Strange happenings in the garden

Early blooms

One of the guys on one of the gardening communities on g+ popped up a pic and stated how he loves this time of year because his Witch Hazel blooms. This statement made me stop and wonder what was going on here. All of my witch hazel has always bloomed late in winter, usually late February to early March. He is in Georgia, I'm in Virginia. We're not that far from each other. So what gives?

Then, late yesterday I was walking around my gardens and I see this! (see image above) What is going on here? they have never bloomed like this before. Then I started thinking... and we all know what that means. Well, my wife always says, "uh oh". Maybe this is the harbinger of things to come. They have already said we are in for a bad winter. Who "they" are is anyone's guess, but I'm thinking it's those prognosticators over at the Farmers Almanac.

Are the plants trying to get everything in before "the end". Do they know something we don't know? So I dig a little deeper. While we have three different varieties of witch hazel, there are tens of dozens of varieties though. After some research, there are a few varieties that actually bloom twice in a year, fall and very early spring.

Hamamelis 'Diane', with dark orange blossoms

Hamamelis 'Jelena', with orange blossoms

Sometimes bloom time depends on the age of a plant, as does growth rate. Our Ginkgo seems like it is taking for ever to get big enough for shade, but all of the ratings I've read say it is fast to moderate. So we'll wait and see on that one. So maybe the double bloom-ability on this Hamamelis just needed a few years to get there.

I also found out why they are so expensive when you do wish to purchase a new variety. They are all from grafted plants. Plants from seeds or cuttings tend to be less expensive, due to less work involved.

The large specimens in Washington DC all seem to bloom in February also, last time we were up there, and they all seemed to yellow. If you are into plants, Washington DC will keep you on your toes. Many were planted decades ago and will be very large.

In other news from our habitat, we had our first snow of the season, which is very early for us. Okay, okay, it was only flurries, but it sure did come down for a bit. The bird feeder was a very busy area of the yard as I added a suet cage with suet/nuts onto the side of it. It seems to be quite popular. We have quite a few woodpeckers/sapsuckers around here, including Pileated, Red-Bellied, Red Headed, Hairy, Downy, and the Common Flicker. I noticed that the Titmouse and Blue Jay also fed from it.

Rerun post. To mulch, or not to mulch, that is the question.

 

This is a rerun of a post I did last November 22nd. Since I have many new readers, I wanted to share my thoughts on this topic, again, and with my new friends on Google+. I was outside today, mulching and cutting and the smells of autumn clicked and brought me back. I laid down in the yard after finishing and watched over 30 birds descend on the bird feeder. I'm not the only one getting ready for winter.

November, 22, 2012.
Every year I see hundreds, no thousands of people raking, bagging, blowing huge piles of leaves frustratingly with a small electric blower, filling huge tarps with leaves, only to put them in bags, ready to go to the landfill. Really?

The plastic bags alone will not decompose for 1000 years. You use paper bags? Really? I'm not going down that path. There are a few ways you can save the planet and still have a nice yard, in fact a better yard, and I will try to share my thoughts on the matter.

First, you don't have to have that yard that looks like you have a full time staff of groundskeepers. I tried that a few years ago. I would get angry when leaves fell on my newly raked yard, curse when the neighbors (who never seems to clean his yard) leaves would blow into my nice clean yard. Clean? Yes. Spotless? No. Ain't gonna happen Mr. Gates.

What are leaves anyway? I see free fertilizer! So I compost just about all of my leaves. In the first part of the season as the leaves are falling as they are now(see pic above), I lower my mower deck, and mulch the hell out of them. Most of the time you can't even tell there were leaves on the lawn. The only thing that throws the mulching mower for a loop are pine needles, but it still cuts them up and eventually they will break down faster this way.

Why not leave them there and do nothing? Well, for one thing it looks like no one lives there. If you leave the leaves and debris on the ground, they get wet, mat up and cut off water, air and sunlight to the ground. They will eventually break down, sure, but it will take a long time, and everything under them will die. When you mulch, you are increasing the surface area of the leaf exponentially therefore giving more area for air and water and bugs and whatnot to break it down. It also reduces the "pile" by 2/3's. See pic below.

After most of the leaves have fallen, and most of my neighbors have joined my collection, I will start to clean out the beds. I do blow these out, into the yard, where I mulch them there. Some are blown down to the back of the yard where they will join the compost pile. The yard loves it and I save on chemicals, time, energy etc.

First frost. Better late than never.

Better late than never. We had our first frost of the season on Thursday morning, then another on Friday morning. This cold snap will really kick into overdrive, the changing of the seasonal colors. It seems like overnight, my commute got a little bit more colorful. The leaves are coming down in the yard more rapidly and the flannel sheets feel a bit more inviting.

Then, it warmed up. Yesterday and today have been in the mid sixties. More of the same for this week, even peeking possibly into the 70s once again. Don't get me wrong. I'm not complaining or anything. You see, I'm not much of a cold weather person. I don't mind chilly days every once in awhile, but I really do dislike cold. I would rather be hot and try to cool off rather than finding a way to stay warm. I have an aversion to frostbite. Gloves make everything harder to do. Glasses fogging over are a pain. Scraping the windshield in the morning sucks. Shoveling snow? Forget about it.

My wife is just the opposite though. She would love to live up north. She loves the cold, dislikes the heat. But living up north would shorten my growing season. It's already too short as it is. The time it takes to get everything to blooming stage takes too much time. Then at the end of the season, we have our plants winding down. I would love to live in a tropical setting, where there are no seasons. Where my orchids could live out doors all year long, all over the trees, blooming profusely all the time.

I like some things about seasonal change. I love the way nature uses this time to rest. I love to see the physical changes to some of the plants, like my juniper bonsai. Some of them change from a deep green to ambers and purples. The spruces and pines see this as their salvation season, and will reward us with new growth candles in the early spring. Look at the leaves on your deciduous plants in the late summer. They are full of holes and other defects from a season and a half of hard knocks. Bugs eating into them, hail stones and sticks poking holes in them. Burnt edges on some of the maples. It's been a hard life. Time to get rid of the damage, rest up, store some energy and start in the spring all over again. It is quite fascinating.

I think Virginia is a compromise for us though. We have definite seasonal changes, each about the same length. Our "real winter" starts here mid January to early March. February is our hardest month. We have the coldest temperatures and most snowfall during this time. Lately we have had more snow in early March, though. Is it due to global warming? I'm not sure. We should ask Al Gore.

Gardening limbo

I seem to be in garden limbo. Nothing is growing right now. Nothing really needs to be done. Autumn, true autumn has yet to visit me. What do I do?

The River Birch is still green

I just had 5 days off and it rained for 4.5 of it. The fifth day brought a brief respite from the soggy conditions. I awoke to beautiful clear bright blue skies and temps in the low 70s. I thought, Yes! I can get out there and cut the grass I was all ready to do that but my wife reminded me that the yard was still waterlogged and she was right, of course. The grass never really dried out so I was left to do some weeding. And then the clouds rolled in again and it even sprinkled in the evening. Sigh. What to do.

So I took off some wire from my bonsai, only to find that I had waited too long and it cut into the bark. This will heal, in time, but the scars might never fully grow out. The warmer, sunny weather brought out, to my dismay, the dreaded European Hornets again, seeing them in the top of one of my birch trees, I set out to set them straight. Their last ditch effort to get supplies for their nest is now their last. Until next summer, of course.

The crabapple is loaded this year

We have had a very dry September here. September rains are what usually determine how colorful a fall we will have. Here it is, the middle of October and the colors are muted and very few trees are showing signs that it even autumn. Those that are just showing some brown leaves, and not the color as I have seen in the last couple of years. We have not had a frost yet, and that might have something to do with it. The coolest it has been is the mid 40s for a couple of mornings, but that is about it.

Next on the list will be lowering the mower deck, mulching some leaves, cutting spent flower stalks and mulching the bulb beds extra thick this year. It is supposed to be a cold one.

The days are getting shorter and the shadows longer

Fall chores starting early

The days are getting shorter, the shadows longer and the nights a bit cooler. I chose today to bring in all the orchids and bonsai Ficus. This year I did something a bit different and I'm glad I did.

Last year I just brought them in and put them in their wintering spots around the house. Unfortunately I also brought in some hitchhikers. There were ants, slugs and spiders taking leave of their summer homes and wandering all over the house. We woke up one morning to silvery trails all over the living room, over the floor, the couch and the pillows!

cleaned and ready for the inside

This morning I brought out my screen I made for screening dirt, and emptied each orchid pot, sifting, making sure there weren't any hangers on. I did find a spider or two in the leaves and one of the pots had 3 slugs living in the bottom under the roots. I washed them all and re-potted them with cleaned orchid bark and I added some sphagnum moss to a couple of them.

Oncidium orchidaceae

I also noticed some good signs. My Oncidium orchidaceae (dancing ladies) has 3-4 new stalks and will be honoring us with beautiful flowers soon. Plus, one of the others has a lot of new leaves after having a hard year. So things are looking up.

new leaves are a good sign

The dying green makes way for color then rest

It's that time of year again...

Boy. Things change over night it seems. Just a few nights ago the temperatures dropped for the first time at night into the high 40s, low 50s. And the next day you could see a change. Some of the leaves are yellowing and some are starting to drop.

Some of this is due to a lack of rain for the last few weeks. Spotty at best, sprinkles here and there. We had a pretty wet summer though. Hard rains greeted me upon my return from India and I thought I had brought the monsoons with me. I'm hoping that there is enough moisture in the ground to give us a showy fall full of all types of colors. It seems that when we have a dry spell, just before autumn, the colors are more muted and all in pretty much the same hues, with very little variation. We'll just have to wait and see.

The echinacea have been completely compromised by the Goldfinch

Leaves are already falling

Hostas are getting ready for their winter nap

Some last minute flowers are popping up, but for the most part things are starting to die down, literally and figuratively. I'll start cutting back the echinacea, Ginger Lily and Hosta leaves and stalks as soon as they wilt and turn tan/brown. Mulching the overwintering tubers and roots is a must. I have heard that in this part of the country, we are supposed to see a very bitter winter, so we will take the necessary precautions.

Beautyberries are showing their colors, offering a feast in the coming months for the birds.

The last canna of the season does not disappoint.

Tree killing European Hornets!

European Hornet, post mortem.

Did I get your attention? If you have River Birch trees on your property, then please read! Houston, we have a problem. Our River Birch trees are being mutilated by these very aggressive bees. They arrive mid to late Summer every year and eat away the bark on the newer branches and main trunks.

This is a European Hornet. Wiki will tell you that is is a species that might be soon endangered. Well, I can understand why. Now, if you have read my blog from the beginning, you will know that I try very hard not to be a killer of everything that flies and really have cut down my pesticide and herbicide use. I do try. Really, I do. But these buggers are costing me dearly.

Any gardener will know, that it ain't cheap growing a garden. Especially when you have to purchase your plants. In the last several years, we have gone from a blank slate to a yard filled with trees, shrubs and flowers. We only have lost a couple for various reasons as all gardeners do from time to time. But this is pest related.

Girdled branch on River Birch

These European Hornets chew off the bark, using it for their nests. The big, oval papery nest we remember from cartoons. They also probably get some nutrition from it also. But they are basically killing the tree. By chewing off the bark and exposing the cambium layer, they are girdling the tree. The branch or trunk will die from that point outward or upward. If they chew the bark off all the way around, it will die. If they don't go all the way around, there is a chance that that branch or trunk can survive. It will however, make it weaker, especially with rain or snow loads.

Freshly chewed.

Damage from last year. This will heal over as it did not go all the way around.

So I have resorted to a couple of methods to deal with this. I can't afford to loose these trees. Actually, the worst time for this to happen is when the trees are young. It can severely misshapen or even kill a younger tree. As far as the older one in my yard, it amounts to lots of lost branches higher up the tree, many falling during snow loads or high winds.

I have tried the traps, but they don't seem to work, so I will be returning those. It seems as Wasp and Hornet spray, ones that shoot long distances, are the ticket. I have to go out in the morning and then again, when I return from work. My wife will try to hit them at one point during the day.

I am dealing with a conundrum. I want to be clean and earth friendly, but I can't afford to be 100%. Am I a hypocrite? Am I a bad person. I know there are natural gardeners out there. I have read about them. Let the chips fall as they may and let nature take it's course is the way they garden.

I'm almost there, really I am. But it is so damned hard.