What’s in store for the Vintage garden in 2025?

Posted on March 17, 2025 by John Kevin Hickey

There is no gardening without humility. Nature is constantly sending even its oldest scholars to the bottom of the class for some egregious blunder. Alfred Austin

Before I get into main point of today’s blog post, I thought I would share a couple of photos I took recently of the Vintage garden. I took these in early March while cleaning up the remains of last year’s garden. Solid proof that Old Man Winter’s reign is nearly at an end for the year.

Small crocuses blooming near the birdbath
A lady beetle stretching it’s wings in the warm(ish) March sun.

Making peace with the garden

One of the first lessons a novice gardener learns is that “the best laid plans of mice and men often go awry.” While the gardener may have an image of what the garden is supposed to look like, the garden itself often has plans of its own. And the sooner the gardener comes to terms with that fact, the sooner the gardener will stopping wasting his or her time, energy, and money on fighting the garden, and start working with the garden instead.

Don’t get me wrong. It’s perfectly fine to have a vision. But, sometimes that vision doesn’t comport with reality. For example, a gardener might buy a plant that likes partial to full sun, and there is a perfect spot for it in the border. Over time, a tree or shrub grows to full size, and now the plant is struggling in full shade. Or, conversely, the garden is a beautiful shade garden, full of Hostas, lungworts, and ferns. Then one night a windstorm blows a massive tree down, and all those wonderful shade-loving plants are getting blasted by the sun all day long.

It doesn’t even have to be that dramatic. You put a plant in a location where it is supposed to thrive, yet it sulks and underperforms, or gradually fades away to never be seen again. However, you find that it has reseeded itself clear across the yard, in a spot you wouldn’t never have thought to plant it. Monty Don, host of BBC’s Gardeners World (https://hdclump.com/category/gardeners-world-2025/), stated that when something like this occurs, the plant is telling you what it wants.

Gardening is always tinkering, tinkering and yet more tinkering.

Tinkering in the Vintage Garden 2025

Fortunately, my tinkering in the garden in the upcoming year is not too extensive. Mostly just filling gaps and moving a couple of plants that I feel would do better in a different location.

Let’s start with the waterwise front yard (update-on-the-front-yard-waterwise-renovation). Below you can see three daylilies that I planted in a half-moon raised border right next to the house. I took this picture the first year of the front yard renovation. As you can see, they flowered pretty good that year.

However, last year they hardly bloomed at all. I suspect that they are not receiving the amount of sunlight they would prefer. While daylilies do fine in partial sun, this border is not only under an eave of the house, it’s also under the overhang of the master bedroom. Not only that, there is a huge honeylocust tree casting filtered afternoon sunlight on the area.

So, where do I plan on moving them?

Daylilies in bloom the summer they were planted.

Right here, in front of this pine tree. This mass of dead brown material you see below is what’s left of last year’s asters. We put these asters in many, many years ago and they have overrun the area. We bought these particular asters from a local grocery store, because that is all we could afford at the time. The reason I am sharing this photo instead of one showing them in flower, is because I apparently never took any pictures of them in bloom! To say I have been less than whelmed by their performance is an understatement.

We have planted much better varieties of asters in other parts of the yarden.

So, I am going to dig out the whole lot. I’ll put a buttload of compost in the area, and transplant the daylilies here sometime in late April or early May.

Not only should the daylilies perform better in the sunnier spot, but they should hopefully provide a much needed spark of interest in mid-summer. The garden goes into a lull during July and early August, when the heat is at its worst.

There is one plant that reliably blooms during that timeframe, and that is this real lily that the youngest Vintage daughter planted many years ago. My hope is that this lily, and the daylilies from the front yard, will bloom around the same time.

These lilies provide the high point of the mid-summer garden in the backyard.

And in their place?

Last year I planted the two Hakenchloa ‘Beni-Kazi’ Japanese forest grasses you see below in a shady spot underneath the living room front window. I am going to plant three more into the spots the daylilies previously occupied. Japanese forest grass is not a waterwise as the daylilies, but they can handle the deeper shade much better.

Japanese forest grass ‘Beni-Kazi’

What else?

I am still not happy with the back corner in backyard. This area has seen a lot of tinkering over the last couple of years. As you can see below, it’s a nice looking border. But this is the focal point of the backyard, and it’s just not pulling its weight. Since it is the first thing you see when entering the backyard, it needs to be really dramatic.

It’s got a nice…personality

Last year I planted 3 ‘Red October’ Big Bluestem grasses for this area. Two of them died, dammit. Nevertheless, I am going to plant two of them again this year. If they don’t hack it, well, I guess that means they don’t like the area and I’ll have to come up with a new plan.

Below is a picture of ‘Red October’ I found somewhere in the interwebz.

Not my plant

Another sore spot for me is found in the birdbath border. We have a redbud tree growing next to the shed. And for some reason, we cannot get anything to grow under this tree. There are some trees, like black locusts, that produce a chemical called juglone. Juglone prevents many other plants from getting established around the base of the locust, reducing competition for moisture and nutrients.

Why will nothing grow under this damn tree?

Redbud is not one of those trees, so I have no idea why plants are struggling to get established. But, I have a plan. Below you can see a Blue Oat grass growing in front of the birdbath. Blue Oat grass in not a North American native, but it is a tough, drought-tolerant plant. One that I hope will thrive in this desolate area of the garden.

Tough Blue Oat grass in front of the birdbath.

Back to the front yard

Let’s briefly wander back to the front yard. One of my all-time favorite native plants is known either as Desert 4 o’clock or Colorado 4 o’clock. This sucker is tough. I planted one behind the patio many years ago, and it has spread to take over most of the area. In a good way. I never have to water or fertilize it, and it comes back stronger every year. As the name implies, its purple flowers open up in late afternoon and evening, usually during the months of June and July. Although some years it sporadically blooms well into August.

The only downside of the plant is that when the first frost hits in autumn, the plant dies back to the ground. I mean, it completely dies back to the ground. All that remains over winter is some brittle brown twigs. No winter interest with this plant. The good news is that it is really easy to clean up in spring.

I am going to purchase and plant one of these in front of the honeylocust tree, near the street. Once it’s established, I won’t need to fret about it ever again.

You can almost set your watch by the blooms of the Desert 4 o’clock.

I have several other areas I want to improve upon, but I think this is enough for one post. I’ll keep you informed on how the tinkering is going as the growing season goes on.

How about you? Every garden has weak spots. What’s yours, and what’s your plan to fix them?

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I’m back, and I’ve got some reading recommendations for you!

Posted on March 2, 2025 by John Kevin Hickey

Howdy all, I am back after a short hiatus. Not to fret, everything is fine at the Vintage domicile. It’s just that I didn’t have anything to say. I know, a little hard to believe coming from a noted raconteur such as myself. But there is no gardening going on, I am a fair weather bicyclist, and the days have been cold and dreary. I’ve just been hunkering down and enduring winter.

However, the downtime has provided my with lots of reading time. And I have a few recommendation, along with one caveat, to share with you.

Let’s get to them.

High, Wide, and Lonesome

I have used some of Hal Borland’s insightful quotes on my blog in the past. I chose to read ‘High, Wide, and Lonesome’ for a very personal reason, which I will get to shortly. But first, a little background on this book, and on Hal Borland. Hal Borland was born in Nebraska in 1900. When he was 10 years old, he moved to Colorado with his parents. His father was a newspaper editor and printer by trade, but was getting tired of the business. He wanted to homestead a plot of land courtesy of the U.S. government. If they were able to stick it out for 3 years, also known as “proving”, he intended to sell the plot. Hopefully at a profit. Sort of a turn of the 2oth century mid-life crisis.

Anyway, the family up and moved to a section of land near the town of Brush, located in northeast Colorado. The town is still around today. It’s located very near the town of Fort Morgan, Colorado.

‘High, Wide, and Lonesome’ covers the first two years of the family’s endeavors at homesteading. They battled drought, blizzards, hostile cattlemen (no shoot ’em ups though), as well as the father barely surviving a bout of typhoid. Ultimately, they persevered and successfully proved the homestead. Whereupon they sold the land, and moved further southeast, near the present town of Burlington, Colorado. There, the father purchased a newspaper, and took the printing trade back up again.

I mentioned the personal angle earlier. My great-grandmother, along with her brothers, homesteaded in the 1880s in Colorado, near the town of Bennett. My maternal grandfather was an itinerant farmer, who took jobs where he could all over the eastern plains of Colorado and southern Wyoming. His wife, and my grandmother, who was the daughter of my homesteading great-grandmother, was a schoolteacher, who often worked in one-room schoolhouses.

My mother was born in 1922, in the tiny hamlet of Kersey, Colorado. The town is still around, and has grown to a vast metropolis of 1490 souls. And many of the stories she recounted of life on the Colorado are eerily similar to those of Mr. Borland. The hard work and responsibilities undertaken at an early age. The battles against the elements. My mother dealt with something Mr. Borland couldn’t have imagined when he grew up. My mother came of age when the Dustbowl raged across the vast open prairies. devastating lives and the land.

The most humorous story she relayed to me was how she resented that on cold winter nights her brother could stand on the porch and whizz out into the yard, whereas she had to trudge all the way out to the outhouse. I will note, that my mom had no desire to ever take up farming or school teaching when she reached adulthood.

For an excellent account of the trials and tribulations of eking out a living on the prairie in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, you won’t go wrong with Hal Borland’s ‘High, Wide, and Lonesome’.

Creators, Conquerors, and Citizens

I’ve always been interested in ancient Greece, but most historians tend to focus on the so-called “Classical” Greek era. Ancient Greece is typically divided into Archaic, Classical, and Hellenistic eras by historians. The Classical era, the time of city-states and the Peloponnesian war, is the one most of us think of when talking about ancient Greek civilization. But I’ve been curious for quite awhile about the other two time frames. How did the Greek civilization get started? What happened to the city states when Alexander the Great conquered them, and then when on to conquer half of the known world? Why were the Greeks, an established and fairly prosperous civilization, so quickly absorbed by the upstart Roman Republic?

Fortunately, I found my answers in Robin Waterfield’s Creators, Conquerors, and Citizens. Mr. Waterfield’s book is a fascinating read about the Greek people and their genius. The book is not laid out chronological order. Instead, Mr. Waterfield breaks down his subject into different issues: politics, trade, women and slaves, and so on, and how the attitudes regarding these issues changed and adapted over the centuries.

Should you be interested at all in the entirety of the ancient Greek civilization, I suggest giving Creators, Conquerors, and Citizens a try.

Heart of the Mountain

Larry Correia, author of the Saga of the Forgotten Warrior, posted a long rant a couple of years ago about Science Fiction/Fantasy authors starting multi-volume series but never finishing them. You can read the rant here: https://monsterhunternation.com/2023/04/18/a-letter-to-epic-fantasy-readers-i-know-rothfuss-and-martin-hurt-you-but-its-time-to-get-over-it-and-move-on/.

His main gripe is that because some authors fail to finish their sagas, fans have become reluctant to commit to long, multi-volume epics that never reach a conclusion. Which hurts other authors in the genre. One notable example of a procrastinating author is Robert Jordan (Wheel of Time series) who died before he finished his series. Another author had to be hired to complete the series based on Jordan’s notes.

The most famous example of an author failing to complete his opus, is George R.R. Martin and his Game of Thrones series. The first book in this series, A Song of Fire and Ice, was published in 1996, almost 30 years ago. Martin has been working (supposedly) on the 6th book since 2012. There is apparently a 7th book also in the works. The fact is, the series is unlikely to ever be finished, and readers are pissed.

Anyway, on the acknowledgment page for the final book in his Forgotten Warrior saga, The Heart of the Mountain, Larry Correia wrote “To George R.R. Martin. See? It’s not that hard”. Nice slam! Lol!

I’ve written before about this series, so I won’t bother you with going into details. You can see some of my previous reviews here: https://www.mrvintageman.com/whats-on-my-autumn-reading-list-for-2023/, https://www.mrvintageman.com/mrvintagemans-autumn-reading-list-for-2024/, https://www.mrvintageman.com/a-book-review-for-this-fierce-people/.

I’ll just say The Heart of the Mountain was a very satisfying conclusion to a very enjoyable series.

Passionate Gardening

The authors of Passionate Gardening, Lauren Springer and Rob Proctor, are legends in the Colorado gardening world. Lauren Springer’s first book, Undaunted Garden, was the first book to actually show just how amazing a low-water and/or Xeriscaping garden could be. Rob Proctor has written numerous books on Colorado gardening. He is a regular guest on local news stations, sharing his knowledge on best practices for Front Range gardening. He also used to have a weekly column in one of the daily newspapers. Heck, for all I know he still does. But who reads newspapers anymore?

The two authors have wildly different gardening styles. Springer’s rural garden is naturalistic, whereas Proctor’s Denver city garden is more of an English cottage garden. In spite of their different styles, they were able to cobble a book together. Passionate Gardening isn’t a how-to book. The authors provide 2 to 4 pages of info on a variety of subjects, all built around gorgeous photography. In reality, it’s more of a “coffee table book”. And that’s the only complaint I have about reading it. The book is large and unwieldy, so it is physically awkward to comfortably read.

I’ve never understood the point coffee table books. You purchase a book not to read, but just to put it out for display? Weird

The Wealth of Nations

Here comes the caveat. I’ve mentioned before that I am working my way through the Harvard Classics Five Foot Shelf of Books that I was given as a gift many, many years ago. I decided, now that I am partially retired, that it was time to work my way through the 50 volumes, ten pages at a time. The first nine volumes were interesting. Some were more sleep inducing than others, but overall, I’ve been enjoying them. Then, I reached volume 10, Adam Smith’s The Wealth of Nations.

Oh, my God! This book was brutal! Mr. Smith was a big proponent of the maxim of military instructors everywhere: tell them what you’re going to tell them, tell them, then tell them what you told them. Over and over again. Mr. Smith was certainly verbose, able to stretch one sentence into at least 4 or 5 paragraphs. My edition came in at nearly 600 pages, but editions with all the appendices are supposed to reach nearly 1000. There’s a story that a writer for the Cato Institute was able to break Wealth of Nations down to its main points in just 7 1/2 pages.

Unless you are college student required to read this book, or are a masochist, I highly recommend avoiding this book at all costs!

What I am reading now: P.J. O’Rourke On the Wealth of Nations

During one of our regular brewery explorations, I mentioned to my good buddy Dave S. that I was wading my way through Adam Smith’s The Wealth of Nations. He asked me how it was going. I gave him a one word response: Awful!

He laughed, and then recommended to me P.J. O’Rourke’s On The Wealth of Nations. He and I have both been big fans of O’Rourke going back to the eighties. If you have never read him, he applies a sardonic humor to current events. Or did. He passed away in 2022. My all time favorite quote from him was regarding Europe during the Reagan years. Back then, before the EU, you had to go through customs whenever you went from one European country to another. Mr. O’Rourke snarked on the tiny size of European countries by stating “you can’t swing a dead cat by the tail without it going through customs six times.”

Anyway, on to On The Wealth of Nations. Mr. O’Rourke subtly mixes humor and serious discourse on Adam Smith’s ponderous tome. He applies, at the time of publication of this book (2007), current economic events to help highlight the points Adam Smith was writing about by making them more relatable to the modern reader. I’m only a few chapters in, but P.J. O’Rourke has made it quite evident why Adam Smith is considered to be a genius. And he makes it does it in funny, yet poignant, way. So far, highly recommend.

Finis

So, that is what I have been up to over the past couple of months.

How about you? How have you been passing the time during the cold and dark days of winter?

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A look back at the Vintage 2024 gardening year

Posted on January 26, 2025 by John Kevin Hickey

Now that the holiday season is in the rearview mirror, and the long and gray months of winter still lie ahead, I like to look back at the previous year’s garden photos. I do this for two reasons: to perk me up from the winter blues, and to seek inspiration for the gardening season ahead.

It was a pretty good gardening year overall. We only lost a couple of plants over the winter, and the weeds seemed less numerous than in the past. On the other hand, last year was hotter and drier than 2023. Consequentially, the water bill was higher in the summer months than the previous year. This in-spite of the conversion of the front yard to a low water landscape.

Victories and defeats, and a near catastrophe

So, what worked and what didn’t in the garden last year? Let’s start with a positive note. I finally got a decent crop of tomatoes! Once upon a time, growing tomatoes would not have been a big deal. I would plop a few plants in the ground, and 3 or 4 months later get decent results. Nowadays, getting more than a handful of fruit is cause for celebration.

Additionally, most of the plants we put in the ground in the spring to fill holes survived the hot, dry summer. That’s always a win. Slowly, yet surely, we are making our landscape match the vision in my head. Undoubtable, the reality should match the dream about the time we either move, or get planted in the ground ourselves.

Conversely, while the failures weren’t numerous, they were rather obvious. The grasshoppers showed up in biblical proportions and devoured many plants to the ground. Assholes. I tried to salvage an Alberta spruce by pruning out a weird growth, only to realize the plant was unsalvageable. And we did lose a chokeberry over the winter that I was really excited about.

The catastrophe occurred in the new waterwise front yard. We put down too much mulch in the spring. So much, in fact, that water from the sprinkler system couldn’t penetrate it and reach the ground. We nearly lost a bunch of plants because of a lack of attention. The plants out there may be waterwise, but they do need some water.

A look back

April started off well. Plenty of sunny days with adequate moisture. No massive snowstorms or bitter cold snaps to blast tender new growth. The mid-spring bulbs gave one of the better displays last year. Below is a clump of crocuses in the long border in the backyard. I’m generally not a huge fan of crocuses, because they’re so small that their display is underwhelming. However, after putting on such a good show last year, I’m thinking of planting quite a few more clumps in the autumn.

Mid-spring crocuses heralding the coming growing season.

Below is the new waterwise front yard. We nearly had a major disaster out here last year. Here you can see the extra mulch we put down in May because the old mulch looked rather shabby. However, we put down too much, and water wasn’t reaching the ground. In late summer, we pulled the mulch back from around the base of the plants, and the plants rebounded nicely.

Mulch is good, unless there is too much of it.

Still, not everything was a near calamity in the front. As you can see below, the Rocky Mountain columbines I planted last year bloomed rather profusely.

Colorado native Rocky Mountain columbine

The arrival of summer

June also had its hits and misses. Below is the Alberta spruce I tried to shape up. Once I cut out the weird growth, I was left with a rather horrendous tree. Sadly, it had to come out.

If the creature from “The Thing” took a floral form. Yuck.

It wasn’t all gloom in June however. The renovations we have undertaken in the back corner are starting to show promising results. This part of the Vintage garden had become overgrown and weedy. With a bit of hard work, and copious sweating, it’s starting to come together.

July is a frustrating month for me. The Vintage garden goes into a bit of a lull at this time. I’ve have been trying over the past few years to provide some spark, but the results have been disappointing. Oh, there is still plants in flower at this time. But the late spring and early summer blooms are starting to fade away, while the late summer blooms are just getting started.

These orange/yellow lilies, name unknown, were planted by the youngest Vintage daughter many years ago while she still lived at home. I’m happy to report they reliably bloom every July, and are still going strong.

Lilies in the July garden

When August rolled around, the eastern part of Colorado has been suffering from a two month drought. We finally got some measurable rain in the middle of the month. It wasn’t a monsoon by any means, but it was something. Any little bit helped. Unfortunately, the rains didn’t bring cooler temperatures. The hot weather would continue on well into autumn.

We come now we come to the pièce de résistance of the 2024 Vintage garden: homegrown tomatoes!

Now that I know I can successfully grow tomatoes is containers, I am going to purchase one or two more faux whiskey barrels and try some different varieties next year. I can’t wait!

Just look at these luscious beauties!

Winding down into autumn

Come September, it was time for us to take stock of the Vintage garden and determine what weaknesses needed to be addressed.

With the removal of the Alberta spruce, it opened up an area of the long border that has long been a sore spot. The spruce was sucking up all the water, and not even waterwise plants could flourish in that spot. We added some Russian sage, black-eyed Susans, lavenders and some sedums to that spot.

We filled in some gaps in other parts of the garden as well. Here’s hoping that the majority of this new transplants survive the winter.

Filling in gaps with some tough and drought tolerant plants.

Even thought the weather was warmer than usual, much of the garden shrugged off the drought and looked awesome.

A very nice September display

Because the weather was so warm, the October fall foliage finale was delayed by about a week or so later than usual. While the display was nice, it was not nearly as dazzling as it was in 2023.

The autumn foliage change was delayed by a week or so by warmer than usual temperatures. But when the change finally occurred, the results were still stunning.

And it wasn’t just the foliage that was a bit disappointing because of the warm autumn.. Some plants, like ‘Autumn Joy’ sedum, need crisp nighttime temperatures to look their best. Instead of bright red seed heads, they were more of a muddy burgundy color last year.

That being said, the asters ignored the warmer temps, and stepped up to the plate and put on a reliable display.

It takes more than dry weather and hot temps to knock asters off their feet!

Imminent arrival of winter

Finally, we come to the end of not just the gardening year, but the calendar year as well. As you can see in the photo below, there is one final bloom of the growing season. Here in the Vintage garden, the autumn crocuses usually bloom in early November, the last plant to bloom before winter sets in. I took this photo on December 17th, just a few days before the winter solstice.

Reflection

As always, the 2024 gardening season had its ups and downs. The downs included grasshoppers, drought, a heatwave, and weeds. On the upside, I harvested homegrown tomatoes! For all the work that we put into the yard and garden, let’s be honest, it’s the plants that are doing the real labor. Give them some water, sun, and a little bit of maintenance, and the garden will usually thrive just fine. As the old adage goes, the best fertilizer is the gardener’s shadow.

How fared your garden last year?

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