Under The Big Trees

Before and after.

The area in front of our house with dry soil is taken by the roots of two big fir trees stealing all the moisture. Those roots create a thick mat that turns digging into torture and suffocates the other plants' roots.

Before:

Yes, I know, it's ugly.

Azaleas and pinks helped a bit, but the shrubs were miserable and some perennials that I tried to incorporate died.

What has been done:

Old mulch removed; soil loosened; compost added and mixed with the original soil; new plants added; new mulch added, watering increased.

After:

Added plants: Lavender, Pacysandra, Sweet woodruff, Sedum, Knock Out rose, Mondo grass, Vinka minor, Hydrangea Endless Summer (in a bottomless pot), Dwarf Lily of the Nile, Moor Grass.

Who is doing the best: woodruff, vinka, moor grass, sedum (in the shade of the Japanese maple).

This project isn't finished, yet. But I can already tell that my husband likes this area more than before because he is not ashamed to display his OU flag now.

Go Sooners!

My First And Only Tree Peony

Please click on the pictures to see them larger

A sea of wild peonies is one of my childhood memories. We were little, and the plants seemed to be very high. The flowers were white and pink. When I saw the first plant, I wanted to pick it up and take it home. Then, I saw another one and couldn' t

decide which one was better. Then, another and another. I was walking from flower to flower. It was a clear sunny day and the air was filled with an unbelievable aroma. When at last I lifted my head and looked around, I realized we were surrounded by hundreds, maybe thousands, of peonies.

It was one of the small islands on the Bikin river in the Russian Far East. We went there by boat. My family had potatoes planted there. It's hard to believe, but in those days, people in rural areas used to start vegetable gardens wherever they could find a good size lot with nice soil. Remember, the land belonged to the people in the USSR! There was no private property. I am not sure you could do it now, but there we were - on our own, on some small island in the kingdom of wild peonies.

I love peonies since then. Those were herbaceous peonies - Paeonia lactiflora, a native of Siberia, called Chinese peony with the large, opulent flowers. Tree peonies (Paeonia suffruticosa) are deciduous shrubs. Their height is usually 3 or 4 feet, but some can grow as tall as 6 feet. The Chinese were the first to cultivate them. The results of their work are large double flowers on the plants which sometimes needed stalking. ( By the way, Tree Peony is regarded as the national flower of China.) The Japanese form of peony has lighter, simpler flowers. From the East, the peony was imported to Europe where new cultivars were created.

One lady at the NW Flower and Garden Show told me that the tree peony is a plant that many people would dig out when they move to a new place. A gift card from my husband speeded up my decision to acquire it. Here it is, 2007.

I was so concerned about finding the right place for it that it spent two winters in a pot while I was thinking. It didn't bloom last year. This spring, at last, I planted it in front of the house.

They don't recommend early morning sun for tree peony. I learned it late and this is exactly where I chose the spot for him - eastern exposure, morning sun. Well, maybe they are wrong, because it blooms right now and the blooms are wonderful.

It's recommended to remove all buds from the plant for the first two years to get better blooms. I never did it. My plant is more than two years old. It had just two buds (three buds in 2007 when I bought it). I am not patient and wanted to see them badly!

Peonies like full sun (light afternoon shade in warmer climates), rich, neutral well-drained soil and are hardy from zones 3 to 8. They also say that peonies will grow in part shade and in many different types of soil if you never let them dry or get waterlogged.

It's recommended to plant them with a handful of blood and bone and mulch every fall with garden compost mixed with blood and bone.
Tree peony doesn't like wind and needs good air circulation.

Tree peonies need to be planted 5"-6" below the soil according to some books, while others say to plant them 3-4" below the grafted portion (3" if they are container grown). Grafted plants (I understand this is what we buy from nurseries) may send up suckers of herbaceous peony that need to be removed. Such suckers have greener leaves and aren't as finely cut as tree peony leaves).

Pruning is recommended to be done in February if needed. Dead or diseased wood should be cut back to a new bud, or down to soil level. They say that the old plants respond well to pruning. Take one main stem a year down to a live bud about a foot above the soil.

These factors can contribute to a plant not producing any blooms:

- A plant is too young

- Spot is too shady or overcrowded

- Too deeply planted

- Plant was exposed to late freeze

- Too much nitrogen or too little phosphorus or potassium

- Disease.

As for desease and pests, A-Z Encyclopedia of Garden Plants says the peony is prone to Verticillium wilt, ringspot virus, tip blight, stem rot, Botrytis blight, leaf blotch, Japanese beetle and nematodes. Peony Wilt is a fungal disease which can be controlled with good hygiene and air circulation around the plants.

Mature plants don't like to be disturbed. If needed, transplant them in the fall. Experts advise dividing mature peonies rather than transplanting them intact. A plant that is not divided may not bloom for several years! Let the plant die back in the fall, don't cut the foliage and cut the stems back to the ground after the first hard frost.

Peonies need a good cold period of dormancy.

Many parts of the plant - roots, bark, seeds and flowers, are said to have medicinal properties.In the Russian Far East, roots have been wildly used by native people to treat many diseases. Pharmacy-bought peony tincture is used to treat sleeplessness, headache, neurasthenia.

*******

The pictures of this plant in May 2010 are here: Tree Peony Blooming

Back To Potatoes!

I never thought I would grow potatoes again! Not that I don't like them. I love them. I love them fried, baked, grilled, whole, sliced, mashed, skin on and skinless... It's just we used to grow them not for fun, but for food. It was a chore. As kids, we helped adults plant, weed, earth potatoes, pick them up, prepare for storage, etc. As students, we used to go to collective farms to help with potato harvesting and sorting. Most colleges in the Soviet Union sent their first and second year students to the farms following orders from local authorities. We knew we'd go to the countryside for a month if we got accepted in a college. Don't be quick to feel sorry for us: the education was free! Wait for the time when your kid will go to college, and tuition becomes a harsh reality. Then, a month of not-so-hard work in the fresh air with a bunch of their peers won't look so bad. We had fun! We worked, we laughed, we sang and had enough energy to go dancing after work. Nevertheless, we would gladly skip that duty if we could!


Back to potatoes. They are a staple in the Russian cuisine. We can not live without them. What do I remember about growing potatoes back then? We never watered them. We knew that they like sandy soil. The first question asked by people buying potatoes at the market was: what soil do you grow them in? Cultivation included one weeding - soon after the green tops would appear and two earthings - piling soil on the both sides of the rows.

On the sidebar of my blog, there is a picture of potatoes.



It's true what I say under it - I have no idea how one potato plant appeared on my raised bed. When I saw it for the first time, I was sure it was a potato plant, but where did it come from? I suspect it came with the soil in one of the pots with seedlings from the market. What was amazing was that I never saw it blooming! When I decided to pull it out to discard, to my great surprise, it had a bunch of good-size, firm nice potatoes!

Next year, there were two plants on the same spot. I didn't turn over the soil in that corner of the bed and probably some little potatoes got left over the winter and grew up!

Again, there were no flowers! There should be flowers! It's still a mystery for me.
This year, I didn't plan to plant potatoes. It happened that a Costco bag of fingerling potatoes was too big for us to eat fast, and they started to sprout.

Well, I just poked them in the free space on the raised bed. Now, I know it wasn't wise - too little soil to earth them.

But, we'll see what we get. Then, we had several red potatoes from the grocery store that started sprouting.

To throw them away? To compost? Well, after reading several posts about growing potatoes in bags, the boys and I planted them in a burlap sack and in a black plastic pot. Experiment!


The history of potatoes is amazing! Originated in South America, they didn't have an easy way to get into European and New World cuisine. Often called a ground nut, they were grown under the order of kings and emperors, and planted with guard enforcement together with some educational propaganda. In Russia, they are associated with Peter The Great and in Germany with Frederick the Great.

I like this story:

" In France the potato was imposed upon society by an intellectual. Antoine Augustine Parmentier saw that the nutritional benefits of the crop combined with its productive capacity could be a boon to the French farmer. He was a pharmacist, chemist and employee of Louis XV. Parmentier discovered the benefits of the potato while held prisoner by the Prussians during the Seven Years War. He was so enamored by the potato that he determined that it should become a staple of the French diet. After failing by conventional means to convince Frenchmen of its advantages, he determined upon a surreptitious means of making his point.Parmentier acquired a miserable and unproductive spot of ground on the outskirts of Paris. There, he planted 50 acres of potatoes. During the day, he set a guard over it. This drew considerable attention in the neighborhood. In the evening the guard was relaxed and the locals came to see what all the fuss was about. Believing this plant must be valuable, many peasants "acquired" some of the potatoes from the plot, and soon were growing the root in their own garden plots. Their resistance was overcome by their curiosity and desire to better their lot with the obviously valuable new produce."
(from http://www.indepthinfo.com/potato/history.shtml ).
Good information about potato history can be found here http://www.history-magazine.com/potato.html

By the way, we have baked potatoes tonight for dinner.

Vincent Van Gogh . The Potato-Eaters

Geranium Revival

They say you are not a real gardener if you can't throw plants. Fine. I might be not a real gardener. Nothing will make me to throw away a nice plant just because winter is coming and I can buy such plant next year. Let's take geraniums. Zonal geraniums. Like these ones:


As always, click on the picture to make it larger

The picture above was taken in July, but they still bloom in October here. I agree that their color doesn't go well with Halloween decorations...

Instead of discarding, I pull them out, shake the soil off and keep them in the garage during winter.






When we had a basement, I used to attach them to wire hangers and hang upside down. Now, I just keep them in the garage. They dry up and might look pretty dead.

I throw away those plants that are obviously won't make it.






Some of them look alive, they even have flowers:

No watering in winter. In spring, I trim them and shorten the roots a bit.

This year, I decided to soak their roots, but this is the first time I did it. I don't think it'll make a big difference.

Then, I plant them directly to the flower beds or in pots.

If some pieces of cut branches look good, I put them somewhere to see if they start to grow (this time, I put a couple of them near my peas). Thus, I can have additional plants.

I checked the geranium pots recently. Here they are:

The one on the right side doesn't look perfect, the front one looks good and the left one makes me happy. Nice, nealthy plant:

Hopefully, in June they will look like this:

As for the Martha Washington geraniums, I keep them in the garage in their pots in winter.

Cut them very low in fall, start watering very lightly in spring, and here they are today:

Piece of Paradise

What happened to your top, Tree?

Click on the images to see them large

North Cascades, WA.

***Copyright TatyanaS

pacific northwest art

What a Question, Hermes!

You won't believe it!

After we found out how they grow beautiful tulip fields, another outstanding question arrived, this time from Hermes : " But how do they make sure they (bulbs) are planted the right way up!" . This question didn't come to my mind when I was reading that article on KING5.com about the bulb-planting machine. Really, HOW do those machines know where is the tulip's top and, what is even more important - HOW do they put a bulb right side up?!!!!!

Again, I went to the library. In my robe and slippers, with a big mug of coffee in my hand. I love this library. I don't know how we lived without it. I have things to do in the garden, but I will die from curiosity if I don't find the answer right now! The good thing is that the library is in my house. It's the Internet.

Well, it was not fast. I looked through many sites before I found the answer. Here it is:
"Root Side Down? Nope. The bulbs never complained a bit. And gardeners who emphasize having to do this have never seen commercial machines planting flower bulbs in operation. Imagine planting millions of bulbs and trying to turn each one root-side-down. The bulbs know. When I grew gladiola commercially, I used to plow a furrow with the tractor, walk along the furrow with a bag of glad corms tossing them in at approximately the right distance. Then I'd run the tractor back down the furrow and roll the soil back in on top of the glads. Not pretty, but really effective when you're planting 10,000 glad bulbs. If you're a bit compulsive about it remember to plant bulbs "pointy side" up."
Thank you Doug at http://www.flower-garden-bulbs.com/plantingflowerbulbs.html

Doug's site is very interesting and has a lot of useful information.

Thank you Hermes for this excellent question! We all will soon be experts in tulip growing!

Thank you Dirt Princess for your comment that started this research!

P.S.Can you believe?! Bulbs don't care which side up we plant them! Should we experiment and try to plant some of them top side down? Hmmm, if you try and fail, please remember that it was not my idea!

Previous posts on this subject: Tulip Fields: By Machine Or By Hand? , Red and Yellow Tulip Fields , Purple and Pink Dream , Yellow Seas

Copyright 2009 TatyanaS

Tulip Fields: By Machine Or By Hand?

I appreciate all the comments I got on my three posts about the Skagit Valley Tulip Festival (Yellow Seas ,Purple and Pink Dream ,Red and Yellow Tulip Fields ). I got curious and did some research after receiving a question from Dirt Princess .

She wrote:
"It is simply amazing! How do they plant them? By machine or by hand? That is quite an undertaking. Of course I realize that most come back, but then there is the dividing and re-planting. I would love to go there." What a good question!

Really, HOW?

The best answer I found was on KING5.com. I think their article is extremely interesting. I am using it to show the main stages of the process:
- When conditions are right, the tulip bulbs are planted much like potatoes. A bin in the back of a tractor holds the bulbs. As the tractor moves through a field, bulbs drop through a shoot and into a furrow in the prepared ground.

- At the same time, another implement of the tractor adds bands of fertilizer on either side of the bulb.

- Finally, a tractor shoe layers a 5 1/2-inch-thick hill of soil over the top of the bulbs.

After planting, tulips become a bit lower-maintenance for a while, as growers rely on the ideal conditions of the Skagit Valley to nurture their crop.
Underground, the bulbs germinate as they soak up water from the Valley's "perfect" amount of rainfall. Eventually, green shoots start to poke up through the soil. When they start to appear also depends on the weather.
The flowers start to bloom as soon as early spring. The time of the bloom also depends on the tulip. Different variety are early-, mid-season- or latebloomers.

- Commercial harvesting of the flowers begins when they start to bloom. Workers bundle the flowers in groups of 10 and put them in trays. The trays go into a warehouse cooler for an hour so the stems are cool when workers pack the bunches into plastic sleeves for shipping to stores.

- As soon as the flower looks ratty, a crew goes into the field to cut all of the petals off, right underneath the head of each flower.
With no flower left to devote energy to, a plant sends all of its nutrients to the bulbs. Each plant is attached to multiple bulbs, including the bulb planted the previous fall and new, smaller bulbs.
Allowing petals to remain to fall off into the foliage can also spread disease to the leaves and bulbs.

- After the flowers are topped, growers give them about three weeks to send nutrients into the growing bulbs. In late May, using a machine called a skimmer, they cut the stems to the ground. A tractor following behind the skimmer scoops out the bulbs. They rise up a belt on the tractor, like potatoes, and the bulbs fall into a hopper.

- The bulbs go to a barn, where they're loaded onto a conveyor belt and washed. Crews pick sprouts off the ends, and the bulbs move along to another belt to a grader for sizing.
As they move along the belt, the smallest bulbs drop through holes in the grader first into waiting bins. The largest bulbs make it to the end. The larger bulbs, 12 centimeters in diameter and larger, are the ones that are sold. Smaller bulbs are retained to be planted again.

- Next the bulbs, sorted into trays, are placed in an air tunnel for drying and storage. Fans keep air circulating over the bulbs to keep them dry, mold-free and cool until conditions are right for planting again.

You can read the whole story here: http://www.king5.com/homeandgarden/stories/NW_041407HGKtulipsKC.128dadf7.html

***Copyright 2009 TatyanaS