Color, potatoes, shade, gravity

OK, so how funny is it that in my sidebar introduction (to the right), I say how I'm not into vegetables and how that's my husband's job--because I have commandeered the vegetable garden full-force and am loving it. John still gets to help...


Here is the view of sweet peas, squash, carrots, beets, lettuce and spinach (going to seed), and my Big Rock Potato Mountain range, with the God of the Garden overseeing all.


And here is the garden from the other side. I started the tomatoes indoors in January--and I bought a few fancy heirloom tomatoes at the Farmers Market--stripes, or purple, or something. So I have 3 cages of each growing here: yellow, cherry, early girl, roma, and one other I think. Again here is the potato mountain range--which was a valuable lesson! Come to find out, you bury potato plants as they grow to increase yield (apparently they produce potatoes all the way up the plant--who knew?? Thank you Jessica McAleese!). So since my potatoes were between 1-2.5' high by the time I learned this, I had to create this ridge of dirt covering the bottoms of the plants. We'll see how it works!


Here are the new beds I made--hard to see, of course. In front is the cucumber/pumpkin patch--including a pumpkin growing for the Farmer's Market big pumpkin contest--I'm going for it! Cucumbers are hard to get started for some reason--I wouldn't recommend starting squash-like plants indoors--except maybe a few weeks early so that they get started enough to not be a squirrel delicacy as pumpkin and corn seeds are!! Behind the pumpkin patch is my corn patch--kind of spotty because of squirrel bandits I'm guessing, so I've interspersed pumpkins and tomatillos in that bed. My friend Cathy is learning about plants that grow together complimentarily--and apparently squash, corn, and beans are good companion plants. Might experiment with that next year. Off to the right is a flower bed with lots of things that have been either moved or started from seed. Should look good this year--painted daisy, yarrow, love in a mist, california poppy, scarlet flax (can't get scarlet flax to do well...), and salvia.

John's fruit trees--apple, apple, apple. Killed a cherry and peach last year, but these three seem to be doing well and I think we even found a few apples on one--I believe these are 3 years old.

OK, on to the flowers, and how there is always something new to learn or adapt to! Take my current dilemma that did not exist a few years ago in my landscape--shade.

When I bought my house in 2000, this was a full sun spot! So I planted full-sun flowers that are currently very sad and confused. I'll be doing a lot of plant moving around and hard-scaping in these areas hopefully this year. What are some pretty things that grow in full shade? Astible. Don't like hostas. Any suggestions would be wonderful (low-water, of course).


Every single one of these plants are for full, hot sun! Ugh. Penstemon. False sunflower. Sedum(?). Gayfeather. I actually moved them from a full-sun hillside because they were all tipping over on the steep hillside (another problem that has emerged--trial and error). Now they are in full shade. 3rd location's a charm, let's hope.


Another spot that is supposed to be full sun--most of these plants came from a friend Kim Shirley who has taught me a lot about low-water landscaping. I'm her weeding slave from time to time and she answers all my questions and has given me these plants which are all doing well, for being in shade when they should be in sun...


This is my miracle plant--a wild four o'clock that was given to me as a baby from Kim. It has somehow survived two years of doing nothing, and now seems to be doing what it's supposed to do--although I'm sure Kim's is 10 times bigger. No water, huge, with pretty purple flowers. Keep your fingers crossed!


While I am sure these flowers will be way happier in SUN, here are some Sweet William (Dianthus), bachelors buttons, with poppies in the back. This is my "start from seed" section of the garden, so all of these flowers are seed-born. The sweet william keeps coming back better than ever each year--I'm starting to really like them!


This is John's and my favorite dianthus. So pretty! Behind it is another dianthus ready to bloom and a larkspur--also a sun-loving flower...


Here is a beautiful penstemon I moved from the hillside that actually managed to get planted where it belongs. I'm no photographer so I apologize for the quality of these photos! Hopefully you can see the amazing fuscia flowers coming off this thing!


Down by the end of the driveway I want to be my "super-duper dry zone"--mostly because it's way on the edge and it's hard to water. So in the front we have ice plant (perennial--although spotty when it comes to over-wintering*), and then I'm filling the area in with portulaca--an annual succulent that has really pretty flowers and needs very little water. In fact, I tried to start portulaca from seed and I totally over-watered them (I think) so they barely grew.

*over-wintering--a fancy way to say "surviving the winter." I think.


View up the driveway and hillside. When I bought the house, this area was all rocks. Which have come in very handy with my landscaping! Over the years I've planted things right, and wrong. I've recently been trying to seed the hillside with flowers where I am examining my second problem--gravity. Shade and gravity are my current gardening issues. And whatever is munching little holes in some of my flower plants.

Steep hillside = short plants. NOT tall plants like what I've got planted here--poppy, bachelor button, larkspur, sunflowers, blue flax. Why? Because they TIP OVER when there is nothing but lots of air underneath them on one side. Duh. So, I'll be re-doing this area too--probably moving over all those plants from Kim that are low-growing, and I do have some lovely veronica and wooly thyme that are growing there already. Should look great once I've got this hillside figured out.


Moving on to my (aah, angels singing) buffalo grass lawn. Doesn't it look great? Buffalo grass is a low-water turf grass--needs about 1/3 the water of a normal lawn, maybe even less. And it looks great when it's all cleaned up. Hallelujah! I started this lawn like 6 years ago and made a ton of mistakes (no need for plugs--seed will work fine--and for pete's sake don't plant your plugs in August...), but now it's looking great. In that front flower bed I have some of my favorite plants--hummingbird mint and my number 1-with-a-bullet (with-a-bullet) most amazing plant--the chocolate flower. Small yellow flowers with a brown center that has a very strong cocoa smell. Way low-water, and supposedly reseeds like a banshee but I've never been able to get them to do that. Seeds are kind of funky but I think I'll try planting them from seed this winter and see how I do. TIP: if you are going to start perennials from seed from your garden you need to put the seeds in the freezer for a few months--they need that freeze to germinate, or something.


View of the house. We tried to match the house colors to what the Sylvia Beach Hotel in Newport, OR looks like. We got pretty close considering we had dime-size, faded paint chips from the hotel. We added the scarlet paint, because I insisted on a red porch when we (and by we I mean John) painted the house a few years ago. The prayer flags were up at our wedding.


Here are the dogs in the backyard which they insist on trashing. That's a half-buffalo grass, half-dog pee spots and weeds lawn. I'm going on a murderous rampage and killing those weeds and getting this lawn going in the right direction soon--now that it's stopped raining! That center flower bed has larkspur, allium, columbine, some weird pink annual penstemon-looking thing, sunflowers, pasque flower, and a few others. In general, it's really hard to keep color all summer long--it's been an interesting task trying to get good color all summer since perennials just bloom at their specific time, do their thing for a few weeks or so, and then fade. I've got some nice long-blooming plants in general, but maintaining even color all summer is a trick.

OK, that's it for now! Can't wait to see the potatoes when they're done. Have a great week!

Asparagus! And CCC history in my backyard.

Hello everyone, happy May 3!

To begin: Look at my scarlet flax flower! I planted these on January 17th, I believe. Scarlet flax is like Lewis's (blue) flax that is common around SE Idaho--but it's red! How cool. I've got white flax that is coming back for the second year outside, as well. But, on to Asparagus!

The first asparagus sighting is a very exciting day in the Goodman-O'Connell household. Not that we get very good asparagus... Asparagus grows wild along creekbeds all around here--people go to these coveted spots with garbage bags to pick asparagus that is growing wild. John was once on a float trip on the Snake river, and people found wild asparagus and cooked it for dinner--yum! In other words, asparagus likes lots and lots and lots of water! Way more than we can ever provide, but we do love our asparagus when it comes up. Someday we'll have a good crop...

But, on to the interesting stuff. About a month ago, I was exploring the gully behind my house and came upon this:

Concrete steps!! In the gully behind my house. These steps were hiding underneath brush, dead sage, tall grass--and the bottom step was under about 3" of dirt. Now my husband and I disagree on the origins of these steps, and we really need an expert to help us decide! John thinks these steps and the found objects in the following photos are from local landscaping, or left by a hobo that is rumored to have lived back in the gully. But I think they are from something else altogether. Although neither one of us know for sure.

See, Pocatello, Southeast Idaho, and Jackson Hole/Yellowstone were very common sites for FDR's New Deal programs--in particular the Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC) and the Works Progress Administration (WPA). I had the great opportunity a few years ago to interview Eddy Kase, now in his mid-90's, who came to Pocatello during the depression as part of the CCC program. The CCC barracks were around where Century High School is today. Kase worked on projects around Mink Creek in the Caribou National Forest (just south of Pocatello), but a more commonly known CCC project in Pocatello are the ridges cut into all the hillsides around town. Like these:


Can you see them? And can you see Osa's cute butt in the lower left-hand corner? This is the gully behind my house, covered in CCC ridges. The ridges were cut as an attempt to hold water up on the hillsides--both, I would imagine, to improve irrigation on the benches, and to reduce the flooding that occurred in the Portneuf river that runs through the middle of town. That obviously failed, since the ultimate Portneuf river flooding solution was to encase the river that flowed through the main part of town in a concrete canal. Pretty. I had the great opportunity to be a "Portneuf River Water Nymph" during Riverfest a few years ago with my friend Kate Humphrey. We had to put on chest waders , and then climb into the pretty cement-encased river to pull out numbered milk bottles that had been "racing" down the river as part of the Portneuf Greenway Foundation's annual fundraising event. But I digress.


Here's another photo of the ridges, sort of. The red brick building used to be a telephone switch-house that got deeded to my property somehow--we use it for storage. Someday, perhaps, it will be a guest room or something cool like that. Until then it is a five-brick thick, razor-wired storage shed.



As further evidence of the CCC's, or some other man-like project, here is Osa posing next to what appears to be a stone wall that was built at some point.



And here is the corner of my new garden spot for pumpkins. When I started digging into this spot with a rototiller, I dug up these tin cans. They were close to two feet under, some were standing upright. My first thought was "treasure!!", but they ended up just being tin cans filled with dirt. But tin cans left by whom? Is this CCC government issue rations? The CCC's were working back here digging these trenches--surely they ate here as well, is my guess. I can't wait to get back here with a metal detector. Not that I'll find gold coins seeing as how it was the depression and all, but I'd have to think things were left behind?

I also found a Budweiser pull-tab beer can and part of a glass electrical thing from a nearby utility pole--they were used to wrap wire around. I've heard they date back to the 40s/50s?



The recent concrete stairs find, and the fact that the CCC's were back here possibly explains this huge wheel thing that was here when I bought the house. Tractor? Bulldozer? I'd love to know!

Of course, my husband could be right about all of this.

Regardless, I think the New Deal programs were amazing. I have no idea about the criticism of those programs and don't really care, for now. The programs put people to work during hard times. These young men (and women?) worked hard to provide for their families, and were able to do so thanks to these programs. What do we have today? Why are we spending so much money on bailing out these archaic industries instead of using that money to put the victims of that unchecked, narcissistic, greedy arrogance back to work in something that will benefit the United States? I'm just saying. Onward!

planting store-bought garlic, the soybean debate, daffodils any minute now

Hello! Back again! Wow--it's been an icky month weather-wise--sheesh--gotta love Idaho in the springtime. Tomorrow could be snowing, could be 90 degrees, just never know.

So I hear that organic store-bought garlic is plantable and I'm going to see if that's true! Couple bulbs of grocery store garlic is certainly less expensive than garlic-for-planting bought at a garden store. We'll see! Any advise would be great!

I'm also going to go for soybeans although I hear it can't be done--all this hearsay--it'll be a miracle if anything grows this year.

I've commandeered the veggie garden for the moment--John's really busy, I've got the time, and I need to put my "Monica" touch on it--as in straight rows, real tomato cages instead of old wire decorative edging, things labeled and organized. It's going to be great! I have no idea how ground temperature should factor into things--but I've planted lettuce and spinach, sweet peas, carrots, beets, pumpkins, and corn so far. I'm going to plant potatoes, onions, the aforementioned garlic pretty soon, and am trying to toughen up my tomato, squash, and cucumber starts so they will be ready to go in--probably a month or so?

The flower garden is going nicely--we are so behind with bulbs! Don't have a single flower yet--combination of elevation and late bloomers, I suppose. AND the deer chomped off the new starts of my tulips a few weeks ago, so Osa has to sleep outside now and guard the plantation!

Each Fall I end up moving tons of perennials around--overgrowing here, need to be in full sun there, and so on. Looks like I've got a pretty good survival rate on the ones I moved last Fall. The summer was evil last year--we had a plague of locusts (seriously--never seen anything like it!!) and it didn't rain all. summer. long. So a few good ones died (like my cool bi-colored penstemon--sad), but the miracle is most survived! So that's what drought tolerant means--it will survive a drought. I love that most things are coming up just like last summer never happened--and I'm getting tons of seedlings on the hillsides that I'm trying to naturalize with wildflowers--poppies, larkspur, bachelors buttons, sunflowers. Can't wait to see what it looks like.

We are limping along with the hops--John's planting them for beer-making. We got a few starts from a neighbor/fellow-brewer who has thousands coming up right now and who pretty much supplies the entire beer-making community in Pocatello with Cascade hops. Pretty useful kind of hops, apparently. We ordered a few different kinds from a brewing catalog last year that came in these puny little starts but they seem to have survived as well. Yay beer. John is starting to draw the neighborhood boys on the weekends when he "plays beer." This weekend he made a beer and a cider (for dad!) with Matt, Matt, and Joe. Boys and beer--gotta love it!

OK, we're getting some garden action finally! Happy me!

The photos speak for themselves!

Happy Spring! March 23, 2009. Notice my cold frame buried under almost a foot of snow? Sweet. It's really blowy and drifting--drifts are a foot or more deep. Amazing. But it is spring, so this will likely all be melted by this afternoon :>)

I'm going to the women's prison today to check out their gardening project. My friend Gary is the head of maintenance--he's trying to get their greenhouses and garden plots going in small baby steps. Has anyone seen "Greenfingers"? Such a great movie! There probably won't be much to see up there today but I'm going anyway!

sage, snow, seed

So two days ago I was outside in a tank top getting a sunburn and pulling out sagebrush with my bare hands (TOWANDA!) and today I'm filling bird feeders in the snow. I love springtime in Idaho. Probably should have gone skiing today, but oh well. So hard to tell this time of year! Pebble Creek snow report said it rained a little up there last night (yesterday Pocatello probably hit low 60's?), but is probably dumping powder up there today. Oh well!

They're alive!

mat daisy, white flax, chocolate flower, yarrow, sweet williams. And more tulips are poking their leaves up.

The wild red poppies (oriental I believe) that grow in masses along my hillside have started to come up too. Sweet! They're huge--like 3' tall. I seeded a few in my regular garden spots and they completely dwarfed the other plants--had to move them--so I dug them up and ran them to my neighbor--I hope they come back for her!

Last few years I've been trying to get some spots in my landscape to grow flowers only from seed. I'm having decent success with that. I'm also trying to seed some of my hillside with low-water wildflowers--flax, poppies (smaller variety), bachelors buttons, larkspur, sunflowers. I seeded a huge area last year and it looks like I'm getting some clumps of seedlings coming up. Yeah! We have sunflowers that don't need any water in the summer--they grow wild on the benches (and along the highway)--take some seed heads from them in the fall and scatter them in your yard--totally awesome, easy sunflowers.

How do I seed? I cut the flower stalks off the old flowers once they have dried out, take them in big bunches, and smack them around a new spot that I'd like to seed. Then I leave the stalks right there as kind of a cover/mulch and let the rest of the seeds fall out naturally. It seems to work!

OK, back to it! Nancy

Sunny and snowing; it's a beautiful day

Yes, snow. And looks/feels like more on the way.

So, not much gardening news to report today! Except I wasn't hallucinating--those tulips have, in fact, started to grow. Feels early to me--these tulips are in a particularly sunny spot that turns into hell's kitchen in July-August. Got some lambs ear, yarrow in there for high summer (oh and there is a patch of wild prickly pear just outside this garden bed)--I need some yucca or other desert-like plants to add in there. But for now, we have tulips. Until the deer eat them.

If you would like to be sent blog updates...

Contact me at goodnanc@yahoo.com and I will add your e-mail to the automatic update list. Thanks! Nancy

test post from my e-mail! oooh, fun blogger toy!

I think I can move tulip bulbs...won't matter--I need to learn about deer-resistant bulbs! And yes, it seems I can update my blog from my e-mail! Very cool. However, this particular post needed extensive editing at my blog in order to be readable--but easy enough fixes. Sweet. Anyone know of a good coast-to-coast wireless internet plan I can plug into my laptop and take on a 2-day bus trip to, say, Philadelphia?

Yes, Tulips!

So I'm not sure--is this normal for Pocatello if you have good early season tulips, or is it super-early? Probably as early as I've noticed them?

I've only been working with bulbs the last few years--first several years it was strictly perennials.

Along the ditch by my driveway, someone at some point spread a ton of random tulip bulbs. These bulbs have, over the course of time, moved, died, been accidentally dug up and never re-planted, choked under 3' of grass, etc etc.

I've got random tulip bulbs close to 100 yards (that's a football field, right?) away from my house. I think squirrels like to plant them as much as I do these days.

So recently I started bulbs. Ugh. Same trial and error as everything else. These bulbs coming up now, for example, are like deer caviar, apparently.

Can I move bulbs in the spring?? Anyone who knows please post!

Nancy

Let it snow??

OK, so my garden is under 2-3 inches of nice fresh powder. Made for a great day at Pebble Creek yesterday, but not much to do around here! I did "fluff" some rocks in preparation of freshening up my rock borders everywhere...and now it's back to staring at my seedlings for a few days it seems! It's what I love about Idaho :>)

oops!

OK, I stand corrected. I guess you can't plant things outdoors in Ohio yet--but it's getting close? Thanks Teresa my Zone 6/Facebook/Peterson Elementary pal!

Teresa, by the way, is starting heirloom tomatoes from dried seeds she harvested from last year's crop. That's hardcore.

I am also very happy to report that my white flax may have survived another year! Those things are hard to get started...I'm pulling out Lewis's (blue) flax like weeds, but the cool white and red kinds? Different story...

This is the time of year I start poking around the crowns of my dormant perennials. Should start seeing new growth very soon and being able to figure out what survived the winter--I tend to lose at least a few plants every winter...but most do live, and it's so much fun to see them come back! This fall I moved a bunch of plants around so am curious to see how many survived the transplant. My theory is: if you move plants around when they're dormant/sleeping*, when they wake up, they don't know they've been moved!

*assuming you haven't hacked off all the roots in the move--a good spade-full of dirt/roots is good--with the new hole already dug and soaked with water.

Wow, I like blogging about plants. Off to First Friday art walk!

Arrow-leaf Balsam Root growing wild...

That tiny yellow smudge to the left is some arrowleaf balsam root that grows wild around here. It's beautiful in the springtime! View from my backyard--terrain is referred to as "high desert, sage-steppe environment". 5000 feet elev., sage (at least 3 kinds...), juniper trees, and during summer seasons desert primrose, lewis's flax, sunflowers, and a few others I haven't identified yet.

Israel flowers, zone differences, and whatever else

OK so I've spent the morning off and on Facebook (I love working at home!!), and have learned so much already about gardening!

There's a flower in Israel called the anemone coronaria (Kalanit) that is forbidden to pick because it's losing habitat due to development. Looks like it might be easy enough to plant here, though? I wonder, and perhaps will try! There are lots of anemone plant varieties--never grown them myself but why not. That'd be a really neat addition to my landscape!

And apparently if you live in Ohio you can plant things outside already. What? We've got two more months here in Idaho before it's safe to do that! We had snow this morning, and last year had snow in June. Amazing. But the really wet spring last year made for amazing columbine, and what I thought was just a big bush exploded with lilac flowers for the first time since I've lived in the house. I'd like to see that again...

Anyway, for now I've got 80 1-5" pots of flowers and veggies growing in my mudroom. I'm a little worried about the scarlet flax. Kind of spindly and seems to be not be really taking off? And I have no idea what portaluca, a re-seeding succulent annual, should be doing in it's early seedling stages, so can only assume what I'm looking at (very small seedlings that aren't growing?) is normal.

I planted everything at once on January 17 which, as I really knew at the time but couldn't help myself, is way way too early to plant squash-like plant seeds!! It's nice to see something so robust, however! Basil for indoors is taking off slowly, and just planted cilantro for indoors since it was growing randomly in my flower starts for some reason.

OK, is everyone bored to death besides me? OK, here's some gardening advice/tip to liven it up: If you can grow it (per region) you should get some chocolate flowers. They are awesome. Low water perennial that likes it HOT and DRY; small daisy flowers have strong cocoa smell up close. Put them by your pathways so you can smell them as often as you want! High Country Gardens is a great catalog/website to buy/learn from, and they have chocolate flowers. I've seen them at our local Town and Country gardens nursery once or twice as well. I wonder if they'd special order them?

Hello everyone!

OK, just decided to do a garden blog--for years I've tried to do a garden "journal" but whatever, that's not my bag, come to find out. But after leaving messages on a Facebook wall where I wasn cut off due to length--I figured I've got some things to say, some tips, some mistakes, some successes, and an ultimate "I have no idea how I did it" triumph or two regarding gardening in Southeast Idaho--and it might help other folks I'd guess who want to save a fortune on their water bill each summer.

So that's it for now, I'll be back soon I promise. Perhaps we'll start with chocolate flowers...