Moss snob

"The work of moss gardening has an elitist quality that I must admit I find appealing. Every John and Jane grows grass. Only Nature's chosen grow moss."

- George Schenk, author of "Moss Gardening: Including Lichens, Liverworts and Other Miniatures"

I'm infatuated with moss lately, and having stumbled across this quote at Each Little World blog, I am amused that this apparently makes me elitist. And among Nature's chosen!

I've started removing grass in some already mossy patches of our yard, mainly around trees where the roots make it difficult or impossible to mow. There's something very Zen about both the process and the result.

I've also collected some mosses to try to grow in a shallow dish indoors... sort of like a bonsai garden. Er, without any trees. Just the moss. Hard to tell if any of them are actually growing, though.

What you wish for

Since we moved back East, we have been complaining to each other that the summer storms here are weak and disappointing compared to those of Kansas. They're also less likely to remove our roof, but that's besides the point.

Yesterday as I was driving home... after a weekend of hard work on gardening projects (more details to follow when I can post photos), the wind kicked up, a torrential downpour became more of a horizontal-pour, the lightning stabbed down, and it HAILED. Pea-sized up to nickel-sized balls of ice. Now that's what I call a storm!

There's a price for such entertainment, though. My Cherokee Purple tomato plant fell over, and although the stem appears to be intact, I'm not yet certain whether it will survive. Same with the cute little Patio Tomato, a bushy thing designed to be grown in a container. The basil plants had some stems broken off, but nothing they can't grow back - and the "harvest" made a tasty addition to the stir fry we had for dinner. The new shrubs I planted had some of their leaves chewed up by the hail, but no major damage as far as I can tell. My poor hostas, though... the ones not protected by trees overhead really took a beating.

Annika thought the hailstones were interesting, but at this age she doesn't understand where they came from, or even that it's odd to have little balls of ice on the ground in June. What she really enjoyed was splashing in a puddle left on our driveway after the storm.

Predictable

I ran across a piece in the NYTimes about iPhone applications that are geared towards kids of various ages, for purposes of education or entertainment. The first line line of the article posed the question "Say you were faced with a 3-year-old child on the verge of full meltdown — which iPhone apps would distract and delight him enough to avoid mayhem?"

Predictably, when I skimmed the comments to see what apps people had found besides the ones mentioned in the article, I found the following comment:

Pathetic. Parents are so helpless in how to handle their kids that they have to resort to this?
Somehow we’ve managed to raise kids for thousands of years without iPhone applications. Sometimes we’ve even done the strange thing called “interacting” with them.Oh, and occasionally saying “no” to tantrum throwing 3 year olds and leaving whatever place they’re throwing the tantrum in!— Library Lady

I wonder, has Library Lady ever been on a long plane flight with a toddler? This sounds to me like exactly the kind of comment made by people who don't have kids of their own, but are nonetheless experts on parenting. Or conversely, someone who raised their own kids long ago... long enough to forget their own troubles and shortcomings, and bemoan those of the newer generation of parents. Someone who, when faced with their own tantrum-throwing 3 year old all those years ago, would probably have killed for a device that could magically bring peace and quiet.

Personally, I plan to use my iPhone with Annika - to entertain, amuse, soothe, stimulate, teach, and whatever else I find it can do. I'm not the least bit worried that if I do so, I'll be depriving her of human interaction or somehow severing her from the "real world." The more puzzling question for me, is at what point it might be reasonable to get a kid their own iPhone. Not anytime soon, certainly. She'll have her own camera long before she has her own phone!

Botany help

I know I've seen this plant before, and I can't recall its name. Here's a link to some photos on Flickr that someone took of the same thing.

http://www.flickr.com/photos/52074377@N00/2570898933/

I saw it at a rest stop, tried to remember if it's native or not, decided that either way it's kind of interesting, and put the seedhead-puff in my purse.

Because doesn't everyone want something in their garden that looks like a giant dandelion?

Stowaway

Earlier this spring, I noticed some kind of alien (small, green, and of mysterious origin) putting up shoots in my rhododendron bed. I am not known for optimism, and my first assumption was that this was something invasive and nasty. I started pulling it out, and certainly it smelled nasty - imagine a combination of icky fish-smell, and harsh citrus cleaning solution. If you're trying to eat lunch while you read this, my apologies.

I didn't think I had seen the last of it. These shoots were scattered across an area about 3 feet in diameter, and if I made the assumption that it had come in - with one of the things I planted several weeks before that? With the mulch? Anyway, assuming it had arrived as a small piece of root/rhizome, it had already somehow spread underground before bothering to show itself.

At first I was afraid that it was the dreaded Japanese Knotweed - but then I saw something like it in UPenn's Kaskey Park, and plucked a piece to confirm, by the nose-wrinkling scent, that it was the same thing I had in my yard. The ones at Penn were bigger, and already blooming; the flowers were nothing like the photos I had seen of Japanese Knotweed. So I had ruled out one possibility, but wasn't much closer to finding out what it was. Knowing that it had white flowers and a weird smell was not a big help.

Finally I did a search for "groundcover shade" and, after reading through several articles, I stumbled across one that sung the praises of Chameleon Plant, and had a picture. This was the variegated cultivar, but I recognized the suspect immediately.

And I soon learned that I had jumped to exactly the right conclusion. Gardeners across the web have spoken thusly: "I made the biggest mistake of my gardening life when I introduced this into my garden"..."I will continue to dig and hold my nose (I think it smells horrindous) for maybe the rest of my life"..."This is the first plant that I have ever detested"..."I started trying to dig up all the roots three years ago, and it is STILL coming back! I even resorted to spraying it with brush killer which only succeeded in wilting it a bit before it came back more vigorously than ever. Trust me, this plant is TOUGH!"...."I finally gave in and bought Round-Up on the advice of our local nursery. I felt really bad, I never use stuff like this and I felt like such a plant murderer! Well, it's now fall and I have sprayed these plants many times over the season, and while the total number of plants has lessened, there's still more growing every time I look."

And my favorite comment of all: "good friends give you good plants; this is a plant to give to your enemies."

Here's a site with lots of photos. The one in my rhododendron bed has more ordinary-looking green leaves with a subtle red edging, but it's definitely the same species. Houttuynia cordata. http://www.srgc.org.uk/pport/Houttuynia/Houttuyinia.html

I expect to be fighting this one for a while. How annoying that something invasive and stinky either a) hitched a ride on one of the native plants I bought, or b) was hiding in the mulch that I put in that bed to prevent weeds from growing there!

Crows and coffee

This morning as I got into my car to go to work, I saw a big crow zoom out of the silver maple and up over the roof of our house. I just barely caught a glimpse of something small and blue held in its beak - probably a robin's egg. I have a lot of respect for the intelligence and adaptability of crows, but I would like them better if they weren't egg-robbers and baby-bird-eaters.

I brought a plastic jar to work, put it near the sink, and posted a sign over it: "Be Green, Recycle Your Coffee Grounds Here". I'm delighted that the coffee-making folks of the lab are obliging me! The idea is to collect coffee grounds for the compost pile. Whyfore, other than to rescue them from the landfill? Having finished a graduate school degree wherein I learned a fair amount about ecological stoichiometry, I'm not sure if it's ironic or simply fitting that I now find myself thinking about carbon:nitrogen ratios when I think about composting. A compost pile made solely of materials with a high C:N ratio - think dry leaves and sawdust - will break down very slowly, and if it's used before it is well broken down, it will actually strip nitrogen from the soil to which it's added. A compost heap with a lot of high-nitrogen materials will heat up nicely, but will be stinky. Since our backyard provides abundant leaves every fall, we have a surplus of high-carbon stuff; coffee grounds have a C:N ratio of 20:1, which helps to balance out the dry leaves' ratio of 60:1. The 'ideal' compost heap has something like a 30:1 ratio. I'm nerdy enough to have looked this up, but not nerdy enough to try to calculate the exact ratios of my compost bins. I'm more of the "guesstimate, see how it works out" philosophy.

Bloodroot and basil, and The Battle of the Back Fence

This year, I've already done much more gardening than last year. Not hard to beat "zero" though, really.

It started in mid-April when the weather suddenly warmed up. I visited one of the few local native plant nurseries, Redbud Native Plant Nursery. I bought some more shade-loving plants for the native plant patch near the shed:


bloodroot










wood aster, Jacob's ladder, phlox. I didn't get decent pictures of all of them, though.

And a few more for sunnier spots: a giant hyssop, golden star, spiderwort


bleeding heart








dutchman's breeches









Turk's cap lily.






So far: the bloodroot didn't bloom, but its leaves stayed green until just recently - it looks like it's starting to go into its summer dormancy. The Jacob's ladder seems to be growing quite well, and had lots of pretty light lavendar flowers. Some of them appear to have been pollinated - looks like I'll have some seeds to sow for next season. The bleeding heart is still blooming wonderfully, as is one of the golden star plants - the other seems unhappy, though I'm not sure why. The Turk's cap lily has grown from 3 inches tall to about 2 1/2 feet - hopefully it will bloom later this summer. The spiderwort started blooming last week - what a pretty purple! Since I planted it in my yard, I've noticed that along the train tracks I ride to work every day, there are thousands of spiderwort plants... too bad I didn't notice that last year, or I would have collected seeds.

Around the same time, on a trip to Lowe's to buy some gardening tools, I also bought two of these cuties - 'Starry Night' violas.

They've grown quite a bit since this photo taken shortly after they were planted; that was about 6 weeks ago, and they've now got about twice as many flowers as in this shot. They're much more vibrantly purple than the photo would suggest.

On Mother's Day my mom and I went to Bowman's Hill Wildflower Preserve. I restrained myself from buying anything at their plant sale, but on our way back we stopped at a nursery and I ended up buying two kinds of bee balm, Monarda fistulosa and Monarda didyma cultivars. I also bought an "obedient plant," Physostegia. Every time I think about its name, I wonder if I can train it to do dishes for me. My mom also brought me some plants from her garden: a cute native woodland wildflower called foamflower (Tiarellia), and some Jack-in-the-Pulpits and lily of the valley.

A week ago, my mom and I both took a day off and tackled a big project in the yard - I've dubbed it The Battle of the Back Fence. We have an old chain link fence separating our backyard from those of our rear neighbors. It does not, however, actually enclose anything, so the only purpose it serves, in my opinion, is to serve as a trellis for poison ivy and a hindrance to me reaching the poison ivy that grows behind it. We suited up in long sleeves, long pants, two layers of gloves, and we started cutting back brush (mostly Norway maple saplings and brambles) and pulling out poison ivy. We created quite a large brush pile, and filled several trash bags with poison ivy. Then, we started taking down the chain link fence - a task complicated by the fact that in places, tree saplings were growing through the chain link so that the fence wires had to be cut around them.

My plans for this area involve keeping it trimmed and poison ivy free for a year or so, and then planting some native shrubs and perennials where the fence used to be. Maybe a rain garden/mini-wetland in the back corner, where it gets very damp every spring.

I fiddled around with ideas for creating raised vegetable beds this year, but realized that I didn't have enough free time/energy/money for that. I'm hoping to get the beds built by fall, to use next spring. For this year, my edible gardening consists mostly of containers on the deck - basil, rosemary, sage, dill, cilantro, and two kinds of tomatoes. I also dug up some wild grape vines growing in several spots in the yard where they are most definitely not wanted (such as under the rhododendrons), and transplanted them next to the deck where, with any luck, they'll cover the deck, feed the birds, and give us a few wild grapes to eat, too.




And, for Jenny - a photo of the wild ginger where you can see a flower, to the left of most of the leaves.