GARDEN TRIAGE

If it ever seems like your garden changes very slowly, just leave it for a couple weeks in the middle of summer and see what it looks like when you get back.

Although I do this (rarely for this long, however) every year, it never ceases to amaze me how much the garden changes in what seems like a short period of time. Of course the average temperature increased by about 15 degrees and we had several good rainfalls while I was gone, so it was optimal growing conditions.

That means that I came home to a pretty overgrown situation. Fortunately I got home with a couple hours of gardening time left in the day (laundry can wait), so I was able to deal with the most dire situations. It was garden triage time.

Weeds have grown amazingly well and lots of plants need deadheading, but that is part of more finely tuned gardening. What I needed to do was quickly assess the areas that were most in need of assistance.

The cardoon was badly in need of water but it will perk up.

The first task was watering. Because of the rain, most of the garden was well hydrated, but the beds alongside the house and the containers were in desperate need of a drink. We have great dogsitters who do their best when it comes to the garden but I want them to focus on the dogs. And Mr. Much More Patient, who made a brief stop home last week, apparently does not follow the head gardener's very explicit watering instructions.

The cardoon was a droopy mess, as were the verbena in the large container by the front door. The cardoon will be fine, but I may have to prune out the floppy verbena. No worries, it will send up new flowers in no time.

The dahlias alongside the house were very unhappy. I gave them all big drinks and they perked up but I hate to stress a plant that should be focusing on flowering.

The dahlia in back was droopy and unhappy and the nasturtiums are attempting to take over the world.

In other areas of the garden, the immediate danger to some plants was not related to hydration, rather smothering from other runaway growers. Garden triage is no time for delicate pruning. I just went in there and hacked away the offending parts of plants. I will go back later to neaten that up, but for now a hack will do.

How did a weed get that big, that quickly?

More nasturtiums staging a garden coup, but the castor bean plants are doing really well and I love them.

The window box, which was dry as a bone, is a total mess. After it gets rehydrated I'll have to do some reassessing.

There's nothing neat about this kind of gardening. There's no time to grab the wheelbarrow to collect prunings and pullings. I just made piles around the garden and I'll go back later to clean up.

Speaking of coups, the goji berry plants are completely out of control. And there's  poppy. There are so many random poppies around!

Anyone need some parsley?

Official pea tester.

In the vegetable garden, which is not receiving the bulk of my attention this year and is worse for it, it's a little wild. I enjoyed eating the first peas (yes, I'm just now getting peas) as did my canine assistant, Rita. The parsley is insane and I hacked at that without even trying to save any of it. There was just no time for that. There's plenty for me and the rest of the town to eat.

The tomatoes have serious issues. I have a single cordon system going, but most of the tomatoes grew 18 inches or more while I was gone, so the system has gone to pieces. Not sure what I'm going to do to straighten that situation out but it definitely requires some attention.

There are a lot of good things happening in the garden as well. The chive hedge, which I cut back right before I left, is already regrown and looking great.

The sweet peas are starting to bloom and they are so lovely!

'Niobe' clematis looks great.

The circle garden is pretty nutty, but I think this picture shows that sometimes a riot of color can work out just fine.

The garden will require many hours of work over the next week or so and that's OK, I missed my time there. Being away from the garden is a good way to realize just how important those mini gardening sessions that occur when you're drinking your coffee or a cocktail really are.


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Don't look now but winter's coming

I was born and raised in Wisconsin, and other than a brief stint down under, I have lived in this state for my entire life. If you're not familiar Wisconsin, you probably associate the state with three things: cheese, the Green Bay Packers and cold weather. It's no coincidence that these are the first things that come to mind when you think of Wisconsin.

So how is it that every year winter sort of catches me by surprise? I have been dragging my feet a little bit on the garden clean up. All the containers are cleaned out and put away and I cut back almost all the perennials (unlike other years I decided to cut back almost everything in fall, even though it's said to be better for your plants to let them stand, to lighten my work load in spring). But I haven't been good about caging some of the trees and shrubs that I like to give a little more protection to (either from the deer or from the weather). For some reason I kept thinking, "Oh, I'll just wait for a warmer weekend day for that."

Seeing the snowflakes fly outside my office window on Monday was a good sign that my plan was flawed. But waking up Tuesday morning to snow still on the ground was proof.

Usually we get plenty of flurries that kind of make it look like you're in a snow globe but nothing really sticks until very late November or early December. For the first snowfall to stick to the ground was a bit disconcerting.

When I left for work Tuesday morning, it was 23 degrees outside and this is what it looked like in my yard.

The Limelight hydrangea flowers are all dry now, but I sort of like to let them stand over winter for a bit of interest.

The cardoon in the corner finally succumbed to the weather. This was my first year growing cardoons and I'll definitely plant them again. What a great architectural plant with beautiful gray-blue foliage.

If you're looking for some more information on how to put the garden to bed, lots of bloggers have written excellent posts about it. Heather at New House New Home offered her to-do list here, Margaret's monthly garden chores list is always great, but her November list is especially good and here are some of my very own tips for winterizing the garden.

Looks like I'm going to need some gloves to finish up the last of the work in the garden. And I'm not talking about gardening gloves.

The evolving window box

I followed my own advice this weekend and spent a good amount of time in the garden, although all I accomplished was a lot of weeding and a little bit of planting. There is still tons to do. I hope the weather hangs in there awhile, even though the first day of fall really felt like the first day of fall to me. Beautiful and sunny with bright blue skies, but it got downright cold around 3:30 p.m. Mr. Much More Patient even turned the heat on before I threatened to chop his hand off if he touches the thermostat again before mid-October.

There wasn't too much exciting to report from my garden chores,  but I will say that all those zinnia seeds I threw in the garden certainly seem to be happy. The garden looks a bit messy right now but it's not lacking in color, that's for sure.

I will write more on my first experience in growing cardoons some other time, but of the three I planted, this one is loving life the most. It is huge, at least 4 feet high and wide and it is in the least amount of sun of any of them, which is surprising to me. It's still mostly sunny, but you can see when I snapped this picture in the afternoon it was already in shade.

Watering continues, especially in this area where the cedar tree came down and everything is newly planted this year. I've found that the single best thing you can do to ensure that new plants survive the winter is to make sure they are well watered before they go dormant.

The window box is rather ridiculous now, it is so overgrown but I sort of like it. This was certainly the most interesting window box planting I've done and perhaps the most successful, depending on how you define that term.

This photo was taken July 7, at least three or more weeks after it was planted. You can tell it was a cool start to summer because there really wasn't much happening at this point.

This was taken August 21 and boy do I wish I had turned off the light in the kitchen before I took it. If the nasturtiums (which were planted WAY late) were a little bigger in this picture I think I would say that hands down this would be my favorite phase of this planting.

This is what it looked like this weekend. You can see that it has essentially turned into a study in foliage, as there is little left to see of the Supertunia Indigo Charm and the Superbena Peachy Keen. Interestingly though, I think this is the best I've had a window box look this late in the season. It's not really what I had originally intended, but I don't mind it, really. I'm really happy with the Blue Mohawk grass in the background and I think I will do that again in the future.

What do you think? Which is your favorite look or are none of these your cup of tea? Did you work in the garden this weekend?