering!  Water those things newly planted!  Water your fall garden!  Water less well established trees and shrubs!  This is the type of weather and the rainfall conditions where you kill trees, but you won't know until next spring, and then people will say "winter kill".  But no, it was lack of water several months earlier.  Which is now!  A neighbor was surprised TPP was watering just after we got a rain.  Well, dig into that mulch a bit and look at the soil underneath.  Dry, dry, dry.  He began watering only a short time later. 

A little drought relief

A band of mild-mannered thunderstorms rolled through the are about 3 am and we became aware of this when a nervous cat clambered onto the bed to tell us about it.  She doesn't like the noise and needs some reassurance.  Things were so very dry that watering required making tough decisions about what to water next, and it was not actually possible to keep up.  It had been so long since the last rain that a spider had built a web down inside the rain gauge, and this sort of webbed up the works, but the storms provided somewhere near 3/4s of an inch of rain giving us just a bit of breathing room.  Hardly know what to do today without watering.  If this type of late summer hot weather drought becomes a regular pattern then some plants may become untenable in this area, e.g., red maple is already iffy.  Plant more oaks people.  A long dry spell also gives you an opportunity to see a lot of poor watering, just wetting the surface and doing no real good at all.  Watering must be long and slow; it takes patience and depending upon the sprinkler and area, one to several hours.  A nozzle on a hose is for washing your car; it's not for watering plants.   

Hot and dry

Through mid-August the summer of 2013 has been quite nice; never hot and wet enough.  But the last 2 weeks have been very hot and very dry.  Dry enough that many plants need watering.  Nothing as chronic as last summer, but you still need at least 1/2 inch of rain a week to keep plants from suffering.  So Labor Day weekend will be used to water the most sensitive sections of our gardens.  Fall crops must also be watered, and they are doing well, although cabbage butterfly larvae are after the baby bok choi, so some policing and a row cover are in order.  Mrs. Phactor was quite thrilled with her pear (singular) crop, the first fruit ever gotten from this tree.  It's a nice big pear, and hopefully it will taste really sweet and be a promise of things to come.  Although the tomatoes were an embarrassing flop, peppers, eggplant, cucumbers, and zucchini have been adequate to plentiful.  Next year some major crop rotation may be necessary to avoid the wilt prone area of the garden. Mrs. Phactor is also trying to nurse a crop out of a couple of volunteer squash vines planted by squirrels who get squash seeds as part of their winter food.  Hard to know what kind of squash the squirrels planted, perhaps acorn, seriously.  If so this will be the only winter squash grown this year. 

Where have all the beetles gone, long time passing?

This year was a no-show year for Japanese beetles, a relatively new pest in our area.  Flea beetles usually turn my potato's and eggplants' leaves into lace unless they are regularly dusted.  Bean beetles usually eat every legume in sight, and cucumber beetles usually deliver a bacterial wilt while feeding terminating the cucumber season by now.  June "bugs" just never appeared at all.  Populations of insects do fluctuate and oscillate, but such a coincidence makes you think that last year's drought and heat had a very negative impact on these populations.  For certain some of these beetles pupate underground, and for some reason, last year's extreme drought and heat may have killed them during this life stage.  Also, cicadas do not seem as numerous this year as they often are, and they may have been affected as well.  The chiggers were not affected at all; pardon while TPP stops and scratches his ankles.  What actual cause of these population declines remains uncertain.  Maybe conditions favored or encouraged or allowed more fungal infections (e.g., milky spore).  Hard to say the actual cause, but you tend to think environmental factors when it affects a multiple species particularly ones that either live in the same place or belong to the same group.  Hope it takes a few years for these populations to recover.

Water relief and toast

Hooray!  All of those burnt offerings paid off and the notoriously fickle Midwestern weather gods presented us with an inch of rain overnight.  Plants, even many of those that had shown no signs of wilting, definitely look perked up this morning.  Plants that still don't look good are now officially in the category of toast.  One was a new planting, a small conifer, that just declined from the time it was planted.  Another is a male holly bush.  It joins others on the toast list, a nearby yew, a large and ancient one, and a nearby redbud, large and ancient, the latter of which is so close to the neighbor's driveway that it has claimed several rear view mirrors of cars backing out.  This tree is now in the burnt toast category; if we'd known it would have been gone years ago.  Strangely from our perspective this redbud doesn't exist since is lines up with another redbud about 5 feet closer so it all looks like just one tree.  None of these hollies has done particularly well, none of them look very good either, which is another way of getting onto the toast list.  The latest were half a dozen dwarf mock orange shrubs.  They looked so cute in marketing pictures; ours never even came close to looking so good, so they got basally pruned.  Now if you lack a male holly for pollination, then one of the better features of the other hollies, red fruit, will shift from the positive to the negative side of the balance sheet.  The removal of the hollies, the yew, and the redbud will generate some considerable opportunity for new plantings.  Ahhh, you're taking out a redbud (someone always says that).  Well, there are probably another dozen or so around the garden, and yesterday TPP probably removed 50 more seedlings; a redbud removal is not a problem.  

Some things are good dry, gardens are not one of them

Dry wine, good.  Dry humor, good.  Dry clothes, good.  Dry garden, not good.  Plants are beginning to suffer as a drought takes hold of our particular area of the upper Midwest.  Any percent chance of rain that isn't 100% (it's actually raining) doesn't seem to be good enough because rain events are happening to the north and south of us.  Now dry lawns don't even concern TPP a little, but lots of plants are beginning to wilt, especially with some hotter weather that always seems to come with drought, and then not recover late in the day.  Now compared to last year, it's not bad yet.  This was the first week that we had to do a lot of watering, and some gardens have yet to be watered.  Here TPP should point out that a friend gave Mrs. Phactor a new rain gauge for her birthday, and it hasn't rained since.  Unfortunately, when we're away, and some upcoming travel is planned, plants really do get neglected, and keeping up with just the minimum amount of watering is a major job.  Some things don't matter.  The tomatoes are basically terminal; some potted replacements will provide some fruit but later, if they get watered.  Any disease that interferes with water transport just makes things worse when it's a bit dry. Anybody got a good rain dance?  Even hanging out laundry didn't do any good today.  A major front moved through the area, but no rain!  Of course sometimes some decisions get made for you.  A big old yew is in decline as well as some American hollies growing near it, and we had been talking about redoing that part of the garden, so now it looks like the decision is being made for us.  Ah, well.

How does your garden grow?

The Phactors are busy assessing the condition of their garden prior to opening our garden grounds to a few hundred visitors.  The drought of 2012, which continued right through the winter, did a lot of damage to a lot of plants.  On the grand scale, on the sit back and just take in your surroundings scale, our garden looks just fine. It's big, spacious, park-like, lovely.  It's in the fine detail where you notice the severe damage to the lawn, yes, even our diverse lawn ecosystem took a beating from a brutally dry summer and a too wet spring.  If you examine gardens up close, the blank spaces here and there tell the story.  All the watering last year was highly beneficial because watered areas had very little if any damage, and without the TLC things would have been worse.  Local nurseries report there was a lot of damage to Japanese maples and other somewhat finicky plants, particularly new plantings of all types and they are being inundated by replacement demands based on their sales agreement, but they know, and TPP knows, that most of those plant deaths were avoidable with adequate watering.  Just a pointer here; if you water with a nozzle on the end of the hose you almost certainly do not water things well.  So nurseries are doing a brisk business in replacements for plants not under warranty.  One of the problems of liking less common plants is that they are not easy to replace.  If your plum yew dies, no body here abouts is going to sell you a replacement.  Say what?  A plum, yew want a plum?  Thank you anyways.  Another interesting phenomenon that someone may wish to comment on is chlorosis, the yellowing of leaves where the veins tend to remain green, a sign of nitrogen deficiency.  For some reason a broad cross section of plants, some of which never looked chlorotic before, are showing need of some nutrients.  Rhododendrons and their heathy relatives always look that way, but the magnolias, crabapples, silver bells, and others are showing the symptoms.  Somehow this must be related to the 2012 drought for this to be so widespread.  Everybody got a dose of foliar fertilizer but it will take some time for the symptoms to subside.  Some long planned hardscaping is under way: a new flag stone path through the back garden looks very nice and will make planning the rest of the area easier (knowing where people will walk always helps).  However the new patio area by the garage and garden shed is just way too pretty for messing up with lawnmowers and wheelbarrows and the like, but that's its destiny.  Someone asked if we had furniture for the area!  Sure.  Furniture.  Prediction: the newness is going to be worn off pretty fast. 

Hear those crispy rice grains calling for help? Snap! Crackle! Pop!

New scientific findings are often fun and interesting, but how some "journalists" write about such things is annoying to the nth degree.  Xylem consists of a series of cellulosic tubes and during water stress, the transpirational pull upon the water columns, a force generated by water loss from leaves, can generate air embolisms.  In a manner of speaking, xylem gets the bends.  A research group has found that formation of these air bubbles makes sounds.  Now that's not all that unexpected or surprising.  Ever listen to the bubbles of carbon dioxide rising from your carbonated beverage?  That hiss you hear is the sound of all those bursting bubbles. If you had sufficiently fine listening devices, and slowed down the sounds recorded, you could probably listen to each individual bursting bubble.  Or how about the sound of air bubbles being made in a drinking straw when your sucking has lowered the level of the liquid to nearly the bottom?  Now the finding that air bubbles in the tiny xylem "straws" in a tree make a noise when forming is somewhat interesting but mostly because people don't think about trees making any noise.  Now here's where the newsy report goes seriously arwy.  It's not a "drought distress call" any more than your crispy rice cereal is calling for help to keep from drowning in the milk.  Scheesh!  This puts this report into a category of bad journalism by making a physical thing that can be explained in a non-technical way into something vaguely anthropomorphic. Was embolism too technical?  Or xylem? Where do the find these writers?  Oh, yeah, far away from science.

Spring garden assessment

This wasn't a particularly bad winter except the coldest weather was not accompanied by snow cover, so plants were quite exposed. Now that spring growth is beginning some assessment of winter damage can be made.  Two new mountain laurels took a beating; one might survive, the other is toast.  A Leptodermis also new last year looks like a loss as well. A big old Annabelle hydrangea looks like a weed whacker went after it, but it was just bunnies.  Most of the trees and shrubs that we expended water on look pretty good this spring, which shows that winter cold often gets the blame for death caused by prior drought. A dwarf hemlock looks OK, and given TPP's track record with this species (0 for 3 attempts) it's a good sign for it to just be alive.  Our nominee for most improved (at this point) is a flowering quince that got severely bunnied last year, but recovered very nicely from within it's cage.  A Pieris has better flower buds than it has had for many years. Hoping for one or two  magnolias to flower for the first time: odds on butterfly magnolia - almost certain; odds on Oyama magnolia - still a long shot. A better evaluation of the patients will be possible as the season progresses.  Bright note: Iris reticulata multiplied nicely since last year (their first), and it's such a cheerfully colorful early bulb when planted in mass.  Drought didn't matter much because they go dormant in the summer heat. 

Drought worrying at official start

It remains bone dry here in the upper midwest of the USA.  January is almost at an end and the amount of precipitation has been way below average.  This area has received none for the past 10 days or so.  The ground is bare exposing ground level plants to the worse of the recent cold without any of the insulating properties of snow.  For many years during my childhood a small mimosa tree/shrub survived in our garden just about 3 miles south of Lake Ontario in an area which was a hard zone five.  My Mother was a southerner who really liked this reminder of the south, so it was planted where a snow drift reliably formed, and if you know anything at all about the snow belt of upstate NY, the snow is reliable.  Any part of the mimosa sticking up got frozen, but the lower parts always survived.  The temperature has reached zero, a funny designation in F degrees because that is 32 degrees below freezing.  Come on people, can't we please switch to C like the rest of the world?  At any rate this may kill some not so hardy plants, but more likely will be the death of plants, particularly newly planted ones, from desiccation.  Yes, plants can freeze, but more damage and plant death comes from the dry conditions of winter than from the cold.  So far our winter has been fairly mild with only one week of fairly cold temperatures so far.  Our winters are basically desert conditions at low temperatures; December through February are the driest months here in terms of precipitation, about 2-3 inches a month tops.  When the soil is frozen because of the lack of snow cover, even less water is available to plants.  So it would appear that the drought, relieved somewhat during the fall, is continuing and looking forward this will make for a dry spring.  Farmers will be happy about being able to get out onto their fields early, but this happiness will be short lived if the dry conditions continue.  So TPP doesn't like the current conditions at all, so the official worrying has begun.  It's a gardener thing.

Issac waters our gardens

The remanents of hurricane Issac dumped rain on north central Lincolnland on Friday night and Saturday morning.  According to our trusty rain gauge Issac left us 4.3" of rain super filling our lily pond and actually requiring the excess to be dumped.  For the first time in more than 3 months, our plants look well watered, but the drought may have claimed another victim, a bush cherry (Prunus tomentosa).  Newly planted grass grew like crazy demonstrating our terrific timing for planting.  The rain seems to have made some late summer crops a possibility: pepper & eggplant are recovering, bush beans looking good, maybe some lettuce, maybe some bokchoi.  One bed of lettuce appears to have become slug fodder.  No complaints about the rain over the long weekend.  More on the KC weekend later.

Drought triage

Almost 2 weeks ago our gardens got 1.5" of rain, and nothing since all the while baking in what is for this area extreme heat.  And remember that rain came after nearly 3 weeks of no significant rain.  Some tough decisions will probably have to be made.  Big investments in new trees and shrubs require the insurance of watering, but small investments, like our kitchen garden, which is doing so poorly anyways, make the triage easy.  You can hardly blame the wildlife for eating things they should leave alone; they are having a hard time finding good fodder, and the Phactor is watering his garden to grow some vegetation.  Their misunderstanding is understandable.  Still this may be the second year in a row, and the only times in his 40+ years of gardening, that the Phactor managed to harvest no zucchini!  It's still rather hard to believe.  Maybe the F1 will feel sorry for us.  A few very drought sensitive plants have already given up the ghost; this area has always been a bit too dry for them, e.g., Clethra alnifolia, even when planted near the end of a downspout, some whimpy blueberries, an unestablished azalea.  And the Phactor refuses to ignore some pet plants, although in general they are doing as well as anything else (e.g. Scaidopitys, a new weeping hemlock).  But there you have it.  Tough choices to be made, but unlike the farmers, at least we have choices.

Breaking more records than predicted

As midwestern North America continues to swelter in high temperatures and become more parched, you still haven't heard much in the news about global warming.  Now as more and more crops in this bread basket region are threatened, you have to take a long-term view if you are a responsible politician.  You must consider that rather than being a rare bad weather year, such weather could become, is becoming, much more common.  Here's a nice set of pie charts based on record high and low temperatures, and of course, if the climate is staying more-or-less steady, you basically expect to get a similar number of record highs and lows each year for a 50:50 pie chart.  Now let's look at the actual data, especially in recent years.  Hmm, are these showing the "no-climate-change" prediction?  Which years are deviating the most in terms of record highs?  So not only is it getting warmer, it's getting warmer faster! Cheerful thought, no?   Although little considered by anyone, our present day human culture has been constructed during a very equitable climatic period.  Arrogantly we think our instutions are now immune to such changes, and yet we have precious little buffer.  Who is to say another famine cannot occur?  Well, what's going to happen if 2, or 3, or 4 such years occur in a row?  Some of those fields that will produce little if any maize crop this year were planted for seed corn destined to become next year's crop.  That's just one domino.  But there are lots more.  How many years of crop failure across this region can the USA, a well-off country, sustain?  Everyone acts like next year won't be like this year?  What if it is?  What impact will greatly reduced yields have on maize and soybean related agri-businesses?   On food prices?  On farmers?  Lot's of questions and no good answers.  Time for people to start shouting at any and all politicos to take climate change seriously.  HT to Climate Central. 

Drought - Garden news during dry times

It's been a bit over 3 weeks since any significant rain has fallen, and it's getting tough on plants.  New plantings are being pampered with regular watering because the only alternative is to let them die.  The natives are struggling, but they will survive.  A number of our perennials have just folded their tents and probably won't be seen until next season, e.g., wax bells, late flowering snake root, and quite a few others.  Some of the hate-to-be-dry plants may have bought the farm: e.g., Clethra alnifolia struggles in our summers in a good year; now it's toast, which is too bad because it's really cute in flower.  It's so dry now that some well established plants are struggling, e.g., the bottle brush buckeye.  A couple of magnolias are showing some signs of stress too.  You may notice certain trees shedding more bark, which is because tree trunks actually shrink in diameter during dry times.  Others plants are doing surprisingly well considering.  When it was younger and during it's growing season, our Japanese parasol pine wilted very easily, but now it has been weathering the hot, dry pretty well in a location where it is protected from the afternoon heat and sun.  A couple of new mountain laurels and a new ornamental black gum are proving pretty tough, and having had rather bad results with ornamental hemlocks in the past, a new one, a quite pretty one, has been watered regularly, and so far so good.  Nothing usually affects wild ginger, but now ours has died back, which it has never done before.  Many of our ferns have packed it in for the season, e.g., the osmundas (3 sp) especially.  The flowering displays of our hostas and native forbs are reduced in size, number, and duration.  The yellow cone flowers seem to be an exception.  However, having seen many maize fields that are clearly a total loss across Ohio, Indiana, and Illinois, the Phactor is happy enough that his livelihood does not depend upon his garden.  Lastly, the bun-buns are eating things they've never touched before showing that they are getting a bit desperate. This morning dawned overcast, but no rain seems to be in the offing, and if this front passes without rain, it will likely be another week before any precipitation is possible. 

Highly conflicted on today's weather

When you are a plant person and your area is suffering from a drought, you want and hope for a really rainy day, but why today! Once a year the Phactor drags out his Cajun cooking gear and out under our big trees, he whips up a big pot of fish soup for a bunch of friends, and now it looks like the hoped for rainy day has come on fish soup day. Thus the emotional conflict, the-rain-very-much-wanted-but-just-not-today conflict, after all what would it hurt if it rained on Monday or Tuesday when classes occupy me all day? So the soup preparations will continue, and no one will complain about the rain, certainly not the plants, but the annoyance remains.