I'm off!

I'm in the Madison airport ready to head off to Buenos Aires for a two-week trip in South America. The overhead speakers at MSN are playing an orchestral version of Pink Floyd's "On the Turning Away." A fitting send-off.
I'll be with my MBA class for the first week of the trip. It should be an interesting trip, learning about business in Argentina and Chile. I'm sure I'll miss Emily and Claude while I'm gone. Emily was sad to see me go this morning. I'm not sure Claude realizes that I'll be gone for two weeks. I got some snuggles from him before I left, so I'll take what I can get.

The second week, Emily will join me in Santiago and Valparaiso. I'm really looking forward to that part of the trip. We'll be enjoying the culture, food, and wine of Chile.

Keep an eye out for updates from me this week and both of us next week.

Garden Observations

A few odds and ends today.

False Indigo
I've learned that with certain plants, it pays to buy a bigger plant right away. False Indigo (Baptisia) is one of them. I planted these two plants at exactly the same time, only I paid about $10 for one and $6 for the other. See if you can guess which is which. That said, I can't say enough good things about this plan. While slow to establish, one it gets going it's practically shrub-sized and requires almost no maintenance The flowers are lovely in the late spring, followed by cool seed pods. Plus the foliage looks great all season and into the winter. I don't cut it down until the spring.

Siberian Iris
I've come to love Siberian irises. While they only bloom for a week or so, their foliage looks decent all summer and they require practically no maintenance, other than cutting off the expired stems. This particular cultivar is called 'Flight of Butterflies' and is wonderful because the foliage is diminutive (the big foliage in the picture is dying tulip foliage) and you have these very dainty flowers on an almost non-existant stem. From a distance it really looks like floating purple butterflies.

Poppies
I planted this papavar orientale two years ago (I don't know the culivar off-hand), but last year the bunnies ate it down to the ground before i could put chicken wire around it that it never recovered. This year, i protected it in time and it bloomed. But the blooms lasted exactly 1.5 days and are now gone. This is a picture at the end of day 2. You can see they're already deteriorating. By the next afternoon, all the petals had fallen off. The foliage is ok, but not pretty enough on its own that I think it's worth having just for that. So overall, I'm not a fan of these poppies.

Allium
This plant has jumped up to the top of my fall-planted, spring-flowering bulb list.  I just can't get over how reliable, bunny-proof, low-maintenance (some of the taller ones do require staking, but I don't mind that - I buy bamboo stakes in bulk), and lovely they are. I'm already planning all the additional places I should plant alliums this fall.

A Quick Peek at Spring

Here are a few quick pictures I took in the yard last week. The tulips are done and the last of the daffodils are starting to die. On to more summery flowers. But since spring is so short, I try to savor it while it's here.

I finally succeeded at pairing two different kinds of bulbs together and having them bloom at the same time (though just barely). This is an allium 'Purple Sensation' and I am in love. I will have to plant more next year.

Last year we didn't bring the bird bath in quickly enough so it cracked and we had to buy a new one. In the background are some cute white daffodils in front of the contorted larch we planted last year. That's a clematis on the right. It is growing like crazy. That trellis we have it on is way too small. I think Adam should built another one like the one he built in the above picture.

These are the trilliums Grandpa had me dig out of the family woods. There were 5 or 6 blossom this year. Still one of my favorite flowers. It's surrounded by mayapples on the left, bloodroot on the right, and ostrich ferns at the back.

Lester's Tropical Garden

Last fall Adam put in a retaining wall/new garden bed alongside the driveway. This space was previously a steeply sloping hill that grew grass poorly and dandelions and crabgrass rather well. I spend our long winters reading all kinds of gardening books and I was inspired to put in a tropical-style garden. I actually have a short list of various garden styles i want to try some day when I have more space. But for now, I am thoroughly enjoying the fastidious level of attention to detail that a city lot-sized garden affords. If i have a true 'before' picture, I haven't looked hard enough to find it (this previously wasn't an area at all worth photographing). So you'll have to start with the 'early spring' picture. The pineapple-type things sticking up are Fritillaria rubra maxima. They are the one thing I planted last fall.

Last week I planted the bulbs i ordered back in March from my trusty bulb source, Brent & Becky's. I planted Canna musafolia and Canna 'Pretoria' along with various dahlias, Crocosmia 'Lucifer', and a couple Lanta 'Landmark Citrus' plants from Klein's (a trusty source of annuals, though this year they seemed pretty picked over).

 

Today I finished the planting, except for the red spider zinnias I plan to direct seed tomorrow. I planted several Geums; Hibiscus 'Lord Baltimore, Colocasia 'Mohito; an Echinacea 'Tiki Torch'; the Castor bean 'Gibsonii' plants, black eyed susan vines, Gaillardia 'Arizona Apricot' & 'Arizona Red Shades', and rooster spur pepper plants that I grew from seed (most seeds courtesy of Seed Savers, my favorite seed supplier), a few Margarita sweet potato vines, and a few serrano pepper plants. I really tried to plant things that I know rabbits don't like. This bed needs to be as rabbit-proof as i can make it, since it would look silly with a bunch of chicken wire. I've never grown Cannas or Colocasia before. I'm hoping that I'll figure out how to dig them up this fall and over winter them, though my attempts at overwintering my first dahlias this past winter were a dismal failure. Turns out that loosly stuffing them in a sack with some shredded paper wasn't sufficient.

 

I know it's currently more impressive in my mind than it is in a picture. Check back in a few months for a much larger, more impressive view. In the meantime, here's a view of my front yard. It changes every day. In fact, since I took this picture a couple days ago, Adam has removed the final two yew bushes and replaced them with the summersweet 'Ruby Spice' shrub he bought me for my birthday.

 

Flowers in the Lawn

We found the first couple crocus blooms today. It's been so cold that the bulbs have been taking their time. I have to enjoy these flowers every second I can, since the bunnies typically eat them later the same day I find them.

 

My seed starting experiment is going pretty well. I definately haven't had 100% germination, and i think i've killed a couple seedlings, but overall it's successful. Some of the first seeds i planted now have a second set of leaves. And i discovered that Castor Beans grow really fast and emerge from the soil in quite the dramatic fasion. Those are the squiggly pink ones on the far right. The tall seedlings next to them are Black Eyed Susan Vine.

 

 

The Tulips Have Arrived

It's about 35 degrees out and there's still close to a foot of snow cover in most of the yard, though it has melted a lot in the past two days. Adam and I took a walk around the yard today to see if anything is awake yet, and we spotted the tulips on the south side of the house and a couple teeny tiny bloodroot shoots. Here are the tulips.

I checked my garden journal and it looks like this year is actually pretty similar to last spring. Here's an entry from 3/23/13:

"Tulips are coming up. However, because we still have around 12" of snow in the yard, the bunnies don't have anything else to eat so they've munched all the tops of the tulip leaves. Weather has been unseasonably cool. It's currently snowing."

The only real difference between last year and this year is that I think more of the bunnies died this winter because of the extreme cold. I have not noticed as much rabbit damage this spring so far. Of course, if you compare to 2012, it's quite different. According to my journal, I spotted tulips on 2/19/12 and the first one was blooming on 3/24/12.


Update on my seed venture:

My first seeds sprouted about 7 days after i planted them and now have two tiny leaves. I planted additional seeds today.

A New Venture: Seed Starting

Given the relatively short growing season in southern Wisconsin and the fact that starting my own plants from seed indoors has always seemed a little daunting, thus far I've been confined to growing the types plants available from local vendors and those that germinate quickly enough for me to directly sow them into the ground in the spring. When tomatoes and peppers were the prime plants that I had to purchase, this wasn't so bad. The selection of unusual and heirloom tomatoes and peppers in Madison is pretty good. But now that I've fallen in love with many annual flowers, it became a pricy proposition to include a lot of annuals into garden beds. Enter the grow light. My MGV friend Melissa decided she wanted one for her birthday last month and it was like a lightbulb went off in my head (no pun intended). Why couldn't I have a grow light in my basement too? Luckily, I have a very handy husband who promptly set off to Home Depot to build me a grow light. You can buy full kits, but like most things, you can build this yourself for less.

The last frost date in Madison is May 15th. So counting backwards, of the seeds that I bought, the seed packets that indicated they needed to be started earliest were Coleus, Verbena, and Angelonia. March 2nd was the day. Here's the rest of what I plan to plant in the next few weeks.

 

The grow light Adam built has 4 full UV spectrum florescent bulbs, indicated for plant use. They are 4' wide, so it fits just over two standard size trays. The trays I bought have 36 pots each, so I have a total of about 80 pots total. This should be plenty for me to get my feet wet with seed starting and grow a few things that  I otherwise couldn't have grown or would have to buy at $1-5 per plant. The grow light is on pulleys that allow me to raise and lower it to the desired height. Here is my system with the light raised.

 

 

Here are the first 25 pots I started. I have a plastic dome that goes over the seeds to keep the temperature warm. I misted the seeds with a smaller mister bottle I already had and I'll check the seeds every day to make sure they stay moist. The light is currently just above the plastic domes. After the seeds germinate, you take the plastic dome off and begin to raise the light to keep it 1-2" above the tops of the leaves.

I'll post again once seeds start to germinate. It's rather amazing how long some seeds take - up to a month in some cases.