General Confusion

Daffodils resurfaced

The plants are as confused as we are (and the deer too, I'm sure) about the season we are in by the relatively warm and unpredictable weather which we've had this winter.  Looking back on my posts from last year, I see "the Iceman Cometh" on the 1st of February, in contrast, it is a balmy 52 degrees this 1st day of February, 2012!  I noticed a week ago that our hyacinth bulbs have already poked through the ground; today I was shocked to see that the daffodils have already bloomed! Kirk is not as sanguine about the weather staying this warm and hopes that we won't have another freeze in the coming days to wipe out those tentative buds.

Birds and Bees

Meyer Lemon Tree

Apollo and Daphne

I was given a Meyer Lemon tree by a friend of ours (Rega) a couple of weeks ago; she helped me pot it and set it in a corner in the breakfast area where there is plenty of southern exposure.  She has joked about naming the tree, Daphne, after the unfortunate maiden who, in order to evade the pursuit of Apollo, was transformed into a laurel tree. The Y-shaped lemon tree seems to bear a certain resemblance to the painting of Daphne pictured above.  Within a few days after we potted it, clusters of small white buds began to appear on the tree, which blossomed into fragrant white flowers with delicate yellow anthers shortly afterwards. 

Delicate Operation

As I've never cultivated a fruit tree indoors before, Rega advised that I would need to take on the work of birds and bees outdoors and perform, so to speak, artificial insemination on the tree, i.e., assist in its self-pollination, so that it could bear fruit indoors.  How fascinating!  I was a little daunted by the delicate operation but with the help of on-line instructions, some Q-tips, and a magnifying glass at hand, I was ready for the task.  I look forward to harvesting plenty of lemons next spring.

Robbed!

Who would have thought that we had some pretty rough thieves hanging around our yard? These are not your average petty thieves that steal into your yard in the early hours and nip off some of your hosta leaves; these are violent petunia robbers who not only devour your petunias down to the barest stems, but completely uproot the plants, leaving their carcasses lying around, showing no mercy.  Kirk and I planted two petunias on Saturday - they were among the batch of annuals I brought back from the Farmer's market, and they were showing such healthy contentment just yesterday.  I could hardly believe my eyes when I saw the carnage this afternoon! 

Planted last Saturday

Upended

It's Alive!

Wisteria blossoms

Our wisteria vine has revived and there is photographic evidence to prove it - If you look hard enough at the picture, you can see some anemic blossoms hanging on the ends of the dry twigs above the pergola.  Kirk has been telling me that something is happening up there and I finally got up on a chair to take a look yesterday afternoon.  Lo and behold there were flowers indeed, which Kirk didn't see just a couple of days before.  The tired, decrepit vine finally woke up from its long hibernation.  Maybe our gentle prodding did have some effect, after all.  All the green you see in the photo is from the tall trees above the vine, not from the vine itself.  However, this morning it is clear, from what we saw with the binoculars from the kitchen window, that leaves are coming out as well.  

Farmer's Market

Downtown Farmer's Market

I was, by mistake, an hour early for my hair appointment downtown this morning.  As this was a Saturday, I walked over to the Farmer's Market just a few blocks away.  We haven't been back to the market since last summer and this seemed like a perfect opportunity.  The Farmer's Market in Bloomington is without doubt a favorite place for locals to hang out on Saturday mornings, and it's the first thing all newcomers are made acquainted with. Locally grown, organic vegetable and dairy products seem to be de riguer and the local Co-op, BloomingFood, is the grocery store of choice for most academics here.  In addition to the hippie farmers, we also have traditional Amish family farmers nearby. The little Amish girls with their demur bonnets and pinafores sitting behind the stalls are adorable.  They seem to take the people and things around them quite comme ils faut, however at odds they may appear with their own life style.

Another quirky thing about the food sources here is the irregular Tuesday gathering of people in a corner of the Co-op's parking lot.  It's a bit mysterious if you are not in on the secret cult.  These are "friends" of Fabian who receive e-mail notification from him a couple of days before he is expected in town.  He (I'm not at all certain that Fabian is a real person) and his crew apparently drive a refrigerated truck all the way here from Galveston,Texas, bringing fresh shrimp, oysters, crab meat, and red snapper, etc., to the poor land-bound folks along the way.  Even though his e-mails always say that the truck will be in the parking lot at 2 p.m. on a certain Tuesday, the faithful here don't take any chances and generally start queuing up at noon.  You are out of luck if you happen to be the next in line when what you want is sold out.  People stock up on fresh seafood and try to make it last until the next time Fabian is back in town, which, unfortunately, follows an occult schedule of its own and is not predictable.  As the shrimp boats don't operate in the winter time, we don't see Fabian from mid November to mid April. It was a long, lean, five-month period without shrimp!  The line was twice as long when the truck showed up on 4/19/11, the first time this year. 

All the preamble above was but a prelude to my confession - after giving all the aisles at the Farmer's Market a once over, I ended up carrying a tray of blooming annuals to my car! I must also confess that I have previously scouted out a couple of spots in the front yard that can use some colors.  The power of instant gratification is irresistible!

At the market

Transplanted

The Lure of Annuals

My perennial bed on 5.23.11

Compared to what it was like about a month ago, my perennial bed is filling out vigorously, albeit in a somewhat disorderly fashion - those I planted last fall jostling for space with the natives whose existence I was not aware of, elbowing one another unceremoniously.  Though I keep a pretty good record of what I planted, it will be nice someday to be able to identify each by name via the shape of its flower and leaf.

the same bed on
4.14.11

I was slightly miffed when I was told by our gardening expert, Greg, that our front yard lacked interest as it was mostly green, before the rhododendrons bursting on the scene, that is. I felt that I needed to defend it by saying that "but there are different shades of green!"  I am not enamored of those artificial-looking, ready-made, showy annuals which are popping up in the token flower beds in front of so many commercial establishments and on the aisles of gardening centers right about now.  And the idea of flowers which are disposable in a season is not very appealing, not to mention "unsustainable", so it seems to me.  Still there is no denying a certain allure in having clusters of colorful annuals lining the borders of one's gardening beds. Perhaps I may succumb to the temptation of putting in some annuals when summer arrives. 

Rhododendron in bloom

As if by appointment, all the rhododendron bushes in our front yard bloomed simultaneously, lending to the mostly green landscape a lively splash of color. I'm embarrassed to admit that for the life of me I could not remember what it was called and had to stop my neighbor, Kay, on her driveway to find out.  Not knowing the names of trees and plants puts one in a very disadvantageous position; it's a little bit like traveling in a foreign country and not knowing the language, either written or spoken, or worse, like an illiterate person missing out on all the printed treasures of knowledge.  I can't wait for an app to come out which, by my snapping a picture of a plant, will instantly identify it for me, like one of those nifty music-recognizing apps, such as Shazam.  

Blood Iris

Under one of the rhododendron bushes I discovered some purple (though they look blue in the pictures) iris flowers with "exotic" looking veins, called Blood iris or Iris sanguinea.  It's mind-boggling to learn that there are so many different species of iris.

An update about our wisteria vine: It was pronounced dead by our "resident", International Society of Arborculture-certified arborist, Mr. Gregory Peters of the Souring Eagles Horticultural Service.  He speculated that its having been confined all these years in a tiny corner of the mostly paved pergola and the severe drought last year probably contributed to its demise. The bottom of the trunk had been withering and dying; large chunks of the trunk had fallen off and not enough of nutrient was able to reach to the branches above the pergola.  Not to belie the name of our house, we are considering planting another wisteria vine on the other side of the existing wisteria behind the trellis where there is more ground to grow.  But I don't know if we will still be living in the same house when the new vine grows big enough to bloom.  

Spring Planting

Herb & Butterfly garden

Beat the rain this morning and got all my new planting done, all 63, tiny, 6"-ish tall plants which I ordered from Bluestone Perennials, a nursery in Ohio.  They included plants from their pre-planned Butterfly Garden, 6 herbs (basil, sage, chives, rosemary, tarragon, and lavender), and a few shrubs and groundcovers to fill in some gaps in the existing garden. The soil was moist and responsive to digging and tamping, like well kneaded bread dough in one's hands.  

Starter Garden

This will be my second gardening experiment since we moved to Bloomington.  The first was the "Starter Garden", also from Bluestone, which I put in the bed off the Sunroom last September.  It consists of 57 plants in 23 varieties of easy to start, foolproof, perennials which are guaranteed to thrive - an encouraging thought to gardening newbies.  Even though they seem to have come back alive with the advent of spring, they are far from resembling the full-grown plants with colorful blooms as shown on their website.  I'm not sure how long it will take before that happens but I guess I must learn to be patient; plants have their own 'plant time', not to be equated to human time.


Kirk and I have become seriously concerned and alarmed that the wisteria vine is perhaps dead!  What a ghastly thought!  Dead, after 45 productive years!  Here are two pictures of the pergola in our backyard, one taken on 4/25/2010, when it was densely covered with purple wisteria, the other on 4/27/2011, around the same time a year later, completely barren and dry, showing no sign of life. 

Then

Now

Don't you agree there is
cause to be alarmed?

Crocuses in riot

About a month ago we first heard of crocus, the name of a flowing perennial plant which was said to be one of the early bloomers in spring.  Without any inkling of their (pre)existence in our yard, we discovered to our delight that the crocus flowers have in fact started blooming all along the garden borders in our front yard.  And every day we seem to be making fresh discoveries all over our yard of flowers which we didn't know we have.  Beside the crocuses, the white and yellow daffodils and the irises that I planted last fall have also begun to make their presence known.  I'm especially anxious to see whether the perennial bed that I put in last September by the Sun Room survives the winter.  At present the white markers which strew about the bed look like grave stones marking ancient burial sites.


For the skeptics, here is a close-up of my crocus -

3.30.11 Crocus update:  People who claimed to know about crocuses have caused me to doubt that what I saw rioting in our yard were actually crocuses, even though it was my piano teacher who first told me that they were when she came over to tea.  But we actually have something in our back yard which fits the expert description of crocuses, esp. the long thin blade-like leaves; unfortunately, it was the only one I found.  For comparison, the image on the left of a single purple flower was from our yard, which looks convincingly like the crocuses image I found on the web on the right. 

Spring Awakening

They may not look like much, these tender shoots of the daffodil bulbs I planted last fall, but they represent for me the tell-tale signs of the gentle re-awakening of life with spring, after a three-month hiatus.  Before we know it, we will have been in Bloomington a whole year and have witnessed how nature, in a more intense fashion, endures and manifests itself a complete cycle of life, death, and rebirth. 


The temperature has crept up to low 60's in the past couple of days but Kirk does not believe that we have seen the last of snow.  After hearing about the several slip-and-fall accidents among the people from the Philosophy department alone after the last major snow storm earlier this month, I finally got wind of this "Ice Melt" thing, which is rock salt that one can sprinkle on walking surfaces to dissolve ice.  I remember driving around town in a blizzard with Kirk trying to find a store that still had ice melt in stock.  When Kirk phoned Lowe's to find out whether they had any, he got a chuckle in response.  As we were having company that evening and our front walk was especially slippery, Kirk first tried to melt the ice with Morton Iodized Salts but soon found out that that wasn't very effective.  He proceeded to melt the ice with buckets of hot water which proved more efficacious but incredibly wasteful.  After who knows how many trips to the tub to fill up the bucket with hot water, we managed to secure our guests safe arrival and departure.  I went back to the local hardware store when they were expecting to get their next shipment of salts and bought a 20-lb bag, a modest amount which probably wouldn't last very long should we encounter another snow storm, but then again it might be sitting on the garage floor until next winter.  An update about the damage we sustained during the last storm - the branch was cut up and removed, and the lamp post straightened on the following day. I'm sorry to say that Kirk did not get the chance to buy a chain saw; I called in Eddie of the Helping Hands who speedily cleaned up the mess.   

Buried Treasures

Within the garden beds in these two photographs there lie buried 85 dormant daffodil, iris, and hyacinth bulbs of various kinds.  About half of them were planted in September and the rest were planted in the last two days.  The photographs will serve as markers to remind me where the treasures are buried and, when the bulbs are in full bloom next spring, as before/after comparisons.  


These bulbs were selected for their colors, fragrant quality and, most importantly, their Deer Resistant characteristics.  (In the few months since we moved here, we already have had several deer-related stories to tell, but they will have to wait for another post.)  I hope that this claim by the nursery where I ordered the bulbs turns out to be true.  I will be devastated if these bulbs, when they finally bloom, end up as fresh spring salad for the neighborhood deer families.  


However, before they have a chance to bloom, they have to first survive the looting by rooting of the squirrels and chipmunks.  The squirrels here are bigger than those in Florida; I think these here are called 'Fox Squirrels'. They are big and fearless and they have a nose for buried bulbs!  I caught one digging at where I just finished planting the first batch of bulbs as soon as my back was turned.  He stood his ground without flinching when I tried to shoo him away; I had to wave a big branch at him before he turned around and scrambled up the tree.  I sought advice from the nursery and was referred to an on-line article called "How to Keep Spring Bulbs Safe from Hungry Squirrels", http://www.greenthumbarticles.com/article/How-to-keep-Spring-Bulbs-Safe-From-Hungry-Squirrels-a887.html.  There are several suggestions but most of them sound too complicated.  I liked the suggestion about using odors that might be offensive to rodents. You see, I have already been using a peppermint-scented deer repellent spray, called Deer Out, on my Hostas which had been decimated by deer before we moved in. The scent works on the principle of association; the deers associate the scent with something which probably didn't taste very good and learn to avoid going near it.  I thought this might work with squirrels as well.  But as there is nothing above ground that they can sink their teeth into at this moment, they probably won't be deterred by the taste of Deer Out.  However, the scent might serve as a mask to keep them from smelling out the tasty stuff lying beneath the ground. 


I am happy to report that so far the spray seems to have worked and my bulbs are lying safely underground dreaming about the coming of spring. That is my hope anyway and I'll be sure to report back in a few months' time to see if these buried treasures have been looted in the interim without my even knowing it.