Little White Lies

Do you want to hear someone tell a lie?  Just ask any gardener how much time they spend maintaining their garden. You can be absolutely certain that the answer they give – no matter how large or small the number – will be understated.  The actual time may be ten percent longer or twice as much as they tell you, but it will never be less than what they say.

We tell these fibs for three reasons.  First, we may genuinely think that gardening takes less than five hours a week.  That’s because the gardener is thinking about April or November when chores are light.  Or, they may be averaging in the winter months when, at least in New England, the only gardening is indoors.

The second reason is that gardeners aren’t looking for pity, brownie points, or convoluted looks when the honest answer is, “Oh, twenty hours a week in season, five or six at the beginning and the tag end.”  The gardeners I know are proud of their work and they don’t want to be seen as having some form of mental illness for devoting so much time to making things look really good.

The third reason – and the one that causes me to write this – is that gardeners forget about the ‘big push’ activities that come at the beginning and end of the season. 

The list above (double-click on it to see it at a larger size) is not contrived.  It has been posted to our refrigerator door since September 21.  On that date, Betty and I did a walk through the property and she called out things that need to be done as we get toward the end of the season.  I was the scribe and, because my handwriting is barely legible under the best of cases, I typed up the list after the walk.

This yellowing daylily foliage makes
the garden look ragged

New England gardens at the end of September show their age.  Most annuals are shot, as are perennials like hosta and daylilies.  There are also plants we put up with during the growing season – such as allowing milkweed to run rampant in places – that now look like poor gardening now that the birds, bees and butterflies that fed on them have decamped for warmer climates.  Performing this end-of-September cleanup greatly improves the look of the garden and extends its season by several weeks.

With the daylily foliage cut back.
Manhattan bed shows off the
still-blooming sedum and asters

The list consists of both things that can be done in a few minutes (‘cut hosta flowers in white garden’) and tasks that are backbreaking (‘turn 5-bin composter’).  There are chores that can be done in pieces, such as taking apart those leggy containers, and ones that are best done in one fell swoop, like cutting down daylilies.

Some of the chores are Trojan Horses.  I cut the dozen or so branches that overhung our forest pansy redbud (cercis canadendis) and a Rose of Sharon (hibiscus syriacus).  But taking down those tree limbs brought to light a similar number of ‘problem’ branches that were heretofore hidden.  And, allowing those two cultivars to get adequate light started me thinking about the fate of the shrubs in out Long Island bed that are starting to ‘lean out’ because the copse of trees behind the bed is also sending out intruding branches.

And, some chores only seem simple.  One bed had both bee balm (monarda) and black-eyed susans (rudbeckia) to be cut down.  But the monarda is prone to diseases.  It must all be taken out at once and clippers cleaned with bleach afterward to prevent the spread of the powdery mildew that affects it.  Only when the monarda has all been cleaned and bagged can the balance of that bed be worked on.

I am not doing this alone; Betty is dividing hostas and moving grasses.  She’ll also take on the ‘skilled’ work on the list.  But it is the undergardener’s job to plow into the stands of daylilies and get rid of their now-yellowing foliage.  (See the ‘before’ and ‘after’ photos to understand why this needs to be done.)

So, all in all, how long will it take to complete this list?  I don’t know, probably half a day.

Summer Rain

Eastern Massachusetts gets about 45 inches of precipitation per year.  Roughly ten inches of that falls as snow, the balance as rain.  Much of our spring rain comes from vast, drenching weather systems that sweep in from the west or up from the south and give us all-day rain ‘events’ that re-charge our ground water and ensure that May and June are brilliant with color.

Precipitation in Eastern
Massachusetts.  Double-click
on the chart to see details.

Then, as the chart at left shows, the rain slows down.  By July, we’re dependent on ‘pop-up’ thunderstorms – highly localized downpours caused by unstable air masses.  The problem is that these thunderstorms are truly hit or miss.  The next town over gets an inch of rain while you get the rumble of distant thunder.  Or, the rain may all fall in a few minutes, meaning water runs off rather than soaking into the soil.  And, this July, the rains did not come at all to Medfield. 

We do not water our lawn and never will.  We water newly planted trees, shrubs and perennials for the recommended periods.  Because they’re annuals, we water our containers and vegetable garden generously.  The primary source of water for our containers is rain barrels – three, 55-gallon drums connected to our downspouts. The secondary source is recycled water from our home.  For example, we keep buckets to capture the three gallons of water from our shower while it warms up in the morning.  We capture the water used to rinse vegetables.  Waterwise, we run a ‘green’ household.

Pop-up thunderstorms.  One town
gets drenched, another gets zilch.

It takes more than 30 gallons of water to drench our 50 containers and, during the hottest days of summer, that needed to be done every other day.  Until last week, we were holding our own despite the lack of precipitation.  Then, I noticed that one of the shrubs in the large bed in front of our property was in distress.  It got the diverted shower water.  Other shrubs and perennials quickly began showing the same distress.  We hauled water in two- and three-gallon containers to the affected plants and poured it slowly, making certain that every ounce went to the roots and none to waste.

But by Saturday evening we were facing an ethical choice.  A week hence, our gardens would be filled with visitors.  Our perennials were limp; there was simply no moisture in the soil.  There was a 70% chance of rain for Sunday but we agreed that, if we didn’t get substantial rain, we would break out of the hoses and watering wand.

Sunday morning, 11 a.m.  Oh, yeah!

Sunday morning we awoke to soft rain – the first in more than 30 days.  The rain gauge showed that four-tenths of an inch had fallen overnight.  An hour later, the rain was steadier and heavier.  By noon, the rain gauge showed more than an inch.  The weather map showed a conduit of moisture passing steadily over Medfield, fed by Atlantic Ocean moisture.  Around 4 p.m., the rain finally stopped; the rain gauge showed a total of 2.4 inches in a twelve-hour period.

This morning, it is as though the month-long dry spell never happened.  The perennials in Old Stone Bed are tall and erect.  Seedeater’s Heaven, which was prostrate a day earlier, has completely recovered.  A quick trowel check of one of the shrub beds shows that there is moisture down at least six inches.

Not every gardener is as serious about water conservation as we are, but then we have to make up for our neighbors who thoughtlessly run their lawn sprinklers despite the watering ban imposed by our town.  Ours is not some holier-than-thou attitude toward water in the garden.  Rather, it’s learning to live by the same common-sense rules that ought to apply to everyone (and what Betty tells the groups that pay her to speak on the subject).  That we have two acres doesn’t give us an exemption.  Enough said.