Digging RI

This summer, I am confronted with a situation that torments the ardent gardeners among us: we are moving.

We have lived in this house for more than eight years, and although I knew that someday we would move away, I could not help but garden here. It wasn’t about the aesthetic. It was the process – the catalog browsing, the weeding, the planting, the early mornings spent hunting sawfly larvae on my roses – that I could not resist.

So I dug and hacked and cut, turned a tangle of Siberian irises into a perennial bed, and made a new bed for the irises. The next year, I moved the irises again and filled that second bed with more perennials. The irises took all this chaos with grace and good humor, and bloomed their heads off every year.

I planted two Meidiland “coral” shrub roses at the base of the staircase to hide the ugly concrete, and I added a Clematis viticella “Polish Spirit.” They all grow together happily and with a minimum of fuss, flowering from June well into October. I love the color combination of light coral and deep violet.

I started a vegetable garden and grew everything from potatoes to heirloom tomatoes. I filled in some gaps with old fashioned annuals such as larkspur and zinnia “State Fair” which I started indoors from seed. I enjoyed watching the hummingbirds and monarch butterflies browse these and the verbena bonariensis that self seeded every year. I always made sure to let some milkweed grow for the monarchs.

I made an effort to attract birds to my garden, and now I feel as if I am letting them down. The hummingbirds will probably have departed by mid-September, and so will the Baltimore and Orchard orioles that have brought their young year after year to the jelly feeder. But what will that small flock of white-throated sparrows do when they arrive sometime in October expecting to spend the winter in my yard, only to find the feeders and the birdbath gone?

I care about my plants, especially the ones that have taken a few years to come into their own. The roses and clematis will still be in flower, and might not survive if I try and move them. I will take some plants with me, but which ones I don’t exactly know yet.

This has been my little piece of habitat, created to nurture birds and plants I like. I guess the operative word is create, since like any creative endeavor, a garden is a reflection of the person who made and maintains it. When that gardener moves on, the garden is no longer hers, and ceases to look or feel the way it did before. It’s uncanny how quickly that happens.

So I will leave this creative enterprise of mine, with its birds and butterflies and the fragrant creeping thyme in the lawn. It’s a pretty safe bet that the new owner of this house will not find it relaxing to poke around in the roses at 7am, hunting for aphids and sawfly larvae. And the birds will move on. There are a couple of trees that will probably be cut down, and no one will know how wonderful it is that the monarda “Marshall’s Delight” that I salvaged from another garden and transplanted here is established and in flower.

Meanwhile, in the new place, I will begin the whole process again, because that is what gardeners do.

Okay, so it’s been rainy here in Little Rhody. Very rainy. According to the weather geeks, we had just three clear days in April and May, and so far this month, we haven’t done much better. It’s been cool, too, with temperatures averaging 3.5 degrees below normal. Yesterday, the sun was coming through the fog, but today we are back to the usual.

A tree reflected in a giant puddle in front of our house

That said, there’s precious little any of us can do about the weather, although some people seem to think that the more they complain the sooner it’ll clear up. I watched an unintentionally funny news story last week, which explored the possibility that people were actually becoming clinically depressed from all the rain. They even interviewed a psychiatrist, who I could tell was thinking, “These news people must be really desperate.”

Yes, the tomatoes are sulking and some of their leaves are turning yellow. The eggplants aren’t happy, either. But our lawns are looking like they belong in Ireland, and our public reservoirs are being replenished. The trees are loving the rain, too, as long as they aren’t sitting in it.  Mosquitoes are up, but deer flies and horse flies are down. There’s no beach traffic so we can actually get from A to B without elaborate logistical planning.  I transplanted some volunteer seedlings yesterday, and they are looking  perky this morning.

My incredibly green lawn

I guess the secret to enjoying life is adapting to whatever it throws at you – in this case, water – lots of water.

For years, I  hired  landscapers to mow our lawn. The entire job usually took them about fifteen minutes. I would come home and gaze with despair at the wreckage of the plants at the front of my perennial border, or the wilted, shredded fragments of the clematis that had been weed whacked FOR THE HUNDREDTH TIME!!! The trees were getting whacked by the trimmer, too, and forget trying to preserve the foliage from the spring bulbs I grow in the lawn. I tried to explain to him what I wanted cut and what to leave alone. I even did the edging myself, but I still lost way too many plants.

The final straw came last September. The grass was hardly growing, so I asked him if he could cut the grass every two weeks instead of once a week. He informed me that it had to be every week or nothing, so I decided that nothing it would be.

Yes! I would do it myself, get some exercise, and save my plants, and $152 per month in the process! I decided to put my money where my mouth is, and I bought this:

My new mower

I am the proud owner of a Brill Razorcut 38 push reel lawnmower. “Not your father’s old push mower!” everyone assured me. This mower is said to be a breeze to use and only needs sharpening every ten years! Ten years! I was sold. About a week later,  my Brill arrived, and a fellow Master Gardener and I proceeded to put it together.

The mower is made in Germany (like Mercedes!)  and the manual was a virtual United Nations of instructions, the English version of which was completely incomprehensible. And there were parts missing, so I deferred assembly until those arrived. One sunny afternoon, I somehow managed to assemble the thing and take it for a spin. It was indeed light, and made a pleasant sound as it rolled over the grass. It cut the grass very short – maybe too short – but overall I was satisfied.

The day finally came when I had to mow the entire lawn. My first mistake was not wearing gloves. My hands were blistered within half an hour. Then, something annoying began to happen. The handle was coming off  the mower part at the bottom. I would have to get down on my hands and knees and get it back on, only to have it happen again in ten minutes. I finally brought the mower to our local hardware store, where a kind man installed automotive retainer clips. These, he assured me, would keep the handle on forever, and he was right. For the princely sum of 90 cents (which is why I love our local hardware store) my mower was operational again.

The business end of the Brill

We are now well into June and my mower and I are developing a working relationship. I know, for instance, that at this time of year, I have to mow once a week, because it cannot handle really long grass.  The other thing my mower dislikes is sticks. It will stop abruptly (and often jarringly) if it gets a stick caught in its blades, but it’s so light I can just pick the whole thing up and shake it until the stick comes out. Neighbors stop to watch me pant and sweat as I trudge back and forth, and I know that one look is enough to keep them chained to their noisy, fume-spewing gas mowers forever.

I will not sugarcoat this push mower business. What took the landscaper 15 minutes now takes me close to an hour and a half. But I am getting some great exercise, and it is quiet, and my garden is not butchered at the end of it.  Best of all,  I feel like I am  doing an environmentally responsible thing, and my lawn really does look nice.  I just have to remember to wear gloves and drink a lot of water.

recognize this?

It’s early summer in Rhode Island, and overwhelming the delicate scent of lilacs is the sharp smell of cedar. Well actually, it’s not real cedar, silly, it’s mulch. Millions and millions of square feet of it. Drive into any shopping mall parking lot this time of year and the landscape contractors have likely been by, “refreshing” the mulch in the concrete islands.It wouldn’t surprise me if one of these days, NASA published a  photograph from space showing a red swath across much of North America.

So how did this happen? Mulch, when used properly, is a very good thing  – in the garden and around trees. It conserves moisture, adds organic matter, suppresses weeds, and makes things look tidy.  There are organic mulches, such as straw, wood chips, compost and coco bean hulls, and there are inorganic mulches, like plastic and even recycled rubber.

not a weed in sight!

The choice of mulch is up to you. Just know what you’re buying. Some of the red stuff is not cedar at all, but ground up scrap wood, dyed and perfumed to resemble cedar. There’s even mulch dye you can apply yourself to really freshen things up. Green wood chips can go “sour” as they decompose, damaging plants and even introducing artillery fungus to the outside of your house. Coco Bean Hulls contain theobromine, which is toxic to pets. So choose your mulch wisely.

Applying mulch correctly is really quite simple. Put down just two to three inches, and keep it away from plant stems and tree trunks. And don’t just dump it on your garden year after year just because it looks nice. Anything more than a couple of inches is too deep.

And that brings me to one of my biggest pet peeves, and a major killer of trees: over mulching. The part of the tree that meets the soil is called the root or trunk flare. These tissues need oxygen. If they can’t get it because the tree is standing in water, or the flare is covered in several inches of mulch, the tree will decline and eventually die. When properly applied, mulch is great for trees because it keeps nasty weed whackers from cutting into the bark, and conserves moisture. But the mulch should NEVER touch the truck of the tree, and the flare should always be exposed.

Now, this is the part I don’t get: we know that mulch overuse or “volcano mulching” kills trees. So  why do so many landscapers continue to do it?  It’s not as though they can’t use mulch at all. They just have to keep it away from the tree trunks.

held captive in a volcano

It’s been a very wet summer so far here in “Little Rhody” and over mulched trees throughout the state are gasping for air.

So please go easy with the mulch. Your garden – and especially your trees –  could be drowning.

Welcome to the “Digging Rhode Island” blog. Stay tuned for fascinating posts, great gardening information, fun facts, disheveled rants.