It’s the first of the month, so that means it is time to review the progress I’ve made over the past 30 days on my New Years Resolutions (to see the resolutions click here: https://www.mrvintageman.com/happy-new-year-2020/).
Let’s get to it:
Travel: still in abeyance, partly due to things still being shut down, but also partly due to not having any plans to travel in the month of April.
Bicycling grade: F. Not a single ride over the past month. Not sure why I am not into bicycling yet, but I do expect some improvement in the upcoming months.
Reading grade: C. Now that the weather is gradually getting warmer, and the sun is shining brighter, I’m spending a lot more time outside and I’ve regressed a bit on my read. I downloaded several digital gardening magazines so I am getting some reading in. Will refocus my efforts in the days to come.
Gardening grade: A+! In the past month I’ve prepped the bird-bath garden for its renovation, put organic matter down on the lawn and in the garden beds, had the lawn aerated and fertilized, overhauled the dry shade/sun garden in front of the house and with MrsVintage’s hard work we are making good progress on overhauling the dry section on the south side of the house. Good job!
One of the bits of wisdom many of us learn as we get older is that there is just only so much time and energy available to us, and that we need to set our priorities and learn to forgive ourselves for not being perfect. If I want to spend hours each day out in the yarden, I’m going to have less time and energy available for other activities. And that’s ok.
Winter returned with a vengeance to my area when an Arctic cold front slammed into another moisture laden front that came in from the southwest, leading to fairly heavy snows and way below average temperatures here in Colorado. This was followed two days later by yet another cold front that dropped more frozen moisture. Parts of the state have seen almost two feet of snow over the past week. I estimate that I got about 5-6 inches total from the two storms.
The next two pictures were taken 24 hours apart:
Saturday was warm and sunny with temperatures at or near 70 degrees. Perfect weather for being in the garden. (The red flags you see are not the ones from the cable company. I put these flags out to mark the sprinkler heads so the lawn aerator lady wouldn’t break them). We saw the temperatures go from a high of 70 degrees down to a low of 22 degrees in just twelve hours. Temperatures the next two nights would fall into the low teens.
We’ve seen the temperatures hit the low teens several times this week. Needless to say, this has not been healthy for some of the plants that have already leafed out.
Brunnera a few days before the storms……and after the storms. Many leaves have turned into a pile of mush and the tiny flowers are nowhere to be seen.
Fortunately, this damage is most likely just temporary. As long as the roots didn’t get zapped by the cold the plants should bounce back shortly.
My big concern was the Brunneras I rescued from the bird bath overhaul. While turning over the soil in that section, I came across a few Brunneras that I decided to save, so I temporarily transplanted to them into containers. They will be re-located elsewhere in the garden later in the year.
My worry about these foundlings was not what the snow would do to them, but the bitter cold. The roots of the plants still in the ground are insulated by the soil and mulch. The containers are located above ground, so there is not nearly as much insulation for the roots. Kill the top growth and the plants should grow back. Kill the roots and the plant is a goner.
So the night before the first storm hit, I covered the containers with towels to help insulate the roots.
Brunnera nursery tucked in safe and sound. This was taken the day after the 1st snowstorm.
As you can see below, it looks like the plants came through unharmed.
Just waiting for better weather to put these Brunnera in their new homes.
This past week has not been all wintery gloom. I managed to get the lawn aerated and fertilized between the storms. When the snow from the second storm melted, I started putting some compost top-dressing down on the grass, with an emphasis on the areas that burned so badly last summer. Hopefully this will help prevent such burning this summer.
Monty Don, garden writer and host of the BBC show “Gardener’s World”, calls organic matter “goodness”. I’m putting some goodness down on the lawn.
I’ve also started top-dressing the garden beds with cotton-burr compost and some organic fertilizer. This is a fairly labor intensive project, as I have to rake the mulch back to get access to the soil, throw down the compost and then rake the mulch back into place. So I have just been doing small sections at a time.
Here I’m putting some goodness in the garden beds.
Unfortunately, this week I don’t have any photos of plants in bloom to show you, because the deep freeze zapped all the blooms.
I recently heard a saying that I had never heard before – “when the forsythia bloom, expect 3 more snows”. When MrsVintage and I moved into our place oh-so-many years ago there used to be quite a lot of forsythias in the neighborhood, including one in our yard. I was not too impressed with this shrub. It only blooms for a few days in early spring and the rest of the year it looks like a giant weed and it tends to spread everywhere. So I yanked it out.
I bring this up because I don’t see forsythias blooming much anymore in my neck of the woods. I think a lot of people felt the way I do about the shrub and pulled theirs out as well. So I have no idea if the forsythias have bloomed yet in the Denver metro area. But if they have, that means there may only be one more snow in my area this spring. I certainly hope so!
With the unseasonably warm weather and the stay-at-home order it has been a very productive week here in the Vintage garden!
Most of the work I’ve been doing is the “heavy” labor required to prep borders for planting. This has involved resetting flagstones, chopping down a tree and a shrub and then digging the stumps out, and turning over the soil in the birdbath garden. I’ve got to tell you, while my back and knees have been complaining a bit, I have been sleeping like a log this week!
First up on the docket was putting the flagstone section at the base of the driveway garden back together. Back in February a contractor for the cable company tore up this section to run new cables. They did a crappy job putting the flagstone base back together, as you can see below.
In addition to the obvious damage that you can see here, MrsVintage found quite a few flower bulbs from this section just thrown into our next door neighbor’s sideyard. Nice.
MrsVintage and I spent the better part of an afternoon putting the flagstone section back together. I’ll be honest, I’m only middling pleased with the result. It looks good, but it looked much better before it was torn up. The soil was so lumpy it was hard to get the stones to level out. Maybe someday I wil redo the section, but for now it is fine.
Ta-da! Almost good as new. If you look closely you can see one lone daffodil in bloom. MrsVintage collected as many of the tossed bulbs she could find and I replanted them in hopes they will survive. Time will tell.
At the other end of the driveway border we have this mess:
What you are looking at is a Leadplant shrub that is completely engulfed by ribbon grass. Leadplant is a very tough and drought tolerant shrub that puts on purple flowers in mid-summer, when not much else is in bloom. I was very fond of this shrub.
Unfortunately, ribbon grass is an even tougher plant. It is very aggressive and spreads prolifically. It’s a garden thug. I planted some years ago because I thought I could control it in this border. I quickly realized I was wrong and a few years later pulled it all out. Or at least I thought I pulled it all out. Unnoticed by me, it took root around the leadplant shrub. By the time I realized it was there, the damage was done
I have tried pulling it out, digging it out and even resorted to chemicals formulated specifically to kill grasses without hurting broadleaf plants. Nothing worked. Last week MrsVintage sat down with a weed digging tool to try her hand at removing the grass. She removed a whole trash bag of the stuff, and you couldn’t even tell the difference. She said she wasn’t able to get the roots out. So we made the decision to just pull the whole mess out and replant something else in the area.
To paraphrase the famous quote from the Vietnam War era: we had to kill the shrub to save the shrub.
I spent an afternoon digging, chopping, hacking and cutting to get the mess out of the ground. When I finally did, I discovered to my horror that the ribbon grass had grown THROUGH the landscape fabric! Not even bindweed will do that. Most weeds, including the hated bindweed, will look for holes or gaps in the fabric. Not this bastard; it just bulled its way through. No wonder why I couldn’t kill it.
I already have a plan for this area and I’ll post updates when I accomplish it. But in the meantime, I will keep a sharp eye out for any signs of the return of ribbon grass and ruthlessly destroy it immediately.
Before we replant in this area, we are going to diligently ensure we get ALL of the ribbon grass out.
The next project on my list was to finish digging the stump out of the birdbath garden. When we left off in my last post, I had cut 0ff all of the branches and removed several feet of main trunk to make digging it out more manageable.
Time to finish this!
It took me two days to get this damn tree out, partly due to I’m not in the best of shape right now, but also because I’ve got a several decades under my belt. Over the years I’ve had to remove numerous trees and shrubs from the property, and in my younger days I would get them out in a few (albeit ball-busting) hours. But that was a long time ago. I’m finding that as I approach my 60th birthday that it takes me longer to get things done around the garden, and that it takes me longer to recover from the effort.
But by God, I got the damn thing out! So what that I spent several days walking like Quasimodo; I showed this stump who’s boss.
Mission accomplished.
I thought that the roots were girdling the trunk, and that was the reason that the tree had been doing so poorly. But after pulling the stump out, I discovered that in actuality the roots were strangling other roots. You can see an example below:
Root girdling.
I’m no master gardener, so the following is just conjecture, but here could be several reasons why the roots did this.
Perhaps when I planted this tree I didn’t “tease” the roots out as thoroughly as I should have, and this led the roots to just keep growing in the direction they were already growing in the nursery pot.
Another possibility is the way I planted the tree. Years ago, the standard advice for planting trees was to dig a hole twice as wide as the tree root ball and put a lot of compost or other organic matter into the hole. Nowadays, they recommend NOT putting organic matter in the hole (but you can top-dress the area) because the roots will not want to leave the modified hole. I put a ton of organic matter in the planning hole; perhaps this led to the roots crowding and fighting each other to gain access to the best soil.
Maybe there was something in the soil that the tree just didn’t like.
Maybe is was a combination of these; or perhaps it was something I just don’t know about. I guess the point is moot now.
Below you can see some of the damage the root strangulation caused. This serviceberry was a multi-trunk tree, and the crack you see here formed at the base of two of the trunks. This most likely led to disease and pest problems, and that was slowly killing the rest of the tree.
This giant crack in the tree stump most likely allowed access to pests and/or diseases which led to the slow death of the tree.
Anyway, once I got the stump out I turned the soil in the border over and added a butt-load of compost to the entire area. I also threw in some natural fertilizer specific for flowering plants. In addition to the nutrients, this fertilizer includes mycorrhiza fungi. Mycorrhiza forms a symbiotic relationship with plants that helps the plants draw nutrients from the soil. Hopefully this will help the new plants settle in and thrive.
The border is ready to receive the new plants. Now I just need to wait a couple of weeks for the soil to settle and for the temperatures to warm-up a little bit more. Oh, and for the mail order plants to arrive.
Elsewhere in the garden, I performed some light maintenance tasks. I pruned back some branches on the redbud tree. Nothing major, just enough to fix some potential problems and thin out some branches in the middle to allow better air circulation and access to sunlight. After the tree finishes blooming in about a month or so, I’m going to perform a little more invasive surgery and remove some of the branches that smack me in the face every time I mow the lawn.
Here you can see two branches physically touching. It’s a good idea to remove branches doing this to prevent diseases or pests from entering the tree where the branches rub together.Here you see a stem curving back toward the main branch (pic is a bit blurry, sorry). Remove these before they grow and crossover the main branch, which as stated above can lead to potential health issues down the road.
I don’t want to leave the impression that it has all been blood, sweat and swear(ing) in the Vintage garden. I’ve also been making my daily patrol around the garden, enjoying the signs of spring’s ascension.
Below are some purty pictures taken in the last few days.
Foliage contrast: purple heuchera leaves next to daylily shoots.Crocuses blooming in the long border in the backyard.Defying the cable company damage: daffodils blooms rising from the wreckage in the driveway border.
The Vintage garden is a cosmopolitan garden; it’s got Russian sage, Japanese maiden grass and in the picture below we see some Siberian bugloss growing beside some Spanish bluebells.
Brunnera (Siberian bugloss) in bloom, while the Spanish bluebells to the left should start blooming in a couple of weeks.
I’ve got to say, these bright sunny days and warmer than usual temperatures have really helped with my outlook during these trying times. Gardening is excellent exercise for the mind, body and spirit. The only fly in the ointment is that the ten-day weather forecast for my area is calling for a return to more normal April weather (read: much cooler) and lots of cloudy days. I guess I have two choices: bitch and sulk, or suck it up and get outside anyway.
Have you been able to enjoy your garden so far this spring? What projects do you have for your garden in the coming months?
