native plants | Stacking Functions Garden

September 6, 2020
by Jennifer Leave a comment

Summer’s end

I’ve been away from this space for a long time. There are many reasons why. For the most part I’ve not had much trouble finding small things here and there to take photos of and write little sentences about on Instagram. But it’s the long form that I’m struggling with right now.

Maybe part of what’s holding me back is that I need more time to process things before I feel like I can write about them intelligently. More time to think about a man dying in an intersection, just hours after I’d driven through that same intersection and commented to Adam “it always seems like there are people struggling on this corner.” My privilege was practically dripping out of the car with the air conditioning condensation, as I accelerated through that intersection on my way home from my natural foods co-op.

Bearded iris in late May.

Late May: back when we were still in the “making the best of it” phase of the pandemic. If we just baked enough cakes—complicated cakes!—and learned how to make sourdough bread—finally! that’s been on my bucket list for a long time!—we would be able to come out the other side of this content for the time we’d spent at home.

Just two weeks before, and just three short blocks west of Cup Foods, my fellow community garden volunteers and I had pulled off our biggest plant giveaway ever. That weekend—with masks, hand sanitizer, the works—we gave away hundreds of tomatoes, peppers, herbs, seeds, annual flowers, and hope that the garden could grow enough food to help see us safely through the pandemic. It was one of my most optimistic days of 2020.

My Pilot, loaded up with plants for the giveaway.

And then a man lost his life, trying to buy food, and maybe passing a fake $20. And the man who took his life was a tax felon who had stolen much, much more. There is no justice. It all came crashing down.

Just days later, I found myself gathering with neighbors, with blackhawk helicopters hovering overhead, making plans on how to defend our neighborhood from white supremacists bent on causing mayhem and fanning flames—literally.

My adrenaline surged. Carrying a shovel, seeds, and donated plants past soldiers with guns, I kept going back to Sabathani. I tended my own garden plots, which had been planted in mid-May. I turned over two more extremely weedy, neglected plots in searing heat, sweat dripping, and planted them with the intention of giving away the produce to the community. I went home and stayed up all night for several nights, listening and watching. Every unplated truck that drove past our house was discussed by many people.

Sunset over the community garden on June 5.

My neighborhood was lucky. We lost our closest gas station and our pharmacy for a while. But homes remained untouched. We kept coming together in June and July as a community to collect and distribute food. But as the summer progressed, everyone and everything started to feel tired. Our most recent meetings have only had a handful of attendees.

But I’d be lying if I said this whole summer has been a waking nightmare. It hasn’t. I’ve had moments of light and joy. I fell in love with several K-pop groups, thanks to my now-teenagers. I painted both kids’ bedrooms. I took time off work, using a neat thing called VPTO (volunteer paid time off) to tend those gardens.

One of the volunteer plots at Sabathani.

After spending an unprecedented amount of time in my flower and vegetable gardens at home, I don’t think my yard has ever looked as good as it does this year. I harvested every single sour cherry from my Mesabi cherry tree and made some of the most delicious jam I’ve ever tried. I shared fruit, jams and jellies with family and friends. In moments of lightness and ease, I reminded myself of how very lucky I am.

Mesabi cherries.

This is the first time in a very long time that I’ve had no plans. It’s such an odd feeling. As of late February, I had a busy summer and fall of travel planned, including taking the kids to see BTS in Chicago for their 13th birthday. It was heartbreaking to cancel. And now that everything else has been canceled, it feels weird to have and make no plans.

Red twig dogwood berries.

What have I learned about gardening this year? Well. Mary Oliver said attention is the beginning of devotion. And I realized this year how much more I notice about my gardens—and how much more I love every part of them—when I simply spend time observing.

A goldfinch eating anise hyssop seeds in August.

I noticed house sparrows eating Japanese and grapevine beetles. I noticed a chipmunk climbing my cherry tree to pilfer cherries. I noticed a bumblebee digging a hole in the ground. I noticed flies farming aphids for their honeydew. I noticed a hummingbird on several occasions and noticed which flowers it seemed to like the most. I noticed my neighbors and how the same ones tend to walk by, at the same time, every day. I laughed one day when I noticed one man surreptitiously picking a purple coneflower from my front yard.

I have plenty of coneflowers to spare.

I welcome the cooler weather coming this week—I probably won’t cover my basil on Tuesday night when it’s supposed to get down in the 40s. I’m ready to let it go.

Pickles.

I feel like the theme of 2020—well, there are many themes—but one of them is getting used to uncertainty. I want to believe that I’ll come out the other side somehow wiser, more content to live in the moment. I want to believe that my family will come out the other side, alive and healthy. And I want that for my neighbors and friends, too. I want to live in a country where we’ll look at the hard lessons of 2020 and decide that we give a shit about public health.

I harvested an unprecedented amount of chamomile this summer.

Lots of good is happening, every single day. I’m not having any trouble seeing it at a micro level. I just step outside my door and watch the bees for a few minutes.

I’ve already drawn up some garden plans for 2021. I’m moving my stock tanks for the first time in 10+ years. I’m planting at least two or three new shrubs, since two of my viburnums died out this year. I’m going to expand my seed-starting operation. Maybe I’ll finally fix up the grassy area in the back. I’m even adding some more tulips this fall, which feels really out of character for my native-plant obsessed self. But I saw people taking pictures of my tiny patch of tulips this spring and it brought me joy. I want more of that.

Shallot harvest.

I’m planting seeds of hope and crossing my fingers that they all germinate. I’m going to need them next spring.

May 26, 2020
by Jennifer Leave a comment

Spring in the Minnesota garden

I can’t think of a more glorious month than May in the state of Minnesota. For the second year in a row, we had a rather chilly April and start of May, so when things finally got warmer, and then we got some much-needed rain here in the Twin Cities on the 17th, plants really took off and the end of the month has been simply glorious. There’s nothing better than planting untold numbers of seeds and transplants, only to have them well-watered in by rain. Here are some photo highlights from May in my garden.

A mining bee (not sure of the species) approaches my Autumn Brilliance Serviceberry (Amelanchier grandiflora) in early May. Early flowering plants like this are critically important sources of nectar for all manner of queen bees who are the only ones in their colony to have overwintered, and now must feed the entire next generation.

Jacob’s Ladder (Polemonium reptans), also blooms in May. It’s a low-growing groundcover plant that thrives even in dry shade. It deserves to be widely planted—it spreads only slowly and the foliage looks great even after blooming.

A not-so-fun spring project around here is trying to protect plants from squirrels and rabbits. Strategies for both need to evolve for different times of year. Rabbits are more of a problem in the winter, when they will eat woody shrubs and small trees down to the ground (or frustratingly, just eat the bark off them, which also kills them).

In the spring, squirrels get very excited about digging in freshly-disturbed soil, especially the friable soil in pots and containers. Happily, this behavior dies down after the pots have been around for a while and the plants in them are actively growing. So these ugly cages on nearly all of my containers can be taken down in another week or two.

Many spring garden vegetables such as lettuce and peas will need to be protected from rabbits continuously. Summer vegetables like zucchini and tomatoes require protection from squirrels. Last year I lost all but one or two zucchinis to squirrels. This year they’re in an impenetrable cage with my tomatoes.

My solution for lettuce is to grow it in a stock tank—it’s a little too high for the rabbits to jump in. We’re eating lettuce daily now and enjoying it while it lasts. The season is always over so quickly. One nice thing about being home-based now with my work is that I’ve had a little extra time to think about succession: I’ve got some romaine lettuce started already in my basement. When this lettuce seeds out in early July, I’ll replace it with some nice romaine. Hopefully.

Thank goodness for an abundance of lettuce, because the rest of the vegetable garden is only just getting going. Beans are sprouted and up, along with carrots and zucchini. My tomato, kohlrabi and brussels sprouts seedlings are small but healthy, and I am growing more sweet and hot peppers this year than I ever have!

Here’s a weedy corner of my back yard. Well, weedy depending on who you ask. It’s got a giant mullein that I’m keeping my eye on—I’ll pull it as soon as it flowers to keep it from self-seeding. The area has also filled in with wild sarsparilla (Aralia nudicaulis) at the front, and it’s fine for now. I’ve got a honeycrisp apple tree in here, as well as a nice patch of Mexican sunflowers at the back (in a rabbit-proof cage for now; rabbits love to eat sunflowers when they’re little).

In the front pots are some 2020 experiments. I took an apple tree pruning and grafting course in February—one of the last social things I did before the pandemic, and it was such a pleasure. So I’m trying to get my grafts to “take” in the smaller foreground pots. We’ll see if it works. Behind them is a half barrel. We had a rain barrel for years that was not holding water very well anymore, so Adam cut it in half and now I have a new large planter. It’s going to be my barrel of onions this year. I plant onion starts thickly, then strategically thin out and harvest them green, gradually creating more room for the remaining ones to grow into bulbs.

Here, an early spring glimpse into what is my ultimate plan for a good-sized chunk of my backyard: a miniature tallgrass prairie! It’s honestly not that impressive in the spring. These are plants that thrive on heat, and every year I spend April and early May fretting about whether they’re actually alive or not. The answer is nearly always yes because these are seriously hardy plants. I’m trying to keep the palette fairly simple, mostly big bluestem, culver’s root, joe pye weed, and I’m trying out a couple of royal catchfly at one edge.

It’s also bordered by many other random things, including asters, showy goldenrod, rhubarb, a cherry tree, gooseberries, and a serviceberry. This part of the backyard has been really fun to sort out since my southerly neighbor cut down a very large tree that deeply shaded it until just a couple years ago. Suddenly I have so many options…

We had a very rainy Memorial Day weekend here, just perfect for sprouting carrots. It also knocked down the last of the pink crabapple petals around the neighborhood—at times it was raining pink petals in a very magical way. The main star of my gardens right now is Wild Columbine. It’s gently reseeded itself all over my yard, and it really ties everything together nicely. Repetition is such an important part of good design, and incorporating more of it in my landscape has made a big difference.

Fruit season is right around the corner: my Red Lake and Ben Sarek currants, plus my gooseberries are nearly ready to eat. Sour cherries are coming along too. We’ll get a short breather between the madness of planting season and then jam-making season will be upon us. And thank goodness—had I not made some rhubarb sauce we would be pretty much out of jam.

I’m so happy to see one of my two red chokeberries (Aronia arbutifolia) blooming this spring. Both shrubs are alive, but barely: I piled snow a little too high next to the protective rabbit fence, and they used the snow as a jumping off point to get right inside. They nibbled off most of the bark on the bottom 1/4 of many of the branches. Fortunately enough branches survived that I think ultimately these shrubs will bounce back.

The web traffic to this blog has gone up significantly this spring—interest in gardening is at an all-time high. If you’re new here, what brought you here? Do you have gardening questions? Ask away, I am happy to help. My U of MN Extension Master Gardener activities are currently on hold, so I’m happy to answer questions virtually. Thanks for reading.

December 27, 2019
by Jennifer 1 Comment

2019 Photo Highlights

As much as I enjoy photography, I am very much an amateur. I never even purchased a telephoto lens until this year—Adam bought me a gently used one for my birthday early this spring. It made a huge difference in the shots I was able to get, especially of wildlife.

Enjoy these photo highlights of 2019. Clicking on the photo will take you to my Flickr page.

This isn’t my most impressive photo but it was SUCH an exciting moment: we saw two black-backed woodpeckers at Sax Zim Bog in February. (This is clearly BEFORE I got the telephoto lens…) It was -20 degrees F and it was worth the frozen toes and fingers to see this unusual bird. Sax Zim is a birding paradise and I can’t wait to go back.

Red-winged blackbird, herald of early spring, at Wood Lake Nature Center in March.

Ice finally completely out on Lake Hiawatha, Minneapolis, April 3, 2019.

Bloodroot in full bloom, my front yard, May 4, 2019.

Jacob’s Ladder in full bloom, my back yard, late May 2019.

Chive blossoms, early June 2019.

Bridal Veil Falls, Glunflint Trail / Laurentian Divide area, northern MN, early July 2019.

Metallic green bee really enjoying the Great St. John’s Wort, mid-July 2019, my front yard.

Ready to pick sour cherries, July 2019, my front yard.

Bumblebee on hoary vervain in my prairie boulevard, July 2019.

Taken only moments later, a monarch butterfly coming in for a landing. July in the pollinator garden is magical in Minnesota.

Harvest time, August 2019. Nearly all harvested from my community garden plot at Sabathani Community Center, Central Neighborhood Minneapolis.

Orange cosmos in my neighborhood, late August 2019. This is one of several photos that I took on my iPhone that surprised me how nice it came out. I love the colors—it was twilight so I didn’t think the photo would work at all.

Kicking off fall with an Autumn Meadowhawk Dragonfly, September 2019.

By late September the butterfly migration was well underway. One day my purple dome asters were covered in sulphur butterflies. The next day they were gone.

Fall leek harvest. I love pictures that capture the true scale of things—here’s my husband Adam with some gigantic leeks. Sabathani Community Garden, mid-October 2019.

We hike Fort Snelling State Park all year round; late fall is a great time to see white-tail deer close up.

What can you do for birds during the winter, really? Beyond the basics (bird feeders, leaving seed heads in your garden for them to eat), try adding a heated bird bath. We easily see 4-5 times greater numbers of birds in the winter than we used to, and a greater variety than just our resident house sparrows shown here. They are entertaining, though. I love how the female looks slightly annoyed at how the male is splashing her.

PSA: I’m not being paid to say this, but if you’re at all into photography, I highly recommend the Flickr Pro community. It’s a great and inexpensive option to back up all your photos, with lots of easy tools to organize them and set privacy levels, etc. I’ve been using it for years and I’m nervous it’s going to go away with the rest of the remaining positive and affirming places on the internet. Check out my photo page, or check out this huge Best of 2019 Group and get inspired for a great new year of photography.

Happy New Year!

July 18, 2019
by Jennifer 4 Comments

Strategies for managing weeds

I’ve been spending a LOT of time weeding this year. I like weeding—or at any rate, I find it very satisfying. Yet, there are lots of other activities that I’d rather pursue, so I am trying to understand WHY my yard is so much weedier this year. Let’s explore.

This was a very sad week. September 2018.

Construction

Anytime you dig in your yard, especially with heavy machinery, you expose thousands of weed seeds to the oxygen and light they need to germinate. Many of those seeds have lain dormant in the soil for years, just waiting for an opportunity like this. In my case, that happened last fall when half of my front yard and boulevard were torn up for a sewer line project.

The newly-sunny area, August 2018. I ended up planting mostly annuals again this year so that I could focus on the front yard.

Changes in growing conditions

When a dramatic change occurs in your yard, expect a flush of new weeds. For example, my southerly neighbor cut down his large crimson king maple about a year ago. It had deeply shaded the southern half of my back yard, to the point where very little grew there at all. But apparently seeds of sun-loving weeds had been collecting in that soil for years because we’ve had flush after flush of new weeds back there.

Weather conditions

We’ve had great growing conditions most of the late spring and summer this year in South Minneapolis. Everything is flourishing! We’ve had plenty of rain, and it’s been warm by day and cool at night. (Until this week’s heat wave. Wow.) Weeds flourish just as much as other plants in these conditions.

So what to do about all this weed madness?

For one thing, and this is especially true if you grow native plants, you need to decide which plants are weeds. Note that deciding is different than simply figuring out. I highly recommend the book Common Backyard Weeds of the Upper Midwest by Teresa Marrone. It will help you identify weeds and understand which ones are edible (you’d be surprised how many you can eat).

Weeds or lovely dill volunteers? You decide.

If you grow natives, many will reseed themselves all over your yard, and most wildflower gardeners find this desirable. But you will need to learn how to identify seedlings of those coneflowers, Wild Columbines, and Black-Eyed Susans. Google is your friend here. If you see a plant and can’t identify it, do a google image search on what you think it might be, e.g. “Wild Columbine seedling.” You will get very skilled, very quickly at identifying certain prolific re-seeding plants, native or non-native. I’m looking at you, dill.

Getting rid of the weeds

So obviously to start with you need to just get rid of these plants that you’ve decided are weeds. I’m not into spraying chemicals on my yard but I issue one plea with those who do: when it comes to herbicides, the label is the law and you should carefully read the instructions of any herbicide before using it. One of the most critical rules is to only spray it at dawn or at dusk when there is little to no wind. Otherwise it blows over to my yard and I get VERY UPSET with you.

It’s also worth noting that even if you Roundup the heck out of your weeds, they will still come back in a few weeks. Roundup does not destroy the weed seed bank in your soil, nor does it prevent new weeds from blowing in via seed or creeping in via underground rhizomes from nearby areas once it has left your soil.

I have poured boiling water on my paver paths and found it to be pretty effective, but if you have a large paver path area you might need to boil several pots’ worth before you can get it all. It takes more than a few drops.

I’ve always hand-pulled weeds. But I heard Larry Weaner, author of the meadow manifesto Garden Revolution, speak this winter, and he made a pretty powerful case for trimming weeds to the ground rather than pulling them out. The idea is that every time you make a disturbance in the soil, you give new weed seeds a chance. This works on a micro-level when you pull weeds, as well as a macro-level when you dig up your sewer line.

So he recommends successive mowing or trimming of weeds—making sure they never get a chance to flower and continually weakening the plant until it just gives up and dies, without ever disturbing the soil and creating conditions for a new weed to grow in its place.

Preventing the weeds in the first place

An ounce of prevention in the native wildflower garden is complex, because you have some process-related and aesthetic decisions to make. The best way to prevent weeds is to have a thick growth of hardy, healthy weed-suppressing perennials (this is true of lawn grass as well). But in order to have that, you’re going to need to overcome this particular American Garden Aesthetic:

I’m sorry for using you as an example of what not to do, random neighbor.

Create a sea of mulch with annuals and perennials tucked here and there, and—congratulations!—you’ve created a maintenance project for yourself. Many people, desperate to maintain this unmaintainable look, turn to plastic sheets of landscape fabric under their wood mulch, hoping they’ll suppress those weeds. (Do not talk to me about rock mulch. That’s a subject for a much longer post, some other time.)

But wood mulch over landscape fabric is also not a good long-term solution because weed seeds will land on top and start growing in the mulch as it decomposes. Furthermore, landscape fabric makes it more difficult for your short-lived but self-seeding native wildflowers (like Wild Columbine) to spread their offspring around. You’re creating conditions that do NOT favor wildflowers.

This prairie boulevard would not have filled in if I didn’t create the conditions favorable for the plants to reseed and spread out.

If you are creating a new garden where there was once turf, sheet mulching is a good choice that will suppress the weed seed bank.

If you are planting into bare ground, mulch with something that you know will break down relatively quickly. Two great choices are lawn clippings (my neighbors are happy to share theirs with me) or fall leaves. Plus one if the fall leaves have been mowed over and collected so that they’re chopped up.

Both of these options break down within a year, allowing your native plants to spread their offspring around, and move around among each other as they please, filling in and creating a thick, lush landscape that weeds eventually will not be able to thrive in.

I use a thick mulch of straw on my vegetable gardens. It takes two years to break down but is easy to move around when you want to harvest or plant something new.

Wood chip mulch is good on a temporary basis while plants get established, because it also breaks down over time. But be wary of cheap bagged mulch from big box stores or gas stations. I get free municipal wood chips from the city of Minneapolis. They’re not as pretty, but they work just fine.

Sheet mulching

Creating a brand new cherry tree garden in our front yard, 2012 or so.

Cherry tree garden earlier this week. It does not get very weedy.

A quick how-to on sheet mulching:

Obtain uncoated cardboard and lay it down in the contours of your new bed—look at it from close-up and from far away to make sure you’ve got your scale and shape right. Cover with at least 2-3 inches of wood chips. Wait at least 6-8 weeks or up to 6-8 months before planting. If you wait weeks, you may need to spade through cardboard and water your new plantings frequently until the cardboard breaks down. If you wait longer, it will be easier.

This is why I like to sheet mulch in the autumn. I can spend my winter researching plants. Come spring, the cardboard has disintegrated and I simply pull back a small circle of wood chips where each plant will go and dig the holes with a trowel.

The chips break down within another year or two, just as the new native plants are ready to start spreading around.

The end goal: mulch with living plants

The eventual goal here is to not need mulch at all. It’s OK to sprinkle some wood chips on a walking path, like this:

This is an area of my back yard that I unintentionally filled with two plants that were far more aggressive than I initially realized. Virginia Waterleaf and Wild Sarsparilla slowly filled this area completely in; the only parts that stay open are the little path where we walk to the garage door, and a little path by the canoe (behind the rain barrel). The rest is completely full of lush green plants, and they suppress weeds better than any mulch ever could. I spend only several minutes per year weeding this area.

Here’s a very weedy little area that also serves as a walkway around my raised strawberry bed (bricks to the left), and also provides access to this end of my vegetable garden. I often place a pot of peppers or two here, but the path has been VERY weedy despite getting walked on. Earlier this year I added a rather invasive plant—peppermint (center right)—to crowd out the weeds and provide a “trap crop” area for four-lined plant bugs. The peppermint doesn’t mind if I step on it occasionally. Eventually it will become a living mulch for this area.

In the foreground, an established perennial garden filled to the brim with a mix of natives and non-natives. It’s easy to maintain. In the background, my new shade garden, planted this year after my sewer line tragedy/opportunity. I’m trying to keep it mulched with grass clippings until the tiny, barely-visible plants have a chance to fill in. It’s required some maintenance weeding, but in a few years it will be as lush and beautiful as the nearer garden.

So there you have it. I set out to explore the world of weed management in my own garden, and I ended up writing a weeding manifesto. How has your weeding been going this summer?

August 11, 2018
by Jennifer 3 Comments

Late Summer

I received 2 free packets of zinnia seeds last winter, and decided on a whim to try sprouting them. They were so easy. I didn’t have a plan for the plants so I just put them in groups of 5 all over the yard to see how they’d do in different light conditions. I’ve found them to be pretty flexible but a bit less floppy when they get plenty of sun. Pollinators love them! Here’s another non-native plant that gets my stamp of approval.

This little skipper spent several minutes nectaring.

I dig all the variations in color and form on the zinnias.

Walking around the yard, this scene caught my eye from some distance. How weird! It appears that a cicada decided to shed its exoskeleton while posing on a flower. The cicadas were almost as loud as the airplanes last night. (I live near the airport. You get used to it.)

Want to attract pollinators to your garden? Plant joe-pye weed. It comes in a few different heights. The original wild variety gets quite tall—perhaps 5 feet—and can get a little floppy. It was meant to be mixed in with other tall-grass prairie plants such as big bluestem. I plan to create a little tallgrass prairie oasis next to my garage next year. It will include divisions of this joe pye plant, plus big bluestem, prairie blazing star, Jerusalem artichokes, and (of course) milkweed. Can’t wait to get started on that project.

I also started nasturtiums from seed this spring. I ended up with so many plants that I scattered them all over the yard in pots, hanging baskets, and this window box on my garden shed. Little did I know: nasturtiums attract hummingbirds! We’ve always hoped to attract a hummingbird to our garden and Anneke has been dutifully filling, cleaning, and refilling a hummingbird feeder for two years in hopes of seeing one. A male ruby-throat has been stopping by several times a day now, but he skips the feeder and goes for the nasturtiums. Figures.

Everything is just OK in the garden. Honestly the annual vegetable garden is the most challenging part of my yard, between the pests, the diseases, the soil amendments, the weeding, etc. My permaculture fruit guilds by comparison are much easier to maintain. I’m really going to rethink my vegetable garden design for 2019 to see what I can do about improving soil health—even if it means the short-term cost of going a summer without certain vegetables.

Can you help me identify this mystery pepper? It’s not “Tangerine Dream”—the pepper I thought I’d bought. I am afraid to try it because it’s really hot—Adam said it reminded him of a habanero. I think it might be a hot lemon pepper.

Here’s another mis-labeled pepper from the Friends’ School Plant Sale. (This is not the first time this has happened to me with that sale.) I think these are likely cayenne. Well, at any rate the squirrels are not touching them. I am a big wimp when it comes to peppers, but we’ll pickle these all the same.

This year I tried interplanting my shallots into my strawberry bed, and I’m happy with the results. Some of them are very large and impressive. Most are average, and a few are tiny. A decent harvest.

Here’s an illustration of why you really do need a certain number of plants for this whole eating from the garden thing to work out right. I have 5 okra plants in part-shade so they’re not hyper-productive. I get 3-4 pods, every 3-4 days. It’s just not ever quite enough to cook with. Next year I’m going to try 10 plants, and put them in full sun. Then we’ll get good and tired of okra. Okra is a great edible landscaping plant—the flowers look like hibiscus.

Here’s a little nostalgia for today. My Rowan, age 4, left and age 11, right. Still helping me in the garden.

Here’s a garden friend that I spotted on my hydrangea this morning: a goldenrod soldier beetle. They feed on other insects including cucumber beetles. I don’t know if goldenrod is necessary to attract this beetle. The name might simply refer to its color. I usually see it on calendula flowers.

And here’s evidence of a garden foe that I’ve been battling for over a month now: the dreaded Japanese beetle. After last year’s near defoliation of my grapevine, I was hyper-vigilant this year. At least twice a day since around July 4 we’ve been out there killing as many as we can, but they are seemingly unstoppable. My best guess is that our grapevine is about 30-40% defoliated. Next year we will most likely resort to spraying neem oil, earlier in the season. We’re almost ready to harvest now so it’s too late for this year.

You can see there is also some Japanese beetle damage on my large cherry tree. However, in this case it’s only 5-10% of the leaves that are affected, so I’m willing to tolerate it. It won’t harm the plant at all. Generally if 10% or fewer of leaves on a tree like this are affected, you have nothing to worry about. Trees in the Prunus genus (cherry, chokecherry, plum) support a wide variety of insect larvae—especially butterflies and moths—so if you can tolerate a little damage, you’ll be giving your area birds a huge boost. Insect larvae are the primary food they feed to their young in the nest.

My back yard is going through a major transformation, due to a large tree being removed. I’m starting to get used to how bare it feels, and starting to come up with all kinds of ideas for what I want to plant next year in my three new full-sun spots. Formerly they were two very deep shade and one part-shade spot, so my options have changed considerably. For now we put in zinnias and sunflowers, just to hold us over until certain other projects are done. It probably won’t get fully planted until next spring, and that’s OK.

We only have two weeks left of summer and then my three people—who have been helping me in the garden every single day—will all go back to school. Sigh.

June 23, 2018
by Jennifer Leave a comment

June / Solstice

Hello! Summer is in full swing, and we have garden challenges galore—from four-lined plant bugs to weeds, weeds, weeds, to the impending doom of a complete main line sewer replacement in August. On the other hand, we ate a kohlrabi from our garden yesterday and it was delicious. Here’s what we’ve been up to the past few weeks.

I spent 4 crazy days in Grand Marais with 80 or so 5th graders (including my two). We endured a severe thunderstorm, one and a half days of cold rain, and then on the final day, damp cold to wrap it up—we were eating cold cereal outside at 40 degrees. On the other hand, we hiked 8 miles of the Superior Hiking Trail during one glorious, mostly rain-free day and I had the privilege of seeing trillium in bloom along the Brule River.

The trail was a bit muddy!

We came home to find that our 40 or so monarch caterpillars had grown a bit under Adam’s care while we were gone.

We released most of them yesterday, in a butterfly bonanza.

This one kindly posed on a milkweed just long enough for me to take some iconic monarch pictures. Can you spot the long-horned milkweed beetle?

Last year, squash vine borers hit my community garden plot hard, so during a rainy period in early June I put down beneficial nematodes. They’ve worked great for me in the past; it’s been about 5 years since I last did this and it was time to refresh the population. You can buy them on a sponge from a garden store (I bought mine at Mother Earth Gardens in Minneapolis). You soak the sponge in water for at least several minutes (rain water is preferable here)—I used a 1/2 gallon jar. Then you can dilute it quite a bit. I split mine into 8 cups and diluted each with 2 gallons of water to water in to my squash hills (background, behind the weeds).

Nematodes can be beneficial for Japanese Beetle control—but only at certain times of the year. I found this article from University of Minnesota’s Jeff Hahn to be very helpful and I plan to try and put some nematodes down in late July if the weather cooperates. They survive better if it’s rainy and a little cooler.

On the home front, I watered in my comfrey compost tea on my vegetables and raspberries yesterday. I’ve seen differing advice about how long to brew this concoction, but I hardly ever brew it for more than 2-3 weeks. I checked it Friday night and saw that it was full of mosquito larvae, so it was time to get rid of it, lest they hatch and make us miserable. I dilute this about 1:3, but again opinions differ on how much you should dilute it as well. Err on the side of caution, I say. It’s powerful. (And STINKY.)

We went to the Eloise Butler Wildflower Garden two weeks ago to see the Showy Lady’s Slippers in bloom—unfortunately none of my pictures of them turned out very well. But I caught this bumble on some wild indigo. I recently realized wild indigo (also called blue false indigo) is *not* native to North America.

However, it’s a beautiful plant that supports pollinators, so maybe it’s… not so bad? I was surprised at how much it dominated the prairie area of Eloise Butler. It’s such a unique plant, perfect when you want something shrub-like, such as along a path. It dies all the way to the ground in the winter, so there’s none of the normal winter shrub care needed.

The kids continue to obsess over their fairy gardens; yesterday they added patios to them with some old leftover slate tiles we had lying around.

Anneke made this new fairy house out of clay over the winter, and added a few accessories from Mother Earth Gardens this spring.

I felt that a good cleansing fire was in order for solstice on Thursday night—we borrowed a neighbor’s fire pit and now I don’t want to give it back. We are having a string of gorgeous weather and I just want to be out in it as much as possible. Think I’ll head out there right now.

May 28, 2018
by Jennifer 1 Comment

Memorial Day 2018

I like to photograph my garden every year on Memorial Day to track where we’re at from a phenology perspective. From the plants’ point of view, we look roughly average, but from a human point of view it’s been anything but.

I swam in a lake in 95 degree heat yesterday; just under 4 weeks ago that lake had ice on it. It’s been a wild swing from winter to summer, seemingly overnight.

We got some bad news this week. Our main line sewer needs to be replaced and pretty much everything in the foreground of this picture will need to go. I’ll know more next week. I was very upset at first but I’m now trying to look at it as an opportunity.

It was such a weird week. This also happened: a red-tailed hawk caught a squirrel in our yard and landed with it on our deck for a minute or two. I was astounded at its size. And not terribly sorry to lose a squirrel, honestly—the hawk dispatched it quickly and efficiently.

Did you know that wild sarsparilla get flowers? They’re hidden under the leaves. I found these on the plants that get a little bit of sunlight each day—in deep shade, I couldn’t find any flowers.

I love the way the gooseberries, wild columbine, and serviceberries are intermingling in our back yard.

My interplanting of shallots and strawberries is coming along swimmingly. The strawberries are thriving in their new raised bed (new in summer 2017). It’s wise to periodically (every 3-5 years) dig up all your strawberry plants, amend the soil, weed thoroughly, and replant them. They get so overrun with weeds over time. Raising them up like this has kept the rabbits from them and made it easier to keep them weeded.

They’re currently covered with blossoms and tiny green strawberries. I’ve been watering them daily to keep them going strong through this heat wave.

One plant that is LOVING the heat is my Meyer Lemon tree. It spends winters inside and generally looks unhappy the whole time, but the second we bring it out in the spring, it starts to revive.

Peppers are also off to a good start with their ollas for water. I’m curious to see how this experiment works out.

My community garden plot is all planted—it’s double in size for this year as my good friend who gardens next to me is taking a year off from her plot. Crossing my fingers that we’ll have a veritable squash kingdom come August, if we can keep the vine borers away.

Last but not least, monarch season has begun! I’ve only seen one, but Anneke found 40 eggs in our yard two nights ago. If all these survive, we’ll have a household record number of releases, in the first round of the migration.

How are you surviving the heat?

August 10, 2017
by Jennifer 2 Comments

It Might Be Over Soon

I finally got a chance to see one of my favorite bands live a few weeks ago—Bon Iver played an incredible set on a beautiful evening at the Walker Art Center. It took me a long time to warm up to the newest album; but it’s now indelibly in my heart along with the first two. So as I’m reading awful news headlines, or working in my August garden, I sometimes find that first track running through my head—It Might Be Over Soon. But not necessarily in a bad way, I guess? Everything has a season.

Even Japanese beetles have a season, and it will be over soon. Apparently I’m not the only one suffering—our cool (but not cold), wet spring meant a bumper crop of beetles for Minnesotans. So, if you have foliage that looks like my poor grapevine above, there’s a good chance you have these bugs (look on the under side the leaf). My whole family has been hunting them every morning and evening. We simply carry around little containers of soapy water and brush them off the leaf and into the water. It’s not hard or even gross; they die pretty quickly.

Here you have a collection of dead Japanese beetles along with two of the last grapevine beetles. Our grapevines had a hard year. Please, if you see Japanese beetles try and get over the gross out factor and TAKE THEM OUT. You will thank yourself next year.

My tomatoes were a bit late this year—partially because I grew only large ones. I didn’t harvest my first until July 29 or 30. Depending on when we get our first frost, this is going to be a very short tomato season. But they’re coming so fast now that I made a big batch of sauce to use them up—I use a recipe from Trout Caviar’s excellent cookbook for oven-roasted tomatoes, then I just blend them up with the immersion blender and freeze in half-pints. This becomes pizza or pasta sauce base in the winter.

The reason for my big tomato harvest: my squirrel proof tomato fortress, installed in May. This thing is wonderful. When Adam built it, we had a small debate over whether to make something just for the tomatoes or whether to make something bigger for the entire garden, and I am not sure we chose correctly. I have beautiful cucumber vines climbing the trellis just to the left of the tomato cage, and I have harvested precisely 2 tiny cucumbers from it—squirrels have eaten nearly 100% of my cucumber harvest. I have some leftover chicken wire and I’m going to see what I can do with it this afternoon.

Summer vacation for my teacher husband and kids will also be over soon. Adam’s been very productive; he’s almost finished with a massive landscaping project of brick paths all over the yard. Walking out to the garden in my slippers can now legitimately be a thing. He also made this raised strawberry bed. Our strawberries were overrun with weeds, and the size and shape of the bed made it annoyingly difficult to maintain. We carefully dug up the strawberry plants, built this, filled the bottom half with compost, then added soil and replanted the strawberries. A week or two later we had pumpkins sprouting, from the compost. I decided to let three of them grow, just to see what happens. If we have a late frost I could end up getting a pumpkin or two!

Here’s another angle. I love all the curved intersections on these paths.

This view hints as to what he has in the works for 2018: a gate! He’s going to complete this path to the door of my garden shed, then replace this chain link fence with a wood fence and gate. The garden will be 10 steps from the kitchen instead of 60. I may never walk around the north end of my house again. He is also going to add a few arches at certain intersections, based on what I found in my friend Marianna’s garden. Arches give such a nice effect.

My peppers also got going a little late and are now making up for it with great quantities. Trying to pickle as many as I can, but everyone’s eating them as fast as I pickle them.

I’m also drying some herbs. Of course basil (right) and parsley (middle left) are not as good dried as fresh, but I have tons and they’ll just go to waste otherwise.

I should get a few ground cherries for the first time this year, but less than I hoped for because the spot is shadier than I first realized when I planted them early this spring.

I love the contrast that these blue bachelors’ buttons give to my brown-eyed susans. They were some orphan plants that I got for free and just planted very randomly with little thought, so what a happy surprise that they’re thriving. Hopefully they’ll reseed and come back next year.

Over in the boulevard, several of these suddenly popped up last year out of nowhere. I suspect their seeds were in some purchased wood mulch. Last year I thought they were weeds and just pulled them all—they do look a bit like creeping bellflower. After I pulled them I figured it out. They’re in the same family—Campanulaceae (Bellflower) but these are American Bellflower, Campanula Americana, a native! And they seem to be just as, erm, vigorous as their invasive cousin—they came back readily this year despite my pulling nearly all of them last year. I’m keeping an eye on them for now.

Here’s a bumble on my anise hyssop. For several years I had a wonderful anise hyssop patch in the back yard, and suddenly early this spring they all got eaten to the ground by some bug. I moved in some volunteers from elsewhere in the yard, and those got eaten too. So I dug up even more volunteers (are you sensing a theme with anise hyssop?) from my community garden plot and added them in a completely different area of the yard, and they’re doing fine. I’m going to wait another year or two before planting them again in the back. Fortunately they’re very versatile in their soil and light requirements—and they are absolutely covered with bees right now. I also dry these leaves/flowers for tea.

That was three blue or purple flowers in a row, but the reality is the majority of my flowers are yellow this time of year. These early sunflowers are VERY vigorous and are taking over much of my prairie boulevard.

Summer might be over soon, so it’s time to get out there and enjoy it while we can.

July 4, 2017
by Jennifer 2 Comments

In the mid-summer garden

If you’re going to have a garden, and you’re going to have kids, I highly recommend marrying a teacher. Adam has been busy all summer long working on landscaping projects, and by the time he’s done our gardens are going to be at a new level. Meanwhile, the kids and dog are … REALLY taking it easy:

Here’s a sneak peek of Adam’s big project:

He’s edging all of our primary flower, fruit, and vegetable gardens and putting in pretty brick paths to tie everything together. He’s going to rent a wet saw this week for all the half-bricks that he needs here.

Another new thing I’m trying this year: I purchased a “Snip N Drip” soaker hose system for the main vegetable garden, because my old soaker hoses basically fell apart (they lasted 10+ years so that’s not too bad). So far, so good except for one factor: there is not nearly enough pressure from the rain barrel to be able to use it with this system. So when I need to water the garden I’m using tap water. The rain barrel water is hardly going to waste though; I’m using it on my fruit trees and bushes.

My vegetable garden is looking very lush right now. Here we have interplanted onions and parsnips, which seems to be working quite nicely. At the back, two collard green plants. (One of which, oddly, is blue? Hmm.)

My new squirrel-proof tomato cage is great. The plants are suckering a little more than usual because it’s not super easy to get in there and prune them, but I’m fine with it.

I cannot wait for fresh tomatoes!

I think we’ll get a wine grape harvest this year, for the first time! These are Marquette grapes, a University of Minnesota hybrid. I’m not growing these in a 100% conventional way. If I were farming grapes with “maximum harvest” as my only goal, I’d grow them more like this. But since this is my home garden, I’m trying to accomplish several things here—I’m stacking up functions of plants and structures, to put it in permaculture words. So these grapevines also provide shade and beauty in the yard in addition to fruit. I’m just crossing my fingers that squirrels won’t eat all the grapes before I get to them.

Here’s a view of the arbor from further away. The grape is on the right nearest corner, in the middle on both sides are hops (climbing up twine). We got a nice hops harvest last year.

We had a minor infestation of currant/gooseberry sawflies in May but an hour or two of hand-picking took care of it, and they haven’t been back. There is supposed to be a second generation of them in June or July but I’ve never seen one. My [somewhat educated] guess is that this is due to the high number of wasps, ladybugs, and other predators that fill my yard by mid-June. Having lots of wildflowers surrounding my fruits creates a healthier ecosystem and less work for me.

It’s almost raspberry season, hurray! The kids have already eaten a handful of them.

My original red currant bush is now at least 8 years old. I’m not really sure when I planted it. The bush doesn’t look so great anymore. I gave it a good pruning this spring and now it looks worse (yet it’s still fruiting like crazy). I am strongly considering doing a “renewal pruning” and just cutting it to the ground next spring, so it can get a fresh start. We added a second red currant bush two years ago, so we’d still get a small harvest.

Our front yard cherry tree garden is filling in nicely, now in its third or fourth year. (I’m losing track of time.) The maximum size of this tree was supposed to be 10-15 feet and it’s already at least 10 feet and not showing any signs of slowing down. We finally had a large enough cherry harvest this year for a pie AND some delicious sour cherry muffins.

Wait, why am I showing you my ugly alley garbage can area?! I “upgraded” to a smaller garbage cart this year, and now this area looks better:

When I saw just how small the new garbage cart was, I got a little nervous. But we’re now several weeks in and it hasn’t gotten filled to overflowing even one time, despite Adam having some construction waste from his various projects. My only gripe about it is this: this garbage can is less than half the size of the previous one, but the discount per month is only $5. Doesn’t…quite…compute. But I do understand that a huge part of the cost of garbage removal is operating the trucks and paying the humans, so I will [try not to] complain.

All of this edging and path-making has left us with a very large pile of sod and soil. Instead of getting rid of it, I had a brainstorm: why not make a berm!? So… we’re making a berm garden in the front, under the shade of a large elm. Since it will become such a major focal point in the front yard, I want it to be very pretty but still use all native plants. I think the biggest plant will be a pagoda dogwood. I’ll surround it with pretty woodland plants like solomon’s seal, bloodroot, and wild ginger.

Look, I’m not a purist. Eleven years ago when we first bought this house, I was not yet turned on to native plants and I planted these beautiful Asiatic lilies. If they ever die, I’ll definitely replace them with natives, but for now… they are very pretty, yes?

I hope you have a peaceful Fourth of July.

May 29, 2017
by Jennifer 3 Comments

Memorial Day Garden Update

Spring is finally underway, after an abundance of cold and wet weather. From a phenology perspective, we’re all over the place. Some things are 2+ weeks later than last year; other things are early. We’ve already got 20 monarch caterpillars in our living room—Anneke spotted eggs on the milkweed leaves from 6 feet away! This is the earliest I’ve ever found monarch eggs.

My American Highbush Cranberries are looking great—their blooms are so unique. They have really taken off recently, and are now about 7 feet tall. I appreciate a shrub that can thrive and look this great in the dry shade under a mature silver maple tree. Our understory layer is coming along.

My raspberries (left), on the other hand, are looking less lush than they have in previous years. In talking with a fellow master gardener about it yesterday, I realized that I haven’t fed them in at least 2 years. I picked up a bag of blood meal and sprinkled it on the ground at their feet, then watered it in; I’ll also add some compost in the next week or two. I’ve not always given these the best of care, but they are forgiving plants and keep on going. Hopefully the blood meal will perk them up and we’ll still have a good harvest.

Here’s something new I’m trying: two very small blueberry bushes in a half barrel. My soil is not right for blueberries, so by growing them in a barrel I have more control over soil composition. I mixed half potting soil, half peat moss for this and so far they are thriving. They’re in a pretty shady spot so they may not ever get really big, but that’s fine.

Over on my currant and gooseberry bushes, we’re fighting another sawfly invasion. I pulled hundreds off today; we pulled nearly that many off a few evenings ago. If I can stay on top of them we should still be able to salvage a great berry harvest. I pull the caterpillars off and drop them into a container of soapy water, which is my general method for all garden pests that I deal with. The “EW” factor is high with these guys.

I am happy to report that FINALLY, I have had a successful radish year. I’ve not had the greatest of luck with them, for several years now. This year I planted them around April 12—a few weeks earlier than usual. My thinking was that I could put them where I intended to grow tomatoes and eggplant, and that the radishes would be done by the time I could plant those warm season crops. They weren’t quite, but very close, so I just put the soil amendments and plants around my rows of radishes. We’ve harvested nearly all of them now, and I’m calling this radish year a success.

Some people replant radishes every two weeks and harvest all summer. Growing them in the heat of summer has never worked for my particular microclimate. You have to keep experimenting until you hit on the right timing and right soil amendments for your situation.

More solutions to our particular problems: pictured here is a new squirrel-proof tomato fortress that we are building. It’s nearly done, just needs a little more chicken wire. It has a door on each side so that I can reach in and harvest. In celebration of this, I’m growing lots of big tomatoes this year—no cherry tomatoes, which I’ve grown in the past in hopes of sacrificing some to the beasts. On the trellis to the right, snow peas are doing quite well (no blossoms yet).

Left to right, garlic, poorly-sprouted beets, and well-sprouted haricot vert green beans. Under the cage/trellis: cucumber seeds not yet sprouted. I had a beautiful line of cucumber seedlings and a squirrel ate all of them. I had to replant. Some day I would like to build a squirrel proof GARDEN enclosure, not just one for tomatoes.

On the west end of the garden, some nice rows of onions, and between them rows of parsnips, which also sprouted nicely. I soaked my parsnip seed this year, and I also planted them very early—we had a very rainy April so I think that was a good strategy as well. They can be finicky to sprout and this was the most successful I’ve ever been. We’ve also got more snow peas and some no-longer-homeless collard greens at the back; finally, a sad dog who wishes he could be right at my side at all times on the deck.

The warnings about planting Jerusalem Artichokes, aka Sunchokes, are apparently not ill-founded. This was three seedlings, last year. They never looked great, and I thought my experiment was a failure….then they turned into more than 15 seedlings this year. I will be sure to harvest at least half of these this fall so that they don’t get out of control. But to get a harvest, really, was the whole point—so I’m pleased.

The kids have spent many hours on their fairy gardens already this year. Anneke’s fairy even has a greenhouse (with the blue plastic). When the elephant’s ears get bigger we won’t be able to see much of this, so it’s fun to get a peek now. Our resident squirrels drink out of her fairy’s pond every day, while the cat watches from the kitchen window in irritation.

We planted a shady rain garden several years ago, and one of the recommended plants was Virginia Waterleaf. This is not the most popular of native landscaping plants due to its aggressive nature. We started with one or two and now they’re all over our back yard. But most of them are growing in places that would otherwise be populated with some noxious weed like garlic mustard, which this is out-competing in a couple places. I’d much rather have Virginia Waterleaf—it’s pretty and it helps pollinators. The rain garden was buzzing with bees today, in between rain showers.

How does your garden grow, this year?