Maggie's Farm

My Montauk Daisies always come into bloom in the first week of October. It's worth the wait but, depending on the first frost, their bloom time can be brief.

Advice to those who grow them: They don't need fertilizer. They want full sun. Prune them to 4-6" high each early spring or you will end up with a huge, scraggly shrub a bit like the one below.

This is Clematis Henryi. I have just ordered one to grow over an arbor.

In my experience, these are tricky plants and slow to establish themselves. When they are unhappy, there's not a damn thing you can do about it. When they are happy on a sunny fence, they are great. They supposedly like their feet cool, shaded, and mulched.

I've tried everything but, like people, they just go their own way and follow their own path, whether it leads to heaven, hell, or Paramus.

I also like Sweet Autumn Clematis, which is a tougher, more forgiving variety.

Johnny Appleseed - John Chapman - was an interesting character: an ascetic, a Swedenborgian missionary, and a nurseryman who had little interest in making money.

Read about him and his unusual life at a good Wiki entry.

As readers may have noticed, with the beginning of Apple Season in Yankeeland we are making a point of having at least one Apple post daily.

Here's Apple Trees: Where and how to plant.

Image is by Nicholas of Verdun (c. 1180)

Along the streambank at the farm:

A re-post:

Both the majestic American Elm and the Chestnut fell victim to blights imported from overseas. With their deaths, the New England landscape was altered, for the worse. No more village blacksmith "under the spreading chestnut tree," and no more village greens and churches graced by rows of giant vase-shaped Elms - the hallmark of old New England.

Yes, we still have some elms, but the young ones don't make it to adulthood, and any remaining trees are slowly dying off.

The good news is that there is a blight-resistant Elm available. You won't live long enough to see it in its glory, but planting some now in the right places will be a heck of a fine gift to the future.

You can find them at Miller Nurseries.

Mrs. BD thought there might be some interest in the subject of growing perennials - rather than annuals - in your containers. It's a bit late in the season to post this, but I will do so anyway, and re-post it next May, God willing.

Since it might cost $50 to pack a good-sized container with annuals, and since perennials are generally more attractive and interesting, it might be worth a try. We have occasionally been happily surprised to see perennials in containers coming back to life in Spring. The trick is overwintering them.

Here's a site that explains it all.

Photo is one of my containers, filled with about $40 of annuals. Should have tried some perennials.

Clematis on a picket fence in CT this month. Thanks, reader.

A close-up of a bit of the shade border, yesterday. Yes, our azaleas are in bloom now up here.

Many people swear by this stuff for their vegetables and perennials, including my Mom, who knows whereof she speaks: Sea Kelp Liquid Fertilizer.

It's difficult to find, except online.

For readers who remember (or care about) the shade perennial border that I was working on finishing up last spring, here is about half of it, one year later, from two angles. (Sorry about my lousy photography.) I am pleased by how well it is shaping up after just one year:

What is getting planted this weekend, besides a ton of basil (and I think I need much more) in the veggie garden:

- A nice large mass of Nepeta (Catmint, not to be confused with Catnip). Photo on right.

- A 20' shade border edge of Green Spice heuchera. Look how it changes color with the seasons. This variety is a very cool plant.

- 20 obscure and delightful Hostas, including Love Pat. We think Hostas look best planted as "wave" plantings in the shade (never in the sun), such that, when mature, the leaves of one plant touch those of the adjacent plant and prevent weeds. For the right effect, that means mass planting of at least 5-10 of the same type, usually, unless you have a spot for a "specimen" plant. To do it right, you have to know what size the darn plant will become. Hostas come in mini, small, medium, large, and extra-large. A medium plant will be 2 1/2-3' across at maturity. An extra-large variety can be 5-6' wide at maturity if it is happy. Hostas mature fairly slowly (3-4 years, like most perennials), and if you divide them they revert and start their maturation process all over again. Best to plant them right the first time, and then leave them alone forever except for some fertilizer in Spring and early Fall.

I keep mine well-mulched - most easily done when they first emerge, but before the leaves unfold. Once they unfold, it's tough to do. Do I enrich the soil when I plant them? You bet I do. The old rule is a $50 hole for a $5 plant (unless it's a herb sort of thing that likes bad soil): twice as deep and twice as wide as you feel like digging. Big hole, soil mixed with humus or manure, and peat moss. Plenty of water the first year. And 6" of mulch (not that ugly and ineffective cedar chip crap) unless weeding gives you pleasure.

It's about the colorful and shapely foliage, not the flowers. From Bridgewood Gardens, on Why We Grow Hostas:

I'm not a botanist, I don't know the science.  But I do know that hostas have some kind of chemical in them that makes people nuts.  I know people who have normal size houses, with normal size back yards, normal kids and a sensible spouse, and these people grow a thousand or more different kinds of hostas.  I don't know just one of these people.  I know a bunch of them.  These people are obviously nuts and they have only one thing in common, they've all come in contact with hostas.

Obviously, there are still people who add a few hostas here and there to their gardens and leave it at that.  There must be some kind of threshold you have to cross - one day you're a sensible gardener, the next day you're nuts.  I think the first sign of trouble is when you say to yourself, "I wonder how many of these things I have now."

So you count your hostas and you're surprised to realize that you already have 40 different kinds.   You don't remember buying that many, you never thought of yourself as a collector, it just sort of happened.

Read the whole thing about Hostaphilia.

Our first post about Hostas was Hosta City. I think Hostas are OK, but it's the Mrs. who is the enthusiast and connoisseur. It takes them a year or two to get established, but after that they are tough. Few things are more pleasing or rewarding to grow in deep shade, and they are so dense that you get no weeds. Hosta Direct has a large selection.

Photo on top: Hosta "Captain Kirk"

My gardening buddies and I journey to this place each May for our vegetable plants. We go because they are the only place around here that has 30 varieties of tomatoes (including the yellow pear-shaped cherry tomatoes and all sorts of heirloom tomatoes), and 15 varieties of Basil and five varieties of Italian parsley, etc., in their herb shed (not that you want that many - it's just fun to see them all). This was yesterday morning:

As of today, we can put vegetables in the ground up here. Got the garden ready?

Why is a wheelbarrow load of soil or firewood easier to move around than a wagon load?

It's not spring yet, but I recently had a discussion about this subject, which led to some minor research. Like simple devices like the nutcracker, the human arm, scales, a see-saw, the crowbar, ratchet wrench, scissors, catapults, and the fishing rod, a wheelbarrow is a lever. In fact, a Type 2 Lever.

By a miracle of physics, levers magnify the force that can be applied with a given amount of effort. Archimedes was the first to attempt to describe the principles of levers. As the physics limerick goes:

One morning while eating my Wheaties,
I felt the earth move 'neath my feeties.
The cause for alarm
Was a long lever-arm,
At the end of which grinned Archimedes.

So, using by using your body to apply effort, with lever action, you are magically carrying a fair amount of the load of the wheelbarrow. A wagon offers no such advantage. (I will spare you the math with the factors of friction, torque, vectors, etc. that make a seemingly simple tool like a wheelbarrow surprising challenging to define.)

(As an aside, let me ask whether they let kids nowadays graduate from high school and college without taking calculus, physics and statistics? If so, wrong, wrong, wrong. This stuff is BASIC. An educated person knows Latin or Greek, calculus, basic physics, basic chemistry, and statistics. Or they are only half-educated about reality and seriously handicapped in the tools for understanding this world. Saddest thing: you forget it all, over time, but, like bike-riding, it's in there somewhere, and the brain can re-connect with it with the right "links".)

I am partial to two-wheelers. The increase in friction, I feel, is compensated by the lack of wobble (torque). Photo is the Ultimate Wheelbarrow from Cariola.

The varieties of Heuchera available these days is remarkable.

Thanks to the magic of genetic engineering, these excellent shade plants, grown best in masses as ground-cover (more for their foliage than for their delicate and modest Spring flowers) now come in every imaginable leaf color.

This site has a number of new varieties. Their "Ginger Ale" is cool.

Just grow them, dry them out, punch a 1" hole in them, and hang 'em in a tree. Instant House Wren house.

A house is not a home unless you have these members of the chattering class around. (Ours haven't arrived yet this Spring. Global cooling is to blame.)

It's a good time of year to re-link our past piece on Removing Pachysandra, that durable shade ground cover which is ubiquitous in these parts and which can be pleasant in the right place, but vulgar, I think, in others.

Getting it established takes some doing, but once it's happy it sure is tough to get rid of.

I have a patch to remove, maybe this weekend but my wheelbarrow has a flat so I need to fix that first.