April 2024: April Showers Bring April Flowers

April was rough with way too many severe storms, violent wind, and tornadoes coming way too close to our house. The worst of it was April 2 when we were awake at 5:00 am and heading to the basement to shelter from tornadoes. Thankfully we made it through the month without storm damage.

Meanwhile, everything emerged in my garden. Some of my favorites were the ferns as they curled their way out of the ground and expanded into their spots in the garden. I always love their changing structures and textures. Another plant with a beautiful emergence is the peony whose leaves twist and turn as they expand from the soil. I also love the colors and textures of the epimedium leaves that line up and expand together in a team of hearts–not to mention the fairy-like epimedium flowers held on delicate stems.

The early spring daffodils and tulips had mostly passed by the start of April and were replaced by things like wild geranium, tiarella, irises, and azaleas. The colors in my garden intensified as the plants began to fill the formerly-empty space. My berries bloomed, and my garlic grew ever larger.

I didn’t do much work in my garden, spending the month mostly just watching its progress and taking pictures. I did start a few tomato plants and sweet potato slips. Many years I’ve felt like I got them going too early and had to try to hold overly-eager plants indoors for too long. Trying to avoid that, I think I may have gotten them started a little later than I could have, though it’s always difficult to know what to do.

On the last weekend of April, John and I were able to go to Scratch Brewing, one of our favorite little breweries. It’s located in Southern Illinois and we’ve gone several times before, though it had been almost a year since our last trip. The beers are hyperlocal and incorporate many plants that the brewers have foraged from the land around the brewery. The flavors are complex and unique.

We arrived late in the afternoon and shared several rounds of samplers along with a couple wood fired pizzas. Beers on tap that weekend included one brewed with dried oak, hickory, and maple leaves; one brewed in a copper kettle with wild cherry bark; one brewed with elderberries; and one brewed with chanterelle mushrooms. All of these items were grown or foraged nearby. The pizzas also featured local foods for their toppings.

In addition to having really interesting drinks and food, Scratch has a beautiful setting. The indoors is full of artwork and the outdoors features a variety of rustic seating areas. We ate in the roofed area built around a log cabin. We had a view of the woods, and an Eastern phoebe had a nest nearby in the eaves so we watched her come and go.

We spent the night nearby, then checked out Inspiration Point in the Shawnee National Forest the next morning before going home. At first, Inspiration Point didn’t seem all that inspiring, but then we braved the steep little side trail and gusty winds to get out on the actual point where the view was, in fact, inspirational. It was a fun little trip.

March 2024: Blooming Time

February’s crocuses and early daffodils were the opening overture for the springtime blooms. March followed with a solid performance of flowers mixed with emerging leaves. March began with the last of the crocuses and the final two of my four hellebores. The magnolia started slow, and I was afraid that it had been frozen out by a couple warm-then-cool cycles in the weather. However, I shouldn’t have worried because it soon burst into full bloom.

The first ferns began to unfurl, the raspberries and blackberries leafed out, the redbud bloomed, and life generally returned to my garden. By the end of the month, there was more than the promise of spring. I could begin to hear echoes of summer approaching in all of the bright colors and bold blooms.

I still haven’t done much gardening for the year. I planted a small raised bed of lettuce, which then took its time to get growing. I also did some cleanup here and there, but that’s about it. I was out of commission with the flu for part of March and was traveling at the end, so it’s good there wasn’t really much to do. At this time of year, I just let the plants do what they want to do, and I’ll assess where we’re at once things get a little farther along.

April 2023: Greening Again

My garden really began to green up and fill out in April. Plenty of things had already begun to emerge from the ground in March, but the blooms and leaves really started to pop in April. You can get a sense of the progression of things in the photos below.

In April, the redbud ended its blooms and added its ever-lovely heart-shaped leaves. Multiple kinds of ferns sent tendrils out of the ground to unfurl in a multitude of sculptural ways. Epimediums sent their delicate, fairy-flower blooms up above new leaves that later spread to catch raindrops. Astrilbe leaves emerged with delicately-cut, feathery edges. Young wild ginger and hardy begonia leaves shimmered almost glittery when the sunlight hit them. My favorite bright orange tulips exploded across the garden under the maple tree. The irises were began their show. New growth and bright colors were everywhere. The one exception, though, were the azaleas out front that are missing a lot of their leaves after the unusually cold weather at Christmas. Time will tell if the bushes recover. They still managed to put on a nice show of color, but they promise to look very bare once the flowers fall.

Meanwhile in my vegetable gardening, the garlic powered onward in both of my main vegetable beds. I’m hoping I can find ways to fit other vegetables around it before it’s ready to harvest in June. I started some lettuce in a couple other beds, but it grew very slowly, so it’s also still taking up space at a time when I had hoped it would be grown and picked. My sweet potato, tomato, melon, and squash starts are growing nicely indoors and are past ready to go out, but are destined to fit around the garlic and lettuce.

May will bring much more planting and new plants in the spaces that April created.

November 2022: Final Harvests

Remarkably, the month of November began still with no killing frost or freeze. We came close very early on, so I harvested all the tomatoes I could find along with all of my sweet potatoes. It’s always interesting to see what I have growing underground in the sweet potato patch. The vines looked healthy this year, but did they produce sweet potatoes? The answer was yes! I got a good harvest and can tell that there are several varieties represented in that harvest. Some have orange flesh and some are all purple, but, as in previous years, the best grower was a Japanese variety that has purple skin and dry, white flesh. They’re all tasty.

I’ve been growing the sweet potatoes in a raised bed that contains sandy soil, so to harvest them I just reach my hands into the earth and feel around for the lumps of potato. The whole process is a lot of work, particularly because I have to dismantle my Boo Boo butt shield (aka: the metal hoops covered in bird net to keep the cats out because…you know…sandy soil). I let the sweet potatoes cure for a few weeks and then we roasted some to sample. They were excellent.

That same weekend I also raked up all the leaves on the ground. I wanted to make sure to do it before they started to break apart and smother the grass under them. They were still wonderfully fluffy and colorful when I raked them, which made them much easier to deal with. Normally the leaves would be coming off the trees a little after we had a frost, so I’d just get my leaf blower out and blow the leaves into my garden beds to decompose over the winter. This year, however, everything was still growing when the leaves came down, so I bagged them all up to store temporarily. I’ll spread them on my garden beds as I clear those beds out for the winter. I got 15 big bags of leaves, including some nice maple leaves I raked up from my neighbor’s house!

The cold snap didn’t materialize as early as first expected, but from the forecasts it was certain to arrive in the third week of November, so I picked one final round of lima beans and tomatoes before it hit. For the record, I picked them all on November 11 with weather so pleasant I didn’t need to wear a jacket. Then on November 12 we had a surprise snowfall followed by frigid temperatures. Finally all of the summer’s growth stopped in my garden. Sadly for me, the snowfall occurred on the one day I was out of town visiting friends, so I missed it! Hopefully this won’t be the one and only snowfall of the year, but that’s exactly what happened a few years ago.

In my absence, I told John to take my camera out and capture some images of the snow on top of green, blooming plants. He did, so all the photos below with snow in them are thanks to him. It’s an interesting juxtaposition of still-vibrant plants frozen under snow. The concern that this raises is whether the plants will be damaged by the quick change from temperature highs in the 70’s to a stretch with lows in the 20’s. That other year that I mentioned earlier when the only snow came in November, we had a similar shift in temperature and my plants were damaged because they hadn’t gone through their normally gradual autumnal shutdown. Adding to the potential plant stress this year was the fact that our area’s moderate drought continued into November. In fact, we got only about three-quarters of an inch of rain for the entire month. I tried to counteract this by watering up until the freeze.

After the snow and cold weather finally killed things off, I was able to start clearing this year’s plants out of my garden and start planting for next year. I reworked the soil in my main raised bed for vegetables, adding leaves and stirring things around with a broadfork, then I planted my garlic. The garlic went in a little later than I thought was best, but I’d wanted to get the area cleared and the soil turned and couldn’t do that as easily until things had died back. Time will tell whether it was ok to wait.

Only at the end of the month did the plants finally start to settle back into the earth, with leaves and fruits gradually losing their shapes and colors. Meanwhile, I still had bright, fresh garden tomatoes to enjoy indoors! They’d ripened nicely in a bowl on my counter. It was pretty remarkable to have fresh garden produce at the end of November.

May 2022: The Bloomsplosion

Looking through my photos from May, I’m surprised at how much bloomed during the month. If you’d have asked me to think back, I’d have thought that surely several of these things bloomed in April and maybe a few of them bloomed in June. And yet here they all are in May!

The month began with leaves still filling out on the trees, tulip blooms, irises, and azalea blossoms. It ended with copious honeysuckle blooms, baptisia, and other flowers I associate solidly with summer. In the meantime, I got my tomatoes out from the grow lights indoors where I started them, and I planted the sweet potato slips that I’d started myself from last fall’s harvest.

Looking back, things were constantly changing. We got good amounts of rain, but also had two weeks of temperatures in the 90’s, which made May feel more like August. I also went to an above average number of plant sales and nurseries this year. It was fun. I shopped at Hasting’s Nursery west of Mount Vernon, IN. Then I stocked up on plants at the Master Gardeners’ annual plant sale. There’s nothing like a plant you’ve elbowed someone else out of the way to get!

I always go right at opening time to get the best selection and to be part of the pandemonium. This year, there were apparently two entrances to the sale. One had a bunch of people at it and the other seemed to have no line, so I chose no line. It turns out that that was the entrance for annuals and houseplants. I’d told myself ahead of time that I shouldn’t get any houseplants because I don’t have enough space for them and I hate having to go around watering them. But there I was, in the section with all the cool houseplants and the crowd had yet to discover them. What was I supposed to do? Of course I grabbed some really cool ones before someone else could come along and get them.

I also shopped at two native plant sales. Last fall I started planting some native plants in the “hell strip” in front of our house between the sidewalk and the street. I’d gotten the idea from a house I saw with that space full of flowers and also from the fact that a couple years ago some workers disturbed some of the sod out front that was from the EPA soil remediation and some native plants started sprouting and blooming from the soil that the EPA had trucked in. There’s a great native plant nursery in our area that holds twice annual plant sales and they mark their plants really well so you know which ones work in dry, sunny conditions. I bought a bunch of those kind of plants and I’m hopeful that they’ll become a low maintenance flower bed in a difficult-to-grow spot.

I spent a lot of May planting all of my new plants. They were mostly perennials of some kind or another. The garden at the base of the magnolia got quite a few and the rest were sprinkled around my other flower beds. The month of May also continued the particularly beautiful fresh shades of green from spring. My garden was really at its peak!

At the end of May was the incredible blooming of the Japanese honeysuckle on the back fence. The scent is a powerful assault on your nose and I love it. Unfortunately, this type of honeysuckle is invasive. The pretty native honeysuckle on my shed continued to bloom with abandon. I haven’t caught any hummingbirds eating from it so far this year, but it’s great for that. Aphids descended onto my third type of honeysuckle, which I think is a hybrid variety. They come every year and ruin the blooms more years than not, so this year I decided to get some insecticide to try to combat them. Unfortunately, the blooms were still twisted and stunted because of the aphids.

Now comes the real heat and dryness of summer. All the optimistic new greens will darken and dull. Things will settle into summer, but the freshness will be gone. I always miss that. Still, there are plenty of things to look forward to in June.

May 2021: Bold Color

All of the colors in my garden got bolder and brighter in May. The greens reached their brightest and fullest. Everywhere things leafed out nicely. The iris bed was full of blooms, including one fancy, purple-edged one that I separated last year from a plant at work that I really liked. The blackberries and raspberries were full of blooms.

I planted the tomatoes that I’d started indoors from seed. They’re an example of what tends to happen in my garden: I have very little space and so much that I want to plant in it. My intention was to maximize the small space in my west raised bed. I planted garlic there in the fall and it will grow until harvest time in June. So, I thought, maybe I could have empty slots between rows of garlic where the tomatoes would grow starting in May. I hoped that maybe the garlic would come out of the ground just as the tomatoes were getting big enough to need supports, and then the tomatoes would fill the empty space where the garlic had been. Well, of course the garlic didn’t come up in the neat rows that I planted it in so there weren’t clear spaces for the tomatoes. And the tomatoes are already expanding rapidly while the garlic still isn’t quite ready to harvest. So I’ve got a pile of plants, but hopefully it will all turn out ok.

My other raised bed will be home to sweet potatoes. Last year I struggled to keep the outdoor cats from using the sandy soil as a litter box, so this year I invested in some big hoops that are supporting bird net. It seems to be working well. In May I planted a couple sweet potatoes that I’d started myself. My shipment of sweet potato slips came at the beginning of June to fill the rest of the bed.

I went to one greenhouse in May to get some annuals for my planters as well as a couple new perennials, because it’s fun shopping for new plants. I went to fewer plant sales and greenhouses than usual this year, but I decided I really don’t need much and I didn’t need the temptation.

Also blooming this month were alums, baptisia, clematis, Virginia irises, and honeysuckles. The hybrid honeysuckle in the front was less-than-spectacular this year. Its blossoms are often plagued by aphids, and the aphids came early this year. I tried to salvage the blooms by spraying them with organic, insecticidal soap, but the aphids just came back. I still got some blooms, but they weren’t as energetic as they can be. The Japanese honeysuckle that makes a green privacy fence around my back yard put on its usual, heavily-perfumed show. I love working in my garden during its bloom time with its sweetness surrounding me, so it’s unfortunate that it’s officially an invasive plant. The native and hybrid honeysuckles I have support the insects and the hummingbirds but do not have the same intense scent as the invasives.

I’m happy to see my Dancing Crane Cobra Lily come back again. It spends most of the summer swamped among the hardy begonias at the side of the house. It’s an interesting plant with an interesting name. Apparently it’s a native of Asia. It looks very similar to the Green Dragons that are a native plant I’ve seen locally. I’d love to get one of those as well but haven’t been able to snag one yet at a native plant sale.

My third and fanciest azalea bloomed later than my other two. I planted it a couple years ago, so it’s still small. The other two weren’t very happy plants this year. I’m not sure what the problem is, but one had really rough looking leaves but good blooms and the other had ok leaves but its blooms were really patchy. Overall, they made a pretty spotty showing. I made sure to give them some fertilizer, and they’re already looking a little better.

Also, I’ve moved my peony around several times through the years in order to find a good spot for it. It’s actually one of the few plants that was here in the garden when I first moved into this house. It’s now landed in the front of the side yard, and I think it may finally be happy and have enough sun. I got several frilly blooms from it this year.

All of this expansion and blooming should set everything up to settle into summertime fruit and seed production during June.

April 2021: The Greening Returns, part 2

A short time ago, WordPress updated all of the behind-the-scenes stuff for the blogs it hosts. It’s been a little bit of an adjustment for me. There are new ways of doing everything and a lot of my old ways of doing things are gone. So, I wasn’t exactly surprised when I went back to look at my last post about my garden and I realized that several photos were missing. I guess WordPress decided I had enough photos in my post and it cut me off!

I’d spent time choosing, editing, uploading, and labeling them all, so I didn’t want to just delete them. So, now you get a few bonus April photos from the end of the month.

April 2021: The Greening Returns

I’m a little later than I’d like in putting together my review of all the things that happened in my garden in April. Part of the problem was that I had a lot of photos to sort through. All month, plants were growing, expanding, and blooming. I’d catch a great color combination or combination of leaf textures one morning, and then by the evening the colors would have shifted or the shapes would have changed and it was a whole new and beautiful thing to see.

At the start of the month, the green had definitely begun to return to my garden. March had seen the emergence of all kinds of plants and several rounds of early blooms, so April was marked by a lot of expansion among my perennials and the later spring blooms. You’ll see that happening in the set of photos below. As always, you can click on any photo for a caption with more information about what you’re looking at.

The month started with unfurling ferns of all sorts, plus fritillaries, tulips, tiarellas, grape hyacinths, my later daffodils, and epimedium. When everything is so small and delicate, I imagine lots of fairies stopping by. For vegetables, I’d started a few tomato seeds indoors at the end of March and I had some lettuce outdoors that I’d tried to get going last fall. The lettuce didn’t do much until this spring, but I cut at least three rounds of salads off of it before cutting it down in May and starting some fresh greens.

The redbud tree our front put on its usual show all month. I love its progression from buds to full blooms that make the branches look zig-zaggy then the emerging, heart-shaped leaves changing to full-sized hearts. By the end of the month the perennials had expanded to fill their usual spots and the irises and azaleas were blooming.

Like I said before, April is always a very pretty month with many changes and lots to see!

April 2020: What a Difference a Month Makes

At the start of the month of April, the daffodils were finishing their blooms and the trees were lightly green with new leaves. The perennials in my perennial beds were mostly just small mounds of leaves. The lilies were just emerging as thick spikes. Ferns were tight knots on long stems.

Everything grew, unfolded, and became brighter green throughout the month. By the middle of the month, I could hear my garden singing.

By the end of the month, the trees’ leaves were large enough to shade my yard once more. The azaleas were a riot of color. The ferns had stretched themselves into feathery fronds. The spring flowers had concluded. Now we’re on the cusp of early summer.

As you flip through the photos below, you can sense the way the light changes and the way the garden builds itself bigger and brighter each week. You can see the same plants change from week to week. It’s an amazing and beautiful process to behold.

August

Much of my August was spent in Northern Michigan, but still my garden grew at home. The effects of the EPA lead remediation in my yard are everywhere.

Before we left for vacation, I had one more set of plants still sitting in temporary pots: my raspberries. I knew that they would hold up better in my absence if they were in the actual ground instead of in a pot where they would dry out much more quickly. As a result, I rushed the project and didn’t do things in the order I would have if there had been more time.

I’d bought the raspberries at the Master Gardeners’ sale a few years ago because I absolutely love red raspberries and I can’t find anywhere local that grows them. I hadn’t realized how much they would spread, and I was surprised at how quickly they overwhelmed the space.

I’d planted them once in my raised bed at the side of the house, then moved them temporarily to my former vegetable garden when I knew it was all going to be dug up. I figured they grew like weeds, so they could handle being dug up and moved around and then moved around again.

Now that it was time to put them in a more permanent space, I tried to figure out how to contain them somewhat. I don’t know that it will really work, but I attempted to dig a trench, line it with weed barrier, then plant the raspberries inside the barrier. I still need to complete a trellis for them. You’ll see the start of it in September.

Meanwhile, I got a little more of my art out, including my German garden weasel, but a lot of my garden art remains in storage where I put it for safekeeping during all the work in my yard. Next year there will be more that makes it out of storage and back into my garden.

Also an effect of the EPA work is the fact that the only vegetable garden I have this year is in my central raised bed, which was created with soil I purchased so it didn’t have to be removed. It’s a pretty haphazard garden. There are a couple tomatoes (all of them are volunteers), a few beans, and basil. Hopefully there will also be a few sweet potatoes later in the fall.

The main planting of vegetables in my yard have always been on the west side, but this area took time for me to remediate the remediation because I needed to turn and loosen the soil before I could plant in it. I decided there wasn’t enough time to grow any vegetables in it this year, and I was still recovering from all the EPA stress myself, so I emptied packet after packet of zinnia seeds into the bed. I hope to have a mass of flowers before the frost. The blooms are already quite happy.

And yet another EPA impact was the tiny, new azalea I planted in front of my house this summer. It was one treat for myself that I’d gotten when all the digging work was done. I’d wanted one to fill an empty gap between the other two by the porch, but I’d known the EPA digging was coming and I didn’t want to subject a tender little plant to that. The existing azaleas are white and pink, so I got one that’s white swirled with pink. I didn’t realize until it surprised me with blooms that it must be one of the new twice-blooming varieties.

I also knew when I left for vacation that I would return to a very different view in the neighbor’s yard. His back yard was up for remediation. It has gotten a little overgrown over the years, but all the critters from the cats to the birds have loved it as a little sanctuary. It had become a nice, green wall.

I knew it was likely to be gone when I returned, and it was. Since our return, it’s been a barren wasteland of compacted dirt. Maybe someday there will be some green returned to it. I keep watching for the EPA subcontractors laying new sod.

And of course, the cats. There are a lot of them. We have our three inside the house and now there is a motley crew of neighborhood cats hanging out around our house. At the moment, there are five who stop by for food every morning and evening: Jazzy [Jeff], [Captain] Scrappy, Spike, Mark [Mc-no-Balls], and Junior with Balls. I think the outdoor guys missed us while we were gone on vacation almost as much as the indoor cats missed us.

Aside from having their people gone for an eternity, the big news for the cats is that it is cicada season. Cicadas are everyone’s favorite plaything. One evening I was out walking Perry and we heard some raspy buzzing in the street between my car and the curb. Perry went over to investigate and the next thing I knew, he had a cicada buzzing angrily in his mouth. For a moment, I thought perhaps it was stuck there. To me, it seemed like it had to have been painful. But Perry carried it up the sidewalk for a good distance before spitting it out. Below is a video of him surveying it. Just imagine it buzzing like that inside his mouth.

I wasn’t sure what he thought about the whole experience. Was it frightening? Painful? Unpleasant? But the next night during our walk, Perry and I heard another cicada in the trees next door and Perry bolted in their direction, hopeful. I guess he enjoyed his close encounter with a cicada.