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.

January 2024: Cold and Atmospheric

January was cold and then it turned frigid. We spent the middle of the month in a polar vortex which brought temperature highs down below freezing and lows into the single digits for more than a week. Add in some windy days, and we had wind chill warnings on top of it all.

Even with the new Feralvillas that I’d gotten for the outdoor cats, I didn’t have confidence that we could keep them sufficiently warm, so we evacuated them to an emergency shelter. We did the same during similar weather last year. They spent 11 days together in a small bathroom and were very much ready to go home by the end of it. They did stay safe and warm, however.

There were no particular happenings in my garden during January, but we were treated to a range of natural beauty. There were cold, crystal-clear sunsets with slivers of moon, enough snow to smooth and brighten the landscape, a stunning sunrise, and particularly dense and mysterious fog.

At the end of the month, I saw the first signs of spring as a few hellebore leaves and buds began to emerge from beneath the dried leaves. There are also some early crocuses, bluebells, and daffodils starting to poke up above the ground.

The sharp-shinned hawks that live in a huge oak across the street are more noticeable and active as the days start to get longer. The other day, I was walking Perry at lunch and noticed a pile of feathers in the backyard next door. When I looked more closely, the hawk was still eating its meal there in the yard. It flew off with its kill (probably a pigeon, judging by the feathers). I’ve noticed the hawk family for years and it’s been interesting to see their activity throughout the seasons.

December 2023: Wrapping Up Another Year

December brought quiet beauty in the muted colors of the remaining leaves. With so many browns everywhere, the remaining greens, yellows, oranges, and reds really popped. The color bled out of the last of the hosta leaves, leaving them collapsed, pale, and skeletal. The heuchera leaves remain colorful as they sit tucked into the leaves fallen around them. And the blackberry leaves are some of the most tenacious, turning both darker and more golden before they will eventually fall away.

I didn’t really work on anything in my garden in December, even though there is still some clean up to do. Instead, I put up my outdoor Christmas lights, and John and I got a Christmas tree. Again this year we got a commercial tree that had been farmed in Northern Indiana. I believe that the days of our stripper pit Christmas trees are probably gone, sigh. Still, the tree we got was tall and skinny and perfect for our house, so we were happy with it.

Another December project was making some new cat houses for the outdoor cats. I always worry about keeping them warm enough in winter. Ever since our first winter with outdoor cats hanging around I’ve had some insulated cat houses with built-in electric heating pads, but Spike has claimed them all and does not share. A couple years ago I made a couple cat shelters using plastic tubs for Mark and Junior. But all of these shelters seem drafty to me and I’m doubtful that they’re enough to keep the chill wind out.

So this year I decided to upgrade to Feralvillas, which are ready-to-assemble cat shelters that some people make in a small shop. I ordered them online, they arrived quickly, and they were super easy to assemble. The cats enter the Feralvilla on a lower level and from inside they can move to an upper level that is enclosed, sheltered from the wind, and completely insulated. I anticipated that cats would be cats and would show me who’s boss by waiting to use these nice things I’d gotten for them, but the cats were using them the first night that they were available. They must be good. I got one for each cat, and the cats appear to have sorted out whose house is whose.

July 2023: Blooms, Fruit, Bugs, and Brutal Heat

July was dry and very hot, but in looking through my photos I realized it was also filled with plenty of happy blooms and happy bugs crawling on them. (I was not happy with many of those happy bugs, though!)

My garden in front of the house is filled with mostly native prairie plants and it really exploded in July. I had a lot of coneflowers blooming along with some coreopsis and an Illinois bundleflower. The bundleflower is a plant I bought without really knowing much about it. I got it from the Master Gardeners, but the Master Gardeners who happened to be there selling it didn’t know anything about it. It turns out that it’s a pretty interesting plant. It has wonderfully feathery leaves that fold up at nighttime. It has puffy little white flowers that turn into amazing “bundled” seedpods. You’ll see plenty of it in the photos below. Many bees, butterflies, and other insects have visited all of these flowers.

Meanwhile my vegetable garden has exploded from meager starts to plants spreading to fill all the space available. One that’s doing amazingly well at that is the zucchino rampicante squash. Its vines keep going and going while also setting several huge squashes. I got the seeds from a friend who said it was impervious to squash vine borers, which has been the case this summer. I also have a butternut squash that hasn’t done quite as well, but it hasn’t been done in by the borers, so that’s a win. Both squashes are favored food of squash bugs, so I’ve done daily patrols to try to pull off the squash bug eggs before they have a chance to hatch. So far I’ve avoided an infestation, but I’m not letting my guard down.

My lima beans and sweet potatoes are also growing nicely. They love the heat, so they have been in their element. Another happy grower is a cucumber. I’d picked a new variety to grow this year. It’s a French pickling cucumber, and I thought it would give me cute little cucumbers like you often see pickled whole. Well, they’re cute but they’re covered with black spines so I don’t really want to touch them, and then they grow big and are still covered with spines so I really don’t want to touch them. Unfortunately that means they’re just getting big and ugly on the vines without me picking them. Oh, well. I won’t grow them again.

My tomatoes have been a mix of good and bad. Several plants had some kind of problem and shriveled up and mostly died. I didn’t put much effort into figuring out which of the many, many things might have caused this, though there were a bunch of stink bugs hanging out on one of the plants that died. I started picking them off during my daily bug patrols. The bug patrols also included picking a lot of Japanese beetles off of my azaleas, raspberries, blackberries, and bundleflower. Other tomato plants in my garden have been happy, so I’ve gotten plenty of nice tomatoes to eat.

It’s also been blackberry season. The blackberries have ripened nicely and haven’t been too bothered by the birds or bugs. It helps that they ripen around the same time that our neighbor’s black cherry tree ripens, so the birds are really distracted with cherries and miss the blackberries. I usually realize the cherries are ripe when I hear a wild hullabaloo high up in the tree next door and realize there’s a feeding frenzy going on. Clearly the cherries are some prime eating!

Things were hot and pretty dry all July. I watered every week. However, it was at the end of the month that things got really brutal. When the “heat dome” blasted through our area we had temperatures at or near 100 degrees, extremely high humidity, and heat indexes well over 110. We monitored the outdoor cats, who were clearly very hot but were able to manage. They had plenty of water, food, and shady spots. The plants seemed to manage, too.

Below you can watch a video garden tour from mid-July and see a little bit of everything that was growing in July!

December 2022: Polar Plunge

December dawned a little warmer than usual, but not much. There were cold spells with lows in the 20’s, and there were sprinklings of rain here an there. Most color had faded from my garden, save the last of the leaves to turn and fall: the leaves on my blackberry. Every year they are some of the last bits of red, yellow, orange, and green to leave my garden. I always enjoy seeing them. Meanwhile, the last of the tomatoes left on the vines withered away to nothing, but indoors I had one final round of fresh tomatoes that I’d picked green in November and that had ripened on my counter. Fresh garden tomatoes in December! John and I baked them with chickpeas and feta for a tasty meal.

Mid-December, John and I got a Christmas tree. This year we didn’t even check the traditional spot in a strip mine where we and others from Patchwork had gone to collect cedar trees for decades. If you remember, lately it’s only been John and I going to get trees there and last year when we went it just felt like too much had changed and it was no longer a good idea. So last year and this year we got a normal commercial tree. Times change.

Just before Christmas, I pulled a year’s worth of raspberries and two years’ worth of blackberries from my freezer and turned them into jam. I like blackberry jam a lot better without seeds, so I used my Squeezo Strainer to separate them out before making jam. It was more difficult than it should have been because I got impatient with the slow-to-thaw berries and tried to run them through when they were still a little frozen. Eventually I got one batch of raspberry jam, two batches of blackberry jam, and one batch of blackberry preserves.

What’s the difference between jam and preserves, you ask? Well, I accidentally used half the sugar I should have on my last batch of jam. I knew I should have made myself check the recipe, but instead I told myself that it was the fourth time through and I remembered the recipe just fine. I didn’t realize my mistake until I noticed that the jam hadn’t gelled correctly. I looked online to find a remedy and the first search result started with the words of wisdom, “If you don’t want to invest any additional work in that jam, the best choice to make is to change your expectations. If the finished product is just sort of runny, call it preserves (they can be great stirred into oatmeal or yogurt, or spooned over waffles). If it’s totally sloshy, label it syrup and stir it into sparkling water.”

As I was finishing the jam, a serious winter storm was gathering. Snow and extreme cold air were forecast to hit our area in the afternoon on December 22. Everyone was urged to get our affairs in order. Suddenly we were prepping our home and workplace for bad weather at the same time as we were preparing work to be closed for the holidays. On the day the storm blew in, the high temperature on my weather station was 44 degrees and the low at bedtime was 3 degrees with a windchill of -10 degrees. Very early in the morning on December 23, the low on my weather station got down to -6 degrees and the windchill reached at least -19 degrees. In other areas around the city where the wind could blow even harder, the windchill got to at least -29 degrees. On Christmas, it was still cold. Christmas night it snowed more. Things started to ease on December 26, but it was still plenty cold.

It was stressful. One night we had an alarm going off on our furnace at home. We had a couple furnaces at work limping along and spent time during our holiday working to keep them going. We had a pipe briefly freeze at home. We were monitoring two buildings at work and the four cats sheltered in them. We pushed off leaving to visit my family for Christmas once then again then just decided to stay home. Since we’d intended to be gone, we hadn’t stocked up on groceries before Christmas, but we still managed to use things we had around to make a fancy Christmas feast of Chicken Cordon Bleu and roasted sweet potatoes from my garden.

The snow was pretty while it lasted, enhancing all of my outdoor Christmas lights. After it melted and the weather warmed, I did notice that many of my plants that normally stay evergreen through the Southwestern Indiana winters have turned black. The leaves on the honeysuckle on the back fence are brown and limp. The azaleas in the front have many leaves that turned brown and are falling off. I will be interested to see how well things come back to life in the spring. Clearly this weather was on the colder end of what they can tolerate.

And with that, we ended 2022! Now it’s time to look toward next summer and to start ordering my seeds.

August 2022: A Promising Start

My review of August in my garden will be relatively brief. We were home for the first two weeks of the month and then gone for the following two and a half weeks. Things started out relatively well. We finally had some nice rain, breaking the drought conditions. Unfortunately, this included a really severe storm on August 1 that felled trees and knocked out power to 30,000 customers in our area. The power stayed on at my house, but several of my plants were a little battered by the wind, particularly my tomatoes that ended up getting beaten at least three feet lower to the ground.

Before heading out on vacation, I had seven varieties of tomatoes with ripened fruit, melons forming (but, sadly, not ripe enough to pick before we left), the last of my blackberries, and a lot of flower blooms. Flowers included everything from zinnias, maypops, and my potted jasmine plant to the surprise lilies that are fixtures in yards this time of year throughout our area. They pop out of the ground with little warning on long stalks. Their leaves came and went in the spring, which lends them another common name: naked ladies.

As always, you can click on any of the photos to get more of a description of what’s in it. I also recorded another garden tour video. When I recorded it, I had a fear that we would come back from vacation and my garden wouldn’t look nearly so go–and, sadly, I was right. We got nice amounts of rain for a couple weeks leading up to vacation, and I gave my garden a good soaking the day that we left. That watering would have held the garden beds for the first week of our absence. After that, I prayed for rain, but it didn’t come. Our time away was unexpectedly extended by a few days (more on that in an upcoming post), and I anxiously watched the Evansville weather radar from afar as several rounds of rain and storms dodged every which way, always managing to miss my house. Additionally, my other efforts to get my plants and garden watered fell through, though last-minute action by my neighbor friend did save some things.

We made it home late on August 31, and even in the dark I could see a lot of things didn’t make it. I thought about sharing the photos in this blog post, but I decided to start my September post there. I rushed to soak everything with water as quickly as possible. Two days later, we got intense rain, and we’re forecast to get rain all week. Of course, I’m sad that all this rain didn’t come earlier to nourish my garden in my absence.

I’m thinking it would be a great venture for someone to start a Garden Sitter business, especially considering all the people who discovered gardening during the pandemic and who are now traveling more. It would be great to be able to call a fellow gardener to have them monitor and thoroughly water my garden. Maybe they could also identify and remove garden pests (like the fat and happy yellow-striped armyworms I found eating my tomatoes when I returned from vacation). Till someone starts that business, I’ll be stuck with the usual trepidation leaving my garden for an extended time.

July 2022: Endurance

The heat cranked up in June and stayed hot through the entirety of July. There were some short respites (a 90° day, yay!), but they were few and far between. We had weeks with multiple Excessive Heat Advisories (maximum heat index temperature is expected to be 100° or higher for at least 2 days, and night time air temperatures will not drop below 75°) and plenty of Excessive Heat Warnings (the maximum heat index temperature is expected to be 105° or higher for at least 2 days and night time air temperatures will not drop below 75°). On top of the heat, we had drought conditions. It was brutal.

I watered my garden a lot all the way through July. It’s painful knowing that our water bill will be extra high, but I know if I don’t water it, my garden will die. It’s one of the costs of gardening, and a time when I’m glad that my space is really pretty small. Even with the small space, it’s an all-day project. And with things being so unpleasant outside, watering about all I did in my garden in July.

My tomatoes haven’t loved the heat, and I’ve barely had enough ripe ones for a daily sandwich for lunch. The ones in the raised beds at the side of the house have done ok, but the ones I planted in the vegetable bed in the back have yet to produce. They’ve all grown a lot, but I’ve had few ripe fruits. The lima beans have also seemed lackluster this year. Only a few plants are growing big, but there’s still time to get some beans. Melons and squash have been slow to take off, but they’re doing ok. The blackberries have done well, though they’ve appreciated my watering. Meanwhile, the basil and the sweet potatoes are quite happy with the excessive heat and have exploded. I’m glad at least something likes the heat. (I sure don’t.)

Another area that seems particularly happy is the row of prairie plants I put in the “hell strip” area in front of our house between the sidewalk and the street. It gets direct sun, has compacted soil, and is far from the outdoor water spigot, so the conditions there are pretty rough. What I have planted there are mostly native prairie plants that are supposed to do ok in dry soil. This is the first year for this group of plants and so far I’m enjoying them and their hardy nature. Since they’re still getting established, I’m watering them regularly with a soaker hose, but they seem plenty happy with the environment they have. I threw in some non-native annuals this spring as they all get established, and I think the color combinations look good.

Sprinkled through the entire month were plenty of insects–and a lot of them the bad kind. I went out multiple times a day to collect and destroy Japanese beetles. They’re remarkably easy to knock off leaves and into a mug of soapy water where they drown. They love my raspberry plants, but have also bothered the blackberries and azaleas. In addition, I’ve had more Mexican bean beetles than I ever remember having before. They look a little like orange ladybugs, but they munch through bean, squash, and melon leaves like there’s no tomorrow. Toward the end of the month, I started to get some of the Japanese beetles’ bigger, nastier cousins: green June beetles. They easily destroyed blackberries and instead of falling gently into my mug of soapy water, when frightened they tore through the blackberry bushes and toward my face. I don’t remember having them ever before. I’ve learned that they are incredibly unpleasant though also an incredibly beautiful, iridescent green.

Not insect pests, but I also had batches of bird pests–mostly robins but also catbirds and maybe a mockingbird–discover my blackberry plants. I think that just before my blackberries were ripe, my neighbor’s black cherry tree fruited and attracted scads of birds. When those cherries ran out, the birds looked for tasty alternatives nearby and found my blackberries. I hung sparkly, silver fabric in the blackberries to try to scare them off. I think it kind of worked, but didn’t entirely.

As a happy finale for the hot, dry, rough month, I finally got a maypop bloom. They’re alien-looking with a wild disk of frilly white and purple threads above a second disk of white petals. I’ve always wanted to try growing one, and I finally found one at the Master Gardener’s plant sale. What I’ve also heard about them is that they tend to be aggressive spreaders, so I’m attempting to grow mine in a container. Hopefully it works because the blooms are amazing and so much fun.

June 2022: Heat Wave

June started out nicely enough. Everything looked lush and green. Things were happy and growing. I went to a few more plant sales, because, well, plants! There were two native plant sales on the first weekend in June and I hit them both because I was looking for something that neither of them had. But I did find several interesting things, so I got them and extended the strip of native and native-adjacent plants growing in the “hell strip” between the sidewalk and the street. Hopefully they’ll be able to weather the hot, dry, dense soil and bring a little color to my yard.

I started the month with a flurry of activity to get as much major work done in my garden before the predicted heat. I also took the opportunity to repot my orchids–a project I’ve been meaning to do for a couple years. Then the heat cranked up to unseasonably hot and dry and stayed there through the entire month. We set record highs and record high lows and it never really rained. We had one bad windstorm in the middle of the month that brought temps down for a few days. The storm brought a lot of fallen trees and power outages in the neighborhood around us, but no rain. After the heat set in I didn’t venture outside for much beyond constant watering. You’ll see this reflected in my photos below. Most are from the first half of the month.

In the list of activities for the month, I planted lima beans and harvested my garlic. For some reason the garlic didn’t do particularly well this year. I should consult my growing guides before I plant it again this fall. My blackberries started to ripen and my red raspberries thrived.

I love red raspberries but have never found them in local farmer’s markets or farm stands, so I’m really happy to have my own. I got a nice batch harvested and then the Japanese beetles descended. Last year they stayed off of the berries but devoured the leaves. This year the berries weren’t safe from the foul creatures. I went out 4-5 times a day with a mug of soapy water and knocked the bugs into it, so they never got as bad as I remember them being last year. Still, they did plenty of damage.

My day lilies and my Asiatic lilies started blooming. Last year I had three kinds of Asiatic lilies growing in the one spot. This year for some reason only one type returned. It was the biggest one, though, and its perfume stretched all the way around the house to the back yard, which I love.

And to finish this post, I’ll include a couple videos. The first is a bumblebee doing a happy little hydrangea surfing dance as it collects pollen. The second is another garden tour with guest appearances by the cats. I figured I’d do another one before things got hot and all my plants got crusty and overheated. I always feel like my garden gets less glamourous as the heat wears on every year.

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.

December 2021: The Final Shades of the Year

December was quiet in my garden. I moved around a few more leaves but that was about all I did all month. All the plants pretty well finished settling back into the earth for the winter. Slowly the last pops of vibrant color drained away. At first glance, the photos of my garden from the start and end of the month look the same, but on further examination you might be surprised at the things that were left to fall away as the month progressed. The blackberries were the last plants to have their leaves turn color and drop. I love their colors darkening from yellows into reds and purples.

We did some good cooking in December (though we cook well every month!). Early in the month we made acorn squash stuffed with Beyond Burger, veggies, and breadcrumbs. The squashes were not from my garden, but they were local. They tasted amazing and 100% like they contained actual meat. We don’t normally cook with Beyond Burger, but we had some on hand and this was a great way to use it.

On Christmas Eve we made Smoking Bishop, a British mulled wine drink mentioned at the end of Dickens’ Christmas Carol. One of the most interesting parts of the recipe was that you roasted citrus fruits in the oven before putting them along with some other spices into some port and heating the whole thing up. It was tasty! Apparently it’s called Smoking Bishop because it’s the color of bishops’ robes and the steam rising off of it looks a little like smoke. (I was inspired to try making it after watching this video.)

I didn’t include a photo, but we did cook up some of my garden produce, too. Our Christmas meal included some of my sweet potatoes roasted.

And I decorated for Christmas! It always looks cheery. I hate to take the outdoor lights down in January knowing we’ll have a few more dreary months to go. I’ve had solar lights on my bottle tree/stump all year, and I thought I’d leave them up for Christmas, but then I saw a photo of the tree last year with real Christmas lights on it. The non-solar lights were so much brighter and really made the bottles sparkle, so I decided I needed to switch out the solar lights for some higher-powered ones for Christmas. I was not disappointed.

And finally, you’ll notice we have a more conventional Christmas tree this year. John and I normally go to a secret spot on strip mine land and grab a cedar. People from Patchwork have been getting their trees that way (though usually with official permits) for nearly a half century (yikes!), but this year when John and I arrived at the spot we knew it wasn’t going to work. It was like the gates leading to Brigadoon had disappeared. There was no route to the clearing where we’ve found our trees over the last many years, despite multiple passes down the road where we knew it should be. And it looked like things were being actively mined again. Without a permit, it felt like a really bad idea to stop, so we didn’t.

We ended up getting a nice tree from a local tree farm. The tree farm’s trees weren’t big enough to cut yet, but they’d gotten several pre-cut trees from a big tree farm in Northern Indiana. I felt a little like one of the people in the Charlie Brown Christmas Special who choose the fancy trees instead of the scraggly little one. The one we got has even been dyed a little bit to ensure a nice, green appearance. Oh well. It was the right choice this year.