Liberated Gardener

Your Shrubs Aren't Blooming?

One of the most common questions I see in garden magazines is also the one I hear the most from gardeners:  "I have had an X plant for Z years and it has never bloomed. Why?"

This same question in a regional gardening magazine about a 4 year-old gardenia that had never bloomed had a disappointing answer. They didn't mention what I think is perhaps the most common reason for lack of blooms--excessive nitrogen and not enough phosphorus in the soil. 

In the end, they did recommend getting a soil test (which could take weeks or months to get an answer), so that will help possibly help resolve it. And they did remark that sunlight and adequate moisture were necessary. 

And I'm assuming (as the writer probably did) that the gardener isn't whacking it back every year in the spring and unwittingly removing flower buds before they open. 

But just as nitrogen is the key building block for leaves, phosphorus is the key nutrient for flowers and fruit. And soils in the southeast generally are rather low on phosphorus compared to what a lot of non-native plants like gardenias would like. 

Not only that, but even if there is enough phosphorus, a walloping amount of nitrogen will choke off the flow of phosphorus. Meaning too much nitrogen = not enough flowers. So stop throwing high-nitrogen fertilizer all over the place.

Also, too much nitrogen can just make plants look sexy to all the bad bugs and diseases out there. I keep my garden lean on nitrogen for that reason. The time and money that some high-nitrogen gardeners spend on sprays for bugs and diseases (and questions about lack of flowers) I spend in a hammock watching my lush garden sway in the breeze. 

So if your shrubs--or perennials, trees, vines, vegetables, etc.--aren't blooming, but they are getting enough sunlight and water, then the likely problem is lack o' phosphorus.

A liberated gardener can remedy this inexpensively and quickly with a five pound bag of bonemeal or rock phosphate. Every year or two I throw about 2-4 fistfuls of bonemeal at each shrub's rootzone, depending on size and whether they've been growing and flowering at a good clip. Organic fertilizers don't much dissolve in water, so they are accessible to the roots slowly, but inevitably. 

For perennial beds, every year or two, I throw about 5 lbs. over 100 square feet or so. Every garden is different, so if plants are madly growing, forgo fertilizing, as it will go to waste and perhaps wash down into a creek, which would be bad for the fish. 

How to choose between bonemeal and rock phosphate?:

Bonemeal is made from bones from slaughterhouses--otherwise it would end up in a landfill. Some gardeners like to repeat an old canard that bonemeal has no nutrients because it's been steamed to kill microbes, but that just isn't true. Bonemeal generally has about 10-15% phoshorus, about 3% nitrogen and little or no potassium and a full range of micronutrients. It also has a good amount of calcium, but not enough to really effect the acidity of your soil.  If using bonemeal gives you the willies or bothers your conscience, use rock phosphate. If you have dogs running around in your garden, you may also want to use rock phosphate. When your dog gets a whiff of the bonemeal in the soil, they may start thinking that there's a cow in there somewhere and they'll find it if they can just dig deep enough. 

Rock Phosphate is quarried from open pits and consists of crushed, compacted fossils of sea creatures, so it is high in phosphorus and calcium from their shells and bones. It won't attract dogs or torture your conscience as much. Only has about 3-5% phosphorus, but also has other micronutrients. 

So after you've dosed your garden with some flower-forming-phosphorus be sure to fix yourself a tasty, nutrient-rich potion too. I'm thinking a cold Bloody Mary with a crisp pickled okra. And a garden magazine. 

 Peonies like them some phosphorus. 

The Leaf-Mobile Arrives

I've been getting a lot of compliments on my truck's paint job when I pull up at gas stations these days. One friend christened my truck "The Leaf-Mobile."

 

This is my 1990 Chevy S-10 pickup truck. I bought it ten years ago when it had only 24,000 miles despite being 10 years old then. The owner had the use of company car and only used the truck on weekends to haul fertilizer. He apologized for not having time to clean the truck before he showed it to me (I was the first to respond to his ad.) But when he lifted the hood I swear my first thought was that the engine was clean enough to eat off of. The only reason he was selling it was the gout in his left leg made using the clutch a pain--so he had already bought himself an automatic S-10. 

My mechanic gave it a clean bill of health so I bought it, figuring it would last me 20 years, since I only put about 4000 miles a year on a work truck (I only work in neighborhoods contiguous with mine.)

Within a year the grey paint began to flake and peel. And after ten years there were rust spots and a very blemished complexion. When a body shop offered coupons for 50% off on a paint job I had them sand out the rust and paint it John Deere green. They gave me a $600 job for $300. 

Then despite Chris' doubts I bought some dark green automotive spray paint, clipped some leaves from the garden and used the leaves as stencils and voila. 

Below, the Leaf-Mobile delivers a Leaf-Stabile.

 

A Plant Palette That Deflects a Deer’s Palate

This is an  incomplete list of plants with strong flavors and unappetizing textures that deer disdain—though sometimes they will eat the tender flowers and new growth.

 

It would be impossible to remember all the plants deer don't like unless you find a way to group them. Since humans have a pyramid of basic food groups maybe I should call these the average deer's non-food groups. Also check with your garden center for local lists of deer-resistant plants.

 

Strong Flavors

 

Culinary Herbs

Lavender ( Lavandula spp.), sage (Salvia spp.), parsley (Petroselinum crispum)

Curry (Helichrysum italicum), fennel (Foeniculum vulgare), oregano (Origanum spp.)

Rosemary (Rosmarinus offiicinalis), Bay tree ( Laurus nobilis),

Thyme ( Thymus spp.), Alliums (Garlic, Chives, Onions, etc.)

 

Photo:  A hedge of lavender. 

 

 

Medicinal Herbs

Horehound (Marrubium spp.), Artemisia “Powis Castle”,

Peony (Paenia officinalis), Foxglove (Digitalis spp.),

Mayapple (Podophyllum peltatum),

St. John’s wort (Hypericum spp.),

Echinacea (but rabbits like it!)

Monkshood (Aconitum spp.))

 

 

 

Irritating Sap

Euphorbia spp.

Helleborus spp.

Rue (Ruta graveolens), 

Bluestar (Amsonia tabernaemontana)

 

 

UNAPPETIZING TEXTURES

 

All Ferns,

Mosses and

Ornamental Grasses

 

Fuzzy Leaves

Gray yarrow (Achillea tomentosa and cultivars), Pincushion flower (Scabiosa caucasia),

Jerusalem sage

Lavender (Lavandula spp.), Rose campion (Lychnis coronaria),

Lamb’s ear ( Stachys byzantina),

Blanket flower (Galliardia x grandiflora)

Photo: Poppies will make you sleeeep. And the deer don't like 'em either.  

Waxy Leaves (but deer will eat the flowers)

Bearded iris (Iris germanica),

Dianthus spp.,

California poppy ( Eschscholzia californica),

Blue hostas are reputedly less attractive to deer because of their waxy coating.

 

 

Tomorrow? See the art truck that I'm putting up for sale....

Not Tonight Deer...

 Here's some tips about keeping the deer away....

#1 Repellents

The best repellent, hands down, is a roving dog. Short of that, store bought and homemade repellents have smells—eggs, hot sauce, coyote urine--too mild for gardeners to notice but they deter deer. Temporarily. One or more rains may wash it away and you’ll have to reapply it. Some bold gardeners are collecting, diluting and spraying their own urine—very cost-effective and “natural”. Some gardeners have luck with sprinklers connected to motion detectors or with battery powered attractants that zap a deer’s nose with a mild shock. Upside: repellents are cheaper than fencing. Downside: may have to reapply in response to weather.  At the many sites where I’ve given my Deer-Resistant Garden program, I’ve heard good reviews of repellents from www.IMustGarden.com.

Photo: Benner brand deer fencing at the Durham Academy Lower School vegetable garden. 

 

#2 Deer Fencing

 

Here I want to offer a few rules of thumb:

 

1)   If they can’t see into your garden, they probably won’t jump in, so a 6’ wooden privacy fence can work.

2)   Even a short picket or wire fence (4’ high or so) can keep deer out, if the width of the fenced area is too narrow to get a running start for jumping out, say 8’ wide or less.

3)   A black plastic deer fence of 7’ height will keep deer out, not because it’s too high for them (they can jump about 10’ with a running start) but because their eyes can’t make out the actual height of the nearly invisible fence. They are afraid it might be over 10’ high because their eyesight—made for detecting motion in the woods—can’t sort out fine details like the thin lines of the deer fence.

4)   Ken Dawson, an Orange County, NC organic farmer, keeps deer out of his lettuce fields with a knee-high electric fence. The deer could jump over it, but he puts a daub of irresistible peanut butter on a square of aluminum foil on the fence every 20’ or so. One mild zap trains them to move along.

5)   Chapel Hill, NC garden designer Matt Arnsberger theorizes that normally resistant plants attract deer when they are first planted because the leaves are so plump and lush from the fervent watering and fertilizing they receive at the nursery. Protecting new plants with individual fencing for a year or two—until they get “leaner and meaner”--can be worthwhile.

 

...more about deer resistant plants tomorrow....

Deer Crazy

It hardly seems fair. While honey bees suffer from Colony Collapse Disorder, white-tailed deer have a rampant case of Multiply-and-Munch-Down-Our-Gardens-Syndrome.

 

Adding insult to injury, they eat the most expensive plants first. Apparently, the fancier the hosta, the more delicious it is. This notion may just be apocryphal, but I have a hunch about why it might also be true. More about that later.

 

Wondering why they liked hostas—known in some circles as “deer spinach”--I once tasted a piece of a young leaf. I thought, “succulent, but not savory” and spit it out. But it confirmed another hunch; deer generally like mild-flavored plants and don’t like those with strong flavors or tough textures.

 

In fact, their tastes reminded me of myself as a 5-year-old: while my sisters were enjoying peanut butter and jelly on toast, I craved white bread with butter. I’ve outgrown that narrow palate, but the deer won’t--unless they are extremely hungry. Lenten rose (Helleborus orientalis), for instance are widely considered deer-resistant because of their irritating sap. But I’ve heard that deer pressure on parts of Long Island has become so great that your Hellebores may no longer be safe until herds decline.

Photo: Lenten rose (hellebore) blooming in winter.

 

In NC we have a stable population of about a million deer; probably more than lived here before the colonial era. But we have many more people here too. And with the people come neighborhoods and roads that slice into deer territory, replacing native trees and shrubs with succulent roses and vegetables. 

 

Of the 176,000 deer killed in NC in 2007, most were taken by conventional hunters on private land, but more were killed by people with vehicles (10%) than by bow hunters (7%), hunters with muskets (8%) or hunters on public lands (4%). In 2008, eleven people in NC died when their vehicles struck a deer. So damage to cars and gardens isn’t the only price we pay for an out-of-balance population or sprawl.

 

Duke University, here in my hometown of Durham,  NC, owns a 7000 acre forest used for research and public recreation. They recently allowed a hunting club to take hundreds of deer from the forest for the second year in a row. Surprisingly, there were no protests on behalf of the deer. In NC we've also reintroduced red wolves in the mountains and the coastal plain with some hope that they'll help curb the deer population. 

 

These efforts are small consolation for my clients with deer problems, however. So I’ve summarized in sidebars below my recommendations on three deer-resistance strategies available to most gardeners: Repellents, Fences and Plant Choices. Like all garden practices, the key is finding the mix that favors your budget, temperament, time, and taste.

 

So why do deer seem to eat our most expensive plants first?

 

Think long stemmed roses. They have lost much of their fragrance and disease resistance as they’ve been bred to be the perfect cutting flower. As we breed plants for visual impact we may also be accidentally losing qualities that made them less tempting for deer. And generally the more generations between a cultivar and it’s original species, the more expensive it is—and perhaps more vulnerable.

 

So just as breeders have turned their attention to breeding disease-free landscape roses, perhaps one day we’ll have a flashy hosta that deer will dismiss. One that tastes like Texas Pete perhaps?

 

....more about deer resistant gardens later this week....tune in.  

 

Need a Speaker for Your Garden Club?

Check out this short video about my work as a garden speaker, created by my friend Bill Elias.

I'm available for programs on deer-resistant gardens, gardening with containers, edible gardens, native wildflowers, Liberated Gardener Techniques and other topics. 

My rates are negotiable, so feel free to call me at 919-824-2239 or email me. 

I've spoken and showed slides to audiences of from a dozen to over 100 gardeners, in Va., Maine and NC. Have spoken at Duke Gardens, Tryon Palace, JC Raulston Arboretum, UNC-G, and nearly a dozen garden clubs from Charlotte to Treyburn to Chapel Hill. I also regularly lead garden classes at Stone Bros. and Byrd Garden Center and at King's Daughters Inn, both in Durham. 

 

Clothes Line Posts = Garden Sculpture

With the warm, dry weather we've been able to reduce our power company's use of coal and oil (and conserving our money for our Travel Fund) by putting a lot of laundry out on the clothesline to dry instead of using the dryer.

 

If you think these clothesline posts look a little odd, then obviously you've no appreciation for art. 

I installed these posts after Chris heard that I had built sculptural clothesline posts for a client. She asked "When are we going to have a clothesline?" 

I don't like the idea of the cobbler's children having no shoes, so I kicked the idea around awhile and created this sculptural clothesline, which I call "Spanish Dancers." 

I put all the actual clothes lines on the same side of the posts so that I could position the posts at the edge of our property, between a rolled bamboo fence from Bamboo Fencer and our still-under-construction patio. 

The lumber is sustainably harvested Ipe; a rot-resistant wood from South America. To keep it from turning grey in the sun, I've given it a couple of coats of Tung oil. The lines are a black cord I bought at the Army surplus store. The wooden clothespins are from a dealer who bought them in East Germany. I cut the tops, arms and notches of the posts freehand with chainsaw, circular saw, jig saw and chisel. 

I've got a commission for another one that I'm going to build of locally harvested cedar and attach it to the side of a deck. It will be shaped like a conventional clothesline post, meaning a 'T' shape. But with the cords attached to glass insulators from old power lines. So it will look like an old-school power line. Kind of fitting for something that saves energy. 

Below is the original sculptural clothesline post, named Clothesline Christ in homage to all the domestic goddesses who've kept our clothes smelling fresh over the millennia. 

 

Free Burlap Mulch

Keeping a garden mulched can cost a lot in terms of time and materials. 

Organic mulches--bark, woodchips, shredded leaves, etc.--all decompose into their basic constituents, which are carbon dioxide and water. 

That decomposition is good for the soil microbes--and the soil microbes are good for the plants--but for the gardener it means an unending chore of replacing mulch before you're left with bare soil exposed to the baking sun and opportunistic weed seeds. And for some, it means frequent dunning of the bank account if you buy mulch. 

For our organic vegetable garden and our community garden in Burch Ave. neighborhood we scavenge old burlap sacks that once held coffee beans and use them to mulch the paths between beds.

 

It only takes a few minutes to spread several dozen bags to cover an area. I put them down with about 4" of overlap. After two or three months (depending on the season) a few of the toughest weeds (think nutsedge or bermuda grass) poke their heads through the weave of the bags. And a few annual weed seeds might germinate on top--like crabgrass in summer or chickweed in winter. 

But here's the fun part. Before the weeds can get very big or numerous (I like to do this before there's more than a couple of weeds on each bag), I go back through the garden and flip every bag over. 

Again, this only takes a few minutes and one of two bad things happen to the weeds:

1) The weed clings to the bag and its roots are ripped out of the ground. When I flip the bag the roots are exposed to the sun and the weed dies. This is usually the case with annual weeds that germinated on top and sent their roots down through the fabric of the bag. 

2) If the weed slips through the bag and remains rooted in the ground, it still loses. When I lay the bag back down, it covers the weed and deprives it of light.  A plant without light for 6-8 weeks will starve to death, since sunlight is food for plants.  

(Ideally, any tough perennial weeds like bermuda grass have been eliminated before you start gardening, but their seeds can float in on the wind too.)

  

 Counter Culture Coffee gives these bags away once they've dumped the beans into their roasters. You don't want to get coffee bags from any roaster--make sure they only use organic beans. One acquaintance picked up bags from her local coffee roaster and got home to find out the bags smelled like petroleum products. They probably had been sprayed with some nasty pesticide before being shipped to this country. She ended up tossing the whole lot. 

As for the ink to make the lovely logos on some bags, I think they must be water-based. An artist who uses coffee bags for her work says the ink rarely survives a run through the washer. So I don't think they'll hurt soil life or contaminate any food plants. 

Finally, because the burlap is also organic matter, after another 2 or 3 months the bags are deteriorating badly and need to be covered with another layer. But since they're free and take little time to spread, it's a small thing to put down  a new layer twice a year. 

And I can occasionally time my visits to the coffee roaster so I'm there for a free coffee tasting--or what they call a "coffee cupping" at 10 am on Fridays.

Now that's liberating. 

Contain Your Mulch

I'm always looking for ways to save time in the garden. 

And watering and weeding are two of the biggest demands on a gardener's time. 

If you spent less time on those two chores, it would leave more time for real gardening: cutting flowers, harvesting groceries, dividing plants that you want more of and kicking back and just looking around at your wonderful garden. 

Some garden writers advocate using containers as a way to reduce garden chores, but by adding pots and window boxes, you could actually increase the amount of time spent watering. Why? Because plants' roots dry out faster in a container--there's just so much less space available for storing water than in a big ol' garden. 

You could be watering containers every day or two during a summer heat wave. 

And weed seeds can fly on the wind to land in containers where they find the expensive potting soil you bought to be a very attractive spot to germinate, grow, flower and set seed--unless you snag 'em  and kick 'em to the curb before they get too big. 

I've got nothing against pots, but I do have something against unnecessary work. That's why I use mulch in all our containers and window boxes. The idea of mulching a garden bed to hold moisture and keep down weeds has become more common (tho too many beds go wanting). No reason not to adopt the same practice when it comes to containers. 

We even use mulch in containers for house plants. No reason not to save time there too. 

Here's a photo of a container I threw together one day for a downtown thrift store. They're no longer in business, but I hope someone is still enjoying this container made from a tire from a racing car, with a mulch of brick chips. 

 

Here's a container with a dwarf citrus tree mulched with Mexican beach pebbles. This kind of mulch is not cheap, but you get your money's worth here, as the pebbles are highly visible and you don't need large quantities. 

 

Here's another potted dwarf citrus tree with pebbles of a different color, that I've turned on edge for a different look.  I used to water my four citrus trees about once a week. With the mulches I now water them about every two weeks. 

  

And you can save your money by using whatever materials are plentiful to make a mulch. Here, Chris used the cups from acorns to mulch a potted pansy. Next spring I may use the oak flowers that clog the rain gutters as a mulch in containers. 

 

Don't get the wrong idea here, (okay, maybe you're getting the right idea) but I've used corks from wine bottles to mulch this ficus tree in our house. Yes, many of the corks are generated in-house, but most of them come from a restaurant that saves corks for me.

 Originally I had just been tossing them into the pot, but the helter-skelter look left something to be desired. I started standing them up for a more attractive look. I used to water this ficus once a week, but now that the potting soil is completely covered with a wine cork mulch, it gets watered about once a month. 

Your favorite restaurant will probably save corks for you if you come by to pick them up every-so-often. It's a shame for good organic material like corks to end up in the landfill. 

 

In other pots we've used more conventional mulches--pine bark, shredded hardwood bark, gravel, shredded tree leaves, cocoa husks, etc. The pine bark tends to float away when you water--which even if you're watering less often, the clean up adds to the work load, so we don't use that anymore, but the others are stable. And they do reduce the amount of watering and weeding.

And if chosen well, the mulch adds something visually attractive and can be cost effective. 

So get your containers mulched before summer really sets in and use the time you save for whatever your favorite gardening tasks might be. Or use the saved time to generate more cork mulch!