Fall Clean-Up

I took advantage of yesterday’s nice weather to play hooky from the computer for an hour to do a little fall clean-up in the garden. The cold temperatures Friday and Saturday nights stopped most of my perennials. The more tender plants I had in containers wilted completely. I’ve now emptied all the containers, except for three pots in a protected place on the front porch. I also raked up some of the leaves and put them in my compost pile. While things are moving steadily toward November brown, a few bright spots still glimmer.

First, how great is the fall color on this oak? The picture was shot near dusk so it may not capture it, but the tree has turned a beautiful russet color. Individual leaves have shades of yellow, red, and brown, but together they are the quintessential fall red-orange, like a flame of a tree. I love the pyramidal shape of this tree as well. A few flowers are still blooming here and there, too. The roses that were nipped by frost have opened; a brave little petunia survives (probably because it spills over on the pavement); and this sunny white and yellow mum is still blooming.

With Halloween here, the days for fall gardening are certainly numbered, but I plan to enjoy every gardening day that I can.

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New Northern Gardener Available

The November/December 2007 issue of Northern Gardener is now available. I’m excited about this issue because it has something for all kinds of gardeners. If you are a do-it-yourselfer, check out Susan Davis Price’s profile of Philippe Galandat’s St. Paul garden. Philippe is one of those amazing people who see a pile of bricks or a bunch of sticks and can not only imagine what to do with them, but can create a garden structure from them. The cover photograph of sticks made into peace signs was taken at Philippe’s garden. It’s no wonder he has won the 2006 Blooming St. Paul award for art in the garden.

The issue also has suggestions for what gifts to buy the gardeners in your life. Rose Eggert, the CEO at the Minnesota State Horticultural Society, is especially fond of this collapsible bucket. It can carry up to 3 gallons of water, weeds, or whatever, and then folds flat for storage. It’s available at the MSHS Bookstore at 1755 Prior Ave. N. in Falcon Heights (just north of the U of M St. Paul campus). My personal favorite is this scrub brush for cleaning pots. I know you are supposed to clean your outdoor containers at the end of the season, but I’ve never been that diligent about it. With the right tool, I might be. Check out the issue for cute, as well as practical, suggestions for garden gifts.

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Frost on a Rose

We’ve had two mornings in a row with significant frost and the thermometer on my deck showed about 30 degrees F at 9 a.m. today. The flowers, especially the tender annuals, are getting nipped, but frost looks becoming on this just-opening rose.

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Hooray for Autumn Joy

As I’ve been thinking about the new flower bed I’ll be installing this fall and next spring, a few plants rate as “must-haves.” One of them is Autumn Joy sedum, which is currently in bloom in my garden and in many others from Canada to the south. What a great plant!

Its scientific names is Sedum ‘Herbstfreude’ so you can see why they came up with the common name Autumn Joy. It has succulent-like leaves and when it comes up in the spring it looks like a tiny cactus or an odd cabbage; the foliage makes the plant interesting even when it is not blooming. It grows about 2 feet tall and in mid-summer develops pale green flowers, about 3 inches across. Beginning in September, these change color, going from green to pink to a rich red then almost rust, fading to brown after a hard freeze. You don’t want to cut it back in the fall, because the seedheads provide food for birds and make perfect landing pads for snowflakes. In winter, the seedheads sometimes look like they are wearing stocking caps of snow.

Autumn Joy is drought and salt tolerant and gets by in fair soil. It does need to be divided every few years to maintain an upright look. Mine has been in this location about four years and definitely needs to be divided. The plant is flopping over.

Plant breeders have developed several other sedum cultivars to take advantage of Autumn Joy’s popularity. ‘Autumn Fire’ is similar to Autumn Joy in color, but forms a tighter clump. ‘Black Jack’ is a sedum with purplish foliage. ‘John Creech’ grows only 2 inches tall and is used as a groundcover. There are many others as well. Sedum is sometimes called stonecrop because it grows so well around rocks. Whether you have a rock garden, or just a sunny one, sedum is a good choice.

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Update on the Pumpkin Planters

I had hoped my pumpkin planters would last until Halloween, but Mother Nature had other ideas. The heavy rains we’ve had since I put the pumpkins out more than two weeks ago has taken a toll, and one of the pumpkins is rotting at the bottom. Yesterday we experienced what felt like gale-force winds; I had to move our grill into the porch to keep it from blowing around the deck. So it’s no surprise the tallest pumpkin fell over. Today I’ll be planting the grass and mum and tossing the pumpkins on the compost pile. It’s too bad, because I really liked how the pumpkins drew attention to the orange flowers of the nasturtium planted nearby.

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African Violet Show This Weekend

Indoor plants have never been my strong suit. I’m just too apt to water too much or too little, which is why I’m in awe of gardeners who can keep African violets blooming all year. This weekend, Minnesota’s premier African violet growers will be showing their stuff at the North Star African Violet Council‘s Fall Show at the Bachman’s store at 60th and Lyndale in Minneapolis. In addition to seeing some beautiful plants, visitors will be able to buy plants grown by council members. The plant at left is called Rob’s Love Bite and was named Best in Show at the council’s Spring 2007 plant show.

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Things Just Keep On Blooming

While out in the garden Saturday, I noticed two more plants blooming that I would not have expected so late in October. In my front bed, a rose has more than a dozen buds on it. These are Flower Carpet Roses, a long-blooming, hardy rose, though I don’t recall ever getting buds this late. In addition, on the north side of the house, several daylilies now have blooms. These are Stella d’Oro, a yellow daylily that is known for its long bloom, but it’s usually wilted by now. Stellas are a particularly hardy daylily and I noticed several of them blooming away in a parking lot bed at Walgreens in Northfield. Sunday morning, while walking the dog, I spotted three other yards nearby with roses blooming, and a purple bloom that looked suspiciously like an iris! If I see the homeowner, I’ll ask what it is. In addition to in-the-ground blooms, my container plants continue to put out flowers and foliage. Two trailing coleus (Lava Green and Lava Rose) look great and the Fiesta Ole double impatiens planted with them are still blooming. A lovely Calibrachoa (MiniFamous Dark Blue) is also blooming like crazy.

 

After my last post on blooms, I decided to check out how other northern gardens were doing. Kathy Purdy, who runs the Cold Climate Gardening web site, and gardens in USDA zone 4 in New York state, recently listed the plants blooming in her garden as of Oct. 15. She also has blooms on larkspur and catmint as well as mallow and yarrow and a few stray blooms on her phlox (mine also has a few flowers). She has petunias in pots, Johnny jump-ups, and colchicum, a flower that grows from corms (or tubers) and is sometimes called autumn crocus.

One reason for the sustained blooming may be the lack of low night temperatures. September 15 the temps dipped to 30 degrees F in Northfield. That knocked out my tomatoes. The night-time lows have been relatively high since then. Perennials usually require a hard freeze, several hours of temperatures in the 27 to 28 degrees F range, to shut down for the season. The National Weather Service is predicting lows in the low- to mid-30s to low-40s this week, with highs in the mid-50s to mid-60s on Thursday. Who knows what will be blooming next.

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Another Great Day to Garden

Two perfect Saturdays in a row–what’s a gardener to do? Judging by the crowds of trucks and trailers pulling into and out of the Northfield compost heap, lots of folks used the day to do end-of-season chores. I made two trips to the brush pile to unload branches we cut last week. I’ll probably have to go again tomorrow to dump off the brush from my raspberry patch, which was cleaned out today in preparation for the installation of a simple trellis to hold the raspberry canes erect. I picked the last few raspberries today amid a swarm of lady beetles, who apparently love raspberries as much as people do.

While it’s sometimes sad to see the growing season come to an end, planning for next year is a part of fall, too. Next year, we plan to add another flower bed in a spot in our front yard that is really too sunny and hot to support grass without lots of watering, especially when it’s dry. (It may be hard to remember, but this summer was dry.) So today, I was moving a hose around the yard, trying to figure out the best spot and the best shape for this new bed. I know pretty clearly what I want in the bed: Drought-tolerant plants, probably natives, with interesting foliage and/or long-blooming flowers. Beyond that, I have no specifics in mind. Luckily, I’ve got all winter to think about it.

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Fall Bloomers: A Sign of Zone Creep?

Maybe it’s the heavy rains we have had this fall or a sign of global warming, but I’m finding surprising things blooming. Yesterday, I discovered new blooms on an English Larkspur (Delphinium elatum ‘Pagan Purples’). I bought the larkspur late in the spring in hopes of getting taller flowers in the back of my front bed. According to the plant tag, this particular variety is supposed to grow 5 to 6 feet tall. (Other sources say 4 to 5 feet.) Unfortunately, right after I planted it, the weather turned very dry and I got very busy and neglectful of the garden. It died–or so I thought. Even though it had wilted right to the ground, a new plant emerged after I got around to watering the flowers more. It bloomed a couple of times in the summer, and now in mid-October. It never got tall–perhaps due to its difficult youth–but its still a lovely plant.

This morning, I noticed my catmint (Nepeta ‘Walker’s Low’) had several new blooms on it, too. Walker’s Low is known as a prolific bloomer, and I cut mine back after its first bloom in June to promote a second round of flowers. I expected them earlier or not at all.

It’s hard to know how to react to blooms in mid-October–part of me wants to rejoice. And, it’s certainly possible that the dry spell we had in July and August delayed blooms that would have appeared earlier had adequate rain fallen. Now it’s wet and not too cold so the plants bloom. Another part of me feels a little spooked by this much blooming so late.

Felicia Parsons, a horticulturist and writer, whose also a jeweler, wrote an excellent article on gardening with climate change in the July/August issue of Northern Gardener. She noted that the American Horticulture Society’s heat map (based on how many days over 86 degrees F an area has) shows a distinct zone creep over the USDA’s zone map, which is based largely on how cold things get. The Arbor Day Foundation has also released a zone map showing that Minnesota is getting warmer.

For gardeners, Felicia offers some advice: If you are deciding what to plant, plant what has always worked or try less hardy shrubs and perennials, but be prepared to take a loss if the weather gets back to “normal.” If you are concerned about global warming, do what you can to diminish your energy consumption (buy efficient appliances and better lightbulbs, drive less, plant a tree near the house to provide shade and reduce your need for air conditioning, compost) and watch what is happening in your own garden. Several web sites have been established for people to report changes they see in the plants and wildlife in their area, including this site from an organization in Wisconsin. This blog will be my report on what’s happening in my garden. Let me know what you see in yours.

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Negative Space

Natalie Goldberg, author of the groundbreaking writing book Writing Down the Bones, says writers need to see and describe negative spaces–what is not obviously present in a scene, the spaces in between what is there. Often, she says, that is where the meaning is. I thought about Goldberg’s negative space idea after my gardening flurry on Saturday. In addition to planting bulbs, I moved some hostas from my shady bed to a spot underneath the stairs that lead from our deck to the yard. This spot is hard to mow and shady, the perfect spot for some low-maintenance hostas. In another bed, I removed the diseased aster I wrote about in an earlier post.

Sunday morning, I was looking out at the back yard when I noticed how much better both of those beds looked. Removing the plants made the beds look neater, more pulled together, more like they had actually been designed as opposed to just planted. The spaces where the plants had been gave the eye a spot to rest. Removing the aster also created a space through which we can view a statue of St. Francis that we put in the garden last year. In many cases, less really is more.

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