Fall fell, so autumn

Today really felt like the first real autumn day, cool, crisp, dry (too dry!), and cool enough over night to require a light blanket with the optional two black kitty-girl warmer, but only for Mrs. Phactor. TPP is not complaining. He picked a handful of grape tomatoes and enough small eggplant for a pasta dinner. This also means it will soon be time to harvest prairie biomass for another master's degree project, but that will probably be done next week. Time to go looking for some prairie gentians; although vividly blue they hide deep within the grassy canopy and so are seldom seen by most people. A bottle gentian grew in our gardens for a few years, but it did not sustain itself. It's a strange plant whose flowers never actually open requiring fairly substantial bees to force their way in. Now TPP is on the prowl for a couple of big, winter squashes, they type with hard, dark orange flesh.  They are around but right now shops want "Halloween" prices for them, not squash prices, so perhaps some will wait for a post October sale. Of course there may also be enough squash remaining in the freezer from last year. Inventory control is so hard, and it's a form of spelunking to find out what frozen items lurk in the depths of the freezer. Mrs. Phactor already pointed out that at least 5 packages of Andouille sausage await the urge to make some gumbo.  And cool fall weather is perfect for a pot of gumbo!  See how things just sort of work out especially as the transition continues from margarita season to NY cocktail season. 

Soggy Saturday

The midwest of North America is having a rain event. Our area is not getting flooded like down in Texas and Oklahoma, but it's plenty wet. Our fountain pond and lily pond are full to overflowing and low areas have puddles. A few recent transplants are being well watered, but the rain has stalled both field and garden work. While waiting for a lull in a local cloud burst, a young fellow said, "Have you ever seen anything like this?" Acutally yes. Us tropical biologists get a whole new perspective on rain. One year our field trip to Costa Rica got over 400 mm of rain in 6 days.  One year TPP survived a monsoonal wet season where his weather diary had the same entry for 44 straight days: low overcast with light to heavy pulses of rain interspersed with a few real deluges. Everything mildewed.  Houseplants that were just moved outside for the summer are probably enjoying getting washed off and thoroughly rehydrated, but it's too much rain for a lot of plants. Having missed a window of opportunity, TPP still needs to plant some summer squashes!  Even if things get much worse, the Phactors neighborhood is what passes for a hill here in the flatlands.   

Giardino di Villa Camberaia - Botanical Geek Tour adventures in Tuscany

Some guide book somewhere mentioned that the garden of the Villa Camberaia perched high in the hills above Florence as a great destination for garden lovers.  Well, you know the botanical geek tour squad will try their best to get the straight dope for our faithful readers. Without any particular agenda today, the villa's location was easily found on Via del Rosselino outside of the little town of Settignano. What better than a little botanical adventure a bit off the beaten tourist track. Coming from the south rather than from Florence our brilliant naviguessing found the Via del Rosselino without any problems, except for one; our approach was from the "back" end of the "street". Our Fiat rental car was just much too wide for the high walled, tight-turned "road" (translation - four foot wide goat path).  At one point, with the rear-view mirrors folded inward, there was an whole 7-8 cm on one side and maybe 1.5 cm clearance on the other side. It was amazing! TPP thought we'd have to return the keys to the car rental people and tell them, "Your car is wedged between two rock walls up in Settignano", where upon TPP figured a prohibition about driving in such places was in the fine print of the rental agreement somewhere. Then it occurred to a passenger that no one was getting out of a car so wedged anyways. So the only recourse was to forge onward at a blazing speed of 2 km/hr or so and hope for the best.  These are the kind of roads where you use your car horn to announce your presence because if two vehicles met, one was going to have to back up until you found some place to get out of the way. Why do they make Fiats so big and wide? One corner was so tight it took 5 forward and back maneuvers to make the turn, and the many-colored paint splotched rock by the driver's door was a testament to the number of drivers who failed this test. Here's an image of the final approach to the villa just so you can begin to visualize this road. This is not a driveway, but the main road through this entire "subdivision"!  Beep! Beep! What a place for a botanist from the flat lands! BTW, apparently most visitors walk up from the town having ridden the bus that far. So is it worth it to try to find and visit this garden? The BGT team cannot say; the garden was closed until August 16th! And of course today was the 15th! Can you believe it? The team drove home and made pizza.

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. 

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. 

Do tigers stalk your garden?

It's not exactly a jungle out there, but this particular tiger does stalk our garden, the eastern tiger swallowtail butterfly. With a wingspan of some 8 to 15 cm it's hard to miss, and in a diverse perennial garden, the adults find plenty of appropriate flowers for feeding. A corner of a side yard tends to light up with very late rays from the setting sun and butterflies, particularly red admirals and tiger swallowtails, often put on quite a mating/territorial flight displays, spiraling columnar flights of 2 or more butterflies, as many as 15 red admirals at times. One of the reasons that tiger swallowtails may be so common is that members of the magnolia family are their larval food plant (and maybe rose family too?), where their caterpillars feed, and big tuliptrees are quite common in our neighborhood, not to mention the Phactor's magnolia collection. Females can be black and confused with black swallowtails.