Views of the Long Border

It may always be a work in progress; just not quite "there". Each  year I tweak it here, tweak it there. I try to remove the quack grass and June grass, it seems to little avail.  Voracious ground-chomping plants eat up the real estate. This is a predator-prey environment. Eat or be eaten. Filipendula, sundrops, phlox, beebalm, geraniums, trandescantia, rudbeckia, asters, chrysanthemums, and heliopsis give no quarter.

I weed out enough flowering plants for more than a couple gardens each year. I pinch and prod others to play nice. It is easy to lose yourself whether you are plant or gardener. It gobbles up garden tools set down for a moment, leaving gardener vowing to paint each and every tool handle a shocking RED.

Animals have crawled in to die escaping more blood-thirsty predators of the four legged kind. It sports habitat for giant larva of untold insects and even a moth as big as my fist a couple nights ago. Hummingbirds attempt to chase me from in it July when beebalm begins to scent the air. The neighborhood bees smile and are as busy as...bees... working over the population of the long border.

Proof of Life

A peony with red foliage making way.  The foliage greens up about the time the buds begin to form.

Winter, you shall not take us down.  You might win a battle here and there, but there will be gardens and there will be
flowers.

And lots of them!  These globe alliums have been seriously hindered by the Austrian black pine I removed after last summer's garden walk.  This will be their year!

 Although out of focus, you can see the results of the scratch test (scraping the outer skin to reveal that shimmer of green)on the akebia quinata:  proof of life!

Akebia quinata scratch test

Native geum triflorum, prairie smoke

A small alpine plant I grew from seed, which I am going to have to check my records to identify!

Crocus under the white pine

My own seedlings of 'Palace Purple' heuchera

Bergenia, or pigsqueak, grown from seed decades ago, and even here evergreen!

At least one of my Pink Knock Outs made it!

Russian achillea, 'Love Parade' looks like it means to fill in some significant real estate left vacant by the black pine.

Ah, tiny bud growth on a few of the branches of the Japanese 'Bloodgood' 

There are a lot of healthy buds on this clematis alpina 'Blue Dancer', which blooms on old wood.  Last year it bloomed two blooms near the ground in mid-May.  This year it looks like it will have a good show, but at eye level.

The privet are thinking about it, but until they leaf out there is the opportunity for the scilla to put on their opening show with a shimmer of blue.  I mean to move them (or some of them to a better location but life pre-empted me.

THIS JUST IN!

Report from the Outliers: The Bee Keeper says this was a good winter for bees.  Although, extremely, bitterly cold, there were none of the extreme temperature fluctuations we have seen in more recent years.  Her father's hives look good and are robust.  As you might remember her hive's queen was attacked and killed by marauding hornets.  The surviving bees were sent to their cousins' hives.  The Bee Keeper reports she will purchase a new queen and the bees will be back in a week or so.

Bee Hanging Around

A fairly docile bee just hanging around on my garden trellis this morning (9/3/13) when the temperatures were less than 60 degrees.  Just hanging around got her captured so I could take a nice close look.

I know, the picture on the trellis was clearer...for you, but watching her in the jar was fun, for a while.  I sure hope she didn't get a good look at me.

What's the Buzz? Fall Pollinators

This last sunny Sunday, the buzzing was very loud indeed.

Take a closer look...

Quite a few honey bees!

A bumble bee...

Even a wasp!

What sort of bee is this? Not a wasp, bumble, or honey...

Even some FEELL_EYES! (flies).

Please Feed the Bees

It is pretty dry here in central Wisconsin. I have a bird bath I empty every day, rinse, and refill. The last few days the bird bath is dry, the plants around it a bit droopy. The moment I began rinsing, honeybees started to alight on the rim. First, three or four, then a dozen. By the time I filled the bowl there had to be two or three dozen swarming to get a drink. It is dry if a honeybee can't find a drop of water.



The morning before last, I went to the garden with the intent to pull these mustard green gone to seed. It was a cool morning and I thought to get a bit of gardening in before the temperatures climbed.I decided against pulling the brassica nigra as the bees were gardening pretty avidly on this mustard.

I'm not the keeper of these bees, but in a way I am my neighbor's keeper. My neighbor gave me a head's up this spring he intended to get a hive. He has told me the honey-making is going slowly this year. The hive is literally a couple dozen steps from the flowers in my border and the potager. I haven't seen too many of them at any one time. Today was a first.

I think my early strawberries froze (like the apples and apricots). The blackberries and later strawberries might be doing better. It might be because of the bees. Typically, I see mainly carpenter bees doing the pollinating in my yard.

But it has been dry, so folks, be sure there is water for the bees!

Beauty in Autumn

Bee working over some broccoli gone to seed in the potager.

I have to admit that sometimes I have a hard time seeing the beauty in fall. Taking a page from DebiO, a great photographer, art teacher, and joy giver to the north; I decided to see if I could digitally capture some beauty amongst the garden decay. This post is what I came up with this bright and beautiful fall day.


Purple Dome aster



The bees do like the asters. This is one tired and cold bee this morning, not even moving when I first came upon him, he finally decided to wake up and smell the pollen.


The blue skies as the perfect backdrop for my sugar maple planted nine years ago. It is a seedling of maples my father moved from his swamp to my parents' backyard when I was 12. My father taps them and makes maple sugar each spring.


Cotinus coggygia 'Nordine' dappled in dew.


I don't know what is with this celery 'Tango', but it has grown more like par-cel than celery this season.


By the way, anyone lucky enough to have their child in DebiO's art classes or actually be a student in one of her classes, you are truly blessed.

The Bees Are Busy

Yellow summer squash blossoms

In the eternal quest to decide what do I want (to do with my day, with my life, and what will I do once my son flies beyond my wingspan and goes off to college in just a brief year), I walked in my garden, camera in hand.

The bees were hard at it. Their lives not focused on decisions, but simply on need. I could hear the buzzing, like flies working over roadkill, but without the stench. The bees were talking in beespeak about how delicious the pollen on the squash blossoms would be to take back to the hive. I watched them for a bit. At one point three of them were easily working in one blossom.

Everything about this hill of squash I added to my plot here in the village as an afterthought has been outsized. It is huge. Its stalks are huge, as are its leaves and blossoms.

I have planted other types of zucchinis and summer squash in my garden in the decade I have lived here and have never been loaded down with truckloads of their fruit. This might be my year.

I have anticipated having oodles of red okra, a good harvest of grapes, all the basil I need, and have been checking out different recipes for chow chow, sauerkraut, and kimchi. Not, yellow squash.

The skies are blue here and after yet another torrential rain storm late yesterday afternoon, the humidity is low, at least this morning. The vegetation is just dripping with dew.

For today, there is still weeding to be done, landscaping to work on, my son to raise. The "want" gets pushed on down the road replaced by the "need" for yet another day.

Sometimes, the simple acts of taking care of the needs develop into something much bigger, like a hive filled with golden honey, or the afterthought of planting a squash.

It seems to be working for the bees.

Count Your Bees and Your Blessings

Daylily 'Mary Todd' given to me by my dear friend Sheila.


Today is the national bee count survey day. So all of you into bees, get out and get counting and go to this link to find out more about The Great Sunflower Project. They offer great real world tips to help our bees. They also have the Bee-o-meter, a fun tool to see how many bees were counting in a 15-minute period in your zip code during the 2010 bee count.

While we are busy thinking about bees and that they help produce 1/3 of the food grown here in the United States, we should also think about the blessings in our lives. Here in central Wisconsin, there is a lot we can be very down about. For example: the unreasonable, unreal weather, the new governor and his capricious actions, the economy and the rhetoric in Washington preventing honest compromise and inability to see the global picture of what happens worldwide if we don't just drop the crap and increase the debt ceiling, all in addition to the individual things that just don't seem to go the way we want.

So here's my list of my blessings:

My parents are still living, as well as all my siblings and their spouses (and exes) and children. And, although my parents can drive me nuts, I would miss the council of my father accumulated in his 78 years and the foibles of my mother.

I have a nephew who is almost 8 suffering from Duchennes Muscular Dystrophy. At 8, he is smart, good-looking, and engaging, and doomed. This is a terrible disease and its long-shadow is already casting its pall on my sister's life. Thirty percent of DMD are caused by spontaneous mutations. We believe this to be the case for Sam. There hasn't been any other incidence among any of our relation that we can find. Needless to say, after learning of Sam's diagnosis, I gave both (my son, and my brother) the big strong men in my matrilinear line (and only ones still living) big hugs just for being. Boys are precious. Hug yours.

Second blessing: My Ex and father of my son. He's a great guy, just not a great guy for me. Although he lives in Chicago, and my son and I live in the wilds of Wisconsin, he has been there for us and provided for his son. And he's been a good friend as well.

Third: Boxers are great dogs. Faithful Companion is incredibly bright. My son and I figure she has a 50-60 word vocabulary and a sense of humor. This morning, I cleaned out the fridge and found a halfway to dried-out chunk of rice krispy treat wrapped in cellophane which I promptly deposited in her bowl (sans cellophane). After mowing down the treat she comes out to the dining room and rolls onto her back, curling her feet in and letting her ample floppy lips fall over her eyes and holds the pose until you notice, in a pose my son and I refer to as "Please Read the Directions Carefully Before Assembling Your Boxer". It never fails to get me to laugh. Faithful Companion knows this. She then prances over and actually gives me a big hug, knowing her job is done.

BTW, never teach your boxer to do the Conga.

So I am leaving you with a final blessing today of some of the things blooming in my garden. And especially today, let's pay it forward as bees do and as my friend to the north always says in her blogposts, "Be a joy-giver."



An unknown bulb given to me by the daughter of a friend who died last November. The daughter found them while cleaning out the basement of my friend's house.



An unnamed daylily cultivar




Sidalecea, grown from seed



Lilium 'Elodie', a great bloomer with nice black stems.

Drunk with It

You can only see the butt-end of the one honey bee in this picture, but I'll tell you, there were hundreds of bees of at least five different species working over this ninebark. Like the one, in the picture they were laden down with pollen in the sacs on their tiny hind legs.

These ninebarks, and and last week my blackberry and later in the fall sedums, are bee magnets. Bee lovers and keepers take notes.