Jane’s beautiful little espaliered apple tree is in: it looks like one of Tolkien’s elvish trees, three branches on a side, and centered on the back (barn red) fence. It has a Gravenstein graft, a Fuji, a Gala, Yellow Delicious, Yellow Transparent, and a Red Macintosh. And it’s going to be a gorgeous backdrop, beyond a freestanding arch with clematis, at the back of what will someday be a little rill of water leading down to a secondary miniature pond.
We got some fancy juniper for that major thoroughfare-side bed: we want something that survives the shadow and chemistry of hemlocks, and that we don’t have to tend if we just keep the water going. Jane thinks putting a couple of our extra firebushes in there will be nice, too, and I agree.
We’ve got a pink magnolia (it was on special) and Jane’s dogwood. I wanted a Dawn Redwood, but they are, well, they’re a redwood, and they’re tall, like 100 feet. They have the most interesting foliage, and trunk, kind of a red shag, and they’re a deciduous tree, shedding their needles in fall, and coming on with brilliant green new growth in spring. I like them for their antiquity…as I’d still like an araucaria (monkey puzzle tree) —but it grows so slowly, and is spendy for such a tiny stick. Dinos would be practically at home with those two. But alas, they’re big and they’re messy. We also had a more favorable look at a nicely priced Korean silver fir, but we were set back when Jane brushed a branch and got a thick cloud of pollen. That’s daunting. But they are gorgeous. Our weeping contorted birch is coming on nicely with leaves.
The next step, we think, will be digging 6’x18″ pit in the front lawn for a ‘dry’ pond, ie, there’s water in it, but there are rocks, a lot of rock, and the water stays invisible under the rocks until it comes out the fountain and falls back in again. That is beside the blue spruce and the weeping birch and the dogwood and magnolia. That will be the west of the lawn. The east—well, we are just planning on a dry streambed (really no water in this one) and mulch, my iris, and what else we’re not sure.
I’m sure we’ll have ideas for that side when we get there. I didn’t mention the retaining walls; but we’re going to have a pretty classic juniper with pale tips ‘fall’ down from lawn level over the retaining wall edge, and a couple of really frilly junipers as the ‘gateway’ up the front steps to the garden/woods, which will require very little water, and no more mowing.
And once done, it’s done, and we’ll be able to do all the OTHER things we want to do—the ship models we have yet to build, some of the internal fixup we want to do—maybe Jane will get back to her cross-stitch and I might warp the loom again. Leisure could be good. Especially hobbies that don’t involve mud. Right now my hands feel like old paper.
Dawn Redwoods are wonderful trees! There is a small grove at the national arboretum that was planted in the 50’s. They are 70-100 feet tall.
We planted a Metasequoia at our first house and at the one we’re in now (the second). Our current tree was planted in 96, and is about 30 feet tall and over 1 foot in diameter at the base. It started at around 5 feet. I suspect they might like you climate more.
Being crowded by a Metasequoia is worth it, I’d say plant one and enjoy ! I’ll post a picture later to add more pressure 😉
I spent most of the afternoon outside mucking in the garden too. My semi-dwarf antique apple tree is blooming: Roxbury Russet, Fameuse and.. oh dear… I forget the other two archaic apples grafted to it. It’s from Miller Gardens, an excellent mail order garden company in upstate New York. Anything that survives there is definitely going to survive in the seacoast of Massachusetts! Frustratingly, the Northern Spy we put in at the same time (about 5 years ago) has never bloomed and doesn’t look like it will this year either. i put in some small plants (spring-blooming, native phlox, some orange mint, two day lilies and some golden Japanese forest grass (Hakonlochoa or something like that, it is called).
A dawn redwood would be lovely: think of the dinosaurs you could invite over to play! What I really want, though, is a wide enough front yard (or back, for that matter) that I could plant two chestnut trees and admire their lovely candles of flowers in the spring.
Where did you get your espalier? That wouldn’t take up any extra room (she says, dreaming of squeezing in just one more fruit tree…).
The apple tree came from a little shop called Spokane Boys. I don’t think they ship, but they have a raft of them.
I mean, I have no more room for 3-d trees in the round, but maybe I could squeeze in a two-dimensional espalier against the chimney… if I removed the antique rose bushes from my grandmother’s camp, and the Russian sage and the irises and the…. Ah well, but oh to have such a cute fruit tree of many colors/apples.
I tried to post this this AM, and apparently LJ ate it.
Don’t forget to label those branches. Friends who had produced a similar tree – doing their own grafting – assumed that they would remember which branches were important. Several years later, when pruning time came around, they discovered that they didn’t!
Butchers grease pencil lasts really well out in the weather.
Better than any of the so called permanent markers that the garden stores sell.
oops sorry, realise that I got posted below. Mercury is retrograde so I am told.
One wonders if you could have a river similar to Ari’s in Regenesis, you wouldn’t have to worry about it evaporating if it were a closed system. Unfortunately, though, all sorts of other problems would surface in such a system. Your way is better.
I had a house once with a huge concrete floor—and a small pie-slice shaped pond in the foundations of the next room, which gave me the idea of cutting an 8″ channel in the big room, hither and yon, waterproofing it, and laying plexi over it, and having fish—couldn’t be too expensive, right? There are guys who cut channels in concrete for a living…right? Waterproofing concrete—there’s a paint-on waterproofing, piece of cake. Plexi—well, I hadn’t priced plexi yet. I was younger, and stupid, and it was a fixer-upper (to say the least.)
But then I thought of algae—and decided that would be like, work.
I figure by 2400 AD we will have figured out how to control algae…somewhere AFTER we figure out FTL.
In my childhood in Japan we once visited a hotel near Fuji that was famous for its ofuros (hot baths) that were hot spring fed. One of them had walls and ceiling of glass brick with gold fish swimming through. They called that one the dream pool. I fantasized for years about having a room like that. It was amazing to lie submerged in the bath watching fish swim overhead.
Personally, I believe we’ll someday get FTL, but never figure out how to control algae. After all, they were here before we were, and they’ve got millions of years, if not billions, more experience at surviving than we have. Plexi isn’t cheap any longer. And, you’ll be wanting plexi that’s quite thick if you plan to walk on it. Then you have to worry about scratches, unless there’s a no shoes rule in place.
For digging, are you using a regular shovel? If so, does it have a hollow back below the ferrule for the handle? If so, mud will stick to that and make the shovel much heavier when you lift it. They do sell shovels that have that hollow filled in with metal. It is a little heavier at first, but since the mud doesn’t stick to it, the end result is that you are lifting less weight, and you aren’t constantly trying to knock the mud off the back every time you lift a load up to the wheelbarrow. If I’m not mistaken, if you spray the shovel with something slick, like Pam, or WD-40, it will help, although I also think it will eventually have to be resprayed. My last can of Pam virtually exploded on me from the spray tip, so it’s been “recycled”.
Never would have thought of Pam.
Washington soil comes in 2 varieties, and we have both: so light you can shovel it from a side attack, with arm strength alone—but God is not so merciful: that sort is usually studded with rounded glacial rock, so you first have to rake the rocks out, by freeing it up small spadeful at a go. The second sort is compacted with fine rock gravel, not quite sand, so you have to take the spade to it, but you can never quite sort the rock component out, so it will re-compact the first time it rains heavily.
Rocks once removed do not reproduce, but the ground produces more every spring. The earth just keeps giving and giving.
On the other hand, I’ve gardened in Oklahoma, too, where ancient ocean gumbo from a Permian shallows is literally a mile deep, red, from the Permian Extinction, and it comes in several flavors: pure clay, which can be fired for bricks or pots: the ancient native Americans’ pottery used it, and modern sculptors use it, and the Acme Brick company uses it, all unadulterated. If you try to walk across a clay bed you will slip and fall flat: it’s like oiled glass that squishes underfoot. It also stains. Permanently. Even skin takes on a week-long orange cast.
There’s sand-stone; that needs a pickaxe.
And there’s regular Oklahoma red dirt, which has no rocks in it, not for a mile down, but which with its admixture of clay can set brick-hard in a dry spell, with cracks as much as a foot deep; which is 11 on the ph scale, and which will starve some trees of iron. Native trees love it. Trying to shovel that is like trying to shovel sticky biscuit dough, hard to get a spade into it (the two-foot hop is one technique) and it has a powerful suction when you try to get the spade-ful out. A regular square shovel is impossible to use. I got quite adept with a mattock, in consequence, because you can peel a row of sod quite handily in that stuff, and doing it with the spade will kill you.
Needless to say I prefer Washington dirt. The sight of Oklahoma red still has an emotional tug, but I also remember what it’s like to garden in.
I have a flint nodule my father found in the west Texas red clay. It’s, yes, red. (There the clay was usually buried a bit, but it was still gumbo when wet, where it was exposed.)
WHOOPEE!! Deceiver is waiting fir me at the post office…….I will wait until the end of May to say anything more! 😆
Looks like the weather is clearing….hopefully will be able to take the last of the sassafras down tomorrow.
At the moment our Irises (on Okie soil and rock) are in full bloom. We don’t do anything to them and whack them off when the blooms are done.
Irises. I love the scent of them. And the colors. They, portulaca, and roses were my great successes in my Oklahoma gardens—they all thrive in that red soil…roses like an acidic mulch; but irises—just grow wherever you put them. And don’t ask much but an occasional division and re-setting to give them room. My favorite is my father’s favorite, old-fashioned Wabash, and I have one—somewhere. When we transplanted the iris bed I lost track of it, and I am waiting for it to bloom this year so I can tag it and give it a special place.
I was amazed and astounded by the yellow iris growing “wild” all over the Isle of Skye back in the 70s and 80s. Everywhere we drove there were bright yellow iris naturalized in ditches and along the roadsides. I had always thought of iris as being less hardy, but I guess anywhere you get a good freeze during the winter is iris country. Unfortunately, my garden in Arizona does not reliably freeze for a long enough stretch, and the iris bulbs rot in the soil or get attacked by native (and not so native) fauna and bugs.
that is probably the wild yellow iris, also called flag, a waterloving plant, Iris pseudacorus. not naturalised, perfectly natural all over britain and Ireland.
Yellow iris also grew on our little lake in Oklahoma City: it seems to be the throwback plant.
There is a way to manage iris in milder climes, and that is to upside-down V cut the leaves at about 6″, and hope. If that doesn’t work, you can also pull the plant, hang it in the garage rafters, and replant by October. Sometimes replanted iris won’t bloom the following year, but I’ve found if you get them in the ground with time to get established before cold weather, they may defy that prediction.
@ready4more, may I suggest that if you plant bulbs, you get some chicken wire, dig your hole, line it bottom and sides with the chicken wire, put in some soil, plant the bulb in the soil, cover with more soil until the hole is almost full, then put another piece of chicken wire across the top and fold it down so the end strands can loop through the wire in the ground. Native fauna can’t dig it out, can’t get to it, and it will send up its leaves and stems through the spaces in the chicken wire.
Clever! You could also leave two ‘handle’ twists for yanking their little butts collectively out of the ground come fall.
I’ve heard of people using the sturdier plastic baskets from markets. Also it’s possible to find plastic made-for-bulbs planting baskets. (Here in southern California, it’s gophers doing it. My mother had a story about seeing some plants shake and then drop several inches, having had the stem eaten out from under them.)
My parents told the exact same story, from their time on one of the hills around Los Angeles!
I can’t say that I have seen that myself, but I have to say that gophers have moved up my list to being one of the few pests I will actually try and kill. Although that’s a pain, because the hole you have to dig to set the traps does almost as much damage as the gopher. There’s a new repellant on the market called Gopher Scram that I am trying. Just put it out yesterday, and all I can say for sure is that this part of the label is definitely true: During the time of initial application, you may see increased gopher activity as the gopher becomes confused and attempts to leave the area. But we’ll see what happens with time. And it smells kind of nice, actually… spicy. Given that the ingredients are things like clove oil and some other spice oil, that’s not too odd.
I’ll try the wire, those pesky rabbits! My garage never gets cold enough. The garage door faces directly south and it gets sunlight all day long. Even without heating, it is generally the warmest place in the house. I’ve tried chilling the roots out in paper bags in the refrigerator as recommended by some gardening sites, but it just didn’t work. With all the travelling I do for work it is hard to nurture water-loving plants such as iris, in Arizona sand/gravel, even when you amend the heck out of the soil and have an irrigation system. I guess I have a purple thumb (as opposed to the grren variety) as far as iris goes. I have great success with trees and juniper-like shrubberies, but flowers?.. Not so much… And I have six palm trees, and 20 oleanders I have been trying to kill off for 20 years now but they just won’t go.
Regular iris (as opposed to Louisiana bog iris) are not particularly water-loving. Their roots would probably thank you for NOT watering. Around here (30″ rain/yr) the saying is to water your iris twice — the day you plant them and the next day — and then leave them alone. That is perhaps a SLIGHT exaggeration 😉 THey persist at old farmhouse sites long after the house is gone.
yes, they grow all over the place in Spain, which is pretty dry!
If you have the peel off lid from a coffee can or nuts can, cut it into long strips of the width you desire with scissors.
Fold in two lengthwise make a lengthwise slit and label it
with a pen, pressing hard enough to emboss the plant name.
Just wrap it around and run one end through the slit. The
Material is free meaning you paid for it already to get the
food.
Algae is easy. all you need to do is make it taste good. I’ve
eaten some stuff in Japan that tasted like it to me, but it
was in no danger of becoming a major crop.
One interesting thing I ran across, was Paul Stamets TED
lecture on how fungi make soil, this could be a solution
for Mojave or Sonoran desert gardeners. Once the Fungal mass
uses up its local nutrients it moves on leaving fertile soil
behind. Stamets seems to think this was the mechanism which
allowed plants to move onto the land in the beginning days.
In school I learned it was all mechanical action, but never
realized that the lithosphere is far too complex to have easy
explanations.
Speaking of algae and non-easy explanations, did anyone see the news about multi-cellular animals using photosynthesis? The quickest web reference is: http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/34824610/ns/technology_and_science-science/?GT1=43001
It’s actually a sea-slug, but it has incorporated genes from algae it has eaten and can go for months without further eating if exposed to sunlight. Also, it can pass down the photosynthetic genes to its offspring!
Green people, anyone? 😉
Maybe it is easier being green. 😉
More rain today, just enough to be annoying……at least it is cool enough so we aren’t growing mold and mildew………yet!
April has been so nice that I forget that it is still spring…..late daffodils are bountiful…not quite time to put the lime tree out.
Brings to mind the movie “Soylent Green” based on a Harry Harrison novel circa 60’s.
In this area (usual rainfall 10″-15″ a year) iris need to be watered occasionally. I had no problem with iris when I lived in DC, and no problem when I lived in Germany, and no problem when I lived in El Paso, TX. I just can’t seem to get iris to flourish in my yard. I think it’s a problem with too much heat and direct sunlight in my flower bed. Soil amendments are good, soil will support vegetables. Caleche layer starts about 18″ below the garden bed but has been chopped up in spots to let water drain down into aquifer. The iris are not sitting with their feet in water.
This has been the craziest spring in the last 30+ years in Arizona. We had measureable snow last week (Friday) and 80 degrees temperatures yesterday (Monday). Arizona normally gets its rainfall from late Nov to early Feb (gentle rains, cool weather, some misty days) and July – August (monsoonal downpours late afternoon on a daily basis). This year we’ve had cold soaking rains throughout the “winter”, snow in late April (still snow on the mountain peaks around us), high winds in April rather than March, no spring to speak of although the wildflowers have been putting on a colorful display. Maybe spring will occur next week. One can certainly tell El Nino is affecting southeastern Arizona.
I’m wondering about soil ph: http://ag.arizona.edu/pubs/garden/mg/soils/ph.html
Your high calcium carbonate may have something to do with it: I know that iris thrive in Oklahoma, where ph is as high, but it’s easily adjustable with mulch…not the same in calcium carbonate elevation. Just a thought.