I have been so busy lately with work, closing up the garden, teaching a class at Carleton College and what not that I have neglected some of my blogging duties.  And, there are two important bits of news that I want to get out. First, the November/December issue of Northern Gardener is on the newsstands now. The issue has a beautiful blue-toned cover and includes a wonderful article on doing holiday decorations with a garden theme. Julie Scouten, who writes the And Sow Forth essay each issue, is a master decorator and she has several fun ideas for using garden implements and plant materials in home decor that can last all winter.  (Julie’s son, Eric Scouten, is the photographer who took the cover shot.) In addition to the decorating article, we have a list of great gift ideas for gardeners, a profile by Terry Yockey of a magnificent small-space garden in Red Wing, and Northfielder Leif Knecht’s recommendations for dwarf conifers. One of his recommendations, the ‘Tannebaum’ mugo pine, is in my new front-yard garden.

The second big item of news is that Northern Gardener recently won a bronze award for general excellence in the special interest publication category at the Minnesota Magazine and Publications Association awards dinner. We were especially pleased to be recognized in this category because it looks at the magazine as a whole, which is how our readers look at it as well. Thanks to the judges for the honor, and as always, thanks to the folks who read the magazine issue after issue.

Looks good in hat

Lose the hat, lady

Let’s face it: Not everyone looks good in a cap. The young lady at right, for instance, has always looked good in hats. Her mother, at left, not so much. (And, why is she kissing a dog?) I think about caps while cleaning up the garden in fall, and today was a perfect day for garden clean-up in Minnesota: warm temperatures, sun, no wind and the ominous threat that this will not last lingering in the air.

So here is the Cap Theory of Garden Clean-Up: Any perennials that would look good in a cap of snow should be left standing. Plants like sedum, Joe Pye weed, yarrow, coneflower, and some rudbeckia provide the perfect landing pads for snowflakes, making them a bright spot in the otherwise monotonous tones of winter. Other plants that might be left standing are those with interesting color and texture, such as grasses or Husker Red penstemon, which as bright red stems. Cut down any plants that look flat or soggy after freezing, such as hosta (yuck — nothing is more unsightly than a hosta after a freeze) and daylilies. Today I also cleaned up a lot of Clara Curtis daisies, some Mexican hat, and a scraggly looking Walker’s Low nepeta. Because they may carry powdery mildew, the phlox also got cut back.

Coneflower, looking good in snow cap.

You don’t have to cut plants back in the fall  at all — and many years, I have just not gotten around to it. But with beautiful weather, it’s fun to walk around the yard, shears and pruners in hand, deciding what would look good wearing snow this winter.

Among annuals, pansies bloom earlier than almost anything else — and given a chance, they’ll bloom later, too. Witness this poor flower, one of several blooming in a low pot on our back deck. I haven’t watered the pot in months — though nature has done a good job of that since September. Yet it’s still blooming, putting out one last flower against the cold and wind of winter descending rapidly upon us.

Ready for winter

Last spring, I added a new raised bed to my vegetable area and filled it using the lasagna method. Despite not having a winter to percolate and meditate and otherwise breakdown, the soil in the garden was humus-rich and fertile. A trowel would easily sink 10 inches into the “dirt” in this bed. I grew some large (if slightly out of control) tomato plants in the bed, and I have a freezer full of the tomato sauce I made with the fruits. So, all in all, a success.

When I cleaned the bed up about two weeks ago, it was clear the lasagna had shrunk. This is to be expected. Lasagna gardening basically involves making compost in your vegetable bed. So, over the past few days, I’ve been layering on the fresh materials: slabs of sod taken out of the lawn, vegetable scraps, a thick layer of finished compost from my two compost piles, and on top, a layer of chopped leaves.  These will have several months to breakdown and renew the bed. I’m not sure what I will plant there next year, but it’s a long winter here, so I’ll have plenty of time to think about it.

Courtesy of Jung Seeds

A second part of our recent spruce-up was the removal of some old alpine currant shrubs that were dying. The shrubs formed a hedge around an area below our back deck, an area that I use mostly for storage of garden equipment. Not wanting to leave this exposed, I planted it this past weekend with nine plants of hedge cotoneaster (Cotoneaster lucidus), a plant that will grow about 4 feet wide and up to 8 feet tall. We’ll probably keep ours around 5 to 6 feet tall by shaving the tops. The cotoneaster should be an improvement over alpine currant for two reasons. First, it is less prone to disease and general keeling over. Second, has a blue berry that birds love, so it should be more attractive to wildlife. It also has a pretty reddish fall color. Right now, my hedge looks skimpy, but the photo at left is what it should look like in a year or two.

The new patio after a recent snowfall.

We recently ripped out the foundation plantings around the front of our house and replaced them with a tiered area with a 8-foot circular brick patio surrounded by shrubs, grasses, and small trees. This is an idea that had been percolating in my head for a couple of years as a result of a sense that the best place to sit outdoors at our house, especially in the early evening, was not the place in the back.  The evolution of this project points to a number of issues related to home siting and what makes people comfortable.

Several years ago, I stumbled upon a book on architecture called A Pattern Language. The authors note that people feel extremely comfortable in older towns — specifically those built in the Middle Ages. These old towns followed similar design principles, including the relationship between people and the street and ways to orient a home. They condensed these ideas to 257 rules, many of which speak to some very basic elements of human nature. Why do people like nooks and window seats, for example? Rule Nos. 179 and 180: Alcoves and window seats. Why do we feel more vibrant in rooms with windows on more than one wall? Rule No. 159: Light on two sides. Why have basement bedrooms for teenagers become so popular? Rule No. 154: A teenager’s cottage.

If you are considering building a house, read this book first. You probably won’t want to follow all the rules — the authors are against most bedrooms — but it will alert you to some typical problems with newer home design.

Several of the rules relate to the connection between the house, the garden and the street. People enjoy front porches because they provide a way to see the street, to interact with your neighbors, while still remaining close to your home and protected. (Rule No. 140). Adding a porch was out of the questions for us: it would have destroyed the lines of our home and cost too much. But the patio was an easier fix and would give us many of the benefits of a front porch.

While I had the vision of what we wanted, I wanted to make sure it would look right with our home and that it would drain properly. (As someone who spent many hours shop-vac-ing the basement of a previous home — trust me on this one, water trumps aesthetics every time.) To make sure the plan would work, I called in Kristen from Knecht’s who had helped me a year or so ago in designing my other front-yard garden. She came up with the idea of repeating the boulders we have on the hilly sides of our house around the front to create a tier. We agreed that an 8-foot patio was plenty of room for a small table and a couple of chairs. Around that, we planted some of my favorite plants: sedum, baptisia (this came out of another garden in our yard), weigela, coreopsis and a hydrangea tree. For a little seculsion, Kristin recommended Karl Foerster grass, which I know is a beautiful and reliable plant that grows about 4 feet tall, just enough to provide a sense of seclusion. Some groundcovers such sweet woodruff and creeping thyme will give texture to the space around the patio, and a nice smaller evergreen — Tannenbaum mugo pine — anchors one edge of the tier. Stepping stones connect the upper and lower tiers and seem to beckon people to come up for a chat.

Knecht’s did the installation for us — moving boulders is beyond my skill level — and finished the job in just a few days. I’m very happy with the look and a couple of my neighbors have commented that they like it, too. For now, the patio is empty, though I’m thinking we might be able to put a Christmas tree out there when the season arrives, and next summer we’ll create a comfortable place to sit out there.

I’m hoping it won’t feel too exposed, but I followed as many of the pattern language rules as possible including having a wall to the back of the sitting area, terracing the levels, and creating a half-high wall (with plants rather than bricks) to offer a sense of seclusion.

With a couple of inches of snow falling and temperatures consistently under 35 the past few days, I’ve been contemplating this question. All of my established perennials, trees and shrubs will shrug off this little blast of Arctic air as a mild inconvenience, of course, but we put in about 20 brand new shrubs and perennials the week before this current cold spell started. Those plants have not had time to send out new roots yet, although we were lucky to get lots of rain — more than 4 inches over several days, according to my rain gauge. So, I’ve been wondering, will my plants survive?

A check of Internet resources proved unhelpful since snow and cold this early is rare even here in Minnesota. So, I talked with the folks from the nursery where I purchased the plants. It turns out these plants likely would have been outside at the nursery anyway, and they should get through the cold just fine. We are expected to return to more seasonable temperatures by the end of the week, and that will give the plants a chance to send out roots and establish themselves. Whew!

Snow on Sedum

When I took the dog out this morning, we were greeted with this: a dusting of snow and temperatures in the 20s. Isn’t it a little early for winter? I still have bulbs to plant, for crying outloud! It will pass, of course, and probably by noon, but the message is clear: Winter is coming.

I have about four comic strips that I have to check in on nearly every day: For Better or Worse (yes, I’m one of those saps who teared up when Farley, the dog, died); Luann, Crankshaft (the recent bit where the parents take their daughter to college was a hoot), and Gary Trudeau’s Doonesbury. It is rare that you get garden information from a comic, but Zonker, the loveable stoner/deadbeat from Doonesbury, has taken up gardening. In recent strips, he’s been talking to his bulbs, pecking at the earth with a trowel, and salivating over the garden catalogs. Gardeners: We have arrived.

I have to admit that I feel like I have finally escaped after processing about 20 pounds of grapes from my neighbor’s vines. My neighbors were not able to do the harvest themselves this year, and I asked if I could step in, having enjoyed some of their fabulous grape jam last year. With their permission, I harvested about 20 pounds of grapes, about half of the Swenson and Concord grapes they have on the vines.

Harvesting grapes is a snap. Take a scissors with you and just snip the bunches off the vines. Then, clean the grapes, and start processing. That’s where the work gets more cumbersome. I made three kinds of grape preserves with the fruit. The first is a recipe taken from Jane Brody’s Good Food Gourmet for grape conserve. To make it, you have to skin the grapes, which sounds difficult, but actually involves only a tiny squeeze on the grape so the innards pop out.  However, it takes a lot of grapes to make even a few jars of conserve and, as Brody notes in her recipe, it’s a lot more fun with a group of people. My 17-year-old helped for awhile, but mostly I soldiered on through the grapes alone.

After that, I still had buckets of grapes left, so I cleaned what I had and dumped all the grapes in a big pot to loosen the skins and seeds. After about 15 minutes of cooking, I ran the mixture through a food mill and ended up with a thick, tart grape juice. (And, a pile of seeds and gunk, which went into the compost pile.) The next day, I took some of the juice, strained it again, and used 5 cups of juice for a traditional jelly recipe. The recipe is in any box of Sure-Jell pectin. While it’s a pretty sugary jelly, the fresh, tart grapes give it a bite that you don’t get from store-bought jelly.

The Final Product

I still had more juice, so the next day, I made an old-fashioned grape marmalade. This is a variation on a recipe I found on the web from an old — like 1800s — cookbook. I took 6 cups thick grape juice, 3 oranges (zested, peeled, and chopped), 3 cups of stewed apples (I’d recommend local Haralson apples microwaved about 5 minutes with some apple cider or water), and one cinnamon stick.  Bring this mixture to a boil and add 1.75 pounds of sugar. Stir until the sugar is dissolved and let it cook for a good half hour — maybe more. While it’s cooking, bring the hot water bath to a boil and clean and sterilize your canning jars and tops. (For instructions on canning, see the U of M’s site.) Then, remove the cinnamon stick, and pour the marmalade in the jars. I processed the jars 10 minutes in a boiling water bath to seal them up, though the original recipe recommends that cooks put paper over the jam and it will “keep for years.” I’m a little doubtful these grape delights will last that long here.