May 2014

Planters Punchlines

Men’s Garden Club of Wethersfield

May 2014

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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.