GroHappy

Vacation from gardening, sort of

When it is February in Connecticut, there are few gardening tasks at hand as the soil is cold and the only thing that warms the soul is the prospect of new growth pushing through the ground in the next month or so. In the next week I will be starting flats of early greens and other vegetables. Flowers and warm-weather vegetables a few weeks later. As my horticultural activities are in stasis, I thought it was a good time to head down south where I can get a jump on a farmer’s tan and enjoy the already green landscape.

If we were having a spring-like winter up north, the south was experiencing a summer-like winter with temperatures in the mid-80s. The grass was a lush green, trees in full bloom and sun lovers in all manners of undress. The wind off the ocean felt warm with the slightest smell of seaweed.

So like a long dormant perennial I soaked up the sun. I was a plant, not a gardener. This would not last as eventually the siren song of working in a garden would prove to be too enticing.

One morning at my friend Brian’s house in the Florida Key’s, he mentioned that he needed some help cleaning out and cutting down vegetation around his fish pond, which had been depleted of fish by a resident frog and crab.  This sounded like a nice way to spend the morning so naturally I volunteered. At first I thought just a few small trees and bushes would need to be removed. When my friend got out the chain saw I realized that the job would become much larger.

When you live in the north you don’t realize that potentially invasive nature of a Southern garden. Like the ruins of Tikal or Chichén-Itzá if you stop cutting down foliage, it will quickly overrun your space. That is kind of what happened in my friend’s fish pond. He planted a couple of papyrus plants in his pond and within a few years, it had spread and taken over. An agave plant that was taken from a tiny houseplant was now the size of a small elephant with porcupine sharp spikes. Trees that started as sticks a few years back, shot up 10 feet high with tuffs of leaves on their tops shading everything below. And finally a neighbor's tree with spiked bark hung over the fence completing the darkening of this area.

It started simply enough with a few small trees being removed with little problem. It didn’t appear to be too hot and the prospect to work outside was appealing to me with my exposed snow-colored legs reflecting the sun like the White Sands in New Mexico. Soon I was up on a ladder cutting down limbs with a chain saw with sawdust falling in my eyes and beginning to coat my increasingly sweaty shirt. Within an hour my skin was covered with creamy, yellow dust that I hoped that I was not allergic to as it became pasty on my epidermis. You never know in the topics.

With each toppled branch came the opportunity to cut another. And another, And another. Little thorns were sticking in my arm like severed stingers from a swarm of angry bumblebees. Razor-like leaves etched fine lines in my legs and arms: the work of Nature’s tattooist.   I was a stinky, sweaty, bloody mess. It was great! Soon we had cleared out enough brush to fill half of Brian’s back patio area and opened the pond to sun it hadn’t seen in years. Brian was happy with the results and said that he could easily muck out the pond, evicting it of its unwelcome tenants.

Fine by me. I was happy to finish a morning’s gardening. Time for a shower and beer.

Splitting up is easy to do

In this unusual winter, things are a little different in the garden. I can still harvest some winter greens as they have stubbornly held on to life and moisture. The ground is often not like a brick but rather can be easily dug and worked. And the typical cover of snow is nowhere to be found leaving a mat of old hosta leaves looking like decayed tissue paper covering large swaths of the back yard by the fence. Trimming the hostas was not the only chore that I was unable to finish the fall: splitting the wood was another.

In past years I would typically have between two and three cords of wood split, ready for the winter ahead. It is rarely a good idea in Connecticut to wait much past Thanksgiving to have your wood stove-ready as we have had over three foot of snow on the ground by Christmas. Last year in January we had nearly five. This anticipation is in stark contract to Long Island, only 40 miles south of Ridgefield, where we would rarely have more than a few inches of snow on the ground.  Wood splitting was a winter activity when I lived on Long Island.

But with a hurricane in late August and Snowtober taking power out for more than a week each, wood splitting was placed on the back burner of chores as it took us weeks to merely clean the property and repair storm damage. Without power,  Snowtober kept the wood stove running 24x7 keeping the house warm and cooking meals for me during the day. In that one week I probably burned at least 1/4 a cord of wood. So this Thanksgiving I was not prepared for winter.

In December I manically looked for an hour a few times a week where it would be pleasant to split wood. While it was cool, it was not always dry. And when it was dry it was not cool. After a while I needed to just get on with it regardless of the conditions. Putting on my Carharrt jacket and leather work gloves I went out to the shed and picked up a splitting wedge and my 6-lb. maul.

It was a good crisp day for splitting wood it being in the mid 20s with bright sun and little wind. The first log was easy to split as it was only 8 inches across with no knots. Other logs were not so cooperative. While a well-branched tree is a beautiful thing to behold, it is a challenge to split. Logs that have been long laying on the soil often develop an obstinacy to being moved. They require a gentle reminder in the form of a smack with the blunt end of your maul.

Even though some friends have recommended against it, I enjoy splitting wood. It is one of the few things you can do on a winter’s day and not be cold. In fact, when it is much above 40 degrees, it is too hot to split wood as the layers peel off with each successive stroke or two.

So now is perfect for splitting as it is quiet with the only noise being the simple thwack of my maul against a log. As it is below freezing, the logs split readily after being coaxed. These logs are a few years old so there is none of the sweet smell of sap or moisture coming from the log. Some logs have become ant hotels and eviction is fast and absolute. Others have corrals of grey woodlice being rounded up by iridescent green centipedes between their bark and the soil.

One log that had been split a while ago was stuck to the ground. A kick with my boot dislodged it revealing a tapestry of leaves, cobwebs, detritus and a fern stuck to a yellowish vein that followed the grain of the wood. The log had become an abstract canvas of nature. I threw it on to the stack but later took it off, putting it back on the ground to see if an unseen artist will lay in another coat of paint.

Timberrr!!!!!!

As I have mentioned in a prior post, one of the large challenges my vegetable garden faces is its exposure or its lack of one. Though its raised beds are situated on a greenhouse foundation, the combination of northern exposure and tree cover, which wasn’t there when the greenhouse was built, makes for light light (particularly in the Spring and Fall.) But last year my neighbor, Donna, agreed to let me have the trees taken down in the space between our properties so that the greenhouse (and my garden) would get the sun my vegetables actively crave.

This area between our properties has been a no-man’s-land of opportunity as maple, locust, cherry, hickory, oak and ash have fought for dominance by spreading their branches and leaders in every direction save straight up. Besides their leaves, these trees were clothed with a spreading dress of grape vine and poison ivy. 

The consecutive storms of the late summer and fall took down some trees and crushed much of the undergrowth. A  locust came through my fence landing in the small 10 foot space between the corner of my greenhouse and that of the garage. Another leaned on a cherry that had its top broken off. Other trees also had broken and hanging branches. So it seemed that now was the time for a clear cut as there were few trees that were not either damaged, leaning too close to my house or somehow damaged by the storms.

Unfortunately after all the trees were removed neither my wife nor neighbor (and me to some degree) were ready for the stark barrenness of the newly denuded landscape. It is perhaps made worse by the fact that no refurbishment or plantings can be attempted for at least two and a half months. Instead of an overgrown patch we had mountains of wood chips and crummy looking undergrowth. I spent the better part of two days trying to clean up and make the area look a bit better. 

As I cut back the broken, overgrown and deformed undergrowth of grape and poison ivy vines I started to discover some real gems: a rhododendron that had been overgrown with grape vine and forsythia, beaten down heirloom roses and tangled masses of raspberries. A pile of vines revealed a fledgling three foot fir that was attempting to make a go of it.

The chips proffered a more muscular exercise with a large and extended pile that was shot across the back area. However, I was able to fill in some very large depressions in the property and grade the area for a nice set of spring plantings. Its consistent and light patina contrasted with the darker leaf litter surrounding it. In a year, however, all would appear the same. And now that I can see what is already there and what can planted in a few months, I’m looking forward to the spring.

Recalling a blackout and October snow

Writing by candlelight and fire evokes images of Abe Lincoln or Ben Franklin recording their thoughts at the end of a long day. But there is little else I was able to do after days without power finding myself alone tending a fire to keep the house warm and the pets fed. This trip back to an off- (or non-existent) grid New England was caused by a freak October snow storm that dumped nearly 18 inches of snow on my back yard. Only now, have I had the chance to post after more than a week of cleaning and catching up.

Initially pretty with large fluffy flecks covering the ground and plants, the snow became more and more menacing as the trees and bushes started to groan and sag against the weight of the snow. By 4:30 in the afternoon nearly 10 inches had dropped in a little over 4 hours and with it many a branch. The progression was fairly consistent: a slow and constant drop of a limb until it stopped moving downward. Nothing save more snow. It then became a waiting game. Could or would the tree be able to hold its own against the snow? Would the snow stop soon? How much would break or crack off?

Sometimes the branch released its cargo with a whoosh and thump like flour from a bag. It then shot upward to catch more snow and start its slow, downward movement again. Other times the snow was liberated only after a branch snapped with a large crack followed by a thud. This spectacle was repeated all evening until the morning when all was white and silent. Everything was broken and we were without power for nearly an entire week.

The butterfly bushes were crushed and laid over on their sides. The hydrangea snapped into pieces with their dried flowers smashed and spread all over. The Montauk daisies were crushed. The ornamentals fared the worse, particularly the Japanese maples.

All of the maples save one lost large chunks of their upper canopies. Like so many toothpicks the branches were scattered with jagged edges some hanging by a thin sliver of bark or wood. One of the trees split into three parts; one for each main leader that rose near the ground from a common base. It was splayed helpless among the pachysandra resting between a concrete Buddha and a crescent of azaleas. It seemed hopeless.

But the next week brought rapidly melting snow (though there is still a small pile in my yard) and progress. The damage forced me to cut back bushes and trees much sooner than I would have. Remarkably I was able to cable the trisected maple together with the base fitting neatly and cleanly together.  I started to split wood every day as I burned through 1/3rd a cord in just a week. With each exhausting day came repair and the a view that this natural pruning process was not as bad as it could have been.

 

One surprise was how well my fall greens held up. Covered with Agribon and glass, my cold frames withheld the weight of the snow and saved the lettuces as well as the Swiss chard. My carrots emerged from the snow with tops still green and looking well. Even the herb garden suffered little damage save a few burnt leaves.

Last week I harvested a salad to have with my dinner. It was delicious.

Building a program—Part 2: Finishing the back

Putting up a deer fence was both an end and starting point. It was the end of the carnage by the deer. If the snow didn’t save them from deer last winter, any remaining plants got chewed up in the spring or died during the rainless July this summer. But now we can start anew. Out of the 70 or so plants we put in last year, 45 were gone and needed to be replaced. Then another 40 needed to be put in around the building and walls now that work was finished.

So many of the plants we had installed last year had been reduced to dead twigs. Because hay instead of straw had been put down to control erosion, we had a big crop of rye grass and associated weeds, which was not the fescue we needed to plant for the back yard.

A backhoe was brought in to remove the sod and grade the area so that water would run away from the building and into a trench leading to the wetlands. Two knee walls were constructed earlier to ensure that the run off would not drain into a patio area.

Mark, the operator, had a wonderfully light touch as he delicately scraped the old sod away and replaced it with new topsoil. He was able to just pull away the right amount of soil with a huge steel arm as a child would run her fingers through the sand. Within a few hours, the area was ready for seeding.

While Mark was working on getting the back ready for a lawn, I with a bunch of landscapers started to plant all the different trees and bushes: American Cranberry, Inkberry, Winterberry, Swamp Azalea, Mountain Laurel, High and Low Bush blueberry, Elderberry, Gray and Red-Osier Dogwood and Spirea were just the beginning. Planting was bittersweet as for almost every plant I positioned another needed to be yanked and discarded. I now understand why professional landscapers around here choose such large specimens: more survival chances against man and beast. In a few cases, I needed to direct the laborers not to step on Witch Hazel saplings, indicating that they were not sticks but rather living plants.

Soon the lawn was ready for seeding. I have had 100 pounds of fescue seed in my basement for 5 months waiting for this moment. Ironically this was the last possible day (October 12) that I could plant: the next week or so looked warm so that the seeds would have the needed sun and temperatures for germination. Rain looked imminent so we worked quickly smoothing out the soil, broadcasting the seed and then spreading shredded straw over the area to hold the seed and erosion. We had just enough seed and straw to finish the job.

As we started to put away the tools it began to rain. Not heavy, but a steady soft rain that would moisten the soil and give the grass, transplanted trees and bushes a good start. I thanked all the people who helped me, loaded my shovels, pick ax and rakes into the car happy that we had finally finished the back area before the bad weather hits. 

Building a program—Part 1: Fighting the deer

Over the past 4 months or so I have been spending a lot of time at Ann’s Place working to build a series of therapeutic gardens. The first phase of this project is almost done after a series of delays that have been caused by the crummy weather we have had this past summer. In the early summer, we started work with the idea that we would be done by Labor Day. Not so much.

The first project was started last year when we tried to get a jump start on the season by planting 4000 daffodils, creating a nature path and planting two-thirds of our native bushes and trees that was part of a mitigation garden required by the town. It looked great in the fall when we planted it; not so much in the spring after the ungulate version of the Taliban decided to lay waste. Between them and the very dry July we had, over half of the plantings were killed and the other half severely pruned.

But as we discovered this, we were able to reclaim some of the surrounding landscape. Like much of Connecticut, the property was ringed with stone walls that had fallen into disrepair; the prior state of neatly stacked stones appeared more as piles of rubble. Fortunately we had a group of volunteer executives from one of our corporate sponsors that hungered for some heavy duty physical effort. We obliged them.

They were amazing as they did not work as executives often do, sitting down at a conference table munching a Danish while listening to a PowerPoint presentation. Rather they were hauling, prying, moving, wheel barrowing, grunting their way to move the rocks back into place that time, nature and people have moved about.

Within six hours they reclaimed over 400 feet of wall and must have moved 10 tons or more of stone. Not bad for free help.

There was another contingent that was less aggressive in their desires, which was great as I needed a group to weed and plant. I had to be careful with instructions for weeding as the site has a lot of Jack-in-the-pulpit planted as well as other wild flowers. But after a few mis-weeds, they followed instructions well and rid the path and site of crabgrass, garlic mustard and other invasives.

Those who didn’t weed helped plant up 80 ferns and 300 Blue Flag irises, which I used to stabilize a hill and fill in an area that is often wet.

But then came the rainy August and September, which stopped us in our tracks (and that of our outdoor contractors.) With over 25 inches of rain over 60 days if it wasn’t raining, it was drying out. Last week we were able to start anew.

We started by deciding to install over 400 feet of deer fence to create a Green Zone against the deer. Amazingly we were able to use existing trees and dig holes that avoided the vast amount of rock that exists around the site. I was worried that the black steel poles and plastic fencing would detract our view into the woods where a few winterberry and grey dogwoods among the barberry escaped the fate of hungry deer.

But once it was done, like the deer it was blocking, it minimized into the background with notice only when the sun shimmered on its profile. We now needed to start the grading and finish planting the rest of the trees. But most important, all the things we were about to plant would get at least a fighting chance from the deer.

Raking memories and leaves

I hadn’t raked leaves at my mother’s house for nearly 35 years. The yard service had done a final cut a few weeks back but since then it seemed as if all the neighboring trees had decided to give their leaves up to my mother’s lawn as a going away gift. Her trees—all oaks—have been stubbornly been hanging onto their charges not wanting to give up this year’s production. It was as if they decided that this was the season to wear a raccoon coat of foliage and no rain or wind would remove the slightest bit.

So as I looked upward at the future blanket for the lawn, I needed to deal with the neighbors’ leaves. There was an old rake missing a few teeth in the garage that my father used years ago before he turned over that duty to others and a pile of old plastic bags. I asked my mother to join me outside. To my surprise she did.

The straw-like zoysia grass was holding onto its blanket with more vigor than does my fescue at home. Perhaps it realizes that the trees above will not give them cover quickly leaving them to deal with the cold autumn winds for longer than they would like. Regardless, I pulled the leaves into large dumpling-shaped piles in the middle of the lawn. Now it was time to bag.

My mother walked out to take a look and I joked to her if she would like to jump into a pile. She laughed and said that was my pleasure of years ago. I thought back about that and remembered that the piles seemed so much larger then. My father and I would rake leaves into a heap that was as tall as me and then I would burrow inside as would a creature readying to hibernate for the season. It was warm and there was an unmistakably sour-sweet smell of decay.

But the piles have gotten smaller as I now towered over them not wanting to jump in but bag them so the town could haul them away to compost. At my home, I just rake the leaves into the woods. Job done. But in my mother’s manicured neighborhood, there is no such space and everything must be removed.

So I opened a bag, shook it out and placed it on the ground anchoring it with my feet and holding an edge while my other arm started to pull swaths of leaves into the bag. Like a piston, my arm mechanically swept the area until I needed to stop and rebuild the pile. Pulling the bag off the ground I shook it and then punched the leaves down, compacting them into a tight mass before repeating the exercise. My father taught this to me.

My mother was supervising the operation from the front step, sitting down carefully after she placed her cane next to her and a piece of cardboard under her as a cushion. I went over during a break and we reminisced about how my father used to feed the squirrels with walnuts from his hand. He would squat down in an seemingly impossible configuration with his knees high and his bottom low rhythmically bouncing while he would smack the walnuts (or filberts) together announcing his arrival.

Initially cautious, the squirrels took to my father (and his nuts) quickly. But they soon came to expect his attentions on a more frequent basis. If they perceived he was late they would come to the house and congregate on the stoop chastising my father that he wanting. And in a Pavlovian manner he would respond.

My mother and laughed. I handed her an acorn and went back to work.

The sweet smell of decay

 

The advent of autumn has always been bittersweet as the seasonal burst of a multifaceted patina of foliage is counterbalanced by the sad brown and gray death of its aftermath. I was in between these worlds this weekend as the first of a weekly raking regime started. I’ve always enjoyed raking as it is a good way to get some exercise as well as reflect on the gardens of my past and the ones I could build in the future.

The current task was both easier and harder than in prior years. Easier as the number of leaves were fewer due to the many trees I had removed last year in advance of a new septic system. Harder in that my successful experimentation with a low-grow, no-mow lawn gave me a thick bed of fescue and clover that coveted every leaf that sat upon it as if they did not want that blanket to be removed. The last sheet was the hardest to separate from their grasps.

This vigor stirred up not only sweat from me but the smells of the season. Fresh soil that became exposed had a simple, fresh aroma. Dead grass that was liberated from the mass by the tines of the rake was sweet and sour like a favorite Chinese take-out dish. The leaves had little fragrance yet as their liberation was fresh and decomposition in the early stages. But in few weeks they will have a distinctively pungent sour smell.

These are all expected and welcome aromas like that of an old friend you come to visit every year. But there was a new fragrance added to the mix that was completely unexpected. 

As I mentioned in my last post, a large leader from a sugar maple snapped barely missing my house. My arborist came by quickly cutting up the larger limbs and trunk of the tree into stove-sized sections while grinding up the rest. I not only kept large logs but also the resulting chips, that were violently regurgitated from a chute after being fed into an interlocking set of toothy rollers that tore though six-inch logs and branches without a thought. I was left with a cord and a half of wood, four yards or so of chips and a stump with 103 rings of age.

The pile of chips is a wonderful byproduct of the tree’s demise as I was about to go out and purchase loads of them to replenish beds and pathways around my gardens. As I put the first shovel into the pile, a tiny wisp of smoke emerged. Then with the next poke a much larger one and the smell of apple cider. The pile, as you dug deeper, was increasingly warm to the touch and with each layer disturbed smelled as would a tub of freshly crushed apples.

This isn’t the first time I associated food with a sugar maple on my property. About 5 years ago, we had some limbs from two sugar maples removed after a winter storm had damaged it and other trees. Toward the end of winter we noticed all the cuts off the maples were bleeding sap and figured out we had inadvertently tapped the trees. Never one to miss an opportunity we started to collect the sap and tried to boil it down on our wood stove dreaming of buckets of delicious maple syrup that would complement our traditional Sunday morning pancakes.

Every day for weeks we would collect a quart or two of sap and put it on the stove to boil down not realizing at the time that for every gallon of thick, dark maple syrup it takes up to 40 gallons of thin, transparent sap to produce it; at the end we got a little less than a half a pint. But it didn’t matter as the process made the house smell sweet, very much like the pile of chips next to my fence.

So with each shovel came a spurt of sweetness. When I emptied a wheelbarrow’s worth of chips came another. For a while I forgot about the leaves and other parts of the fall preferring to focus on this unexpected harvest and experience it for the rest of the day.

Pop, crackle, snap: It’s not a Rice Crispy

It was a dark and stormy night . . .

Or at least it was incredibly windy as the porch light illuminated a rain of leaves being blown about like flat slices of snow during a blizzard. It seemed as if the peak of leaf season and their escape from perches high on maples, birches, ashes and oaks would combine in this one day.  It was not a good night to be out and peering out the front door after calling in our dog, Daisy, all of our surrounding trees still fat with leaves were undulating with the wind seemly to the breaking point like crazed possessed dancers.

Except for one.

There is often little warning or even understanding when a tree snaps. It usually occurs during times of weather-related stress but not always. A few years back I was speaking to a client from my office desk, which faces the back of our tree-filled property. It was a bright summer day, with not even a breadth of wind disturbing the highest of leaves. All of a sudden a 90-foot red oak toppled from its base and started to fall toward my window.  A discussion on some arcane technological feature was halted by my yelling, “Holy crap! There is a tree falling right toward my house!” It came to rest 40 feet away, the victim of a carpenter-ant nest. I exaggerated. Prior to its fall, there was only the visual cue of its pivoting from its rotted base and toppling down with the slightest of sound. Even its thump on the soil was muted by its passing though adjacent trees whose thin branches acted as ineffective arms trying to slow its descent.

At night there are no such cues. Instead, beginning to prepare for dinner, we heard a pop, crackle, snap and then a whoosh followed by a gentle thump. Walking out the back door I was greeted by the top of a maple tree, which used to be at least 70 feet away by earth and 80 feet or more in the air. It was now 10 feet in front of me. I tried to investigate but there was little to do except wait for the morning light.

Looking at the tree this morning I remembered one of my favorite sayings: “Better to be lucky than good.” The tree used to have a single trunk with two large leaders splitting at around 20 feet above the ground into an exaggerated V. The nearest leader separated itself last night falling neatly between two fence posts, brushing a rhododendron, sitting above two stone benches, bending an heirloom rose and resting between a Japanese maple and a rose arbor. Only two boards on the fence were knocked down (not broken)  and would be easy to nail back into place.

The call last night to my tree guy elicited a quick response with his inspection of the site this morning followed up by Joe (an associate) coming by with his chain saw a few hours ago to cut up the felled leader branch. My role was simple: stay out of the way until he was done or at least out of range so I could stack wood that would be split in years to come. As we partially heat our house with wood, more wood is not a bad thing though I have at least four cords of ash to split before I get to this newly felled maple. Time to throw another log on the fire.

Chilled expectations

It is the end of perhaps the most harsh February that I have had the displeasure to experience in recent memory. The worst was the winter of 1996 where nearly 120 inches of snow dropped in the Danbury, CT, region. But this winter is right up there with relentless blizzards coming one after another. Now that shouldn’t mean much for me as I am supposedly staying warm in the Florida Keys to swaying palm trees and vacationers lubricated with beer and pina coladas.

That has been far from the truth as we came to the tropics but the tropics never came to us. The excessively bizarre weather from the Northeast has migrated with us dropping average temperatures: the typical lows of the mid 60s are higher then the typical highs that we have had during our month down here.

And with the lovely 20-knot-plus Northern winds pushing up the whitecaps on Florida Bay, it has not been the weather to snorkel, swim, kayak, fish or do anything on the water save look for the occasional lovely sunset, which we have had all too few because of overcast skies. As is obvious, our expectations have been chilled by the weather. We are content to be in a nicer climate but strangely are only slightly warmer than we would be in the North.

Back home, I would be tending the stove throwing on another log between treks outside to shovel snow off the driveway and my greenhouse. The house would be toasty warm with my wife telling me to damp down the stove. I would be baking bread and cooking a vat of chili. In our cottage here, however, the portable heaters strain to keep our dwelling warm as the fast and relentless winds suck the heat out through all of the drafty jalacy windows that comprise the majority of area on three of the four cinderblock walls. My wife spends evenings bundled up in a cocoon of Polartec blankets while wearing most of the winter cloths she brought. None of the bathing suits, sleeveless shirts or other warm-weather fare have seen the light as they are sequestered at the bottom of a dresser drawer.

And as I mentioned in the last post, there isn’t much diversity in the plants. They are green. They are big. They tend to grow fast. Because of the cold, most of the flowers have fallen off. I hate to say it but they are kind of boring.

We will be heading for home in the next week. I only hope we can bring some of the warmth with us so the snow will melt and the plants can grow. The North may be cold in the winter but at least you can count on it.