How does your garden grow?

One of the problems with having a big garden is that it is a hand full for some one to babysit any time the Phactors are away, especially if things are a bit dry.  Our trip to Savannah was just 10 and a half days long and yet it seemed we were absent for weeks. Several things are clear at this point, this year has been just about perfect for crab grass. It's luxuriant and it's everywhere. While commuting to work yesterday by bicycle, it was also clear that the giant ragweed crop will be monsterous. Beware if you suffer from its pollen.  Several new additions to the garden were in serious need of water, but it looks as if all will recover. As the F1 pointed out, "you guys plant so many things in so many places no one but you know where they all are".  She is quite right. And  even if you had a map then either carrying water around or dragging hoses becomes quite a chore.  She did get steamed crabs and Savannah beer.  May have to see about getting a garden sitter in the future, especially if we are going to be away for a longer period of time.  Even  after just 10 days the kitty-girls act as though they were over-fed and starved for attention. 
The kitchen garden delivered some cucumbers, some tomatoes, a not too big zucchini, and sweet peppers.  Eggplant may yet recover enough to provide more fruit. Soon the beans will be producing and time to plant fall lettuce and bok choi is approaching.
To be completely fair, the same weather that is producing the crab grass and ragweed has also produced a huge display of naked ladies (and here too), and we has us hundreds.

Very uncomfortable weather

Today is a hot, humid day, the worst so far this summer.  Some thunder storms may roll in later.  Hmm, the actually humidity is 70% and the temperature 91 F, so the heat index is 109, swell. You can look up a chart to figure the index out. The kitty girls are used to lounging in north window sills, but under these conditions the windows will stay closed.  TPP got caught up on lawn mowing this morning when it was somewhat cooler. The crab grass is trying to take over the world along with a number of other summer weeds. This is when mulching earlier in the year will pay off. 
Our house handles the heat fairly well, but it has limitations. When the night time temperature drops into the low 70s or upper 60s, the house will stay comfortable without AC. But under these conditions the low tonight will probably be in the upper 70s.  The house is massive, white, and well-shaded for much of the day. It has good flow through ventilation and a lot of rooms have ceiling fans.  An evaluation for solar power came out as are you kidding?  So the economics may not work out so well for us although the shading is nice. Our electrical usage is below average anyways. 
TPP must venture out again soon because even though it's hot out there several plants may need water especially those in pots or planters, or those that are just newly planted period.  

Water, water everything

This time of year is tricky for gardening especially when mild warm weather predominates, but things aren't growing so much. Gardens just don't look like it's the end of September out there, and it's easy to get lulled into complacency. So here's the thing: keep those newly planted trees and shrubs, especially conifers, well watered. Remember winter survival is more about desiccation than it is about cold. Deciduous plants drop all those water-wasting leaves, but most conifers are evergreen, and while their leaves have relatively small areas and correspondingly less water loss, as the air gets colder it gets drier and when the soil freezes water is really "hard" to take up. So it's easy to lose track of rainfall and let plants dry out too much before the cold really sets in. TPP is now certain that his prize conifer died during the winter not because of cold but because of the severe drought the summer before.  And that combined with less well established roots was a deadly combination. Remember, half an inch of water a week is needed at a minimum to keep things growing well, and water those newly planted trees and shrubs deeply.   

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. 

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. 

Summer Lawn Care

Hot, dry conditions are always a challenge especially for lawns, so the Phactor is here to provide the advice you need.  The basic principles of ecological lawn care must apply.  So please understand the following.  Lawn grasses go dormant under hot dry conditions, so to deal with this you must do nothing.  Yes, that's right, do nothing.  On my commute to work this AM a fellow was doing it completely backwards, the lawn was being watered and stressed young trees were being ignored.  Wrong, wrong, wrong, and to compound the error this fellow will have be out there mowing his lawn in 103 F temperatures.  On the other hand if you have planted any trees or shrubs within the past 12-15 months, water, water, water them.  If no amount of water seems to help, then in all liklihood the root ball was not properly spread at the time of planting (Yes, you've been instructed about that too.), so now you will pay the price, and if it makes you feel any better the Phactor learned this lesson the hard way.  Hot, dry conditions provide the proving ground for proper planting, although at times there's just nothing you can do.  Three Japanese yews were planted in different locations; two are doing fine, and the third is showing severe stress and may not survive and who knows why.  At any rate, when you hear that comforting crunch under foot you know you are treating your lawn correctly.

Music to my ears!

It's 91 F (32.8C) today, and tomorrow promises to be hotter.  Even though the spring was early, our herb and kitchen gardens are late.  So naturally, hot weather arrives to better assist us in gardening, that and the lack of rain, a great duo.  Terrific.  Ah, but what's that marvelous sound?  Why it's the sound of a 20-something back shoveling some of the 10 cubic yards of wood mulch and shipping it around the gardens.  Yes.  This is money being well spent and well earned, the more so because a colleague is happy to have her son actually outside doing physical labor for a decent wage ($2.65 an hour and all the grass he can eat).  It actually isn't so bad as many parts of our yard are always shaded, so you can move your efforts around during the day, and our massive white house withstands the heat quite well without the AC.  Most of our neighbors have already started theirs running.  The most important thing about such early dry heat is to keep the mulch spreader and all of our newly planted trees and shrubs well watered.  In the meantime, having worn himself out, the Phactor is pondering the deep meaning of margarita while planning a "treat yourself well" dinner.

Keep watering!

The Phactor is issuing a general warning that the great inequalities of precipitation we have been experiencing pose a grave danger to plants, especially any planted this year. After two weeks of no rain locally, a day of light rain helped a little, but not a lot. The rain gauge said it was barely 1/3d of an inch, barely wetting the surface, and not even that under the crowns of some of our large trees that not only are tremendous competitors for water but creators of their own rain shadows. So in marked constrast to the eastern USA, it remains a drought out here. Now here's the problem. Many people noted the recent rainy day and are mistakenly thinking things are OK for awhile, but they aren't. The soil water was not replenished and many plants are suffering stress. If you do not keep watering newly planted trees in the mistaken belief that nature has taken care of them they will die during the winter, fail to leaf out or grow in the spring, and winter cold will take the blame for your neglect. You see winter is actually a drought season, a cold dry desert effect takes place which is bad enough by itself, but when the plant enters winter already water stressed, the deck is stacked against survival. A number of new plantings around our town are already good bets for "winter kill" including almost all the city's mandated landscaping around new buildings because after meeting the letter of the regulation, the plants are routinely ignored, and the town is not very diligent at holding feet to the fire for replacement plantings. Some official exqamines the required landscaping, check, everything in compliance, everything dies, no one cares. So what's wrong with a 1 year check up? So unless the weather patterns change considerably the fall looks to be dry so lots of plants will die as a result. When you purchase a plant, especially a nice big expensive one, in my case an 8 foot tall weeping white pine,you must protect your investment by watering, watering, watering, and yes that costs money, but so does buying a replacement. Don't waste any water on the lawn; any grass in your lawn will just go dormant, so no worries. The general rule of thumb is that it takes at least an inch of rain a week to keep things in good shape. Lastly my apologies to those readers who have gotten way, way too much precipitation; it just isn't fair, it's nature, who just doesn't care.

Indian Summer- Keep Watering

As always battling weather fronts make for weather extremes here in Midwestern North America. Only a week ago, the over night lows were flirting with a frost, although in the center of our mighty metropolis it's usually a few degrees warmer. Presently this Saturday's high is in the lower 80s, and not having had any significant rain in nearly two weeks, the area is parched. A typical enough Indian summer, but one that requires gardeners to take some care. Farmers harvesting their maize and soybeans are delighted, but many plants are suffering, and if they were newly planted, the wise gardener is providing them with some significant water. Watched a neighbor making a common error, spray over watering, a novice mistake. Using a hand held nozzle he only wet the top millimeter of soil, and while the top looked wet, the plant roots remain bone dry, and even worse he thinks he watered! It takes patience, or forgetfulness to water well. Lacking the former you are much better off to use a slow gentle sprinkler and then simply forget about things for a couple of hours. Come spring, didn't-water-morons will complain about how many plants died, but they killed them, right now during the fall, but this will be a hard sell. What most people don't realize is that the biggest winter kill problem is from desiccation; winter is like a cold desert, and more plants die of dehydration than freezing. Indian summers are nice for getting the garage painted, today's major chore, and it's a delightful temperature, but tough on plants.

Gunga Din where are you?

Quite the opposite of Mary's situation, late summer in the upper midwestern USA means hot and dry, and at the best of times August and September are near droughts. Since all the rain is falling elsewhere, with which we agree is unfair, it's time to watch after your plants. Those of us who can't help ourselves, plant exotics that are not well adapted to the rigors of our climate, and you either baby the baby, or watch it whither and die. It takes 1.5 cm (1/2 inch) of rain a week to keep things like a well-mulched kitchen garden going in the summer heat, but that is not enough for a deep soaking, so deeper rooted plants begin to suffer. Last week some storms provided a scant 1/2 inch, and last night's storms not only interrupted a patio dinner, but dumped a whopping 1/4 inch of rain if we were lucky, and that's it for two weeks, and probably unless some more materializes today, all for the rest of this week, so no wonder lots of plants are suffering. If you have newly planted trees or shrubs, meaning plants in the ground for 3 years or less, keep them well watered and that takes more time and water than most people think. The Phactor is hounding our neighbors, not the ones who ripped out everything and planted grass, but the others who planted dozens of new things, a major non-grass landscaping effort that includes several very nice trees of some size, to keep watering, but they just don't water enough. Everyone thinks they can water, but after watching the superficial watering, you sometimes have to dig just below the surface and show them it remains bone dry down there; they always appear surprized. This is why drip irrigation works so well if you can just turn it on, go get a cold drink and forget about your water bills for the next four to five hours or so. Afterall if you spent some pretty good cash on a 2 meter tall golden dawn redwood, what's a few bucks more to keep it alive? Now there is one exception: grassy lawns. Let them bloody well dry out! Yes, they turn brown with the added benefit of needing no mowing, but that's what grass is meant to do in the heat of summer. It goes dormant. And yet the grass mono-culture morons keep dumping on the water. But that's life in the 'burbs.