Blowin' in the Wind

Rutgers Gardens is sponsoring a photo contest this fall. It’s limited to amateur photographers. Photos must be taken between January 1 and September 10, 2010. Only one entry can be submitted in each of the three categories: plants, wildlife and people. I don’t do anything with a heartbeat, so I may only be able to enter one photo if I don’t get a good butterfly or bee photo.

I have been so busy in the greenhouse so far this year that I haven’t had time to take any photos at the Gardens. Yesterday, I found myself with some time, so I took a quick walk around. Quick, because the wind was blowing so hard that taking photos was nearly impossible.

I can compensate for a little bit of movement, but when my subjects are being blown completely out of the frame, there’s nothing I can do.

In spite of the dire conditions, I did manage to get two decent photos.

The sky was a gorgeous blue. I took a lot of pictures of plants silhouetted against it. Just for fun, I turned my camera upwards and took a picture of just the sky.

When I downloaded it at home, I burst out laughing. It screams "Windows98", doesn’t it?

This is the first photo that I took yesterday.

I love how it came out. The flower is past its prime but has such an interesting shape.

Next weekend is Rutgers Day . Rutgers Gardens will be selling plants at the event. Look for me between noon and 4 pm. I’ll be the one in the straw hat selling herbs.

See you there!

Saturdays in the Greenhouse

The Flower House

The Vegetable House

The Cold Frame

The two new greenhouses at Rutgers Gardens went into production this year. Gone are the days of not enough room to work, not enough room on the mist table, not enough room for all the plants. The old, small greenhouse is now used to house tropicals being overwintered while the new, larger greenhouses are used to raise plants for sale or for use in the various beds around the Gardens.

With more space available, we are able to grow more plants. This year’s Spring Flower Fair will be our biggest plant sale ever.

Photos taken with my Blackberry Storm

Blooming in My Garden

The Jack Frost brunnera has become a handsome plant. It is worth every penny that I paid for it.

There used to be daffodils there. Probably if I looked a little harder, I could find them. Luckily, they were free Thalia daffs. There are larger, more established clumps in the Purple Garden and in front of the shed. These are lunaria that have reseeded themselves despite my best efforts to collect all the seeds. The rosebush is Seven Sisters. Obviously, it likes this spot.

A note on daffodils: whereas tulips and hyacinths rarely last more than one year, daffodils have always done well for me, increasing in number every year. The exception seems to be pink daffodils. I have noticed that the pink daffodils that I planted in the Entry Garden fall 2006 have steadily decreased in number each year.

Saturdays in the Greenhouse

After an exhausting day ridding the greenhouse of vermin, Rutger took a snooze in the catnip.

Photo taken with my Blackberry Storm

More Wild Weather

The forecast was for rain this weekend and I was looking forward to working in the greenhouse. I love working in the greenhouse when it rains. I love the warm humidity and growing plants. I love the sound of rain gently drumming on the roof and sides.

While the predictions were for heavy rain and possible flooding, I’m quite certain that there was no mention of gale force winds. Working in the greenhouse yesterday felt like being in a Hollywood blockbuster disaster movie. The wind howled. The plastic covering flapped. The supports bent. Water flooded in under the doors. And then the lights went out. Queue the dramatic music.

It was late afternoon and good time to go home. My usual 20 minute ride turned into a 45 minute odyssey as I desperately tried to find a road into Middlesex that wasn’t flooded. I finally ended up driving to Dunellen and then taking Rte 28 west into Middlesex. I live on that side of town and knew that it wouldn’t be flooded.

Then it was a quick dinner and shower and, you guessed it, off to work for my final nightshift. I gave myself an hour to get there knowing that Rte 22 regularly floods in the area of Scotch Plains. I managed to get as far as Watchung before being detoured off of 22. The traffic was heavy so I went the other way up the mountain to Rte 78.

Rte 78 has a posted speed limit of 65 mph. New Jersey drivers consider speed limits as minimum speeds, rather than maximum speeds, so you can imagine my surprise to find the traffic crawling along at 40 mph. The driving rain made visibility almost nil. I exited in Summit and inched my way back down the mountain through gushing streams of water and downed tree branches, arriving at my office in Westfield exactly 59 minutes after leaving my house.

Then it was hours of listening to the building groan in the wind while worrying about my basement. Water had begun to seep in as I was leaving. I have a sump pump, but if the water comes in too fast, it overwhelms the sump pump which then shuts down and I’m forced to bail until I can get ahead of it and get the sump pump working again. My concern was that I wouldn’t be home all night and if the sump pump shut down, my basement would flood. My furnace and hot water heater are elevated a few inches off the floor but much more rain than that was expected. Plus what was coming off the mountain.

For those of you who don’t live in New Jersey, Middlesex is located at the foot of the Watchung Mountains. Rain and melting snow drain straight down the mountain and into my basement. Hence my familiarity with sump pumps and bailing. And, no, I wasn’t told about this when I bought the house. In fact, there were people living in the basement when I bought it so how was I supposed to know that the basement regularly gets water in it?

Thanks to the time change, I left work an hour early. Which was negated by the hour it took me to get home. Rte 22 was still blocked, so it was back up to Rte 78 and then creep down the mountain through gushing streams of water and downed tree branches. I arrived home to the beautiful sound of the sump pump still doggedly working away.

Not much sleep today. I was up every two hours, checking on the basement. So far, so good. But I think it’s time to move. Thanks to global warming, there will be more and more severe storms. I’m tired of losing sleep and bailing out my basement.

Spring Has Sprung

The calendar may say it’s still winter, but my garden is started to burst into spring. These cheerful crocus greeted me this morning when I came home from work.

Willowwood Arboretum

I love revisiting gardens. There is always something more to see. This is especially true when visiting the same gardens during different seasons. I had an opportunity last April to go to Willowood Arboretum, which I had first visited a few years ago during the month of September.

First, the Photo of the Day. There were two of them this time.

Look! It’s not centered. I’m making progress on that front.

I love this photo because it is up to the viewer to decide what is the subject. Is the picture about the flowers? Is it about the gate? Is it about the ivy-covered stones?

Visiting Willowwood during the month of April when the gardens were just starting to come alive, gave me a chance to examine the bones of the garden as well as the functional and decorative objects in the landscape.

I don’t recall seeing this water pump last time probably because it was overwhelmed by the shrub and other plants and flowers that captured my attention instead. The sunny daffodils made this little vignette really stand out.

This house grabbed my camera and wouldn’t let go.

I don’t recall this feature from my last visit. It looks like a perfect spot for containers. And check out the great stonework.

Also a contender for the Photo of the Day.

When I looked at the photos I took on my first trip to Willowwood, with the exception of the gate, there is not a single picture of any of these things. I didn’t “see” them through the mature vegetation and colorful flowers.

You can see all of the photos of my trip to Willowwood on Flickr.

Sole Survivor

I had this great idea last year as the much-anticipated Pinetree Gardens catalog arrived. Instead of just ordering their luscious red zinnias to be planted in the hummingbird part of my “Butterfly/Hummingbird Garden”, I would also order zinnias in orange, yellow and white.

I would create waves of color. The red zinnias, as usual, would surround the hummingbird feeder. Next to them on either side would be the orange zinnias, followed by the yellow zinnias and ending with the white ones. Very Gertrude Jekyll.

I should know by now that any time I have one of my “great ideas”, it should be duly noted but never, ever put into practice.

Two rabbits moved into my backyard this year. Initially I wasn’t alarmed, having already dealt with a cotton-tail attack years ago. A truce of sorts was eventually reached. They stopped digging up and eating my tulip bulbs and I stopped planting tulip bulbs.

Tulips are a waste anyways. They look great the first spring and then are never seen again. I concentrate on bulbs that not only return every year, but also multiply, spreading color everywhere. Snowdrops, crocuses, daffodils, grape hyacinths. Can’t beat ‘em.

So when a couple of Peter Rabbit’s relatives showed up this spring, I allowed myself to think “how cute!”. For about 30 seconds. Which is how long it took me to discover that all of the tiny annual seedlings interspersed among the perennials were really a Bunny Buffet.

I start all of my annuals from seed. I fill in the gaps between the perennials with them, creating little spots of color. This year, I had only gaps. The seedlings never made it past their first set of true leaves.

Those waves of color in the Butterfly/Hummingbird Garden? Never happened. I planted the zinnia seeds, was happy to see most of them germinate and thrilled when the seedlings made it to their first set of true leaves. Then I never saw them again.

Literally overnight, every single plant but one disappeared, victims of the voracious rabbits. Perhaps mocking me, they allowed one zinnia to grow. Appropriately it is white, the color of mourning in most Asian cultures.

Blooming in My Garden

The first daffodils of spring.

Signs of Life

If you look closely, you can see that the gardens are beginning to stir.

Lilac

Bronze Fennel

Cyclamen

Chrysanthemum

Columbine

Spring Surprise

I started out my wintersowing with a lot of containers, a lot of seeds and a lot of good intentions. But life has a way of happening and I always seemed to be too busy to plant containers. I finally threw in the towel during the last week in February. I had planted a grand total of “only” 56 containers.

March came in like a lion and we had snow last week. This week has been much warmer but still too early for anything to have sprouted. Or so I thought. Just for fun, I peeked into the containers. And saw green! I got out my spreadsheet (no one is surprised that I have a spreadsheet, right?) to see what was coming up:

Tall Fernleaf Fiddleneck

Heirloom Poppy

Valerian

German Chamomile

Verbena bonariensis

Wallflower

Stock

Lavender Love

One of the advantages of keeping records is being able to identify plants years after their introduction to my gardens. I know from my “Fall 2006 Bulb Order” spreadsheet, that these cuties are Crocus tommasinianus. And from the zero in the price column, I know that they were freebies. What I didn’t remember was that they were billed as “Species Mixed Crocus”.


When I see the word “mixed” in a description, I expect more than one color, don’t you?


Regardless, their cheerful lavender blooms are welcome after a long, dreary winter.

Color at Last

Just when I thought I couldn’t stand the browns and grays of winter any longer, a spot of color has appeared. Crocuses at last. Spring is on the way.

Finally . . .

All of the mild weather has made me hungry for blossoms. I was thrilled to spot these snowdrops today. I thought it was an early sighting until I started checking prior years on my old blog. Last year, I had snowdrops in full bloom a week earlier.

Ordering Seeds OldRoses Style

One of my fondest wishes has been granted. Seed catalogs no longer start arriving in October. Instead, the first catalog, Pinetree Garden Seeds, one of my favorites, arrived in the middle of November, then there was a lull of several weeks before the rest of my favorites began to show up. After years of trial and error, I have narrowed down the catalogs that I consistently use to ones that offer seed that I want to grow and have good germination rates. And the winners are: Pinetree Garden Seeds (also the winner in the Most Attractive Packaging category), Select Seeds (which now carries a selection of heirloom bulbs), Seeds of Change (love their offerings of herbs and native plants), Park Seed and Burpee.

I always tell people that I may work in IT, but I’m not a geek. I prefer to think of myself as a gardener with computer skills. I have to admit that I am a little geeky when it comes to ordering seeds. After weeks of careful perusal, I write out my order from each catalog. This takes several days because of overlap between catalogs. I check each one for the best buy on the seeds that are offered by more than one company.

Next comes the geeky part, the spreadsheets. I create a workbook for each planting season, spring and fall, each year. Every workbook has a Master List, listing every seed (spring) or bulb (fall) ordered that season followed by worksheets for each catalog the seed/bulbs were ordered from, followed by worksheets for each garden bed. All of this effort tells me what I’ve ordered, from which catalog I’ve ordered it and where I’m going to plant it. It also helps me to see if I’ve forgotten to order something.

I know that this sounds like an awful lot of work, but I highly recommend it. I have workbooks going back to Fall 2005 and I’ve discovered some Fun Facts:

Fun Fact #1: Despite the fact that my seed orders vary in content each year, they are consistent in number. I ordered 68 types of flowers and herbs in 2006, 2007 and 2008. This year ended that streak. I ordered 70 kinds of flowers and herbs.

Fun Fact #2: Pinetree Garden Seeds has moved from last to first place. I ordered 5 packets of seed from them in 2006, 10 in 2007, 11 in 2008 and 23 in 2009. I increased the number of zinnia colors that I ordered from them this year not to mention their fabulous prices on my other favorites.

Fun Fact #3: Select Seed, my favorite source of heirloom flowers held the top spot in 2006, 2007 (24 packets each) and 2008 (27 packets) but fell to third place this year with 16 packets. They have begun to carry fewer of my antique favorites and more “New Introductions”.

Fun Fact #4: While the number of cosmos varietes has steadily declined over the years from 4 to 1, the number of zinnias has held steady at four.

Fun Fact #5: I only grew one marigold for years, the variety changing from year to year. That streak was broken last year when I grew two kinds of marigolds. I have ordered the same two varieties this year.

Starting last year, I added height and any special growing instructions. The growing instructions are helpful in pinpointing good candidates for wintersowing (“needs cold stratification”) or reasons for germination failure (“needs light to germinate”).

Then in a final burst of geekiness, I place my orders online and blog the experience.