Planters Punchlines
Men’s Garden Club of Wethersfield
May 2014
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
NEXT MEETING – PLEASE NOTE SPECIAL DATE, TIME AND
LOCATION
Monday May 12, 5:30 pm @ Tony Sanders house @ 281 Garden
Street, Wethersfield. (Rain Date – if
Plant Sale is rain delayed, then this meeting is rescheduled for May 19)
Reminisce about the plant sale.
Pick from the leftovers for your own use or as a really cheap belated
Mother’s Day present. Hot dogs, beer
& soda will be available.
Donate some perennials from your personal collection to
the Plant Sale. Plants should be split and potted ASAP to look good for
the sale. Please label all plants.
Contact Fred Odell (860.529.6064) for official pots and plant labels.
Price your own.
Plant Sale Saturday May 10th (Rain Date May 17th)
7:00 - 9:00 Set Up Deliver homegrowns, unload plants, price
plants, set up tables
9:00 - 1:00 Sell Help customers, total up sales, answer
questions
1:00 - 2:00 Close Clean
up, break down tables, pack up leftover plants
Volunteer! Contribute
your own “homegrowns”
President Tony Sanders will make the “go or no go” rain
decision and get the word out.
Weston Rose Garden
As you will read below – the Rose Garden has been opened
up for the season. The health of many of
the roses is questionable and will be assessed in the next few weeks. New ones may be needed. No maintenace schedule yet, but please feel
free to drop in and do some weeding.
When we get going we’ll need workers pretty much every Saturday a.m.
Annual Picnic
The annual Club Picnic will be held on Monday, June 30th,
on the grounds (and porch) of The Solomon Welles House, from 5:30 until 8:00
pm. More to come.
Compostable Matter
By Jim Meehan
The gardening
season has now officially begun for me.
When I closed my eyes to sleep the other night I saw weeds.
Some
insomniacs count sheep. I relax by
visualizing vegetation I don’t like (e.g. dandelions) that is growing where I
don’t want it (e.g. my lawn). For the past several weeks, as I cleared my
perennial beds and the first signs of green life began appearing, my sleep has
been somewhat restive – due in part to uncertainty about all those spots where
I didn’t see signs of growth, and concern for the weather conditions that could
destroy those sprouts that were beginning to emerge. But now that the evil invasives are back for
me to do battle with – a one-shot operation with no “will they make it?” type
of worries – I can once again rest peacefully.
It isn’t just
my own weeds that can generate these soporific perceptions in my mind
however. This time it was the plethora
of pervasive plant pests that percolated up from the depths of the Frank Weston
Rose Garden, and presented themselves for our gardening pleasure earlier in the
day.
“Our” is the
assemblage of plantsmen from the Men’s Garden Club of Wethersfield who had
gathered earlier in the day to “open up” the town’s rose garden. The MGCoW has
been caring for this public recreational area since we planted it in 1983.
Rocco, Ernie,
John, James, Prez Tony, and I arrived at 8:00 a.m. Club member Richard had previously done some
of the work. Our tactical plan was to
clean up winter debris; spread composted cow manure (which had frozen last autumn
before we were able to “winter-over” with it); evaluate the rose bushes’ health
and cold weather survival status; cut away some deadwood; and do a little
incidental weeding. This last task
turned out to be our major occupation for the morning.
The abnormal
cold and snow pattern of the past winter appears to have played havoc with the
floribunda’s wellbeing – we will know more in a few weeks. But the strange weather clearly was a godsend
for the unwanted groundcover vegetation (chickweed, etc.) that vies for space
with the fragrant perennials for which this planting area is intended.
This
unexpected enemy was fine with me since I had passed up my usual Saturday
morning at the health club for what I was hoping would be a comparable, but
purposeful, workout. Part of which
would consist of carrying the 40-pound bags of composted cow-patties, and
strategically dumping that dung around the bases of the plants. And now the war of the weeds would complete
my exercise program.
Although
somewhat taken by surprise, our band of “Rose Warriors” was nonetheless up to
the challenge – using cultivators, shovels, and gloved hands to rip the
unwanted miscreants from their wrongful places in “our” modest, man-made
attempt at Eden.
Unfortunately,
being out of practice, I had not brought my all-time favorite garden tool – the
fork-tongued weed remover. No gardening
job is more rewarding to me than duck-walking along a weed-stricken piece of
land and plunging that tool into the soil to undercut the culprit’s last
earthly connection. So instead I ripped them out the old fashioned, manual way
– with some improvised help from my pruning tool as up-rooter. The bending, kneeling, standing, lifting,
twisting, stretching and tugging was a great complement to the aforementioned
heavy lifting.
I did however
remember to bring my second favorite gardening toy, a Japanese pruning saw –
which Rocco and Ernie discovered the joy of when they grappled with two patches
of orna-monster grass which, uncut in the fall, had turned to stubborn,
eye-high, vertical straw stacks over the winter.
In the end it
was time well spent and much fun – as evidenced by the resulting look of the
garden, the fatigued feeling in our muscles, the collective sense of
satisfaction, and the long-awaited images of unwanted plants that appeared to
me when I settled into bed that evening.
Plant growers
in arid places like New Mexico, who struggle to cultivate anything floral, find
it difficult to believe that I spend even more time and energy removing
unwanted greenery than they do nurturing it – and that I get as much, and
sometimes more, satisfaction out of acts of extermination than of those of
germination. They may even question how
I, an inveterate destroyer of plant life, dare to call myself a gardener.
To which I
reply, “How do you people sleep at night?”
What's the Story, Morning Glory?
Morning glories are poisonous beauties.
Know your plants to keep your household safe.
By Maureen Gilmer, DIY--Do It Yourself Network
One afternoon
I ripped out a thicket of morning glory vines that left my skin sticky with sap
from the cuttings. I felt odd that evening, then woke up the next morning with
a blinding migraine headache.
It was
preceded with a visual aura of visual patterns akin to psychedelic
hallucinations. That was followed by lower-level migraine for days and
persistent dizziness that lasted a week. I know now it was all caused by
morning glory poisoning. Why? Because my work partner woke up sick with the
same symptoms. It was no coincidence.
Buried in the
academic texts of medical botany there are references to morning glory, Ipomaea
violacea. This native of Mexico is an incredibly beautiful perennial vine grown
as an old-fashioned annual garden flower further north. Being frost-tender,
plants usually die with the first cold snap of fall.
The plant
known by the Aztecs as "ololiuqui" (that which makes one dizzy) was
used in divination rituals. The shaman would consume it, then fall into
delirium in which he could hear messages from the gods. Morning glory is still
used in this way in remote parts of Mexico.
So what's in
morning glory that's so painfully psychoactive and potentially toxic? My books
revealed the same alkaloids shared by ergot, a fungus of rye that produces
profound vascular spasms and hallucinations if consumed.
In Europe it
would be responsible for the devastating disease, St. Anthony's fire. In fact,
morning glory contains d-lysergic acid amid in its seed. This chemical presence
in morning glory is potentially lethal, and from personal experience I can
attest to its long, painful hangover.
Transdermal
patches are now widely used for administering nicotine and birth-control
medications. This illustrates the porosity of human skin. Plants such as
nightshades that contain potent chemicals can result in transdermal poisoning
if handled in quantity. This penetration factor skyrockets when you're sweating
and your skin pores are wide open.
Mexican
immigrant gardeners in Los Angeles are reluctant to handle angels trumpets,
which are species of genus Brugmansia. These spectacular ornamental nightshades
contain serious chemical constituents such as atropine. The Aztecs handed down
their knowledge of transdermal poisoning, and to this day Mexicans are
particularly cautious if they have open cuts, blisters and wounds on their
hands.
As a lifelong
garden authority I'm embarrassed that morning glory caught me off guard. I
should have worn rubber gloves and long sleeves to keep all plant juices from
skin contact. But, frankly, I'd never worked on such a huge morning glory, so
there was never enough sap to cause a problem before.
It's important
to know the major offenders so you're not caught barehanded. Common foxglove
contains digitalis, a powerful cardiac stimulant can cause serious poisoning.
The sap of the entire family of euphorbias, including poinsettia, is also toxic,
often causing surface blistering of the skin. Beware of Euphorbia truncata,
popularly known as firesticks, which bleed profusely, potentially entering the
bloodstream through the skin. Monkshood and castor bean also should be handled
with care.
It is always
best to consider all plants poisonous unless you know otherwise. Poisoning
through the skin is not likely unless you are handling a lot of plant material,
particularly in the heat. But this can often be the case if you're clearing
ground, weeding and rehabilitating an overgrown homesite in the summer.
If you must
grub out some of these bad boys, be sure to wear protection. Pets and kids are
also vulnerable to when rolling around in the bushes. Know your plants to keep
your household safe.
I have not
removed my Ipomaea violacea because they are such exquisitely beautiful plants.
But rest assured I now afford them a great deal of respect after learning the
hard way that morning glories can indeed become a real nightmare.
Here are the
poisonous plants of the gardens:
Acontium spp:
Monkshood
Atropa belladonna: Deadly Nightshade
Brugmansia spp: Angel's Trumpet
Conium maculatum: Poison Hemlock
Datura spp: Devil's Weed
Digitalis purpurea: Foxglove
Euphorbia spp: Spurge
Gelsemium sempervirens: Carolina Jessamine
Helleborus foetidus: Christmas Rose
Hyocyamus niger: Black Henbane
Ipomaea violacea: Morning Glory
Nerium oleander: Oleander
Ricinis communis: Castor Bean
Garden Thugs: Plants That Don't Play Well With Others
By Bart Ziegler (http://online.wsj.com)
On my to-do
list this weekend at my house in upstate New York is the usual overload of
springtime garden chores. I plan to clean out the matted messes of leaves under
shrubs that I never got to last fall, finish clipping the dead tops of
perennials I ignored in November and start spreading weed-smothering mulch.
But there's
another task I wish I didn't have to face: Ripping out or thinning the
fast-spreading plants that have become permanent headaches in my gardens.
I'm not
talking about kudzu or Japanese knotweed, those notoriously rampant growers
whose sale is banned in many states. I mean plants that are sold at garden
centers and online often without any kind of warning that they could take over
your yard.
Some of these
plants expand through fast-growing roots or underground stems called rhizomes.
Others spew hundreds of tiny seeds each year, creating offspring where you
don't want them.
There's an
ongoing debate in the garden world over which plants should be considered
invasive and taken out of circulation—some experts say even old favorites such
as rose of Sharon and grape hyacinth are dangerous—and which are simply
vigorous growers. But all of my problem perennials can be thugs, shoving aside
better-behaved plants that get in their way.
Chief among my
horticultural hooligans is a vine called lamiastrum 'Herman's Pride.' Its spiky
silver leaves are overlaid with intricate green veins and it produces handsome
yellow flowers in spring. Not only is it an eye-catcher but it has the rare
ability to thrive in dry shade, the toughest garden condition. And deer hate
it.
Lamiastrum
'Herman's Pride,' one of my problem plants, reappeared this spring even though
I tried to rip out all of it last summer. Bart Ziegler
So what's not
to like?
I put a bunch
of Herman's Pride on a hillside under dense trees, where many things struggle
to grow. Not this plant. Within two years it had multiplied like those puffy
tribbles on "Star Trek." Its roots and vines wormed their way into
the stalks of nearby daffodils, tried to take my hostas hostage and even
escaped over a stone wall into the lawn.
Last summer I
decided it was curtains for Herman. I ripped all of it out. Or at least I tried
to. Capt. Kirk would appreciate this plant's ability to reproduce itself from
the smallest piece of root.
This spring
Herman's shiny leaves are taunting me again by poking out of the ground ahead
of almost every other perennial. Maybe that's why one of its nicknames is
Archangel.
Here's my list
of other plants you should think twice about putting in your yard. Fellow
weekend gardeners will want to expend their limited free time on perennials
with better manners:
Bishop's weed:
Like lamiastrum, this attractive green-and-white plant multiples in dry shade,
an indicator of how tough it is. I somehow ended up with a few sprouts of
bishop's weed (Aegopodium podagraria 'Variegatum') in my garden, which likely
tagged along when I was given some plants from a friend's yard. Two summers
later these bishops threatened to take over a big swath of the flower bed. Was
it the start of a holy war?
Artemisia
'Oriental Limelight,' with its plumes of yellow-green leaves (center) provides
a striking contrast to the purple salvia (foreground) and globes of violet
allium in my spring garden shown last year, but it threatens to take over the
flower bed. Bart Ziegler
Last year, I
tore out the bishop's weed at the same time I tried to dispatch Herman's Pride.
But my triumph was short-lived. Last weekend I saw sprigs of bishop's weed
peeking out of the soil in my hillside garden.
My advice:
Don't ever plant either bishop's weed or Herman's Pride unless you want it to
fill an entire area that is well separated from other garden beds.
Rudbeckia
triloba: This tall flowering plant, one of several commonly known as brown-eyed
Susans, puts up a profusion of yellow blooms with brown centers in late summer.
For several years I thought it was a great way to have color in my yard after
many other flowers had faded.
But this
variety of rudbeckia—not to be confused with the popular and well-behaved
rudbeckia 'Goldsturm'--seeds itself so freely that each spring I have to yank
out dozens of the youngsters that show up in the strangest places.
Some of the
offspring pop up in the middle of other plants, making them tough to extract.
Others appear across the yard in another flower bed. And when I transplanted
some phlox from one bed to another, rudbeckia triloba hitchhiked along. If you
don't catch the young plants soon enough they develop an enormous root
structure that is tough to dig out.
My verdict:
Avoid it unless you use it in a meadow or naturalized garden, or are willing to
snip off all the spent flowers each fall before they turn to seed.
Sweet
woodruff: This low-growing ground cover (Galium odoratum) produces
sweet-smelling white flowers atop its whirled leaves in spring that perfume the
garden. But it spreads by its root stems into a thick mat and its tentacles pop
up inside other nearby plants.
While not as
rampant a spreader as Herman's Pride, sweet woodruff can be annoying. I moved
most of mine to a more-open area after it began to worm its way into nearby
foamflowers (tiarella) and lady's mantle (alchemilla).
Sundrops: I
decided I had to have this plant (Oenothera tetragona) after I saw its bright
yellow flowers filling the base of a restaurant sign in my town in late spring,
after the daffodils were gone and little else was blooming. It turns out the
key fact is "filling."
Sundrops have
an amazing ability to replicate all over the place, including between the
clumps of iris I planted nearby. While they are easy to pull out before they
get too big, if you don't catch them early their roots can become entwined with
those of other plants.
Bee balm: Bee
balm (Monarda didyma) is another major-league spreader. While I love its
elaborate flowers, which resemble a headdress or royal crown, and the bees and
butterflies appreciate the nectar, this native plant can quickly smother
everything around it by forming a thick mat.
I've
successfully kept it in check for years in one of my gardens by surrounding it
with flat rocks. But in another garden where I didn't take this precaution the
bee balm expanded and seems to have killed some lily bulbs beneath it that I
really liked. I've also heard about keeping bee balm in check by planting it in
a large container and sinking the container in the garden, but that's one more
garden chore I never got around to.
Dame's rocket:
While not commonly sold as a plant in garden centers, the seeds of dame's
rocket (Hesperis matronalis) are promoted as a wildflower, though technically
it is an introduced species from Eurasia. Where I garden in upstate New York
the fragrant pink and white flowers break out along roadsides in early summer.
Thinking it would look just as great in my yard I dug up a clump.
Big mistake.
Dame's rocket throws off zillions of seeds each year. After a season or two of
ripping out its young while keeping the mother plant I decided it was better to
remove all of it. So far, that seems to have done the trick.
Artemisia:
While some varieties of this frilly-leafed plant play well with others, I made
the mistake of planting artemisia 'Oriental Limelight.' It spreads by both its
aggressive roots and abundant seeds. Sure, its yellow-splotched green leaves
light up the garden, but it threatens to take over the entire bed.
A year after I
planted Oriental Limelight, a big plant-marketing concern that sells it, Proven
Winners, changed its tag to warn that it "may be aggressive or even
invasive" and that it could be used in pots or containers "but not in
the landscape."
I've been
tearing out my Oriental Limelight this spring in the hopes of confining it to a
small patch, but I'm not optimistic. I've read accounts of gardeners resorting
to the kill-all herbicide Roundup but still being unable to eradicate it.
The bottom
line: Be careful about planting anything whose label says it grows
aggressively. Either avoid it entirely, or place it in a confined area to see
how fast it spreads.
Gardening is Gross. And Scary. And Dangerous.
Guest Rant by Veratrine of Dark of Night
(http://gardenrant.com)
Don’t get me
wrong; I love my garden. But seriously, gardening is gross, scary, and
dangerous compared with most other hobbies. You know: Baking. Sewing.
Skydiving. Ordinary safe stuff like that.
Case in point:
last weekend:
Saturday, I
put my ungloved finger into a black widow lair, complete with black widow. Now,
you’re thinking this person must be blind AND a doofus, but knowing that all
small spaces in my yard are potential homes for those toxic ladies, I DO look
before inserting fingers. In this case, the space was inside a roll of green
plastic tape used for tying up tomatoes, and the black widow had somehow
cleverly concealed herself when I inspected the roll prior to picking it up. Fortunately, I
withdrew my finger in time, and no major damage was suffered. But the potential
was emphatically there, so that gives you the scary/dangerous factor.
Sunday, while
tying up the late tomatoes with the aforementioned green plastic tape (now that
the black widow had vacated her premises) I put my once-more-ungloved finger on
a caterpillar (admittedly an extremely small one). I screamed and jumped
hastily away.
Sherlock
Holmes-like, you might correctly infer that I am not one of those gardeners who cheerfully hand-pick and squish pests. In
fact, the rumors that some people DO hand-pick and squish snails and other
critters seem to me to suggest that some gardeners positively revel in the more
disgusting aspects of gardening.
Then there’s
the salvia greggii, infested with scale (gross). And the definitely gross
things I sometimes have to clean up in the garden…the remains of the local
cats’ birds. The possum poop.
The remains of
the possum that expired inconveniently behind the dietes bicolora. (Generally, I avert my eyes, suppress the gag
reflex, and make with a shovel, but in the case of the dead possum, I chickened
out after tracking it down by smell and made my husband deal with it.)
And to get
back to scary, there are the various slithery scaly things that scuttle hastily
through the foliage when I water (although I would like to appreciate them, I
find them scary and also gross). Finally, due to a phobia acquired when I was
about 8, I am appalled by the presence of worms in the dirt I have to dig in.
The guilty party in said phobia has apologized for the worm incident, but the
phobia remains.
Basically, my
average weekend in the garden involves a series of subdued shrieks which bring
my husband to the window to make sure I’m okay:
“Just another
worm/spider/lizard/caterpillar?”
“Yup.”
“Okay, fine.
Have fun.”
So, am I a
total wuss, or is gardening a pastime for the masochistic and those who are
into extreme full-contact hobbies?
And, yeah,
maybe I should wear gloves more.
Horticulture Corner
“Gardens are not made
by singing 'Oh, how beautiful!'
and sitting in the shade.”
- Rudyard Kipling, Complete Verse
As Snow Melts, Snow Mold Is Showing Up
http://wane.com/news/local/
[Our Organic Lawn Care Guy says Marsha and I have Snow
Mold in parts of our lawn.]
When the snow sits around for weeks and months at a time,
it creates great conditions for snow mold to grow….“The sun can’t get in to dry
out the grass. The grass can also fold over on itself and that doesn’t allow
air or light to circulate,”
“If you want to get out now and do
something, you can rake your yard and encourage that air to circulate. Anywhere
you’ve piled up bigger piles of snow, the heavier snow smashed it down ever
more. Those are particular areas you want to rake up.” When weeds first start
to pop up, the ground temperature will be warm enough for [slow-releasing]
fertilizer.
The best way
to fight snow mold is to prevent it – that happens before the snow falls.
“Mow the grass
down to 2.5 inches or 2.25 inches late in the season. I’m talking in December.
That creates shorter grass that can’t lay over on itself and that’s where the
snow mold problem is. Where it’s bending over at the crown of the grass is
where it’s actually killing it. That’s where the mold is growing, right at the
fold of the grass”.
Some of the
grass with snow mold may recover, but …. it’s likely people will need to
re-seed those areas. The best time to re-seed is around July after the
pre-emergents have worn off.
