Irresponsible Watering
June 19th, 2006So I’m driving back from a weekend at my parents house in one of the worst rain storms I can remember yesterday. It was pouring, practically no visibility at some points.
We get off the freeway and I drive by this row of condos and guess what, their sprinklers are going.
This is wrong for two reasons:
1. It is an obvious waste of water.
2. You’re watering late in the evening, which is the worst time of day to water, as leaving plants with wet leaves overnight is a contributing factor for fungal infections.
Sprinkler systems are great, but lets leave the automation out of it. Most automatic sprinklers are turned on more often than they need to be to begin with. It is not that hard to turn them on manually when the grass or plants need it. You’ll save water, which will lighten the load on your wallet and help mother nature.
If you’re truly lazy I believe that there are rain or moisture sensors you can install that will automatically turn on your sprinklers but only when needed.
Plus, no one likes being laughed at, and I’m willing to bet everyone who notices those sprinklers running had a little chuckle.
Petunias: My Favorite Annual
June 15th, 2006I wrote a new article today, all about petunias, enjoy!
(and yes, since I decided to turn my more article-like blog posts into actual articles I’m going to just be linking to them instead of reposting them here.)
Backyard Gardening Site Launched
June 5th, 2006I have finished my new site.
Backyard Gardening is an article driven site on gardening. It includes a Gardening Forum.
This move might seem odd to most people. This blog is not very old nor altogether that popular, so expanding it may seem premature. However publishing websites is what I do for a living (since I can’t get paid to garden) so I knew I would end up going this route eventually and sooner is always better than later so I did it now.
Currently there are only 9 articles on the site, but I plan a few a month at least. Also if anyone wants to write articles for the site, let me know. Finally I would of course appreciate backlinks and forum registrations from the lot of you. Be sure to checkout the forum gallery its a good way to share pictures of your passion.
Blooming!
June 1st, 2006The blooms are coming! The blooms are coming!
Yesterday, I had my first poppy bloom. Today I had 2 first daylily blooms (Stella de Oro & Happy Returns). Also today I had my first rose bloom.
I’m excited. There are many plants in my landscape that have never bloomed for me (recent purchases) and most should be blooming soon. In fact any day now one of the most expensive daylilies I own should be blooming for the first time.
What is blooming in your neck of the woods?
Iris Update
May 27th, 2006
As I reported previously my irises hadn’t bloomed for a number of years and were not going dormant during the winter.
So what I did was give them all a haircut to try to simulate dormancy and well, either it worked or the irises finally stored up enough energy because they’re all blooming nicely now.
They are a little late this year, but so is everything else, at least 2 weeks later than last year I’d estimate. Our spring was warm, or so it seemed, but perhaps it wasn’t quite warm enough.
Fledging Robin Visitor
May 27th, 2006
The other day I noticed this fledging Robin in my back yard and I went out to say hello. He was very well camouflagued and had I not seen him move I would never have noticed him. He wasn’t that scared of us but I believe they’re instincts are to stay still to avoid notice. His parents (all 4 of them it seemed) sure got upset though, screeching at us from all over.
I was really quite worried about it. Our neighbors let their cats out and they’re always coming over to our yard and a flightless bird like this would be quite a morsel for them. Apparently too robins are in this state of being able to walk but not fly for quite awhile as they mature and so I really don’t know if it’ll be able to avoid the cats for that long. They also apparently need to eat constantly so when I was done with it I fed it some worms (which it took quite readily). I figured I had probably stressed it out the least I could do is feed it.
Apparently, by the way, there is a whole Keep Cats Indoors campaign. The idea is that domestic house cats exist with greater density than any natural predator would be able to and still survive so they disproportionately threaten the species they hunt. Anyways, our cats are house cats and that works fine for us.
Sick Rhododendron
May 24th, 2006
I went and bough 2 3-gallon rhododendrons at Lowes back in April. One was a pink variety, one was a red variety. I already have a pink one and so I gave the new one to my Mom for Mother’s Day and its doing fine and flowering for her.
The red variety I planted myself in a new small raised bed I built. It is on the north side of our house so it gets very little sun. I came back from our vacation and noticed it was sick. It apparently rained every day we were gone and continued for a week after we got back more or less and so I think it might be fungal, but I’m not sure since this progressed very fast. It certainly isn’t drought though.
I’ve sprayed it a few times with some Ortho Garden Disease control and the rains have stopped and the decay has not progressed any further, so thats good, but still most of the leaves on the plant (those that haven’t dropped) are signifcantly brown on the margins.
It looks like it is still going to bloom atleast, but I worry about it’s long term health.
Baby Cardinals
May 6th, 2006
As part gardening I (and my wife joins me in this) try to attract birds to our backyard. My wife likes birds, and I do as well but mostly I appreciate the good they can do for a garden by eating insects and whatnot.
This Spring a family of cardinals made a nest in one of our spruces and they’ve already had their first babies. In the photo (click to enlarge) you’ll notice that there are two hatchlings and two still whole eggs. I don’t know how old these babies are, but considering their siblings are still in eggs I’m guessing a day or two at the most, they might have been born this morning for all I know. Supposedly they leave the nest in as little as 10 days after hatching so these birds have some major growing to do.
Cardinal females do the nesting, but once the young are born it is usually the male that takes over feeding while the female makes a new nest. In this way they can have multiple broods per year. They also do not migrate and so I hope we’ll eventually have more cardinals living in our backyard as this family multiplies.
For more on cardinals try this link.
I also want to apologize for not posting much the last few weeks. There are two reasons for this, the first is that I’ve been busy gardening. However in this time I’ve gathered a bunch of materials and pictures for later posts. The other reason is that I’m working on a large expansion for this site. I realized that many of the things I wish to write about do not fit well with the blog format and so I am going to expand. I hope to have that done by the end of May and a deluge of new content for you.
For now though I’m taking my wife on a well deserved week long vacation. Adios.
Using Ditch Lilies to Fill Spaces
April 19th, 2006
We have some bad neighbors, they don’t take any care of their house or lawn, they’re constantly being cited by our city’s ordinance enforcement department for things like having grass that is too long. No one on our block likes them, when we moved in we heard nothing but bad things about them from all our other neighbors. If they’d just move house values would go up I’m sure.
Anyways, their lack of yard care has resulting in a bumper crop of weeds. We have 3 large conifers in our backyard forming a border between our property and theirs. Before we had our privacy fence it was so obvious where all our weeds were coming from. There were 2 wide swathes of dandelions precisely where the trees weren’t. Meaning all the weed seeds were blowing over from their yard. There were literally two stripes of dandelions, I couldn’t ask for a better indication of where my weed problems were coming from.
In addition to our new privacy fence, I also have weed barriers in the forum of mulch, bushes, trees, fabric, or all of the above, running along my entire border with their property, except by the curb. You see our curb area, the area between the sidewalk and the road, is shared with them, and as such it’s really rather crappy, almost no grass, all weeds. I don’t see much point in trying to reclaim it with grass since I’ll only be able to do my side and the weed will creep back over. So I decided to use ditch lilies to fill it up.
Ditch lilies, also known as tawny daylilies, the common orange daylily, or the latin name of hemerocallis fulva are a form of daylily, but a different species than the typically hybridized daylilies you find. These things are crazy resistant to everything, they are like tanks of the flower world. Hardy to at least zone 4, these plants produce nice orange flowers in late spring. The really benefit of using them is that, like I said, they’re tanks. They’ll grow in sun, shade, drought, water. They’ll take poor soil, rich soil, sandy soil, salty soil, crappy city soil. They’re even hard to kill with pesticides, even Round Up won’t kill em.
They also have two other “features”. For one, they overpower any nearby plants, weeds, whatever. For two, they spread with underground runners and can cover quite an area, they also can come back if you leave just one bit of tuber in the ground.
As you can imagine it means that these plants are considered invasive in some areas of the country. Many gardeners have planted them only to be unable to get rid of them later. As such it is usually not recommended that you plant these in the midst of other perennials, or anywhere that you do not want them to spread.
However, these plants are perfect when you want it to spread, fill up a large defined area, and do it cheaply. They’re so prolific they’re sometimes used to control erosion even. You can buy them for usually less than a buck each if you get them in bulk. I’ve seen daylily farms offer them for 50 cents each, I’ve seen them on ebay for 30 cents each . If you know someone who has them they’ll typically give you all you want for free.
So, my plan is to plant various clumps of ditch lilies in my margin area there, let them overpower the weeds, and give passing motorists a nice orange show in late Spring.
Wayside Gardens Coupons
April 9th, 2006Got this coupon in the email today:
* Deal: $15 off $100 Wayside Gardens order
* Coupon Code: “mail order plants”
* Expires: Friday, April 21During the checkout process look for “Enter Bonus Codes Here”
Coupon code is required to get discount.
I used it, bought some of a nice new hosta, ‘Orange Marmalade’ that I will plant as a border by a spruce. Then I got 2 ‘Zephirine Drouhin‘ climbing roses to pair up with 1 I already have in climbing an arbor.
Anyways, after checking out, they gave me 2 more coupons to Parks, their sister company:
1. Free Thuja Green Giant with any order, use code FREETHUJA
2. Free shipping on a $75 order, use code S1AL19
Not sure on expirations of the latter.