funnystrange.com

I got so wrapped up in the bolting spinach problem that I forgot about today's garden work. Well, this morning we planted the last rose out front by the road. Again this meant a lot of bed preparation. Mostly weeding. I had to use the mattock because the roots of those weeds are so entrenched.

When the rose was in we went to work on a new bed at the end of that bank. When we tilled up there a couple of years ago, and planted all the dayllilies, we just didn't go all the way to the end. And the last few feet on the end got all nasty and weedy like the whole bank used to be. Today we dug up the most aggressive weeds, covered the rest with cardboard, and piled a thick layer of soil and leaf mulch over top. It's a small area -- about 4×5' -- but it's been looking bad for a couple of years now, and I'm so glad to finally have it dealt with. In theory it should take a year for the cardboard to break down, which should be enough time to kill the weeds underneath.

While planting the rose, we accidently knocked a branch off of it. I had read that roses can be propagated from cuttings, so I figured I'd try it. It was kind of ridiculously easy. Just strip the bottom few leaves off, score the length of the stem, dip it in rooting hormone, stick it in potting soil, water and cover with a plastic bag.

My only concern is that I didn't do the rooting immediately, I spent some time reading about how to do it, and during that time the top of the cutting wilted. I read that wilted cuttings are less likely to take root, and I really hope I didn't let it go too long. I misted the cutting to try and rehydrate it. I hope that was enough!

By this point it was time for lunch --great salad at Nosh, yum -- and Divaville. After the show I went back out, sowed sunflower seeds in the new bed we made this morning, and did some more weeding. It was easier to work in the evening, much less hot. The weeds grow so fast out there! I got the weeds cleared from two of the roses, which leaves two more to do. I still want to go back into the bed and weed around the daylilies, but the critical weeding -- the part that 1. can be seen from the road, and 2. is in danger of smothering the roses -- is mostly done.

Whew! I guess we got a lot done. I didn't even mention how Georg bought a four-way splitter for the outdoor faucet and completely reorganized our hoses and soaker hoses. That is going to be so nice, to have easy access to water wherever we need it. The only place we'll still have to lug watering cans to is the roses way out front.

Another wonderfully productive weekend. We started out by emptying the shed of paint cans and old cleaning products, and taking them all to the hazardous waste collection place out by the dump. Which is free! I had no idea. I guess they make it free to encourage people to do it. If they charged, people might hide their old antifreeze cans in the regular trash or something awful like that.

Next we went to the dump. Where they had free compost! They called it "leaf mulch" though I wouldn't call it mulch. Really more of a light compost made of leaves and sticks. It did have chunks of stick in it, but very few bits of plastic trash. Which the regular compost is unfortunately rife with.

Back home we spent the afternoon planting the gardenia by friend Joe had given us. It doesn't sound like that much, but we had to start from scratch and create a new bed for it. The soil was horrible solid clay. With a scruffy old rose growing there, that had to be dug out. And the location is right under the electrical meter and breaker box, so we had to be very careful not to dig too deep and cut a line. And just in case the job wasn't enough of a pain, at some point in the past we had piled up a bunch of old bricks and concrete blocks there to get them out of the way.

So basically, we had to move a big pile of concrete, then dig a big hole in heavy clay, but carefully, carefully, then remove the clay, and then finally we could plant the gardenia. I hope it likes its new home! It's a nice sheltered location against the southwest wall of the house.

After that I took a rest during the hottest part of the day, then went back out and planted a flat of marigolds that I had bought a couple of weeks ago. We also watered, which was a good opportunity to walk around and see how everything is doing. We were pleased to see that the potatoes are starting to come up, sunflower seedlings are starting to emerge, and best of all, two sugar snaps and two tomatoes have flowers! Woo!

On the downside, the spinach is bolting. I knew it would happen when it got hot, I just hoped it wouldn't happen quite so soon. Oh well, we've had several good meals from the spinach and it looks like we'll have several more before it all goes. It creates a slight dilemma though. We had planned to plant pumpkins in that spot after the spinach was done. But we don't want to plant the pumpkins until early-mid July. I hate for that spot to go unused for two months, but what can we plant there for such a short time?

We might try greens and put a row cover over them. Shaded from full sun they might do okay. Any other suggestions?

Today has been one of those incredibly frustrating days where you're busy all day and absolutely nothing gets done, except giving yourself a headache from trying to keep track of everything. Enough about that; let's talk about fish emulsion!

See, I had never fertilized my garden before. Because organic gardeners believe, at least I have read in many places, that synthetic fertilizers actually burn away the natural nutrients in the soil. So that the more you fertilize, the more you need to fertilize just to sustain normal plant growth. It's like tilling: the theory is that repeated tilling does more harm than good to the soil, and so tilling every spring is worse than wasted effort.

I wasn't inclined to fertilize anyway. Because that sounds like work, and I've already got more work than I can handle just keeping up with the garden. I'm all in favor of a theory that confirms my basic laziness (see freedom lawn) and so I was happy to swear off fertilizing.

So the only fertilizing I've done is to add compost to the garden beds every once in a while, and that's worked out pretty well I think. But lately I've been thinking that maybe my plants would do better if they had a boost. And I went over to my friend David's house and his garden is looking fantastic, much further along than mine, and when I asked him his secret, he said Miracle Gro. And my favorite gardening show host, who is all organic, uses fish emulsion as a fertilizer. So I bought a bottle of fish emulsion. What could be the harm?

Fish emulsion, as it turns out, is nasty stuff. I never really thought about it before, but of course it's exactly what it sounds like: liquified fish. It's a thick brown liquid, about the consistency of heavy cream, and it stinks! It didn't smell so bad in the bottle but mixing it with water seemed to release the scent. Lugging gallon after gallon of it around the garden and pouring it over the plants, hoo boy did it stink. The smell was probably worsened by the sun and heat yesterday too.

You mix a capful of the fish stuff with a gallon of water, then use it to water your plants as normal. I didn't realize my watering can held two gallons, and accidentally mixed it half strength. Which I'm glad about in retrospect. We had a terrible accident a couple of years ago with some improperly mixed insecticidal soap that ate away every plant surface it touched. We started with buggy squash plants and ended with sad little mounds of shriveled mush. After that I'm leery of any concentrate that has to be mixed, and happy to start out with a weak mixture just to be safe.

So anyway, I was out in the yard yesterday, in the sun, pouring this fish water over my plants and trying to hold my nose at the same time. The watering can is too heavy to pour one-handed when full, so this didn't work as well as I could have hoped. Jane on the other hand was in heaven. Following me around grinning (I know dogs don't smile, but when she's happy she sort of looks like she is smiling so I think of her that way) like "What is that wonderful smell? This is the best garden ever!" I kept her away from the area where I mixed the fish water, in case some of the stronger concentrate were left on the ground. There wasn't a toxicity warning on the bottle, but it certainly couldn't be good for her to eat it.

I used the fish emulsion on the blueberries, the vegetable beds, the hydrangeas, the butterfly garden, the asparagus and the roses. Did not use it on the tiny seedlings because I was leery of the effect on tender plants (see insecticidal soap disaster, above). Everything looked fine this morning so I guess it's safe to use it again. You're supposed to apply this stuff every two weeks during the growing season, and also you can put it in a sprayer and spray plant leaves (this is called "foliar feeding"). I don't know if I'm going to manage either of those. For one thing, that sounds suspiciously like work. And for another, the smell is only going to get worse as we head into summer.

What a nice day in the garden. Actually, to be honest most of the day was spent on garden-related shopping. We went to the farmer's market, which has gotten really busy now that it's warm. We had a short list of things to buy -- a lime thyme, a French tarragon, an epazote, poblano peppers and tomato plants, if the heirloom tomato people were there -- and we found everything on our list except the poblanos.

The heirloom tomato people from last year weren't there, but there was an herb vendor who had heirloom tomatoes. We got Cherokee Purple and Zebra Green, a green tomato with reddish stripes. We've already got a Better Boy and an Early Girl. All we need now is a cherry tomato. I really like Super Sweet 100, it's done well for us in the past, but I've only seen it in 4-packs, which I'd rather not buy because we only need one. Here's hoping we find a single plant soon! If not I'll just buy a 4-pack and give the rest away.

We also bought a few things we hadn't planned on: borage, "toothache plant" which I've also seen described as "eyeball plant," a special gaillarda, a couple of geraniums with really unusual foliage, some hens and chickens, and one of my favorite annuals: bat face!

The garden center at the farmer's market closed last year, and we noticed this morning that the space had re-opened. It's now called "Market Imports" or something and sells lawn art as well as indoor tchotchkes. It looks to be really expensive, and I don't think we'll be buying much (if anything) there, but it was really fun to browse. I think our favorite things were the chickens and piggies made of scrap metal. They also had a watering can made of a 55-gallon drum that I really liked.

We also hit the concrete lawn ornament place across the street, where I scored the moai two weeks ago. We were looking for a bird bath, of which they have many, unfortunately none were what we wanted. At one point I said to Georg, "I'm just looking for something more contemporary." We looked at each other and I said, "I know, in that case what am I doing here." They have a pretty wide range of styles there, just not contemporary. Still, we did have fun looking at everything and I took a bunch of photos.

We ran a few errands on the way home, and then it was time to plant! I got all our purchases into the ground. Except the hens and chickens which Georg planted. I also planted a Cecile Brunner rose which my friend David gave me. The funny thing is, I went to his house yesterday to surprise him with a rose, and it turned out he had a rose for me! I gave him a Secret Garden Musk Climber, which I had just ordered for myself, because I knew how much he likes old-fashioned single roses. I planted the Cecile Brunner in a big clay pot because I'm not sure yet where I'm going to put it in the garden. It looks really nice in the pot actually; I might leave it there, as long as I can remember to water it!

The garden is doing pretty well if I do say so. It's such fun to watch the perennials get bigger every day. Some of them are starting to bloom, and luckily we have the pansies for color until the perennials get going. The only big bummer is that something ate all the artichokes I had potted up last weekend. The entire seedling was chomped right off! I still have the two that I planted in the new bed, but the eight in pots were razed to the ground. Dang.

While I was planting, Georg weed whacked down by the road. By the end of all that we were both pretty tired! So we decided to have dinner at the Q Shack instead of cooking. On the way home we stopped at Lowe's to check out their bird baths. Turns out they don't have any! While we were there, I picked up another packet of artichoke seeds. They don't fruit the first year anyway, so it doesn't matter if they get planted late. Also we browsed the plants, and discovered that they have poblano peppers! Yay! I've been looking for them for weeks, and had just about given up. In fact we were on the verge of buying some other kind of pepper at the farmer's market, but in all the hubbub we forgot. How lucky was that?

Busy day in the yard today. We started out by covering the blueberries with bird netting. Last year we only got one berry each before the birds picked the bushes clean! This year we have a much bigger crop coming, which we'd like to eat ourselves. We had already done the bird netting, when we covered them with plastic. But we didn't know what we were doing, and we put the stakes too close to the bushes, and when it got windy the netting got all caught in the branches.

Turns out bird netting is annoying stuff that gets caught on everything. Disentangling the netting from the blueberries was a tricky chore. Unfortunately we pulled a few baby berries off, but only a few. We moved the stakes further away from the bushes, and pulled the netting taut over the frames so it wouldn't get tangled on the branches. And we did a good job if I do say so myself. I dare the birds to eat our blueberries now!

While we were down at that end of the yard, we noticed an open flower on one of the roses! My first rose bloom! It's the Reve D'Or, a noisette climber. It was described as a buff-yellow but it looks off-white to me. The flower is beautiful. I love antique roses. Both the single kind with only five petals, like the Tudor rose, and the kind with many many petals, like noisettes.

Unfortunately the Crepuscule up by the house isn't doing so well in terms of flowers. It has about a half-dozen buds, but they get all crumply and don't open. I think this is called "balling" (no dirty jokes please!) and we suspect it's because the weather has been wet and the rose isn't getting enough sun. That spot got full afternoon sun last summer, but the oak tree seems to have grown and is now shading that area.

In the afternoon Georg unloaded the rest of the soil from the truck and into the new bed. He also cut a branch from the oak tree to let poor Crepuscule get some sun. Meanwhile I did less strenuous work, mostly planting. Let's see, I planted a blue columbine on the north side of the house. Also two six-packs of torenia (a cute shade annual with trumpet-shaped blue flowers) under the hydrangeas. The special alstroemeria from Messenbrink went into the bank along the driveway. I had planned to put it in the bare spot where a caryopteris had died over the winter. But when I stuck in my trowel, I discovered new shoots from the caryopteris! It didn't die! What a nice surprise. Caryopteris is a small (approx 2 feet tall) woody shrub with tiny blue flowers in late summer, which bees and butterflies love. Luckily there was a space next to the caryopteris where I could put the alstroemeria. I also planted a bright red verbena in a red/orange bed down near the road.

Then I went to work on my seedlings. We started a bunch of perennials from seed over the winter. It's such a huge savings -- $3 for a whole packet of seeds vs. $6-10 per plant -- that I don't even mind that they won't bloom this year. The seedlings all did well in their little peat pots, and they've gotten to the point where the peat pots are too small and they can't grow any bigger until they get into the ground. I planted all the baby yarrows in the new bed by the house, the one where Georg was unloading soil today. I also sowed a few hollyhock seeds behind the yarrow. I understand it may be several years before the hollyhocks bloom but it will be worth it.

I also planted baby butterfly weeds, up in the butterfly garden and also down in the red/orange bed with the new verbena. And I put the artichoke seedlings in pots, because I don't have the space ready in the ground for them yet. The pots aren't big enough to be their permanent homes, but it will do for now.

And Georg and I planted another rose. I never even mentioned that after my big order from Ashdown, I also ordered a couple from Roses Unlimited (also in SC), which arrived last weekend. These are Secret Garden Musk Climber, a rare (seriously, I searched a bunch of rose vendors before I found one who had it) & acclaimed climbing rose that someone discovered in an antique garden and propagated. It's supposed to be vigorous, disease resistant and covered with clusters of single white flowers. Perfect for filling in that high slope down by the road. We got one of them into the ground today & only have one left to plant.

Well, by this point Georg and I were both exhausted. Even though I had taken an hour nap in the afternoon! I'm kind of frustrated with myself for tiring out so easily. I guess I just have to work a little every day and build back up to my prior activity level.

I had planned to make a simple dinner, a riff on Barbara Tropp's curried lamb fried rice. Until we discovered that we're out of rice! So much for that plan. Instead we had a lovely dinner at the Barbecue Joint. On the way there we drove past several chain restaurants with dozens of people standing outside, waiting for tables. I will never understand why so many people will wait 45 minutes for a table at a mediocre, noisy chain restaurant, when they could go someplace awesome like the Barbecue Joint and get better food that costs less, with no wait.

It hasn't been quite as cold as predicted the past couple of days. 29° on Friday night and 30° on Saturday night, according to weather.com. And the cold damage has been much less severe than I had feared.

There is some bad news: first, the heliotrope I bought a week ago is a goner. I had no idea they had so little cold tolerance. We put a little straw over it, but not much, and most of it blew away during the night. There's a teeny tiny bit of green at the bottom of the plant, which may well be gone tomorrow. Oh well, I love the smell of heliotrope and it wasn't expensive, so I'll buy another if this one dies.

All the nasturtium seedlings died. I put straw on all the other seedlings, but I forgot all about these guys. There's still time to try again with another seed packet. But honestly, I have such bad luck with nasturtiums every year that I wonder if this is a sign.

Some of the straw blew off the gerber daisies and a few of them look frozen. I expect the plants will come back though. As will the beautyberry, which lost most of its foliage. The butterfly bush also looks pretty droopy, but it will bounce right back.

Also the hydrangeas took some damage. The plants will be fine but we may have fewer flowers this year. This one wasn't a surprise, so I'm a bit bummed but not crushed.

Now the good news: most of the garden looks fine. The spinach and sugar snaps took no damage, with no protection at all. As did the roses; even the flower buds (which a couple of them have, to my delight) look untouched. And all the seedlings I remembered to cover with straw survived: basil, snapdragons, bee balm and butterfly weed. Also no damage to the blueberries, or the cilantro, or the verbascum we just planted. And the fig looks great too! I'm so happy that the fig made it through the winter.

We brought a bunch of plants inside for the night, so many that the kitchen is basically unusable. Here's hoping it warms up soon so we can put everything back outside!

Today we had our first harvest from the garden! Georg picked some spinach for a wonderful lamb and chickpea stew. Actually it was called a stew, but it was in broth rather than a gravy, so kind of more like a really hearty soup. So good. It hit the spot on a cold night.

Weather.com is predicting 26° tonight, which is a little alarming. But they were way off last night ( their prediction was 5 degrees colder than the actual low) so I'm not going to worry. Besides, we've done as much as we can reasonably do to protect the plants. If they're going to live, then they're going to live.