Tomato tripods

One post per year is either pathetic, or an interesting way to see a garden change. Let's go with interesting. Like last summer the house is on the market, and like last summer, there are not enough fully employed in the state to sustain a housing market.

In the past year we have added several hundred square feet of garden. The neighbors are allowing a silver maple (i.e., giant woody weed) to grow over our vegetable garden. So we dug a new bed, actually expanded an old bed along the garage. Here you can see the tripods that I set up today. Apparently I planted heirloom indeterminate tomatoes - in other words: tomato vines.

Heirloom tomatoes are a hot topic this year, and I enjoyed trading seeds all winter. Pictured here are Black Krim from seed that we saved from last year, black or white cherry tomatoes (the seeds got mixed, oops!), and a unique rare variety called "Sojourner's South American." The latter are big plants with huge blossoms. The pictures really do not do them justice. They have grown a foot at least this last week, already outgrowing the cheap store-bought tomato cages.

We have been enjoying salads this week. The looseleaf lettuce was the first to bolt, and romaine started bolting this week. They get bitter when they switch from making leaves to making stems, flowers, and eventually seeds. The red oak-leaf variety in the front yard is still might tasty, and prolific.

We have garlic scape hummus, kale, swiss chard, a few strawberries, and sugar snap peas. Not to mention more oregano, sage, and thyme than I know what to do with. Soon we'll probably dig some new potatoes and soft-neck garlic.

The native plants are once again in bloom, pulling in native pollinators and other good bugs. I'll save that for next time, maybe next year.

Invert-ed

I recently read that most of the biodiversity of a given area is in its invertebrates, and yet we always do conservation for plants or cute animals. That's it. I'm converted. Or "Invert"-ed. Now to try to identify these things.

My native plant garden was planted primarily to make me learn to identify rare (or not so rare) native prairie and savanna plants. Then I decided I liked how it looks. Now it is all buggy. The main attractor is the gray goldenrod (Solidago nemoralis), so named for the color of the stem, in case you are wondering. Cup-plant and tall coneflower also bring them in. Here is a small sampling of the (mostly) native bees and flies and such.

If you, dear reader, know of any resources for identifying native bees - or better yet can identify any of these from the photo (!), please let me know. The full set of pictures is over at Flickr.

Peak Bloom in the Wildflower Garden

Now is the beginning of peak bloom time in the garden. A few of the early flowers are still ingering on, such as the lance-leaf coreopsis (Coreopsis lanceolata). A few of the late bloomers, such as the gray goldenrod (Solidago nemoralis), are just starting. While I did a pretty good job this year moving tall plants to the back of beds and promoting some short plants forward, I was not ruthless pulling out sprouts of good plants in wrong places. So I have some tall 1st years screening out plants further back. Tall coreopsis and brown-eyed susan (Rudbckia triloba) are the most problematic. The tall coreopsis will be transplanted, the brown-eyed susans have thus far been biennial. Was it the drought conditions of the past few years? No sense in moving them if they may not comeback next year.That'd just give me an empty bed where they were moved from and an empty bed where they were moved to.

The front bed project continues. I am tired of my burn experiment and will now shift gears to either regular raking or (if I can find cheap mulch) smothering. I have burned the bed every 3-4 days for the last three weeks. I have exhausted by propane tank, and my back, but not the reserved of the grass seedlings. The roots are insulated from the fire by the soil, so really I am doing the same thing as very frequent, very low mowing - which may be bad for the grass in the long run, but not deadly over the span of my attention.


In the photo of the new bed, you can see hostas in full bloom. Yesterday while sitting on the front porch, a female ruby-throated hummingbird visited the tubular hosta blooms. While I have never been particularly enarmoured of hosta flowers, my opinion of them has changed from "shade filler plant" to "sometime hummingbird food."


Below is a taste of a few of the flowers, mostly native, now blooming. In order, top to bottom:


















Borage (Borago officinalis, not native, but pretty and a good companion plant to veggies)























Thimbleweed (Anemone virginiana), with purple coneflower (Echinacea purpurea) and butterfly bush (Buddleia davidii) behind


















Red milkweed (Asclepias incarnata), with bergemot (Monarda didyma) and spiderwort (Tradescantia virginiana)


















Gray goldenrod (Solidago nemoralis), with gray-headed coneflower (Ratibida pinnata) and ox-eye sunflower (Heliopsis helianthoides)

















Cup-plant (Silphium perfoliatum, yellow), Culver's root (Veronicastrum virginicum, white), with gray-headed coneflower and purple coneflower in background


















Purple coneflower and prairie blazing star (Liatris pycnostachya), with fleabane (Erigeron sp.)























Spotted mint (Monarda punctata)
















Rattlesnake master (white), with purple coneflower and black eyed susans in background

Insects go native

I burned the lawn again three days ago, and then again this evening. That grass just keeps growing back! Soon tho it will be exhausted. Soon.

Maybe.

A monarch butterfly has been frequenting our garden as of late. So far this year we have been visited by the abundant Cabbage White, a sulfur, a European skipper, a Common checkered skipper, and an Eastern tailed blue. Tally: six species of butterflies. The less desirable Japanese beetles are back as well, and really seem to be attracted to the rouge evening primrose that popped up in the garden.

I also caught this dragonfly watching me from a cup plant leaf. Cup plant is just starting to flower today.

The cup plant is a draw for many insects. The base of the leaves surround the stem and form a "cup" which holds water for several days after each rain. This water draws in many colorful little flies, wasps, and native bees - which then attract larger predator insects like damselflies and dragonflies.

Bed of Fire

Whoa. Three month break and then two posts in two days. I do not do any hobby but by fits and starts. After a 6 year hiatus I am contemplating setting up the hammer dulcimer too.

This evening I smell. Of smoke. Yes, I set fire to my yard. Well, not really. I have a propane torch, purchased by my in-laws, from amazon.com, as a Christmas present. And it is just to tool I need to kill sod and create a new flower bed. Why, you may ask, not use a shovel? The answer is in our leaning catalpa, a massive hollow, sweet-heart of a tree. (A heart of honey, wax, and bee cement called "propolis.") This aged tree is leaning over our house and I am loath to sever any (more) roots. Cutting sod under the tree is just not an option. I do not want to use herbicides because I have two thumbsuckers at home. And to be honest, I simply like using fire as a tool.

I only killed the leaves. Grass is tough. It'll resprout, and I'll burn it again. And it'll resprout, and I'll burn it again. This sounds really fun.

And for my mother and any other folks who might worry for my safety, I have been trained in this. I called in my fire permit and did this legally and with full permission of the fire department. I sprayed the part of the lawn I was not going to burn with water and left the hose running while I burned this very green, not-at-all flammable grass.

Lush

After a few years of drier than average weather, the tide has turned. And when it rains, it pours. Here in Barry County, Michigan we have had two storms with over 4 inches of rain per storm. That is more than we get on average in a month. And the prairie plants are responding in a big way.

Weeds were far less a problem this year than in years past. These plants are now established and shading out the annual weeds. I keep on top of the grasses, a few maples, and the ever present catalpa seedlings.


Shown here are the black eyed susans, purple coneflowers, and few orange butterflyweed. The white is white prairie clover and a bit of daisy fleabane. I generally pull out most of the fleabane, which is weedy, but the bees and butterflies do like it.

A few weeks ago we saw flats of annuals on sale, and my lovely wife suggested we dig sod to make a new bed. I did not need to be asked twice. Over two evenings we cut about 300 square feet of sod and planted 5 flats of annuals. That may be just enough room for plants we desperately need to divide. We are well on our way to a grassless front lawn. And we were rewarded by a visit by goldfinches feeding on the coreopsis seedheads. I never thought of the goldfinch as an expert in camouflage, but they are tough to spot in a see of yellow flowers.

Bursting all over the place

Some of the perennials are waking up and a few flowers are blooming. Garden season has begun again. I spent some time pulling grass from around the flowers today, in the cold. The temperature here did not venture far above 40F today, and snow was falling this morning when we left for church.

Try as I might, I have not been able to remove the violets from my plantings. I admit, I have not tried very hard.












Wild blue lupines are more fickle than I had thought. I planted many, from plugs, in fall 2006. Few survived the winter, and fewer still are sprouting now. However, I have seen lupines thirve through drought, fire, and being nibbled by deer. One thing it appears that they cannot abide is loamy, rich soil. They are only persisting in a sandy barren corner of the yard that barely supported grass when we bought the place.













This native relative of the yucca wins the contest for best name: rattlesnake master. I adopted this fellow at a native plant swap in Kalamazoo last year.


















Lest you think we grow only pretty flowers, here is my May/June salad. I bought several packets of different greens in fall 2006 for $0.10 each. I did not get around to planting them in 2007, and so I dumped them all this year.










This is the parent to a plant that I am propogating from seed, I like to so much. Almost all the hawkweeds in Michigan are invasive exotics, a major weed of lawns and a minor (usually minor) weed of natural areas. However, there is one native: hairy hawkweed. The flowers are nondescript and yellow, but the foliage is a basal rosette of very fuzzy leaves.









Here you can get a little perspective on the small size of these young shoots. The small plants are one of our native Silphiums: cup plant. The taller plant is a daffodil that has not yet bloomed. In a few weeks, the cup-plant will tower over the daffodil, and by August the cup-plant will tower over me.















And lastly, I have a picture of another non-native, and one of my wife's favorite flowers: bleeding heart. (The flower of liberals?) And in the background you can see something else in the yard.