August 2010

[I garden in Zone 7, but this article is suitable to gardens throughout Massachusetts - as cold as Zone 5.]
You know those loooong lists of “chores” in the garden for each month? Well, I hate ‘em. I’m a gardener of the low-maintenance school, and here’s what I’d rather know: What do I really, really have to do this month, ot the 40 possible things I could do? The 40 things I probably would do if I were of the Martha Stewart of gardening, which, unfortunately, I’m not.

Watering

Experienced gardeners will see this as the no-brainer of the month but I have to say it: In the absence of regular rain, it’s time for some summer triage. That means choosing the plants that really could die without supplemental watering, and saving on water and labor by letting the lawn go dormant for a while.(At least this is how I treated my lawn when I had one, and it always bounced back in September.)

I walk my garden at LEAST once a week and really look at the plants to see which ones are wilting and need help. Also, Iwater trees and evergreen shrubs whether they’re wilting or not (they won’t) because they’re the most valuable plants in my garden, bar none! Trees are particularly vulnerable to drought, and they require deep watering. That means using a soaker hose or letting the regular hose drip for several hours, or until the soil is wet at least 6 inches deep.

My containers, of course, need watering daily unless there’s rain.

Weeding

This is the other obvious garden chore for August, since weeds are pretty darn obvious this time of year. My weeding tips?

• I do about 30 minutes of weeding at a time, to keep my middle-aged backaches to a minimum.
• In the summer I do my weeding first thing in the morning, finishing by 8 a.m. when it’s especially hot (July of 2010!!)
• If I can’t devote lots of time to weeding, triage is helpful here, too. I at least remove the great jungle-makers of the weed word - VINES! - and target weeds that are crowding out and possibly smothering the plants I actually like.
• I try to never, ever remove weed without having a container to put them in. Low-maintenance gardening is smart gardening, and dumping weeds on the ground just means having to pick them up again.

Pruning

I’m removing dead, damaged or disease wood from trees and shrubs as I find them. Same goes for suckers and water sprouts. Otherwise, it’s a no-pruning month for me.

Sowing vegetable seeds

I’m sowing my fall crops - peas, and lettuce greens - in the empty spaces where my melons and cucumbers grew until just last week. For the salad greens I’ll sow a few seeds every 10 days to two weeks and see how long I can keep the harvest coming.

Feeding

No more feeding for my garden. Not that I ever did much of it. Only my vegetables, containers and roses received this kind of coddling (I’m of the tough-love school). It IS the time to feed lawn, though, so keep reading.

Lawns are never this lush and full without added nitrogen.

Lawn Care

(When I had a Lawn)
From now until early September is the best time to start a new lawn or overseed a sparse one (and whose lawn isn’t?), so when I had a lawn, this is when I tried to improve it. (Watch for a blog story later this month by Mike Mahoney about his favorite grass seed.)

Now about fertilizing. Lawns simply use up their stores of nitrogen every year and become unhealthy and spotty if the nitrogen isn’t replaced – at the rate of 2 pounds of nitrogen per 1,000 square feet. So if your lawn is sparse, August and early September are the absolute best time to apply a slow-release, organic fertilizer. (Look for the term WIN, which stands for water-insoluable nitrogen). Read those instructions first, and follow them. Compost is also a terrific source of nutrition for your lawn, and many organic gardeners simply apply a quarter- to half-inch layer every fall to keep their lawns healthy and full.

If you applied the recommended amount of corn gluten last winter to prevent weeds, your lawn may already have enough nitrogen for the year. Other ways to make sure your lawn gets the food it needs are grasscycling - leaving grass clippings from the mower where they fall - and including clover in your lawn. Yes, clover’s a good thing! It’s described as “self-fertilizing” because this wonderful little plant turns nitrogen in the soil into nitrogen the plants can use. (And there’s a term for that -“fixing” nitrogen.)

New Plants

Here’s the part that’s optional for me because my garden’s pretty darn full by now - after 25 years here in this spot. Butit’s been months since I bought any plants and the sales are on and I can’t stop myself. But hey, they’re on sale. (And if they’re not, I’m sure I needed the plants, anyway. That’s my story and I’m sticking to it.)

Who SAYS the strip of land between your sidewalk and the street has to be covered with turfgrass? Okay, in some places the government actually says that but where I live and elsewhere, homeowners have the opportunity to do something a little more interesting - and less resource-intensive, too. Here you see the curb garden or “hell strip” in front of my house, where I’ve made sure the water-meter guy still has access, and also that this little garden doesn’t block the view of drivers. (Safety first!)

I goofed in not knowing (or inquiring about) permission I should have gotten first from my city before planting anything here, so I’m just lucky I was allowed to keep this garden. Which garden my neighbors, I might add, never seem to tire of admiring, and thanking me for. Public gardening sure has its rewards.

Now about the choice of plants, curb gardens need tough ones because sites don’t get much tougher than this one. They have to be able to handle the usual stresses of heat and drought PLUS cars, snow plows and salt trucks, kids on bikes, and the regular diggings and droppings of all the dogs on the street. I wasn’t about to spend money here, just to see everything destroyed. So everything here was a cast-off or division from other parts of my garden.

And it’s important to note that this spot can be garden-like, crammed full of plants of different heights, only because there’s no parking on my side of the street. I’ve seen some great curb gardens that DO allow for access to parked cars and I’ll be posting about them soon, right here.

The Plant List
Yoshino cherry tree, a beautyberry shrub, Miscanthus sinensis ‘Morning Light’, purple coneflowers, black-eyed susans, sedum ‘Autumn Joy’, common garden phlox,  lots of daylily cultivars in assorted colors, and creeping sedums as groundcover.

Four years in the ground, and what’s the result? Absolutely no damage from any of the feared sources, and a pretty garden that’s almost no work. These plants are drought-tolerant, and pretty good at crowding out the weeds. So, a bit of watering, a bit of weeding. Then in late winter I do clean-up - remove dead perennial flowers, hack the grasses back to the ground, and prune the beautybush.

Buffalo, NY
Next stop, a curb garden in Buffalo, New York, the city with the largest garden tour in America. (Every July over 300 gardens are open to the public over two days, all free. More about Garden Walk Buffalo here.)

Portland, Oregon
And from the West Coast, below you see a high-impact garden packed in between the street and the unseen sidewalk.

Inspired yet? One New York Times writer was inspired to do something creative in his Minneapolis hell strip, and recounts the transition here. I’ll be asking for an update next year, so hopefully more will be revealed.

I read surprisingly few gardening books, maybe because after all these years I think - what could be new?  So I’m pleasantly surprised when I come across a new book that does seem new, at least to me, and here are three that I actually read and enjoyed.

Gardening for a Lifetime by Sydney Eddison 
This may seem like a book for older gardeners, but it’s not.  It’s for low-mobility and low-maintenance gardeners of all types - and doesn’t that include most of us?  And this long-time gardener covers not just the usual ways to garden with less physical strain - raised beds - but tips we don’t usually see, like switching out perennials and annuals for shrubs, and how to find hired help.

Favorite quotes?  “It took a great deal of effort to make my garden as high-maintenance as it is,” and she “loved digging great big holes and moving plants around all the time.  That was the point of it all.” So it’s due entirely to annoying developments like hip replacement surgery that Eddison even considered switching to low-maintenance gardening.

Eddison is also simply a delight to read.  Honest writing from someone who’s been there, but doesn’t pretend she knows better than anyone else.  Now I’ll have to check out her five previous books. 

I had the chance to chat with Eddison by phone and was so taken with her, I’m bound and determined to visit her and her garden…somewhere in Connecticut.

Energy-Wise Landscape Design by Sue Reed 

Doubtful at first that I needed a whole book to tell me to grow shade trees, I was surprised to find that Energy-Wise Landscape Design covers the whole waterfront of eco-gardening - buying locally grown plants, avoiding peatmoss, conserving water, improving the soil, filling our gardens with as many large, healthy plants as possible, and more.  All very thorough, readable, and practical, from a Massachusetts garden designer. 

My favorite part of the book is the large section dealing with lawns - a hot topic today.  Reed’s message isn’t anti-lawn but simply: Why have more than you need?  And if you DO have lawn, her “Five Problems with Conventional Lawn Treatment” might inspire you to switch to the more natural lawn care she promotes.  

Garden Bouquets and Beyond by Suzy Bales

 I swear, I’d never once shown an interest in flower arranging, but this engaging writer changed that.  In her latest book Suzy Bales turns readers on to some very cool and unconventional techniques for arranging, plus topics like mock topiaries, mini-trees, and how to coax buds to open.  And she uses not just the predictable flowers but also vines, foliage, shrubs and tree branches.  I’ve long been a fan of Bales’s writing (starting with her Down to Earth Gardener) and this, her fourth book, didn’t disappoint. 

And Bales is one garden writer whose garden I HAVE actually seen - just this summer I visited her in her Long Island garden. So how about sometime this winter when we’re starved for color we take a tour through Suzy’s garden - and then tour all the other awesome Long Island gardens she showed me over two action-packed days of touring? Okay, it’s a date.

One of my favorite gardens to visit in New England is Tower Hill Botanic Garden in Boyleston, MA.  I first visited Tower Hill about 15 years ago and immediately joined their membership roll.  Botanic gardens, I believe, are a great equalizer in society and as a true lover of horticulture, it makes sense to support a public garden that offers continuing education, gardens with a  wide variety of labeled plants, and beautiful spaces created for the enjoyment of all. 

This botanic garden houses the third oldest horticultural society in the country, the Worcester County Horticultural Society, founded in 1842.  The mission statement of the WCHS  is as follows”

  ” …educational organization for the purpose of
advancing the science and encouraging and improving
the practice of horticulture …”

The Trustees of the Society voted to establish a botanic garden in 1983 and the master plan was unveiled in 1988.  In just over 30 years, this garden has evolved and will continue to evolve along the lines of that master plan, with completion slated for 2040.   It is a daunting task and the current changes include the new entry design and the ongoing construction of the Winter Garden. New pool in Winter Garden  You can find out more about Tower Hill here (just click on the highlighted word).

Tower Hill is a destination garden which welcomes the whole family.  You can stroll through the visitor’s center, the orangerie, the systematic garden and on through Pliny’s Allee following the trail which loops up through the woods. Pliny’s Allee   The trail then leads down and around the pond area, which the kids will love.  There’s always something there to catch the eye and delight both adults and children. Fur BallsThis unusual annual, Gomphocarpus physocarpus or ‘Fur Balls’, is just an example of some of the interesting annuals that are planted seasonally in the gardens. As you can see, the bees love it.

One of my favorite gardens at Tower Hill is the vegetable garden, which is at its peak in August and early September.  Every year it has a different  theme, with vegetables and annuals being used to complement the color scheme.  In 2007, there was a red/orange theme and in 2008, it was a purple theme. Last year yellow was the predominant color through the garden and deep colors were used to highlight the structures and the companion plantings.

This year brings a rainbow of color to the garden, along with some more unusual vegetables that are growing in popularity, such as this lacinato kale. It’s the crinkly, blue-leaved plant next to the yellow stakes..Lacinato kale

While the vegetable garden changes dramatically every year, the other gardens are evolving as the trees, shrubs and perennials grow and prosper. 

Tower Hill Botanic Garden is one of New England’s horticultural gems and a visit should be on every gardener’s list.  Have you been to Tower Hill and, if so, what caught your eye?