From Birmingham, Alabama, commentor Ben Cisco:
I will say this – I learned that the best thing I can do for flowers is to NOT TOUCH ANYTHING!!
***********
I’m frankly envious. Here north of Boston, that tactic only works with daffodils (now ending their season), lilacs (ours were gorgeous this year!) and irises (the Spousal Unit’s dwarf varieties are out, and the feral dark-blue Van Gogh-style volunteers are just starting to bloom). If I want any color in the yard between June and October, this is my season for digging & dragging… and that’s just for flowers.
So of course my mail-order tomatoes all showed up a week or ten days in advance of their due dates, which means I need to immediately order (and drag) many, many bags of fresh potting mix. I was hoping to have some extra time figuring out which perennials were dead, and which merely dormant, before I marshalled my energy for the most labor-intensive part of my gardening year!
What’s going on in your garden(s), this week?
rikyrah
Good Morning, Everyone???
satby
@rikyrah: Good morning!
@Ben Cisco: shrub roses and daffodils! Both in my garden too, because both positively thrive on neglect ? But I’m too far north to see them bloom at the same time. It makes for a lovely garden!
satby
Sadly, the late freezes we had not only deprived me of lilacs on my 5 year old bushes, they killed one entirely and 3 of the remaining 4 are struggling to come back with barely any leaves. Only one is doing ok, but it’s the runt of the litter and I’ve been debating moving it because it barely grows year to year.
And after years of failure with grafted hybrid tea roses, my shrub roses are not only doing great, I’m going to have blooms starting in about a week.
Baud
@rikyrah: Good morning.
HeartlandLiberal
@Ben Cisco: We grew up in Birmingham, left in 1969 after college, never came back except to visit. But I have always missed the soil and dirt of Alabama, where you just drop a seed and jump back. I also miss the pine forests, and the wind in the pines. We have three big pines on our lot, and sometimes on windy days I stand under one of them to just here a faint whisper of home. Thanks for sharing.
Geminid
That is a nice looking garden bed, Mr. Cisco! Thank you for the pictures.
Argiope
Peonies, baby! I planted two in the Fall of 2019 and in a fit of Pandemic Peony Patch Planning, 5 more in 2020. Amazingly, all 7 plants made it through winter and have foliage and the two from 2019 have buds, and quite a few of them. Can’t wait to see these guys bloom. Also in a fit of peony-success optimism, I got some climbing hedge roses for my back fence. My mom and grandmother both were skilled in keeping roses happy. I’ve only tried one previously but killed it. We’ll see how these two go.
WereBear
@satby: These days, there’s a rose for (almost) any place!
Sad about your lilacs.
WereBear
Heads up! I’m writing an article about coat color in cats and how it indicates personality… if my fellow Jackals have any thoughts, please share!
PAM Dirac
Here in our part of Maryland spring is really busting out. We had a very mild winter; the lowest low was 17F, which is about 10-12 degrees warmer than the last few winters. The early spring was a bit on the cool side, especially the nights. It’s probably a good thing as a solid warm spell in Feb or March probably would have wakened everything up enough to get clobbered by the April freezes. As it worked out we got a nice 80 degree spell in late April and everything kind of popped out together. The vineyard hasn’t ever had a bud break and early growth that was this synchronized. Think of the beautiful wine that can be made from grapes that all ripen together! The weigela is in full bloom and gorgeous. The shrub roses are starting to bloom and after some rough years, the crepe myrtles are looking very good. I also had my best seedings in many years (hat tip to Baker Creek Heirloom Seeds) and the tomatoes, peppers and eggplant are looking good. Of course this is all nature and I remember a conversation with a vineyard owner last year after a nice spring where she said “The only surprises from here on in are bad ones”. Hmmmm, kind of like the relentless optimism displayed by many Democrats.
ETA – Our lilacs did very well too although the blooms are almost gone now.
Princess
@WereBear: How interesting! I have long thought that coat colour in cats suggested personality — especially after having two calicoes with similar markings, born a thousand miles apart in different families, who were extremely similar. My theory is that there are basically 20 or so cat personaloty types, and they cluster around particular coat colours. There are “coat colour personalities” that are not my favourite, and I’d avoid cats who have those coats, and “coat colour personalities” I love.
satby
Me too! I had never heard of winter-killed lilacs, even after the polar vortex winter of 2014 my multiple young lilacs came through fine. But I learned that during dry winters watering the ground can protect the plants better and that those buds that overwinter are susceptible to late freezes just like fruit tree buds and blossoms. Gardening in predominately sandy soil continues to teach me new things about plants I thought I knew well.
Ben Cisco (onboard the Defiant)
Thanks everyone!
Like I told AL, I can take no credit for what you see in the pictures – the flowers were here when I bought the house last year. I’ve been back in Alabama for three years now, and I have fallen in love, again, with the beauty of this place. I was away for a long time, it’s good to be back.
Gvg
My success revolves around always improve the soil. Don’t rake up leaves and throw them away. Use them for mulch or run over them with a mulching mower. I go around and collect the bags of leave neighbors throw away and compost them. I never bag my grass clippings, instead I mulch them into the yard. It only takes a couple of years of not throwing away nutrients the plants make, to see a yard start getting greener and more drought resistant. I cannot believe how much work people put into raking leaves and throwing them away. Florida has poor soils but some of that is caused by poor farming practices and continued with poor lawn and garden practices. I also don’t enjoy weeding, and mulching reduces the need. And if you improve the soil, plants grow better leaving fewer spaces for weeds.
debbie
There are lots of shrub roses around here, and they’ve just started blooming. None are quite this size though!
TerryC
Many of the 250 baby, bare-root trees we planted this spring have begun to leaf out. It’s fun watching them grow: two different kinds of buckeyes, sycamore, bald cypress, loblolly pine, and Kentucky coffee Bean tree are all sprouting leaves.
We got hit hard by frost on the native plums, pears, and apricots but the apples all look okay.
After six years of planting, more than 11,000 trees altogether, this year for the first time I am going back and fertilizing the ones which have survived. They seem to like it.
WereBear
This is an intriguing concept. I certainly used coat color for our recent acquisitions. Before we got Rhiannon, I knew what she would be like because she was a dilute tortoiseshell.
Calicoes and tortoiseshells (tri-colors) are almost always female. And there is plenty of attitude that comes with it!
debbie
Today’s poem of the day seems appropriate:
germy
That’s sad, though. It means some cats are missing out on being adopted because of people making assumptions about their personalities based on their fur.
WaterGirl
@satby: We had freeze warnings on the same nights that you did, and all the lilacs around here weren’t affected at all. I wonder if your freeze was just lower or if it is related to soil.
Either way, that’s a big disappointment!
germy
MagdaInBlack
@germy: Ugh.
SiubhanDuinne
@HeartlandLiberal:
What a wonderfully picturesque line!
@Ben Cisco, your flowers are lovely.
MomSense
@germy:
Ha!
SiubhanDuinne
@WereBear:
I have had two solid black cats, and they were both addicted to high perches. I know all cats like to look down on their hoomans to a certain degree, but these two practically lived on top of the highest bookcase, china cabinet, or whatever was the tallest piece of furniture around.
ETA: I had them at completely different times, so it wasn’t a matter of one copying the other’s behaviour. And none of my other (non-black) cats ever scaled the heights the way first Kaboodle and later Hamish did.
WereBear
@germy:
Studies go back and forth on it. After years in rescue, I find coat color can be a start, but it doesn’t guarantee anything.
There are clusters of traits, though. If we understand that properly, we get a compatible cat. Which is the end goal.
Geminid
@TerryC: Your project is fascinating, and I envy you. Planting so many trees must be hard work, but it’s some of the best work there is.
But I’m curious: what fertilizer are you using, and how do you apply it?
WereBear
@SiubhanDuinne: Panthers actually have some Siamese in them; especially the long and leggy ones. The points distinctive to this breed hides the fact that, genetically, they are black cats with a masking gene :)
germy
@WereBear:
I’m willing to say positive things. For example, I used to live with an orange male tabby who was mellow and affectionate. So I’ll go ahead and say all orange male tabbies are mellow and affectionate. Is that really true? I don’t know, but it’s fun to think so.
But I’m reluctant to ascribe any negative traits to any cat, based just on their fur.
Black cats have taken abuse over the centuries, because of folk tales around them.
Benw
@WereBear: my kids’ elementary school bus driver loved our orange tabby and insisted that all orange tabbies are female. I always thought that didn’t sound right but maybe she’s right.
Also, orange tabbies are cray cray
Danton
Sadly, what’s going on in our garden is Rose Rosette Disease.and I’m dreading pulling up our roses.
SiubhanDuinne
@WereBear:
Hamish was part Siamese. I’m pretty sure Kaboodle wasn’t.
And not sure whether this is helpful, but H was male and K was female, FWIW.
Benw
@germy: haha a non crazy male orange tabby! Pretty much the complete opposite of my orange tabby girl
germy
@Benw:
Which proves maybe we shouldn’t judge books by their covers..
sab
@WereBear: My childhood calico was a wildcat. I loved her and she loved me, but the rest of the family was afraid of her. My brother might have secretly abused her.
I love my tuxedo( w/ siamese) and he follows me around like a dog. All the other cats also like him. And he is friendly to houseguests. But he attacks big dogs.
Our longhair tabby (looks like a Maine coon) is friendly to people but a jerk to other cats. He is shy around houseguests and tends to disappear.
Our shorthair brown tabby is friendly to everyone, human, canine, feline, even now when he is completely blind.
Our gray kitty (also some siamese) is extremely skittish. She is the one I call meankitty. She is friendly to my husband, my stepson and my tuxedo. Otherwise she alternates between wary and hissyfit. She spent her first year outside semiferal so I make allowances. Lately she will sleep at the foot of the bed with me in it as long as I ignore her or approach very tentatively and back off when she tells me to. She looks almost exactly like Majorx4’s little guy, so I doubt her personality is typical of grays. Our rottmix dog died and Shadow misses her a lot.
Our black and white spotted little girl is very shy but also very sweet and gentle.
WereBear
Only 20% right.
Male orange tabbies, like the famous cat actor Rhubarb in the Hammer studio, are known for being mellow and easily trainable. On a sliding cat scale, of course :)
TaMara (HFG)
Everything is very, very and understandably late this year. The lilacs have been slow to open, my trees and bushes painfully slow to leaf out.
I have two more tomatoes to plant and then the veggie garden is done. I planted a 1/2 dozen perennials in the new front yard grass-less section. I still need to plant the butterfly bush and then I’m on the hunt for the Japanese Maple I want. I’ll add a few more perennials from a friend’s garden (as they are moving, they’re happy to give me too many plants). And then after Memorial Day (and after the window/gutter guy has cleaned) I’ll do window boxes and baskets.
Then it is just (!!) weeding over this summer…
TomatoQueen
@WereBear:
Up until yesterday morning I have a sturdy black cat with a wisp of white throat, golden eyes, a soft trilling cry, and a tendency to be silly. As of yesterday morning he has Vanished. All the usual searching/posting has commenced. Have gone past shock and denial and now into sobbing interrupted by occasional screaming. His name is Merlin and if anyone sees him he’s hungry and thirsty and his mom is very worried.
laura
A blue bird visited our yard Friday evening. It’s the first time we’ve had such a visitor. Our gardenias are getting ready to unfurl, there’s some cosmos sweet peas and fuscias to plant and the mj is happily settling in between sugarbaby watermelons, sunflowers and a tower of climbing nasturtiums. Also weeds- they’re a constant battle.
WereBear
@TomatoQueen: Oh, that’s so awful. I hope things turn out to be not what you fear.
WaterGirl
@TomatoQueen: I have been there, and I was beside myself. I remember the near-panic vividly.
I had all but given up, when 2 days later he showed back up. Totally soaked (raining) and stressed out, but home.
There is still hope.
James E Powell
My school is surrounded by these trees. Can any of you tell me what they are?
opiejeanne
@WereBear:
@satby: Those surviving lilacs may come back really strong next year. That’s what ours are doing after last year’s late, hard freezes. Also, the cherry and apple trees just finished an amazing bloom (where are the bees?) and we may get a very nice crop of each.
TomatoQueen
@James E Powell:
posting for distraction
That looks like crimson bottlebrush, one of Australia’s many gifts to Florida. Now tell me you live in Alaska.
TomatoQueen
@WereBear:
@WaterGirl:
Thank you both. I just had one of those auditory hallucinations,one long cry, so thinking I’d heard him I tottered on my walker all through the places we’d checked yesterday—nothing. My son’s caregiver is out looking, with a rattling crunchies dish. It’s Sunday so services are limited, but is it too soon to call animal control?
Matt McIrvin
@Benw: It’s the other way around–orange tabbies are more likely to be male, though it’s a weaker correlation than calico/tortie with females.
Basically, the orange/not orange gene is on the X chromosome, and for an XX cat to be an orange tabby it has to get the gene from both parents, whereas an XY cat only needs it from one parent. So most orange tabbies are XY.
With calico cats, the usual genetic mechanism involves two X chromosomes, so male ones are relatively rare–they’ve got some unusual chromosomal or intersex condition or they’re genetic chimeras.
BruceFromOhio
@satby:
Sorry about the lilacs. Once they get well-rooted with some foliage they are more hearty, and between deer and frost can have a tough time getting big enough. We tented our one blooming lilac as it had just started opening at the first of three hard frosts. It’s a little guy, barely shoulder height, but it made it. Yours will, too, give them time and plenty of sun, they’ll bounce back.
BruceFromOhio
@Gvg:
This! We are in year 20 at this location, and have been doing all you describe since we arrived. We’ve brought in plenty of topsoil over the years to augment leave mulch and compost made from leaf mulch, food waste and grass clippings. Less landfill waste = more humus for the local soil.
BruceFromOhio
@TerryC:
That sounds awesome! I’m happy if I can get a couple of tomato plants to survive. Your way sounds much better!
BruceFromOhio
After days of cold, miserable rain at the start of the month, it dried up and looks to stay dry for the next seven days. Cooler nights still occasionally threaten patchy frost, most everything is now strong enough to resist without damage or requiring coverage.
Distributed 5 yards of mulch to the various beds, MrsFromOhio found a local supplier of good stuff that doesn’t stink to high heaven. A giant pile in the driveway is now a very small pile that will likely disappear later today.
MFO has trays of stuff waiting to get planted, so I was tilling and weeding ahead of The Great Planting. After cutting the grass (mulching! Not bagging! =) my eyes started to swell. I paid little mind, my eyes are constantly aggravated at this time of year. After dinner, my eyes felt really weird, more so than usual, and I was shocked to see my face looking like I caught an airbag or a wicked left-hook. It’s still pretty swollen, not sure what specifically set it off; the tree and grass pollen are off the charts here.
But the gardens and the lawn look fabulous. The early blooming stuff is all done (lilacs, lenten rose, daffodils). The dogwood is blooming fully, and the cool weather is keeping them from dropping so quickly. Waiting on iris and peonies, both coming slow but looking like they will have a good season.
The robins are legion.
Matt McIrvin
@germy: Yeah. I have a black cat who is a high-energy handful, and I know black cats have a certain reputation for mischief, but given the stigma associated with black cats I can never be sure if that’s just part of the superstition. I’m sure there are mellow black cats out there.
StringOnAStick
I’ve been doing hard labor; my husband calls it “toiling” and is concerned but I can see the light at the end of the “what has to get done before the painters arrive” tunnel. The prior owners built mounds to landscape in but too high and too close to the fences so I’ve been installing retaining walls a foot tall (carving each placement by hand in hard, rocky soil) so the bottom of the fences are no longer buried. One section of fence is completely rotted out and will be replaced this fall and not at below grade (seriously, why would anyone do that?!?!). The newer section is now protected and above ground surface. I am tired but only one more day of work should do it.
After 4 weeks of waiting for an irrigation service to come and do the work they promised, I found someone else who I really think is going to show up tomorrow. It’s booming here and contractors of all types either don’t respond or blow you off when you ask about additional work they aren’t interested in doing but don’t bother to tell you that.
The prior owner shut off the irrigation system and ripped up the drip portions because of dementia so the grass was looking bad when we moved in last October. It’s been dry and I can’t use the sprinklers until this repair work gets done so it looks extra bad now. I’d planned to replace the grass with a much less water hungry one in this desert, but the seed mix is sold out for this season. I guess a couple of fussy neighbours are just going to have to deal with it. It took 16 years of neglect for the yard to get this bad; I can’t fix it all in one season though I am trying my best.
James E Powell
@TomatoQueen:
The school is in Carson, California
J R in WV
@Princess:
We had a giant white cat with bright red/orange spots, and named him Ralph for his loud purr. He moved in when a guy dropped by to work on the washing machine in the basement. He told us “He walked in with me like it was his house…” and so he did — lived with us for nearly 20 more years, and died wrapped around his dinner bowl around midnight one night.
Then just a couple of years later on, I stopped for gas at the local hardware store/gas station, and a big kitten, white with red spots, walked out from under my car and wrapped around my ankle. I started out to drive to work, but only got a mile before going back for that cat. He lived with us the rest of his life, was named Rufus for the red spot on his head, like a birb type might be named.
When he got older, he would quietly sneak into bed and lay against my head. He was even more like a member of the family than Ralph was, would sit at the table between us, and very properly would wait for us to pass him a tiny bit of whatever meat-like substance we were eating that night. Especially when neighbors joined us, and they just treated him like any other dinner guest.
So white tom cats with red spots, that’s a type, and one of the very best kinds of cats. Orange cats are also good, now we have a black and brown tortie girl, who is very affectionate, and a grey tabby who only learned to purr by lying on my shoulder while I slaved at a hot computer. It took her a year to make her first tiny sound — now she purrs on my shoulder so loudly other people can hear it. I hummed at her until she hummed back at me.
We’ve had a black cat or two, and they’re usually great. Would adopt one in a heartbeat.
But would prefer a big white tom with red/oranges pots. Great fearless cats, will tackle anything from a Great Dane to a fox. Ralph was 22 pounds — all bone sinew and muscle. Rufus not quite as big, but did attack and kill a rat bigger than he was, who lived under the hog pen til we took the hog to the butcher. Attacked a fox in his old age, Wife saved his ass, the fox had him down in the creek fixing to drown him.
I am a cat person, and cats can tell one from a distance I think…
J R in WV
@SiubhanDuinne:
Our first cat was black, and after a bit, she would perch on top of the fridge every morning, and whoever went in early to make that first pot of coffee would get their head batted harmlessly, and then she would plunge down behind the fridge.
She prowled around my folks’ kitchen, they had wall mounted cabinets, she loved to haunt up there near the knotty pine ceilings. Could walk along the top of a doorway frame…
Really, I don’t recall a cat that we didn’t get along with, out of maybe 30 that have passed our way over the last 48 years or so.
Geminid
@StringOnAStick: I know you live in a different climate than Virginia, but here grass seed is best planted in September. Maybe you can score some of the right seed by then. September may be too late to plant where you are, but August might work.
Annual rye grass seed could be of some use now. As long as it is cut before it heads out, it won’t persist. Planted thinly, annual rygrass might serve as a nursecrop for the right seed when you obtain some. Not to be confused with the grain rye, annual ryegrass is often mixed with perennial grass seed here in Virgina. It sprouts in 5 days, and is used to help hold the soil until slower sprouting perennial grasses get going.
Congratulations on so much bed building progress! Landscape construction can be very good work if you don’t do too much at once.
Matt McIrvin
One non-stigmatizing but cute thing I have been wondering about is whether black cats are more likely to make trilling noises, “mrrp”. Ours does this all the time and I have, purely anecdotally, noticed that black cats on YouTube seem unusually fond of trilling. (Shorty of ShoKo and OwlKitty being two YouTube-famous examples.)
Ed
@StringOnAStick: There’s an old saying – don’t take down a fence until you know what it was put up for. If they put the fence below grade they might have been purposely keeping something out ( rabbits, perhaps ?) It’s worth thinking about. You can always put something that doesn’t rot at and below grade. Anyway – good luck with your toil.