Note: Since this is my first Gardening Report post, I was seriously contemplating backdating posts to fill in since last February ... but then I realized that they would all read, "We pulled weeds, fought mightily against the oregano, and moved gladiolus. The end," and it just wouldn't be interesting. So we'll start last Thursday, a stormy Thursday toward the end of April, and work our way up from here.
A pretty moment around 3:00, sandwiched between thunderstorms. Ah, the early Southern summer.
Also, as of a couple of weeks ago, I am fully prepared to declare the hoe to be the most important invention of mankind short of the laptop computer. But more on this later. Back to gladiolus.
Woodburn's garden is absolutely filled with heirloom gladiolus (gladioli? ... glads). At some point, someone seems to have planted them along the southern border of the garden, and they have now mounted a hostile takeover. In my experience, gladiolus don't flower unless they're extremely happy with their location, but when they are ... ohhh brother.
On the upside, gladiolus are an absolutely stunning tall element in a summer garden.
On the downside, they don't belong in this one.
The time to transplant gladiolus is after they've flowered. However, if we'd waited that long, we wouldn't have been able to see the garden for the gladiolus, so we've been digging them and moving them to the edges. Since these flowers get insanely tall (though heirloom glads are shorter than hybrids, some of ours are looking me in the eye already), we'd like them to serve as a border to stop people treading on the plants. Transplanting the gladiolus is a tedious process, because it involves disentangling the corms (roots) from one another and from the roots of the crabgrass that has also moved in. It also means that they probably won't grow again until next year, since gladiolus don't like to be disturbed after they've put up leaves.
If they've put up not just leaves but flowers, however, moving the glads can kill them. It takes a lot of energy for bulbs (and corms) to flower, and they need the photosynthesis time afterward to build up energy for next year's flowers.
Sometime in the first half of April when M and I were horribly ill, they've flowered. We have lost this battle for time. But we will win the war ... when they're done flowering.
Scores for 4/27/12
Heirloom Tomatoes Planted: 3
Other Plants Planted: 5
Types of Seeds Planted: 4
Wheelbarrows Added to Compost: 1
Wheelbarrows of Soil Returned to Garden: 1
Horribly Painful Thorny Weeds Grasped: 3
Tree Saplings Removed: 4
Things on the To-Do List Now:
- plant the seeds currently cold-stratifying in the refrigerator
- plant the foxglove, thimbleweed, chamomile, and catnip seeds
- prune the fennel again
- continue policing for oak saplings
- moisten the compost heap
- plant marigolds near the tomatoes
- build tomato cages out of sticks
Things to Be Done at Some Point which Is Not Now:
- move the rest of the glads
- dig the pond
- do something about the brick path sliding down the hill
More photos and tales of seeding, including the question of why on earth we're planting tomatoes, after the jump!
Well, see, about the tomatoes. It's an experiment in succession planting, so bear with me a moment:
One of the plants that I very much wanted to include in Woodburn's herb garden was some form of cohosh -- either Cimifuga racemosa, black cohosh, or Caulophyllum thalictroides, blue cohosh. We decided on black cohosh, since blue cohosh prefers a little less sun, and the packets from our supplier come with fewer seeds, resulting in more potential for failure on my part.
Both cohoshes are used to stimulate childbirth and would have been a standby for Cherokee and Gullah midwives; there's some debate as to whether Caucasian doctors would have been using it too, but today's midwives and doulas still use black cohosh as an effective uterine tonic. Both are Appalachian native herbs, and black cohosh attracts butterflies and pollinating bees.
Black cohosh will be going along the back of quadrant II (the quadrants start at the upper right of a person standing on the house side [where the photographer is in the following photo], and work around clockwise).
A: Gladiolus border. B: What we believe to be a variety of St. John's Wort.
C: A Kellogg's Breakfast heirloom tomato plant. D: Echinacea laevigata, smooth purple coneflower.
E: A length of the brick path that divides the garden into four quadrants.
The black cohosh will be growing all along the piled-stone border to either side of location C. This plant will provide a tall element at the back of the bed and will help serve the needs of pollinators (most of our pollinator-friendly plants are going right here in quadrant II; I have an idea that this will balance the bees' need to eat with our need to be in pruning the lower-growing culinary herbs. We'll see how it goes).
However, this necessitated an addition of something, because our options for getting black cohosh seeds to grow were either to undertake a six-month process of alternating warm-moist and cold-moist stratification, or to plant a year in advance of when we hope to see the plants. Hopefully, we'll see black cohosh begin to sprout in spring 2013.
Then a friend who plays in our tabletop RPG offered us some of her perfectly hardened-off heirloom tomato plants, and who can say no to free garden plants?
There at location C are (left to right) an Aunt Ruby's German Green, a Japanese Black, and a Kellogg's Breakfast varietal of tomato plant. (Side note: is there any smell more absolutely wonderful than the leaves of a tomato plant?) I've planted the cohosh by scattering the seeds around the tomato plants and brushing the soil back over the top, then allowing Friday's downpour to water them in. If we're lucky, the tomatoes will produce there, Foundation members will get to enjoy the fruit, the plants will die a natural death and join our compost heap, and then the cohosh will grow there once the tomatoes are only a memory. Voila, eco-friendly succession planting!
I'm also going to add marigolds as companion plants for the tomatoes when I return on Monday. Annual marigolds discourage tomato hornworms and aphids from attacking the plants nearby, and the natural chemical defense they produce kills the nematodes that like tomato roots. It's a safe, natural way to kill pests without chemical pesticides, and was probably practiced during the 1870s and 1880s here at Woodburn, which was then an experimental stock farm that grew all types of crops. Our nineteenth-century farm ledger notes a number of instances where rows of flowers were planted, presumably for exactly this reason.
Also on Thursday, we put in a smooth purple coneflower purchased at the South Carolina Botanical Garden plants sale (one of the volunteers told us that this was not a particularly showy coneflower, but was the best for native education; it gets cool slender petals and is a federally listed endangered species). We seeded New Jersey tea and clustered poppy-mallow at the dryer side of the garden. We did quite a bit of hoeing (so. much. hoeing), but were able to work around the St. John's wort at location B in that first photo, while removing the grass and myrtle choking it down. We were lucky to realize what that was; we were planning to take it out, thinking it was another tree sapling like the oaks and myrtles we've been fighting, then happened to see one with a label at the SC Botanical Garden up the road.
Looking in the other direction from the same spot, you can see one of the historic millstones placed at the path
end. That insane spray of green froth on the far left is the fennel, which survived several years of neglect but
is thriving with some of its competition removed. Also, lots more glads. The structures you see are the Moorhead
cabin (1798; original, though not to this site) and the carriage house (full replica of the original built around 1970).
Another task on Thursday was taking out most of the apple mint and replacing it with slender mountain mint (the spot is just behind the white board leaning on the chimney in the photo above). Mints eat gardens, and I'd rather have a native herb do the eating. Mountain mints, which are Appalachian natives, are a species important to Piedmont prairie restoration gardening, and I expect ours to do just fine; Prairie Moon Nursery often recommends that their seeds be planted after 90-day warm stratification, 60-day cold stratification, scarification, boiling water treatment, any number of methods to improve the seeds' chances -- but for slender mountain mint, their advice boils down to "Eh, put it in the ground, it'll do its thing."
Hopefully several of the plants will do as well now that we're finally getting seeds in!
No comments:
Post a Comment