The Fairy Gardener: Of Fish, and Graves, and Waxy Bells...

by Jim Edminster, Chicago, IL

Let's start this glorious May Day with a seemingly gloomy item from the NY Times:  A woman, Katrina Spade, is trying to start a composting business.  For human bodies.  She has titled her enterprise the Urban Death Project & estimates the whole process would cost about $2500, much less than any burial.  Think about this a bit - I've kidded for years that I wanted to die on the dance floor & be put in my compost heap.  Cemeteries are overcrowded and even crematoria chapels (with niches for ashes in urns) are becoming too full.  Ms Spade will return about 3 cubic feet of perfectly good dirt to the bereaved for the garden or forest or park.  Dust to dust you all.

A couple more sad stories:  Horticulture magazine reports some (unlabeled) flats of flowers have been sprayed with pesticides that attract & poison bees.  Don't plant Callery (aka Bradford) pears anymore:  they have weak crotches which break easily & worse - when blooming they smell like something nasty your dog has rolled in.  (These are ornamental non-bearing plants.)

I hereby establish the "Ivy League Sub-section of the Guerilla Gardening Society."  Lately people have been putting up large windowless, unornamented red brick buildings in the hood.  These buildings need something.  Ivy comes to mind.  My house has ivy & it has ivy berries.  These berries seem to be flying to the bases of these buildings.  Imagine!

Garden notes off the top of my head - I've been planting some spring bulbs & plants.  My yard is fairly dense so I've marked their burial (this is a theme in this essay) spots with bright bendable plastic drinking straws.  The yard looks like it's full of little periscopes.  I've planted 3 packages of borage which is a foot tall herb with fuzzy jade green leaves & bright blue flowers loved by bees ( & it's not poisonous!)  I moved a trial geranium in & out of the house 3 times before it stayed warm enough for it outside.  My wonderful tenant, Brit, (helped by her white husky, Nova) helped me haul my water lilies, cannas, dahlias & amaryllis out of the basement onto the patio.  I will have to pull MANY yellow jewelweed babies out (because their parents loved the yard & multiplied!)  I've never planted a red tulip in my life but a third of my yard's tulips are red.  All my fish are having a good time in the pond.  I have an actual bed frame in the yard (for a flower bed, of course) & I found 2 old cracked but handsome chairs for plant stands.  This garden is going to be a real garden room.  Just took my sasquatch out to put on the garden path - he's my green apeman I found a couple of years ago.  Found some hardy primroses to plant along my garden path . .I have a 3 foot wide, 40 feet long stretch of dirt between my sidewalk and my neighbor's house - it has many blank spots in it.  I'm going hogwild and planting every color of heuchera (coral bells) that I can find in those spots.  I need more shooting stars along the path and where a small oak-leaved hydrangea passed away (we return to the theme) I'm going to put a yellow wax bells (Kirengoshima) as soon as I can find.  

Fairy Gardener: Buying, Buying, Scratch, Bought!

Buying, Buying, Scratch, Bought.

by James Edminster, Chicago, IL

Courtesy K. van Bourgondien & Sons

Trotting off to The Chalet, the giant plant nursery and retail plant nursery & garden center in Wilmette, IL, my garden club was met by Tony Fulmer, the head horticulturist who's been on the job there nearly 30 years. Here are some of the tidbits I caught during his lecture:  snow mold (which appears on some lawn grasses in spring) is ugly but harmless - just do a light raking;  voles, those little mouse-like critters can occasionally girdle (cut the bark) of some small trees & shrubs but are basically not too bothersome;  for salt spray from roads (which can spread up to 300 feet) one can apply gypsum which chemically ties up the salt's sodium;  for lawns the best time to revamp is late summer/early fall;  seed lawns in early spring;  don't bury lawn seed - let it fall into minor cracks in the soil;  fertilize lawns around Labor Day & Halloween;  commercial fertilizer's 3 numbers = nitrogen, phosphorous, & potassium;  roses DO need fertilizer;  Sluggo is a non-toxic slug bait;  sulphur is a natural black spot (a rose fungus) cure;  if south-facing beds of groundcovers brown out cover them with evergreen boughs;  put sulphur on soil for blue (even permanently blue) hydrangeas but don't apply it over mulch which ties it up;  trees need a bark-based or wood-based mulch;  don't use mushroom compost - it's too high in salts & can damage plants.

In making my spring plant order I'm mainly using the K. van Bourgondien & Sons, Inc. catalog.  This year this catalog seems to be somewhat cheaper.  I've used my old tried-and-true method of ordering:  on the order form I write down everything I could possibly want.  Then I go back and cross out half of the total.  I settled on 3 Raspberry Sundae hostas (red/purple stems) 9) (see above);  5 Brasilia lilies (white/pink);  5 Vice Versa lilies (pink/yellow);  5 Golden Stone lilies (yellow/red);  3 Martagon lilies (purple); 25 Blue Magic Dutch Iris;  5 Arum Italicums (orange berries);  3 Astranias Star of Magic (purple/red).  I'm also getting a sun sensitive gazing ball from another catalog.

Here's this month's recipe borrowed from The Old Farmer's Almanac:  Kale Salad - Ingredients = one big bunch of green-leaf kale (to make about 8 cups of thin sliced leaves), 1 tablespoon minced shallots, half cup chopped walnuts, half cup crumbled feta cheese, half cup chopped dried cranberries, 2 tablespoons rice-wine vinegar, 1 tablespoon of lemon or lime juice, 6 tablespoons of olive oil, salt & pepper to taste.  To do:  wash de-stemmed kale, slice in half inch strips.  Mix dry ingredients.  Mix wet ingredients & pour over rest.  Serve.

Summer vacation is coming.  Here are 10 of the best Botanic Gardens in this country.  Go see 'em:  1) Longwood Gardens, Kennett Square, Pa. 2) Bartram's Garden, Philadelphia, Pa.  3)  Denver Botanic Gardens, Denver, Colo. 4)  Fairchild Tropical Botanic Garden, Coral Gables, Fla.  5)  Huntington Botanical Garden, San Marino, Calif.  6)  International Peace Garden, Dunseith, N.D.  7)  Desert Botanical Garden, Phoenix, Ariz.  8)  Missouri Botanical Garden, St. Louis, Mo.  9)  National Tropical Botanical Garden, 4 locations in Hawaii & one in Coconut Grove, Fla.  10)  U.S. Botanical Garden in Washington, D.C.

The Fairy Gardeners has decided to collect  & promulgate various gardening blogs.  Here are 3:  hortiholic.com  (this is Chalet's Tony Fulmer's blog);  The Jackass Gardener ( a Chicagoan's blog) and trust4781.blogspot.com  (Warning - I may be writing for this Indiana based gardening, re-cycling semi-Amish blog)

Well, hallelujah - my 13 goldfish over wintered just fine outside.  Snow drops & purple & yellow crocus are blooming.  Tulips and daffs are above ground.  Found a large bag of still green pine branches so I cut them up for mulch.  For the obsessive among you - cat, dog & people hair is compostable or even useful in mulch (it may deter some critters).  For that matter fingernails are compostable - I clip mine over houseplants.  I don't have to go far - there are 7 in my small bathroom.

See you at the next garden club meeting at the Center on Halsted!

K. van Bourgondien & Sons 

Fairy Gardener: Lords-and-Ladies of Spring

 by James Edminster

PHOTO: Arum italicum courtesy Wikimedia.org

  Deep as the snow is I still have Lords-and-Ladies growing green under the snow, (You may know them as Arum italicum; they have mottled dark green arrow-headed shaped leaves & orange berries.  They like my yard so I'm planting lots more.)  Some off-the-top-of-my-head garden tidbits:  I left my goldfish outside in the pond (with an icemelter and a circulating pump and so far no floating piscine bodies.)  Am I the only one smelling Spring in the air?  I go outside to cardinals singing and there are little green shoots at the edges of the snow banks.  The grand total of bulbs I planted was 750.  We'll see how many come up.  (For procrastinators there are still perennial bulbs which can be planted in Spring - primarily lilies and alliums.)  You want a free scarecrow line for the garden?  If you have pets many cans of pet food have pull tabs.  Save and wash the tops & tie them to a line - birds don't like them.  Don't use cocoa mulch if you have outdoor cats or let your dog use the yard.  Chocolate is poisonous to them.  Pots of elephant ears make great punctuation marks around the yard - sun or shade, just water them adequately.  Someone gives you a baby shrub or an offshoot of a perennial - stick them in fancy pot with good dirt & don't plant them out till they're bigger.  New plants to try:  "Spring Symphony" foamflowers (pink/shade);  masterwort (Astrania - pink/part shade);  Salvia Cardona(sun/purple).  "Marcesent" means when plant leaves wither but stay on the plant in winter.  Many oaks do this.  (There is a very fine row of fastigate [means "upright, like a Lombardy poplar] oaks near my favorite bookstore.  I HAD to correct someone who thought they were diseased.)

    Here's this month's recipe in honor of my home state of Kansas:  Sunflower slaw - head of cabbage shredded (red is fun), 5 carrots shredded, can of crushed pineapple, small 3 or 4 oz. pkg. roasted sunflower kernels, 3/4 cup mayonnaise, 3 Tb. lemon juice, 3 Tb. orange juice.  Combine dry ingredients in bowl;  combine dressing ingredients & pour over rest.  Chill & serve.

    Now is the time to dig out that garden map you promised yourself to do for the last set of garden resolutions so you can remember the blank spots, the flat-out failures, the overly successful & those species you've always longed for, since the garden catalogs are here!  Time to order!  Ahem, I suppose I could get all superior and show you the map I did make (really!) except .... I can't find it.  So we're all in the same boat which reminds me of one of the most poignant garden stories I ever heard:  a couple who had been married many years found that the wife had incurable cancer.  One of her favorite winter activities had been ordering new plants for their garden.  It was this time of year and she was due to die in several months - her husband found her in their den ordering plants as usual & asked her incredulously what she was doing.  She answered calmly that she was plotting the resurrection.  So all of you plot your plot's new beginnings & we'll see you all at the next garden club meeting!