S'no Fun Getting Rid of the White Stuff

This has been a bitterly cold winter though, until now, not especially snowy.  That appears to be changing.  We had eight inches of snow over the weekend, an inch yesterday morning, and there is a prediction for a 'major storm' for Thursday and Friday.  The problem for us is, what do you do when there's too much snow?

Planning for snow removal is part of
planning for a New England garden

This weather report is part of a garden blog because snow is a reality in New England and where to put snow is a continuing problem for any serious gardener in this region. Our particular issues are twofold: first, where the town puts the snow from the street and, second, where we put the snow from our driveway.

We are at the end of a cul-de-sac with a broad turning circle as part of our streetscape. The upside is that this gives us a very dramatic arc around which to design a garden. The downside is that the town plows have to put the snow from the other end of the street somewhere, and that ‘somewhere’ includes the buffer zone between our sidewalk and the street. And, because the town lays down chemicals to keep the street passable prior to plowing, the snow that ends up on that buffer zone (variously called an ‘easement’ or a ‘hell strip’) is laden with salts that render the strip inhospitable to grass.

This xeric bed - shown in its
summer glory - was under
several feet of chemical-
laden snow today

We’ve adapted the strip – some 960 square feet – into a xeric garden that is planted with perennials that tolerate the chemical soup. That garden planting scheme was detailed in this blog entry. There is already a two-foot-high mound of snow on part of that xeric garden and the Valentine's Day Storm could add several feet to that total.

The second issue is where we put the snow from our own driveway. We are set back 220 feet from the street on a meandering driveway and, at the head of the driveway, the asphalt widens out to 35 feet to feed a three-car garage, plus provide an additional backing-out area for cars. The home’s architect was apparently from some southern clime because the driveway dead-ends into the garage.  As such, there is no ‘simple’ place to put snow.  The problem grows geometrically with the depth of the snow and new snowfalls follow ones already on the ground.  There is already a four-foot-high wall of snow on one wall of the backing-out area.  After this storm, it may be double that height.

Removing 18 inches of snow - carefully

We’ve adapted the gardens along the driveway to this reality. (Double-click on the plot plan at the top of this post to get a more detailed view of the descriptions that follow.)  Along the main stretch of access, there is a grass strip roughly eight to ten feet wide, the sole purpose of which is to provide a landing spot for the snow from the driveway.  The driveway is never treated, so the snow simply provides moisture for the spring growing season.

This burlap skirt for
Thuja occidentalis was
added in November

The gardens in front of the house adjacent to the wide part of the driveway are, with a few exceptions, spring and summer perennials. A thuja occidentalis has a protective burlap skirt to deflect snow and we carefully direct our snowblower away from a now-seven-year-old oxydendrum that occupies the center of that bed. The perennials in the bed are already under a blanket of up to three feet of snow.  Absent a prolonged thaw, this area may not be bare until mid-March.

The wisteria bed was planned to
support heavy snow cover
in winter

Three years ago, we created a new garden at a critical area for snow removal. The "wisteria" garden, about which I wrote in 2010, is roughly 200 square feet and is anchored by six woody shrubs – three ilex and three miniature kalmia. The balance of the bed is spring- and summer-blooming perennials that can take heavy snow cover. After the blizzard, the depth of snow thrown in this area is up to five feet and is heavily compacted. We made every effort to direct snow around the tender kalmias. We cross our fingers each season and, so far, the kalmias have bounced back without damage.

The back of the turnaround area has long been planted with Kirengeshoma (Japanese wax bells) and Hakonechola macra ‘Aureola’ (Golden Japanese forest grass), with miscellaneous rhododendron behind them. These perennials die back to the ground in late September; the several feet of snow that cover the area all winter seems to make the plants thrive in the growing season.

February 1, 1974

The passage of time throws a haze over most of our adult lives.  Months blend into years that are smoothed into decades.  Can you say with any certainty what you did on your birthday in, say, 1997?  Unless it was the date of the birth of a child or some other such milestone, can you recall what you did on a specific date two or three decades ago?

With enough research I can approximate where I was and what I was doing during a given month of a year; I went somewhere on vacation or completed a project for work.  A newspaper headline might jog a memory.  For me, though, as for most people, our adult lives are a continuum; a blur.

I can, however, remember one day with perfect clarity.  That date is Friday, February 1, 1974.



I was working for a stagnant backwater of GE

For me, the year 1974 did not start off auspiciously.  I had been out of college nearly three years and I was spending my second winter in Schenectady, New York.  I had gone to work for General Electric in a management training program with the promise that, after a year in North Carolina, I would be transferred to an office in San Jose, California.  That promise was turning out to be hollow.  Moreover, I discovered that the branch of GE that was my employer was a stagnant backwater and that my skills were ones that the company valued only as an afterthought.

It was an era of bad music...

My goal upon graduation from college had been to get as far away from Florida – the only place I had ever known – as possible.  On that score, I had succeeded.  However, in the middle of yet another upstate New York winter, that plan was looking increasingly poorly thought out.  Mostly, though, the year was starting off poorly because I was alone.  Apart from a few friends at work, I had no one in my life.

... and long gas lines

On the morning of February 1, my attendance was required at what was called a ‘section meeting’ in Colonie, NY, where my office had recently moved.  There, the sixty or so of us who could not find an excuse to be somewhere else got to hear about the importance of filling out time sheets and filing weekly activity reports.  A subsection manager delivered a half-hour talk outlining an exciting (to him) new business opportunity.

Then, at about 8:30 a.m., a small group of people joined the meeting.  They were from an office in Pittsfield, Massachusetts, some 40 miles away.  I would not have noticed their arrival except that they were forced to sit in the front of the room (I was ensconced in the back row) and that one of their number was a strikingly attractive blonde. 

For the next several hours I did little but look at her (well, at the back of her head and shoulders) and wonder who she was.  The meeting broke up shortly after noon and she was one of the first people out of the room.  My heart sank.  Then, I found her sitting in the lobby.  She was waiting for her ride back to Pittsfield. 

Betty was late to the meeting because
she had been at a Bob Dylan concert

She said that her name was Betty Burgess and that she had been late because she had been at a Bob Dylan concert in New York the previous evening and had gotten back to Pittsfield with an empty gas tank (this was an era of odd/even gas rationing).  Her smile was radiant.  She was intelligent and funny; knowledgeable and quick.  I asked if she could excuse me for a minute, but that I would be right back.

I went back to my cubicle and pulled out my copy of the employee phone directory.  There she was.  And, in the grand, sexist tradition of GE and of the era, employee names bore one of three prefixes: ‘Mr.’, ‘Mrs.’ and ‘Miss’.  Betty Burgess was a ‘Miss’.

Us, 40 years later

I was back in the lobby in seconds.  She was still there, though she was gathering her coat and briefcase for the trip back.  I gathered every ounce of courage I could muster and asked the dumbest question I had ever put to a member of the opposite sex in my life:  “Are you dateable?”

She paused for a moment and said ‘yes’.

Two years and two weeks later, we were married.  A few weeks after our wedding, we escaped from General Electric and began a new life together.

That’s what happened 40 years ago today. 

It was the luckiest day of my life.

The January Garden Club Meeting

I was the guest speaker at a garden club on Boston’s South Shore yesterday.  January has been a very good month for ‘Gardening Is Murder’; clubs want to be entertained rather than educated, especially when there is a foot of snow on the ground.  And what I provide is, for all intents and purposes, entertainment: the practice of gardening packaged as humor.

Because my presentation involves PowerPoint, I typically arrive well before the meeting starts so that my setting up is not disruptive.  I sit quietly through the business meeting, and then I get up and do my thing.

The business meeting yesterday was an eye-opener into the purpose and workings of an active garden club.  Even in the heart of winter, the club is vibrant.

Wayside gardens, like this one in my
town of Medfield, are frequently the
work of garden clubs.

Like most clubs, this one has a ‘garden therapy’ group that does outreach at retirement homes.  There was a report on the club’s most recent outing – making small floral arrangements in vintage teacups with the residents of an area nursing home.  There is also a ‘junior gardeners’ group that teaches horticulture to a group at the local school and it, too, had been active since the club’s last meeting.  If I heard the report correctly, the junior gardeners will go as a group to the Boston Flower & Garden Show in March under the club’s sponsorship.

For its own members, the club is organizing a trip to the greenhouses at Wellesley College in early March as well as an overnight outing to the Coastal Maine Botanical Garden for August.  The latter will include a talk by Bill Cullina, the Garden’s executive director and a noted horticulturalist.

Like many garden clubs, this one plants and maintains multiple wayside gardens around town.  Those sites are currently under heavy snow cover but keeping up those locales from early May through the first heavy frost is not cheap.  Clubs need to raise funds for their planting and this one will hold its annual plant sale at the end of May. Organizing and running such a sale is a volunteer-intensive effort and, through the meeting, a clipboard was circulated for members to sign up for specific tasks.

Plant sales and garden tours are
staples of garden club fundraising
efforts.  Support them and you
support your town.

Garden clubs are also social groups and one of this one has a long-time member who is in uncertain health.  The club devoted several minutes to discussing what it will do to make certain the elderly member knows she has not been forgotten by her friends.

This was one club on one frigid morning in January.  All over the country there are other clubs doing similar things.  They are educating themselves, doing outreach to their community, and beautifying their towns. 

I guess the takeaway is this:  come spring, you will likely read or hear about the garden club in your community raising money through some kind of an event – a plant sale or a garden tour, for example.  Please participate.  Whatever amount you pay will be returned to your town with long-lasting benefits. 

A Winter Lift from Fellow Indoor Gardeners

I had the pleasure this past weekend to be the guest speaker for the Hobby Greenhouse and Indoor Gardening Group of Massachusetts, an ungainly name for a very lively group of people who don’t believe that the gardening season ends with the first hard freeze.  It was a surprisingly large crowd who ventured out on a nasty Saturday afternoon for some camaraderie, plant- and tip-swapping. 

Part of our indoor garden

The group was formed in 1981 as the Hobby Greenhouse Association to give home greenhouse owners an opportunity to compare notes.  John Russo, the club president, explained to me that the current name – adopted in 2006 – recognizes that having a greenhouse is just one facet (and a somewhat rarefied one at that) of enjoying the pleasures of living with plants year-round.  Some members have full-fledged stand-alone greenhouses, some have partial glassed-in spaces.  One very spry lady with whom I spoke, lately residing in a retirement village, makes do with a particularly sunny window.

I came across a statistic last year that the average home contains five houseplants.  If that is the case, then the Sanders household is somewhere at the far end of the bell curve.  We don’t quite have a hundred, but we’re within reach of that figure.  Some are long-term residents, having been with us for decades.  Others are transitory.

Three primula that came home
with Betty

Among the latter are a trio of primroses – primula vulgaris – that came home in Betty’s grocery bag late last week.  On one level, primroses are lowest-common-denominator houseplants.  You can purchase them this time of year from every supermarket for a few dollars a pot.  Native to southern Europe and western Asia, in nature their bell-shaped flowers are white, pale yellow and pink.  Today, breeders have turned them into veritable rainbows.

Primroses are also the ultimate easy-care houseplant.  If you don’t over-water them, they’ll happily bloom indoors until summer.  If they start to flag, put them in the basement for a few weeks and watch for a new crop of flower buds.

Orchids are the other winter pleaser that plant breeders have made accessible to everyone. They’ve come a very long way in the past decade. Once orchids were rare, temperamental and outlandishly expensive. Today, tissue culture technology has made them readily available, especially phalaenopsis and dendrobium which adapt well to growing in homes. Ours occupy a tray in our upstairs hallway where a southeast-facing set of windows provide all-day light. We provide the moisture they need by resting the orchid pots on trays filled with a thin layer of pea gravel and water.

Paphiopedlium 'Napa
Valley' in a south-
facing window

Orchids require more care than primula. They need a reasonable amount of air circulation and higher humidity than most homes can provide in winter. They’re prone to spider mites, scale and aphids and so need to be watched (a little alcohol or soapy water is the best medicine). But the payoff is worth the effort: months of spectacular flowers on spikes and, miracle of miracles, re-blooms on plants that have been allowed to rest and gather energy.

I cite these two plants because attending a meeting of a group like the HG&IGGM keeps me excited about being a gardener (or, at least a Principal Undergardener) even in the throes of winter. 

I came home from that meeting and did an inventory of our indoor garden, and felt pretty good about our level of commitment.  Given that it will be nearly four months before anything can grow reliably out of doors, being an indoor gardener is a very good thing.

Houseplants to the Rescue

There is snow falling heavily outside as this is written.  The wind chill is well below zero and gale-force gusts are forecast overnight.  Inside, though, there’s a date palm in fruit; orchids in bloom; and a croton with splashy red, gold and yellow leaves.

Welcome to winter in my home, where houseplants are king for a season.

One of the greenhouses at
the Lyman Estate

It is, of course, possible to see stunning displays of flowers and greenery in mid-winter.  Here in eastern Massachusetts, Wellesley College has a wonderful complex of greenhouses open to the public as does the Lyman Estate in Waltham.  I'm certain there's a comparable indoor garden near you, whereever you live.  But visiting those indoor gardens requires getting in a car and driving, and the pleasure is just for an hour or so.  By all means, go see those places, but why not stop in at your local garden center on your way home and start your own collection?

That’s what we did several decades ago.  It started with the usual suspects: a hibiscus and a ficus tree.  Then we added a bougainvillea or two.  Or three.  We bought a peace lily (spathiphyllum) which grew and was divided.  Each division doubled in size and was then divided yet again.  Today, we force them on guests. 

Dracaena 'Lemon
Surprise' - one of our
houseplants

Our houseplants are family; they’ve followed us around the country.  When we move, one car or truck driven by one of us and dedicated to ensuring that every plant arrives undamaged.  Moreover, every houseplant has a history: it came from a road trip to Logee’s in Connecticut or by mail from White Flower Farm.  We bought it at the flower show or it came via a garden club plant swap.  It was a gift from a friend or there was an end-of-season sale at Mahoney’s or Weston Nurseries.

For seven months of the year, our houseplants get fed, watered, re-potted, rotated indoors and out, and generally pampered.  We take such good care of them when the outdoors is filled with blooming things in order to toughen them up for times like these.  From mid-October until the end of April, they will be continually stressed by low light levels, extremely low humidity and drafts.  Moreover, any hint of an insect infestation can send a plant into a quarantine from which there is often no return.

Two of the four
bougainvillea that keep
me company while I work

To me, houseplants are a form of rescue: a lifeline to a world of beauty when the outdoors is inhospitable.  I grew up with tropicals, which perhaps starts to explain my affinity for them as an adult.  I wake up to a cheerful variegated philodendron and a jasmine that is starting its bloom cycle.  We eat breakfast to a collection of succulents that grow in exotic shapes and textures.  I do my work in an office flanked by a pair of bougainvillea that will flower pink and yellow next month. 

By April, we’ll have landscapes of early bulbs to admire. Come May, we’ll all be enchanted by annuals and perennials, more bulbs and flowering trees.  For the next three months, it will be the houseplants that keep me sane.  They continually remind me that, even in New England, gardening is a year-round avocation.

Oh, Christmas Tree – the 2013 Edition

Putting up the Sanders Family Christmas Tree is always a complex operation, and this year’s production is no different. 

First, there is the search for the tree.  Then, there is bringing the tree home.  After that, there is the storing of the tree until the proper date, after which comes placing the tree in the stand.  Finally, there is the decorating of the tree.  None of these are simple tasks where the Sanders Family Christmas Tree is concerned.

The tree comes into the house.
That's 'The Lemon Drop Kid'
playing in the background.
Double-click on any of these
photos for a slideshow.

I should interject a little background for the unwary reader.  Mine is a mixed marriage.  Betty is a born-and-bred New Yorker from the Finger Lakes, where horse-drawn sleighs drag magnificent, fresh-cut firs through crisp, fresh-fallen snow to homes on Christmas Eve.  I am a native Floridian and my circa-1957 vision of the pathetic, parched, brown-needled Scotch pines that slumped listlessly against fences in Kiwanis-Club-operated lots in my hometown is permanently seared in memory. 

This is a drawing on an
egg of our first house, 
a brownstone in Brooklyn

In the Finger Lakes, multiple generations of a family gather around a roaring fire to roast chestnuts before going out to skate on frozen ponds.  In Miami, we picked up a couple of #2 Christmas dinners at the drive-through window at Bubi’s on our way to the beach.

Betty has always been a true believer.  She only had to give me a taste of the Real Thing to bring me around.  I cut my first Christmas tree in 1974 on a tree farm north of Albany with Betty as my guide to distinguishing between ‘good’ and ‘bad’ trees.  It was a revelation.  I was hooked.  I saw the light, and there no greater zealot in the Christmas Tree Universe than a convert. 

A decided mix of cultures: at
lower left, a Ukranian egg from
our days in Chicago; at center,
an Indian on an elephant; one
of Betty's parent's ornaments
from the 1940s.

This year, we began scouting Christmas trees before Thanksgiving and made an exploratory visit to our first lot soon thereafter.  For several years – at the height of my mania – we traveled fifty miles to southern Rhode Island to cut fourteen-foot behemoths at Big John Leyden’s Tree Farm (inexplicably, there are no cut-your-own tree farms in Boston – go figure).  Going to Big John’s involved borrowing a truck and spending upwards of three hours finding ‘the right’ tree.  And, while the cost of the tree was a very reasonable $35, the gas involved made the excursion less of a bargain.  And, Big John eventually ran out of fourteen-foot Fraser firs, plus Betty put her foot down that we would never again devote two solid days just to getting a tree to stand up straight.

There's something for
everyone on the tree

We found this year’s tree at Weston Nurseries, a nine-plus-foot Fraser fir that smelled like the Great North Woods.  It was baled and placed atop our car for the fifteen-mile drive home. That was on December 8.  We do not, however, put up our tree until exactly one week before Christmas, and I am unable to fathom why putting up trees – real or artificial – in late November has become both commonplace and acceptable.  To me, a tree has a two-week engagement where it occupies center stage in a house.  It should go up on December 18 while an appropriate Christmas movie or three plays in the background and come down while watching the Rose Parade on HGTV.

The density of ornaments
reflects travel and eclectic tastes.

Once home, we un-baled the tree and parked it in our woods to regain its proper form.  This involved cutting a fresh bottom, standing the tree up in a tub of water, and securing it at four points to nearby trees.  Tying ropes in sub-freezing weather is not fun but we accomplished the feat in a little under an hour.  There, the tree stood for eight days, which included one bout of snow and sleet. 

On Monday, though, there was a warning for a fresh three-to-six inches of the white stuff the following day and we thought it unwise to carry a snow-encrusted tree into the house.  So, we cleared a space in the garage and devoted two hours to anchoring the tree to the railing of one of our garage doors while tying the base of the tree to the other railing so the tree could not kick out and hit a car.  Elapsed time:  ninety minutes. 

Then, late Tuesday afternoon, after the tree had shed its accumulation of snow (and while heavy snow fell outside), we carried it into the house.  We must be getting better at placing trees in stands (it requires an extremely heavy-duty stand to accommodate a tree of our size and girth) because we got it standing perfectly straight on the first try.  We tightened the tree in its stand.  We also deploy a pair of guy wires to augment the stand because, in years past, cats had gotten inspired to scale the tree in search of whatever it is cats climb trees to find.

A koala from Australia, an angel,
an ornate ceramic egg and my
drawing of our Stamford home.

Once guy-wired, we inspected the tree one last time.  It was magnificent, with a circumference at its base of more than twenty-five feet.  It was perfect… except that it was facing the wrong way.  And so, with guy wires removed, I wiggled my way into the tree and picked it up in its stand, slowly rotating a hundred-pound tree (plus stand) one hundred and eighty degrees. Guy wires were re-attached.  Miraculously, the tree was still straight.  Elapsed time:  two hours.

Tuesday evening, we added nine hundred lights.  Wednesday, we started decorating.

It is decorating a tree that is the true joy of having one.  Opening each box of ornaments is a voyage of discovery through time and space.  There are the tiny vases we acquired in Greece and the prayer balls from Japan.  There are matched glass lamps from Harrod’s in London and terra cotta jugs from Sorrento.  There is a tiny Champagne bottle from old friends in Virginia and one of my baby shoes. 

Box after box is opened and memories are unleashed:  tiny koalas from Australia and a carved tiger in a Santa cap from the San Diego Zoo; crystal icicles we bought on sale after Christmas at B. Altman in the late 1970s and delicate ornaments from the 1940s that graced Betty’s tree when she was a girl.  Hand-painted Ukrainian eggs from our days in Chicago and a Russian one featuring a red fox framed against a snowy night from a street fair in Augusta, Georgia.

The finished tree.
Merry Christmas!

There are more than 600 ornaments in all (a computerized list keeps track of each one and its origin).  We add a few new ornaments each year; both ones we are given and ones we acquire.  Sadly, a few become too delicate to use and so are taken out, admired, and returned to storage.

This is our ritual.  Christmas means many things to different people.  For me, the tree is a symbol of both timeless and evolution; of change and of constancy.  I look at the decorated tree and I see a diorama of my life preserved in precious bundles each weighing a few ounces.

Christmas trees come but once a year, but the enchantment is eternal.

Why We Garden - The Thanksgiving Edition

One of Betty’s most popular programs for garden clubs has the cumbersome title, “Planning, Preparing and Planting the Vegetable Garden”.  In it, she takes clubs through all the stages of getting involved in creating a home garden, imparting considerable wisdom along the way. 

Norman Rockwell focused on
the turkey.  We focus on
the vegetables.

The program ends with a slide titled ‘Why We Garden’ and the bullet points are ‘Remembering where food comes from’, ‘Eating truly fresh vegetables’ and ‘Eating well long after the garden is gone’.  Betty expounds on each benefit before raising the lights and asking for questions.

The illustration for that slide is an array of home-canned fruits and vegetables in a larder.  After today, I have an idea for a much better one: a photograph of our Thanksgiving dinner.  We have just completed a sumptuous dinner and the remarkable part is that nearly all of it came from our garden – that same garden that was plowed under four weeks ago.

We started with a superb vichyssoise – potato leek soup for the uninitiated.  Hours before the garden was eradicated for 2013, we pulled the last of our leeks – more than a dozen plump, succulent and fragrant specimens that shrugged off the sub-freezing nights.  We have been eating those leeks ever since.  Today’s repast used the last of them and they were delicious.

Our main course included creamed onions, green beans, corn, turnips, butternut squash, turkey and dressing.  Everything on the table grew in our garden except the turkey and dressing, and those two items were liberally seasoned with rosemary, thyme and sage from our kitchen garden.  The dressing contained onions and celery from our garden.  I draw the line, though, at growing wheat.

Three squares of corn meant
enough extra to freeze

The corn bears special mention.  During the prime corn harvesting season in August and September, we ate two or four ears of corn every day as each ‘square’ ripened.  Inevitably, though, there was an overlap when one square was not completely picked while the next was clearly ripe.  During that interregnum, we picked, shucked, blanched and quick-froze the excess corn.  A day later, we sheared the cobs of their kernels and froze them in plastic bags.  The resulting product is startling: it tastes nothing like the frozen corn you find in supermarkets.  Rather, it is just a shade off what was picked back in August and September: incredibly sweet and crunchy.

We had our salad course after the main meal.  I had sincere doubts whether the lettuce we transplanted to our cold frame in September would survive the pair of 15 degree nights and 40 mph winds we endured last week.  I covered the cold frame with a tarp and crossed my fingers.  To my surprise, several of the lettuce heads came through without freeze damage.  It tasted grand.

This is our post-Thanksgiving
squash and sweet potato supply

Dessert was a sweet potato chocolate nut cake; a recipe straight out of the Victory Garden cookbook.  I confess we did not grow sweet potatoes this year.  However, I did watch them grow in an adjoining plot on our community garden.  One enterprising gardener purchased several hundred ‘slips’ and parceled them out among more than a dozen plot holders.  In September, we bartered red peppers and okra for half a dozen plump specimens grown by a gardening neighbor.  They were terrific in late November and will be even sweeter in mid-winter.

The squash we ate will, at the rate we are consuming it, last until spring.  We harvested more than two dozen Waltham Butternut squashes, each weighing several pounds.  Like the sweet potatoes, winter squash ‘sweetens’ as it rests following harvest.  I see a lot of squash soup in our future.

What will be on the table next year?  During the main course, Betty casually noted that the only reason cranberries are grown in bogs is for ease of harvesting; cranberry bushes grow just fine on dry land.  Stay tuned for further developments.

All the Leaves Are Brown

We are coming down to the end of the garden clean-up.  The perennial beds have been cut back to stubs and even the grasses are looking weary.  What we are left with are… oak leaves.

We have perhaps two hundred trees on our two-acre property.  There is a healthy mix of specimen trees we planted over the past 14 years (oxydendron, forest pansy redbud, heptacodium, dogwood, cornelian cherry, etc.), but the preponderance of our little forest are trees that were on the property when we got here. 

This fifty-foot oak on our
property still has some leaves
to shed.

Among the latter group are twenty or more oaks.  The largest are over fifty years old and sixty feet high but we have them in all sizes.  What all of the oaks have in common is that they all wait to drop their leaves until after the other trees on the property have done so. Around our home, the maples, ash and birch all shed their leaves in October.  Even the pines completed their needle drop by the end of the month.  It is now mid-November and a good gust of wind can still bring down a cascade of oak leaves.

The lawn was mowed yesterday.  Last
night's storm left it looking like this.

Oak leaves are the savior of lawn services.  Maples, for example, drop their leaves quickly:  typically in two weeks or less.  Moreover, they are ‘thin’ leaves and their C:N ratio (carbon to nitrogen) is around 20.  This means they break down very rapidly when simply mowed into the lawn.  The mulched leaves return the same nutrients needed for next year’s growth.  Lawn services, or course, are not in the business of letting Mother Nature do for free what three guys with a truck can do for a fee.   When the maple leaves fall, there’s a single visit to rake/suck up the leaves and leave the lawn looking neat and tidy.  Lawn ‘nutrition’ will be added later in the form of a ‘fall (chemical) fertilization’.

If not cleared, oak leaves will form
a mat that smothers whatever is
underneath it, like our rock garden.

Oak leaves, on the other hand, can take a month or more to drop.  Their C:N ratio is 60:1 and the leaves are both thick and heavy with tannin.  What this means is that the leaves decompose very slowly (because of the preservative property of the tannin) and, once on the ground, they stay there.  A diligent lawn care company can milk oak leaf season for half a dozen clean-up trips.  Clients pay because there are few things as ugly as an oak-leaf-strewn lawn.

We, of course, don’t use a lawn service.  The earlier, non-oak leaf drops were all mowed into the lawn and have long since disappeared.  The oak leaves, on the other hand, have another fate: we turn them into mulch.  It’s a laborious process but well worth it.

Here’s what we do:  first, we rake all of the leaves out of the various beds and onto the lawn.  We do this because oak leaves tend to mat.  Because they’re not drying out after they fall, they’re still pancake-flat after several weeks.  If you get a layer of oak leaves six or eight thick, it turns into a smothering blanket over your lawn or perennial bed and little moisture gets through.  The result is snow mold and other diseases.

These chopped-up oak leaves are
spread on our beds as a protective
mulch for the perennials.

Next, we chop up the leaves with our lawn mower and bag them.  Then, the well-chopped leaves go right back onto the beds as a mulch.  They won’t mat because they’ve now been torn into tiny pieces.  Bacteria have a lot more edges to chew on, hastening their composting. The oak-leaf mulch provides insulation for the plants in the beds (preventing heaving), a moisture barrier to keep water in the soil from evaporating, and a slow-acting compost to enrich the soil.

By spring, the oak leaves will have mostly disappeared and we’ll put down a layer of brown wood mulch for the season.  In the meantime, we’ve taken a problem (those drab oak leaves) and turned them into an asset. 

The Garden Ogre Goes Back Into His Cave

Betty and I secured a plot in the Medfield Community Garden a year after we moved back to New England in 1999.  From our first year, though, we noticed that the garden seemed to be run for the benefit of a few families who staked out multiple plots for themselves, did little maintenance, and imposed a three-page-long list of rules that amounted to a screed against the use of anything contrary to their idea of ‘organic’ principles.

A Google maps view of the
garden, circa 2009.  It has
since been enlarged.

We complained – to no avail – to the ‘committee’ and then to a town selectman who looked into it and found that the garden was under the auspices of the town’s Conservation Commission.  We spoke to a member of the Commission who nodded in all the right places.  A few months later, we were called into the Town Clerk’s office and sworn in as members of the Community Garden Committee.

Which is when we found out that we were the only members of the Committee; the others having finally found suckers to take their place, and promptly resigned.  The one who had written the garden rule, as it turns out, wasn't even a committee member.

That was six years ago.  I dredge up this bit of ancient history because, this weekend, the garden was plowed under for the season by a farmer from a neighboring town.  The garden’s year is officially over.

The garden in April...

I like to think that Betty and I have made some improvements in the running of the Community Garden.  For one thing, it is now considerably larger: 30,000 square feet of gardens plus ancillary walkways, compost piles, and whatnot; call it an acre in all.  There are fifty, 600-square-foot plots; about ten of which are further subdivided into 300-square-foot plots so that those with smaller gardening aspirations can still get their hands dirty.  We can offer plots to up to sixty families each season while charging just $20 per full plot or $15 per half plot (which pays for two plowings, the delivery of compost and manure, and on-site water).  For another thing, the gardening ‘guidelines’ fit nicely on one page.

... and at the end of June

We work with the town to bring in wood chips to keep weeds out of the paths, and well-composted manure to provide fertilizer.  A soil test done on the garden last spring showed that the garden is 18% ‘organics’ – no other fertilizer is needed.  The garden is plowed under in the fall, overspread with manure over the winter, and then harrowed in the spring.  That fact that after twelve years at its current site, the garden is now a full foot higher than the surrounding field speaks volumes.

Betty’s job is garden advisor.  She gives a vegetable gardening lecture to a standing-room crowd each March at the Medfield Library, and then fields a continuing string of questions as the season progresses.  For her, the questions are a gold mine:  they tell her what is on the mind of both beginning and experienced gardeners which, in turn, allows her to fine-tune her presentations to garden clubs and civic groups. 

She fields many queries while she works our plot.  Most questions, though, arrive via email and Betty responds with page-long answers that include links to university and extension service websites.  As a result, Betty has been given the title of 'garden guru', and properly so.

Back in the bad old days, garden
plots would be abandoned

In addition to mowing and weed-whacking the garden perimeter, my job is garden ogre.  Garden communications are via email and the ones I send out over the course of the season are invariably of the nagging variety. In April and May I am telling people that they need to show ‘evidence of gardening’ or else their plot will be given away. This is because, in the bad old days, people would sign up for a plot, find it actually involved effort, and abandon their garden to the weeds.  Those weeds would become everyone’s problem.  Now, any garden that is not worked by the middle of May gets turned over to someone on a waiting list.

... and in August, when
everything ripens.

As the season progresses, I tell people, gently at first and then stridently if follow-up communications are needed, to clear weeds from the walking aisles, trim back vegetables that are causing their fences to bulge into the aisles, get the excess weeds out of their plots and, in August, to get their blankety-blank sweet potato and squash vines out of the aisles.

Then comes the end-of-season cleanup campaign.  I am aware that many community gardens allow permanent fences.  To me, this promotes insularity and a sense of a closed community.  In Medfield, all gardens must be taken down by the end of October. “Taken down” means fences, but also includes stalks and vines that must be bagged up and completely removed from the vicinity together with anything that might be diseased.  Weeds should be chucked to the perimeter of the garden.  All that should remain is stuff that the tractor can easily plow under.

It is during October that I begin signing emails with the title ‘Garden Ogre’.  The vast majority of our gardeners are responsible.  A minority have either an unwarranted sense of entitlement or some aversion to meeting deadlines.  I walk the garden every week noting who is putting off their cleanup work and I start sending out ‘reminders’.  If it gets to be the middle of the month and the garden still shows no sign of cleanup activity, the tone of my emails becomes downright unfriendly.

The response to these emails varies from a wake-up call that finally gets them out on a chilly Saturday morning to a petulant reply from one family that “they have small children and preparing for Halloween is more important.”  Guess which family will not be invited back for the 2014 season?

Ready for next year.

I walked the garden one final time on Saturday morning.  I pulled a dozen or so stakes and some landscape fabric that had been buried by mulch. The garden was otherwise clean of debris.  Later this month, I’ll send out notes to each plot holder asking if they want to return for 2014 and, if so, to what size garden.  That survey will tell me how much ‘marketing’ needs to be done to fill the spaces next year.

It is a satisfying bit of public service.  A fair number of the notes I receive from my fellow gardeners make a point of praising the work Betty and I do to keep the enterprise running.  Best of all, my fellow gardeners are a great group of people whom I would otherwise likely never get to know.  

What more can an ogre ask?  Well,, a donkey sidekick would be nice...

A Gardener's Work Is Never Done

Yesterday morning I was awakened at 5:35 a.m. when our cat walked into our bedroom and let out a single, very loud ‘meow’.  The cat then went downstairs where it emitted multiple noises that sounded for all the world like a cement mixer missing one or more ball bearings.

Our cat is not normally so talkative, so we put on our robes and went downstairs to see what had upset our normally (except at mealtime) placid pet.  The answer was immediately obvious: outside our front door, two deer were sizing up our holly bushes as a breakfast entrée.

Welcome to the gardener’s world, where the end of summer and the growing season are just pencil marks on a continuum of chores that span the year.  I categorize those chore into four baskets:  things we don’t know we have to do until reality slaps us upside the head and tells us we better do them ‘now’; things we put off doing during the summer because it was too damned hot; things that you can’t hurry; and things that need to get done, and autumn just seems like the right time of year to do them.

You do not want to see these on
your doorstep.

For example, yesterday’s meowing cat begat an hour of spraying every evergreen in our garden with a nasty commercial concoction of putrefied eggs and garlic and a red-circled reminder on our calendar to repeat the process in six weeks.  That’s a prime example of a chore that kind of sneaks up on you.  Spraying is second nature while the garden is in its full flower.  It takes a couple of tick-bearing ruminants on your doorstep to drive home the reminder than deer repellent needs to be applied even after the tastiest morsels are history.

This rock border project was
saved for cooler weather.

The late autumn is also when projects that were put in abeyance because of the summer’s heat come home to roost.  We had a portion of our driveway repaved in July.  Now that the weather is cooler, we are re-installing a rock drainage border around the driveway.  It sounds like a simple task until you consider that the contractor performing the repaving work made no effort to preserve our earlier border.  As a result, new drainage channels must be created, shaped and filled with rocks that have sat in crates for several months.  Is it a gardening project?  Absolutely.  The drainage borders protect the gardens that surround the driveway from rainwater that would otherwise wash those gardens away.

Taking down the gardens in the autumn is a gradual process that requires respect of both nature and reality, and so stretches well beyond the end of Daylight Savings Time.  A large bed of daylilies was cut down in late September when the foliage yellowed.  Honeybees, however, still feasted on the asters that were interspersed among the daylilies. And so that part of the cleanup was put off.  Now that the asters have passed, I am going around dutifully completing that part of the project.

These grasses are in their glory
right now.  Why cut them down?

We also have tall grasses that come into their glory in October and November.  They wave in the breeze at the front of our property and are impervious to frost.  Cutting them down early would be senseless.  But the first snow of the season will leave them looking disheveled and forlorn. As soon as that first snow of the season has fallen and melted, those grasses will need to come down.

Finally, late autumn is also the time for those projects on the ‘long term’ list.  Several years ago, I insisted that a part of the back of our property be cultivated as ‘Seedeaters’ Heaven’, a stand of tall rudbeckia, hellenium and other plants that would provide a wealth of seeds for the avians that keep down the insect population of our garden. 

It was a great and noble idea in theory.  In practice, it never looked good and quickly became an overgrown mess filled with weeds and unwanted interlopers.  Now that the days are cool, my responsibility is to grub out the area so that it can be replanted more sensibly.

In undertaking these projects, we race against the calendar. Sometime in November or December, it will be too cold to work outside and the days will be too short to get work done.  When that happens, we throw in the towel and retreat indoors to contemplate seed catalogs for the 2014 season.

But not, of course, until I’ve split enough wood to get through the New Year.