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.

February 2024: The First Signs of Spring

The first flowers are stirring in my garden. I saw my first crocuses around February 9, the first daffodil followed around February 20, and the snowdrops jumped in somewhere in between. One of my hellebores was probably blooming even before the end of January, but it is located pretty far back in my garden and it took a while for its low, nodding blooms to move above the leaf clutter. By February’s end, my other hellebores were blooming, too. I also have shoots of garlic showing above the leafy mulch in their bed, promising that the garlic has spent the winter growing underground. I’m always tempted to photograph every new crocus that blooms. I have different varieties scattered all around my yard, so it’s always a surprise to see another pop of color appear in one place then the next. After months of drabness, each one is a small celebration.

November 2023: A Short Month

I was traveling at both the beginning and the end of November, so I don’t have as much to show from my garden this month. Overall, there was a gradual decline in greenness and growth. November 1 dawned with the first solid freeze of the season. This halted most of the plant growth, but surprisingly not all of it. I was amazed to even have a few tomatoes to harvest mid-month. Things faded a little more every time that the temperatures dipped near or below freezing. Finally temperatures got to the low 20’s at the end of the month and crushed the last of the green out of any remaining tender leaves.

In my garden, I had only a couple accomplishments for the month. I got my garlic planted in my vegetable garden and then I blew all of the fallen leaves around to cover it and my other garden beds. Hopefully the garlic grows happily all winter now that it’s tucked into its bed. In addition to tidying up the leaves, I started my general garden clean up before winter hits, but there’s still plenty more to do.

June 2023: Dry, Dry, Dry, Smoky, RAIN!

June was incredibly dry. I watered my garden every single week, and while that technically should have provided enough moisture, there’s nothing like real rain to keep things happy. I always feel a little like my watering is like keeping the plants on life support–they survive but don’t really thrive the way they would with rain. June was dry enough to officially qualify as “abnormally dry,” which is one step away from being a “moderate drought.”

In addition to the lack of rain, we had poor air quality because of the Canadian wildfire smoke. There were a few days toward the beginning of June when we were in the “orange” zone. I spent one “orange” zone day working outdoors in my garden and thought it was ok until the next day when my throat was scratchy. At the end of June we had worse air. We were in the “red” zone and almost in the “purple” zone. The wildfire smoke was bad enough to affect visibility, plus it was hot and humid. I tried not to go out in it.

A couple rounds of rain passed us by, including one that resulted in absolutely magnificent cloud formations. Then on the second-to-last day of the month we had several rounds of serious storms that knocked out power across the city (including our house for several hours) and dumped 2″ of rain in only a few hours. Our basement started to flood. There was tree damage across the city. It was awful. We got another 1″-2″ of rain over the following few days, and still we’re categorized as “abnormally dry.”

In between all of that, there’s been plenty going on in my garden. I continue to be plagued by critters. One noon I looked out the back door and saw a stocky, brown form dart across the back yard. It was a woodchuck and it headed toward my raspberries. I screamed from the surprise of it. I haven’t seen a woodchuck around here in many, many years, though there’s a hole in the neighbor’s yard that I’ve been suspicious of for a while. Additionally, we have at least one possum who stops by in broad daylight to snack on cat food. We’ve also had a lot of raccoon activity all over the back yard–pulling up my potted plants, digging though all my garden beds, upturning plants, and scavenging for any stray cat food crunchie. I’d be happy if they all just went away.

In my garden, I’ve had a long parade of purple coneflower blooms. They’re not full of frills, but they are very happy, easygoing flowers. They’re right next to my favorite grey-headed coneflowers, which are delicate and sunny. The two mixed together make me really smile. Other blooms have included a mass of lilies whose perfume is intoxicating. They’re on the far side of the house where I don’t see them every day, so it’s always their scent that announces that their spectacular blooms have arrived. Additionally, there was a wonderful mixture of other blooms. Look through the photos below to see them.

At the beginning of the month, I still hadn’t planted my sweet potatoes, even though it was time. The problem was that the raised bed where I wanted to put them was full of garlic that was close to mature but not quite. An additional complication was that I had dramatically increasing numbers of tree of heaven shoots coming up in that raised bed, betraying the fact that the tree had a fully grown root system in the bed. Any break in any root meant a new tree would shoot up. Unfortunately, harvesting sweet potatoes involves breaking a lot of roots. If I did nothing, pretty soon I’d have a raised bed full of these horribly invasive, nasty, growing a-mile-a-minute trees.

I decided I needed to do everything I could to reduce the amount of roots, so I figured there was no way around digging through the bed to locate and rip out tree of heaven roots. I thought it would be a really rough job, but it was worse than that. I dug through every inch of that bed on my hands and knees, feeling for tree roots, following them through the bed, and ripping them out. It took several hours, and it was brutal work. Hopefully I was successful in slowing the tree of heaven down.

I’d hoped to spare the garlic planted in the bed so it could grow for a few more weeks, but in the end there were so many roots to remove that I couldn’t save the garlic. I harvested it just a little earlier than I’d intended, but it still looked ok. I had a second patch of garlic in my other vegetable bed that I was able to wait a few weeks to harvest. It had grown better anyway, and looked pretty good as I pulled it out of the ground. Its absence leaves space for the tomatoes and squashes to grow.

A June highlight for me was that it was the start of berry season. First my red raspberries fruited. I don’t know of anywhere around here where I can get them, and I love them, so having my own personal patch makes me happy. Unfortunately, the birds quickly moved in and started eating them, so I covered them in bird net and strung some Mylar “flash tape” that flashes red and silver in the breeze to scare the birds. With red raspberries being such a precious commodity, I wasn’t willing to share them with the birds. Less than two weeks later, I had to pull the bird net off so I could get better access to the plants after the Japanese beetles moved in. Sigh. Still, I got a nice harvest.

Toward the end of June, the blueberries were in season. I love to eat them and I don’t mind picking them, so I always pick a whole lot and freeze most of them for later. Last year, I needed to find a new place to pick because the place I’d gone for years had closed. I tried a couple local farms last year and one new one this year before deciding that I just need to switch to Decker’s, which is about 45 minutes north of Evansville. They have a huge field and the berries are delicious. I went there three times so far and my freezer is stuffed.

Overall, it was a pretty good, though dry, June!

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.

March 2023: In Like a Lion, Out Like a Lion

The saying goes that if March comes in like a lion it will go out like a lamb, and if it comes in like a lamb it will go out like a lion. Well, this March was bookended by tornado warnings. It’s also been pretty consistently rainy, so I haven’t been able to get into my garden to get any work done. I have not enjoyed this weather very much, though at our house we got through it all without serious damage.

The worst of the March storms for us came on March 3 when we had a tornado warning that included downtown Evansville. Tornados did touch down in the Evansville area, but at our house it was just the damaging winds. The Weather Service reported that we had 50-70 mph wind gusts. They were strong enough that we had a big branch break in the magnolia tree. I heard it crack and fall as I headed to the basement. My weather station isn’t very high up, so the wind speeds are never really accurate, but I will say that before that day I’d never seen it register a wind speed over 18. On the 3rd, its peak windspeed was 27. The storm also included at least three inches of rain and the all-time lowest recorded barometric pressure for our area. Even after the storms moved through, the very strong wind blew and blew and blew for hours. It was unrelenting.

Other than the storms, we had some warm days and then some cool days and then warm and then cold. I was grateful that the magnolia tree’s early blooms reached their peak before the cold weather moved in and edged their blooms in brown. Looking back, I like the look. In the later half of the month, we had lows in the 20’s, and that completely froze the magnolia petals, turning them completely brown while preventing them from falling off the tree. They’re still stuck on the tree and don’t look very attractive at all.

In March my late crocuses finished blooming and my daffodils began theirs. The hellebores grew and developed nicely. The two larger hellebores expanded and filled out beautifully. The two smaller plants were almost destroyed by slugs, but once I figured out that they were under attack and gave a counter attack, they each produced a single, fancy flower. I love the white flower with magenta dots, but I also like the way the light came through the all-pink double bloom.

By the end of the month, the hops was up, and so were the ferns. The redbud was budding. Also, enough green stuff was popping up everywhere to give everything a decidedly fresh, green color. In terms of edible plants, my garlic started to emerge, and it looks like most of what I planted survived. I also started my tomato plants under a couple grow lights.

February 2023: Something New Every Day

I began February feeling like things were a little behind. Often I will see my first crocus blooms by the last couple weeks of January, but there was no sign of them this year. I have several very early varieties of crocus, and I love the little hints of spring that they bring to my yard just as the brown, cold, dull winter is starting to feel tiresome. It always impresses me to find their blooms shining among the dry leaves in January.

January is also the time when I typically see the fresh hellebore leaves and blossoms emerge from the ground. They sort of crawl out of the earth with tight, dark knots of leaves and buds. Slowly their leaves expand and the blooms open. Typically, the blooms face downward, but as the days pass their flower stalks grow longer and the flowers rise higher and lift a little more skyward. Still, they’re tricky to admire and tough to photograph. They’re beautiful flowers, though.

Not seeing any blooms, I was starting to get a little worried. But then in the first full week of February I spotted my first crocus, followed by the second only a few days later. Soon, the hellebores were showing signs of emergence. Spring was underway! From that point, things started to move along quickly, picking up more and more speed as they went. Every day while Perry and I were out on our walk, I would notice a new crocus blooming, new hellebores appearing, new leaves, and finally the first signs that my garlic made it through the winter and was sprouting happily. Some of my favorite surprises were the reticulated irises that I always forget about until I suddenly see their delicate blooms in my garden.

Some of my daily surprises happened indoors, like my Venus flytrap that I’ve managed to keep happy for nearing a year. It’s even blooming now! Also blooming is an orchid that I haven’t gotten to flower in a while. Outdoors, I heard a series of sweet little birdcalls and realized that after almost 15 years I finally had a couple of chickadees gracing my yard. They’re such sweet little energetic birds with such a crisp black and white color scheme. I’ve always loved them. They joined my usual flock of tufted titmice, cardinals, and juncos along with the ever-present house finches, house sparrows, and starlings.

February ended with a bang–the magnolia tree going into full bloom. It felt very early to see such an explosion of flowers. Looking back through several years of my garden photos, this does look like this may be the earliest it’s bloomed. A couple other years it bloomed a week or two later than it’s blooming now, but most years it was blooming a full month later than now. I’m just glad that this early bloom didn’t get caught in a freeze!

Even with everything popping up on a daily basis during February, there’s still more to come in March. I’ve had quite a few pleasant surprises already this month. And I’ve gotten my vegetable garden started indoors. At the end of February I started my tomato seeds and started some of last year’s sweet potatoes sprouting. By March, I was seeing signs of sprouts. Stay tuned!

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.

October 2022: Turning Colors

October began green and ended in a beautiful multitude of yellows, reds, oranges, and browns. That’s all despite the fact that we remained in a drought, which I might have expected to mute the colors more than it did. We also went the whole month without a killing frost or temperatures below freezing, so everything was still growing at the end of the month. In fact, the month was all unseasonably warm.

Early in the month we did have a stretch of nighttime temperatures forecast to get to the freezing point. Of course it wasn’t conveniently on a weekend, so I spent one evening harvesting all my basil and the following evenings going step-by-step through the process of turning it into pesto. I’d thought that a lot of my basil had died when it didn’t get watered this past summer, so I was surprised to end up with a gallon or more of pesto. It’s all in my freezer so we can pull it out for a quick meal anytime all winter long. The air temperature reached 33 degrees, and that’s as cold as it got, so it appears I wouldn’t have needed to rush harvesting my basil. It was good to have it all taken care of, though.

The last of my monarch caterpillars disappeared from my garden on October 1. I never saw any chrysalises this year, so I don’t know where they went, but 14 days later a monarch butterfly flew by me at Patchwork. It’s not that far from my house, so I told myself that maybe it was one of my caterpillars headed for Mexico.

My harvests included several rounds of tomatoes that ripened nicely indoors, lima beans, squashes, and one final melon. My zinnias and marigolds continued to bloom profusely. My toad lilies also bloomed happily. They’re a plant I’d never known about before planting one the first year I had my garden. I always feel echoes of my initial pleasant surprise when the fancy, orchid-like blooms appear. They look like something tropical or spring-like, but they bloom in the fall and their purples and blues look fantastic with the yellow and orange leaves falling on the ground around them.

Toward the middle of the month, John and I returned to Scratch Brewing in Ava, Illinois to sample their Octoberfest beers. You may remember some of our previous visits. They make very unique brews using local ingredients from farms and plants foraged from their property. The flavors are really unique. Some taste like you’re drinking a tree–but in a good way. It’s in the middle of nowhere, so it’s beautiful place to sit and eat and drink all afternoon.

As you scroll through the photos below, notice the changing colors that predominate. It’s pretty cool to see the way that fall arrived. And click on any individual photo to get some more detail about what is in it. After the photos, I’ve included another video tour of my garden recorded at the end of October.

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.