Gardening spring fever, exercise spring ferver

As per usual our weather goes from rather cold to warm-hot more or less directly. Our gardens look quite lovely, very colorful with a combination of bulbs, perennials, trees, and shrubs all in flower. Even the spring beauty/violet infested lawn is beautiful, in fact, spring beauty and violets are the lawn. It's the peak for bluebells, our most prominent and numerous wild flower. In one place yellow celandine poppies contrast nicely with the blue, and usually accented by the pink of bleeding hearts, but the freeze of a week ago (what a difference a week makes!) did them damage. For Mrs. Phactor the transition from tax season (very taxing) transitions immediately to garden season. Anyone who wants to experience our whole body garden-your-butt-off exercise program need only stop by and we'll see that you get a workout. Why is it that exercise zealots are never gardeners? Gardening is exercise that accomplishes something, or does that make it work and therefore ineligible as exercise? 
Last week's freeze demonstrated some plants' susceptibility to freezes: flower buds on a Butterflies Magnolia got totally toasted, so did the emerging leaf buds on a Oyama magnolia (and hopefully the damage is not too severe). Yet our tulip and saucer magnolias were unscathed because they were purposely sited to delay their flowering, and this year it worked. The freeze caught most of the saucer magnolias in full bloom and they suddenly went from magnificent flowering displays to toast.  Sudden heat causes plant to flower quickly and fade just as quickly. TPP has also begun replanting the boundary garden where a huge limb from their tulip tree broke during an ice storm and squashed three conifers like bugs; they did not survive. The 'Techny' arbor vitaes will be replaced, but not the limber pine. A new 'black tulp' magnolia has been planted too. TPP also got to replace his Japanese umbrella pine (Scaidopitys), but you cannot replace 6 years of growth.  
New trees and shrubs means digging holes; you have no idea how many muscle groups get a workout digging holes, so again stop by, a stake marks the spot for the next hole twice the diameter of the root ball please. Get your back into it! This is for your own good! In another exercise challenge, yesterday TPP rebuilt a pedestal for a objet d'art out of large 
pavers, a non-leaning pedestal, and this AM his right hand is feeling the effects of that exercise as he types this blog. Stop on by, he'll show you which keys to hit.

Date the 100th plant flowered

It been a pretty average spring so far; maybe just a bit dry. Yesterday the 100th plant flowered, not the 100th individual plant, but the 100th different type of plant, mostly different species. So 100 different plants flowered by April 28th. Since beginning this data gathering a lot of plants have come and gone, so it isn't the same species list, but let's assume it hasn't been biased toward one direction or the other. The earliest the 100th plant flowered was March 25th in 2012, an exceptionally early spring. The latest the 100th plant flowered was May 5th in 2013 and 2014.  In 2010 the 100th plant flowered on April 21st and in 2011 if was on April 29th. TPP is struggling to get all this data out of notebooks and into a nice data base, but it isn't easy and is time-consuming. Things are listed in a goofy mix of common and scientific names, plus bloody cultivars and hybrids, and that takes time to sort out. Some people find it hard to believe that our gardens contain so many different plants. And things do surprise us at times. Last year a new Erythronium x "Pagoda" grew quite well and a nice display was expected this spring, but thus far it's a no show. So what happened? Don't know.

Bored with nothing to do?

You know it was a busy weekend if you need a Monday to rest up.  The weekend started with a TGIF with friends and a walk in the garden.  A little cool, but the smoked trout was excellent with a tart NZ chardonnay, and several spring flowering plants were looking quite nice (look for a blog later this week). Saturday was cold and wet with rain all morning. TPP found the last butternut squash in the cool cellar and since it was still in good condition transformed it into a curried squash and apple soup (this isn't exactly the recipe but close), perfect for a cold, wet day, but it hasn't been eaten yet. When you can't garden, why not garden shop? A Mrs. Phactor motto that makes her such a favorite with our local garden shoppe proprietor. Went out to dinner with friends to try a restaurant that was new to us - Escobar's (E. Columbia, Champaign, IL); it is very much worth a visit.  Sunday was much nicer, so the garden spring clean-up continued with pruning, shifting of bunny protection cages from shrubs to emerging perennials, fertilizing, pruning of trees and shrubs, and the first mowing of some lawn (avoiding the blue lawn-green slime Scilla dominated areas).  Found time to make a ground lamb ragu pasta for din-dins.  Ended the day with a very heavy nostalgia trip by attending a gray hairs' concert by the Nitty-Gritty Dirt Band who still perform well and sound pretty good.  Whoosh! Where did the weekend go?  And best of all didn't hear or see anything about a single playoff game of any sport!  No such boredom 'round here.

Spring cleaning

One problem with herbaceous perennials is the spring cleanup. Most herbaceous perennials need to have last years aerial shoots pruned off before this season's new shoots really get going. This process is complicated in our gardens by all the leaves collected by all of last year's shoots. The amount of plant litter that needs to be removed and gotten out of the way is quite voluminous both because of the number of herbaceous perennials, the size of the gardens, and the amount of leaves particularly those dropped only recently by our uncooperative oaks. Other artifacts are uncovered: very much used tennis balls from the golden retrievers next door, a short soaker hose for watering what was a newly planted tree about 12 years ago, some perviously useful pruning shears. And the work has only just begun. Part of the problem here is that until April 15th Mrs. Phactor hasn't got any time for gardening. This clearly demonstrates that the IRS is not very supportive of gardeners. There actually should be some major deductions for gardeners to encourage gardening and make the world a better place, but instead the deductions primarily benefit bad-hair plutocrats.  It's all about priorities. This was a pretty mild winter so the gardens don't seem to have suffered any serious losses. It was also time to take the straw mulch off the strawberry bed, and good thing they were so mulched because the particular freezing and thawing this winter resulted in considerable amounts of heaving to which strawberries are particularly prone. Most of the woodland perennials handle a leafy mulch without much help. The wild ramp in particular, as well as the bluebells (of the borage sort), have the ability to push up though a massive mulch of leaves. So no rest for the wicked. Wicked?

Spring bits and pieces

Here's some bits and pieces that have popped up along with the spring flowers. First, remember when planting new trees and shrubs, especially those that have been grown in plastic pots, to tease out pot bound roots. A large blunt screw driver or a large plastic tent stake work effectively to dislodge and tease out pot bound roots before planting. Teasing out roots is rather like combing out tangled hair or like getting a lump of chewing gum out of the coat of a Maine coon cat. The cat doesn't chew gum, and the child had no idea how such a thing could happen, but some local anesthetic was needed, in this case a couple of sardines. When a cat's nose & mouth are so occupied they notice little else.  So if  you want successful transplants you would do well to untangle root balls. 
Second, now is the time to plant early kitchen garden crops. Broccoli, spinach, lettuces, and the like, do very well in cool weather especially under a floating row cover. To maximize yield with minimal space use some interplantings. TPP's best such trick is to plant broccoli at about 18" spacing, and then interplant with bibb or romaine lettuce seedlings. The lettuce will mature and be ready to harvest before the broccoli would crowd it. 
Third, this is the time of year to prune things. Sorry TPP can easily show you how to prune, but it's hard to describe, hard to use hard fast rules because trees and shrubs vary. It's so easy when you know how woody plants grow but so hard to transfer that knowledge verbally. 
Fourth, nothing says spring as much as woodland wildflowers, perennial ephemerals that grow fast, flower, and fruit before the leaves above close the canopy. Our earliest are liverwort, trilliums, and bloodroot. Nothing is more cheerful than finding these small plants poking up through the leaf litter. If you have a shady, tree-covered portion of your property, then this is one of the easiest of all natural gardens to develop.