Extension News: August 2011 Archives

by Meg Downey Hardy, UNH Cooperative Extension Master Gardener

Some gardeners have fantasies about lounging in an Adirondack chair under the arbor, sipping iced tea with fresh-picked mint, and enjoying the results of their hard work.

But sitting under my arbor is too close to the action for me. I feel a need to pull the weeds or deadhead those flowers that I missed--everything that doesn't meet the perfection idealized in magazines and books.

So, I enjoy and observe from above, from my second-story bedroom window.

Working in my garden is like meditating to me. The physical labor of maintaining and nurturing all that life pulls me in, and hours go by without a thought of anything else. After hours in my yard, I retreat to the cool house to rid myself of my wet, mud-drenched clothes and shoes. I scrub my grime-filled fingernails and my weathered skin of sweat, sun block and insect repellent and I settle down to my quiet reflections from my upstairs window.

When I am in the garden, I work because I can't help myself: deadheading a plant here, staking a plant there, watering another plant, pulling weeds or snipping blossoms and foliage to bring pieces of my garden indoors. My hands are full, and I scatter tools around the garden as I jump from one task to the next. I carry scissors, clippers, a shovel, a bowl of water, ties for stakes, plant identification labels, and my glasses.

My garden is a party I am hosting; my guests need attention and I need to offer it.

The distance and perspective from my bedroom window offer a different kind of meditation. The view from above allows me to soak in the multitude of summer colors and patterns, each flowing into the next with the changes between colors varying from rigid angles to fuzzy and soft blends.

Some areas are explosive and wild, catching my eye and demanding attention, while other parts of the garden seek my eyes with a quiet, understated presence.

Plants have personalities. The garden party that I witness from above is full of drama. The sun-gold, majestic daisies stand firm and rigid next to the fuzzy lavender and red of the bee balm, equally as tall but fighting for attention with less gusto.

My eye travels away from my tall, egotistical friends to the shady corner where the comical mauve and white astilbes bob their feathery heads, daintily dancing over the bold-leaved, no-nonsense hostas of white, green and yellow.

Next my eyes rest on the soft, muted lamb's ear reclining next to the splashing purple, peach and plum pansies bobbing along the edge, holding their own with mirth and good humor. Fragrant mint spreads to every vacant spot; fragile multi-colored cosmos add their dainty touch, and sturdy, bold marigolds work hard to fend off uninvited insects.

My 2011 tomato crop leans limply against stakes. As their hostess I hope for a harvest like a few years ago that kept me in the kitchen for hours with friends cooking and freezing pasta sauces and chili. But from above, my tomatoes are only a small part of the party.

Some of my gardener friends choose to invite one type of flower friend to their party. Some want peaceful, calm attendees. I like interesting parties that deliver surprises. So I expand my guest list to wild unknowns. I welcome native weeds to add their spunk and stubbornness. My husband groans as I find new loners along back roads or swamp edges or the untended fringes of our yard. He thinks they are ugly and should be kept out.

I look for diversity. I like underdogs. My mothering nature demands that I include these vagabonds, and I tend to their needs just as I tend to all the needs of my invited guests. I admit there are times when my need to include everyone leads to chaos and confusion.

Colors and styles clash, pop, and zing. Some of my new guests end up towering over shorter invitees that need to be in the front. It gets crowded with my open invitation, and every year I need to redirect the quieter, smaller plants towards the front of the crowd. When a guest gets too aggressive, I replant it at the fringe of the party.

Every day new surprises await me. Guests come and go. As one flower drops its faded blooms, a new one of a different height, color, or shape appears.

I enjoy inviting guests and tending to their needs. I like the succession of guests and the varying moods of the party. And I cherish stepping up and away to watch them from above seeing the guests intermingling and enjoying the party as a whole.

Photo credit: Meg Hardy

by Bill Dawson, UNH Cooperative Extension Natural Resources Steward

After you retire and are free to move about the world without the restrictions of regular 9-to-5 work schedules, you tend to fill your calendar with volunteer activities. Some are coerced and some arise because you have chosen to do this or that particular activity. Being a grandpa fits both categories so I try not to be grumpy about minding the third generation. I must say though, my patience has been sorely tried a few times.

Since I have taken some training as earth team/tree steward docent, I get involved in some dirty jobs in other people's back yards. After church a group of us "older folks" gather over coffee and doughnuts and discuss the world problems in our usual erudite fashion. During a pause in the conversation, one of the "really older ones" said that he wished the he had the strength to prepare a place for some spring bulbs. Being a robust 73 year old male still somewhat invincible, I blurted out, "Let me help!"

That's when the trouble began. My friend explained that the spot where he wanted to put the bulbs was currently occupied by a plot of blue flag irises that had not been attended to for about eight years. I stopped by his house during the next week to check the location. I tested the surface of the bed with a shovel and found it resistant to penetration. I told him that I would be back with some additional tools in a week or so. He said that he would order the bulbs in the meantime.

I have been known to do battle with rocks in the past, so I have some tools not possessed by the average gardener. I gathered my mattock, a sledge hammer, a spade and a heavy-duty hoe and set off to do battle. What a battle it was!

First I drove the spade into the bed about six inches. I continued across the bed in similar fashion. Feeling good about how things were progressing, I moved over about 18 inches and repeated the procedure. It was now time to pause for a drink--of water, of course.

Now it was mattock time. I drove the flat blade into the fissure created by the spade and began prying chunks of the lily mat out and tossing them into the garden cart. That was easy enough but the plot was about 6ft. by 20ft. By the time I had removed the entire mat, a couple of hours had elapsed and my back was complaining. I was overdue for another drink and some pain killers.

The soil under the bed was hard packed and very dry. Since it was getting close to my labor limit for one day, I quit and retreated to my recliner for some much-needed relaxation. After a spell of respite, I returned with my spade and hoe. I brought along a bag of peat moss, spread half the bag on the surface, and spaded it into the soil. That was no easy task I'll tell you! The rest of the bag was dumped on the surface and chopped in with the hoe. Last came a thorough watering of the bed. Time for another break while the water percolated into the soil.

We developed a plot plan for the assortment of tulips, daffodils and large bearded irises. The last step was to place the bulbs according to the plan with a bit of fertilizer for each. Hopefully the squirrels won't find them before the freeze. I can't wait to see what comes up in the spring!

Would I do it again? Probably not for someone else. But, on my own plots, I am constantly digging until the snow comes between me and

by Helen Downing, UNH Extension Master Gardener

Living on a busy rural highway can have its advantages: We don't have far to plow in winter and hardly ever suffer power outages. On the downside, I can't just run across the road to open the chicken coop in my bathrobe. That's because the road divides our property; our house is on the west side of the road, the barn, chicken coop, and gardens are on the east.

The road, I need to add, has only been around since 1810. At that time, if the state decided to expand its highways, residents on the road itself were required to help in its construction. The once-quiet, unpaved highway between the county seat and the nearest district court has evolved over time into a paved thoroughfare. It still connects the court with the county seat, but now serves a stream of tourists, businesses, and local traffic.

That same visibility from the highway also caused me some embarrassment with our scarecrows. One year while I was away, my husband put up two scarecrows. One looked kind of like him--plaid shirt, baseball cap--and the other, looked like me--straw hat with flowers, flannel shirt, garden pants and...chubby. (Gasp!)

It's amazing how looking at a scarecrow that resembles you and includes negative attributes can make you feel crabby. Needless to say, that scarecrow got a change of clothes and lost some its stuffing in a hurry. It's one thing to fight the battle of the bulge, another to scream our overstuffed condition to every trucker, bus, and RV that goes by.

Anyone passing by must have wondered if we'd finally lost all of our marbles the day we dragged our chicken coop across the highway. This was a brand new coop built by my husband, who is well known for overbuilding even the most trivial of wooden devices.

He had built in our dooryard (Yankee for front driveway and place to work on really big projects). He and our adult son, also genetically inclined to participate in projects of dubious and complicated strategies, dragged it on skids across the road to its resting place using our Ford tractor.

With four grandkids sitting beside the road staring in disbelief and cheering wildly, the coop made the trip smoothly and remains in place to this day, housing 20 chickens who just don't know how lucky they are.

Two generations of chickens and their byproducts have lived in that coop and keep the garden compost heap and perennial beds healthy and fertile.

A few years ago as part of a fall display, I placed a four-foot tall, smiling scarecrow dressed in red, yellow, and blue in my garden facing the road. My dentist's receptionist, who drives by daily, commented as I entered the office one day how much she enjoyed my "frog."

It took me a few days to realize that from her viewpoint, in a car traveling along the highway, a scarecrow could resemble a frog! Ever since, frogs have become another staple in my garden, only now they don't look like scarecrows.

A few autumns back, while I weeded in a bed of perennials, my husband mowed across the field from where I knelt. He could see a medium-sized bear approaching from the opposite direction, getting closer and closer to where I was stationed, head down and oblivious.

There was no way he could warn me, since I was too far away to hear him yell. Cars passed, the sun felt warm on my back, and all seemed well with the world. I remember having the distinct impression I could hear a dog panting, but rather than look up, I just continued to exist absent mindedly in the moment.

Later, my husband would tell me he watched as traffic distracted the bear, and it crossed the road heading for the woods behind our house. I doubt that the bear ever endangered me, but still my mind's-eye view of the near encounter made me realize that we all remain too oblivious to our surroundings, including most of the passing drivers.

Over the years, I have noticed that rarely do the tourists and shoppers look left or right as they pass our house and grounds, so my fears of being as the crazy old lady were unfounded. (Okay, my reluctance to become the topic of local gossip still inhibits any urges I might have to cross the road in my pj's and fetch some eggs for breakfast).

Like my obliviousness to the bear in my garden, most drivers are focused on their immediate business. Whether beauty or danger confronts us, we've often become so accustomed to our surroundings that we forget to pause, look, value, and anticipate the amazing choices we have each day.

Hmmm. Maybe I'll add a life-sized bear facsimile to our garden displays. Will anyone even notice?

Photo credit: battlecreekcvb. (Not Helen's scarecrow!) Some rights reserved.

By Suzanne Hebert, UNH Cooperative Extension volunteer writer

There is very little sea glass on the beach this year. I try to smother the disappointment that threatens to squeeze in. The waves are bigger than usual, pounding the sand. They rise, pause and loom, then crash in a white froth that ends in a trickle as their energy is spent. So far, this trip has yielded only pieces of sand dollars.

My daughter patiently waits, floating in the ocean on her surfboard. The black of her wetsuit makes it easy to see her small, youthful frame, silhouetted against the dark blue-green Atlantic water. She is new to surfing. She paddles hard with her arms as the water rises behind her and shakes her head when it continues forward without her. I sense her disappointment.

The sun shimmers on the salt water at the distant horizon line. I can barely hear the drone of a single-engine plane as it moves down the coastline. The tide is coming in, the water inching its way to where I sit. My toes are buried in the sand at last night's high-water line, and I wonder if the incoming water will reach me.

When my daughters and I picked this beach cottage through an internet search we didn't know it was in the same set of cottages my parents had rented 40 years ago. My memories of this beach, then, are dim. Maybe the only reason I can conjure up that time in my childhood is because I've seen the slide of my sister and me playing in the sand with plastic buckets and shovels. The image was large on the white sheet hanging in the family room when my dad hauled out the projector and we would relive the family vacation.

The seaweed is scattered in haphazard lines. Bits of wood, straw-like sticks and lathe from old lobster traps have become driftwood. There are small blue and yellow rubber bands, presumably off the claws of lobsters. Bits of unidentifiable plastic from unknown human sources contrast against the natural black of the seaweed and the white of the sand. Numerous large clam shells lie split open in random places where the waves have deposited them.

I see people walking with these treasures in their hands. I do the same. But my daughters no longer want to walk with me looking for gifts from the sea. The days of toddler legs running to the water's edge with me hovering close have passed. Instead they are clad in bikinis that show the figures of young women.

As the tide continues to rise and fall, so do our lives. Later in the day I walk alone again, searching. This time, I am lucky. Nestled in the sand, face up is a small perfect sand dollar. I gently cradle it in my hand, excited to bring it back to show my girls.

The seagulls skitter along the water's edge, facing up the beach into the wind. Why do they do this? The rocks are tumbled smooth by the sand as they roll in and out with the waves. I carefully side step around the jagged edges of broken clam shells in my bare feet.

Some days my teenage daughters smile at me, acknowledge me, and I remember being a rock in their lives. Some days I am smooth and some days I am still jagged. I pause, close my eyes, breath in the salty air and listen to the waves break, hopeful for a smile when I unfurl my fingers and show them the fragile sand dollar with the perfect star etched on the top.

It survived the rough-and-tumble environment of its home. We will too.

Photo credit: Suzanne Hebert

by Casey Pike, UNH Cooperative Extension Master Gardener

Melancholic by nature, I associate the color blue with a mood I am too often clawing to emerge from. So every year I find it ironic that, just as I am shaking the winter blues, my perennial garden goes through its blue phase.

Purely by serendipity this little path of dirt has evolved into a place where the blues are acceptable. Buddhism teaches us to stay with sadness and it is in my blue garden that I have found a place to rest and allow blue and purple hues to become part of my emotional vocabulary.

The ubiquitous lupine represents both naiveté and good fortune to me. Naiveté because I planted the indigo-colored plant before I knew just how rapidly it spreads. If one is good, two are better. Right?

I must admit it can be maddening to constantly pull young lupine out of the garden confines,
where it borders on weed status. But what good fortune that they have descended upon and begun to take hold on a portion of lawn I would like to forgo mowing. From my first day in New Hampshire I have been dreaming of fields of lupine.

The irises render thoughts of abundance and surprise. One day I was surprised to find mounds and mounds of iris bulbs in the parking lot of the town's corner store with a For Free sign. I excitedly loaded several large clumps into the car. The established irises immediately took root and produced a proliferation of shades of blue violet with white, yellow and brown splashes on three different varieties.

Then last fall a friend bestowed upon me what he claimed were stunning brown and peacock-blue miniature irises. And he had basketsful if I was so inclined. I'm practically beside myself waiting for them to bloom. To my delight it seems that many more came up than I planted, which should be no surprise.

The fragrant salvia is one of three blue plants that evoke memories of my mother and her gardens. A favorite of the bees, salvia will produce deep purple spikes well into October, evoking long hot summer days spent at Mom's beach house on the Connecticut Sound. A second is Stokes aster, the metallic periwinkle-colored, scraggy beauty, which to my dismay has yet to survive in my Zone 3 habitat.

Blue hydrangeas were abundant at Mom's as well. Mop-heads and lace-tops, ranging in color from pale cerulean to deep, vibrant psychedelic purple. Unfortunately, I have yet to succeed in establishing one in my neck of the woods. Not even with Endless Summer, the blue hydrangea promoted to be hardy to Zone 3. I have tried three locations in the yard to no avail. But I remind myself that new cultivars are being developed all the time.

A stately shrub-sized False Indigo in the garden is reminds me of the fervent strength of the human spirit. It is the sole survivor from a garden that was my refuge during a difficult period if my life. Not only did it survive, but like me, it has thrived.

The light-amethyst aliums pose in the garden like the modern sculpture of a minimalist artist. Sleek and simple from afar, intricate and detailed up close, they remind me of Whoville in Horton Hears a Who by Dr. Suess.

The corn-flower blue of the perennial bachelor buttons remind me of my ex-husband. And as I do with my ex, I have a complicated relationship with this cultivar that teems with blossoms all spring and summer. While charming at this point in the season, the leaves and stems will brown up in shortly, and for the remainder of the summer I will hem and haw about whether to cut it back completely or enjoy it for the blossoms alone.

Part of the garden is outlined by pieces of an old granite foundation I installed to give the space definition and texture. Without my having intended it, these slabs also act as benches. It is here that I sit with the blues and in the blues, establishing new neural pathways and improving my vocabulary. Immersed in my blue garden I am able to experience those precious little states of grace I so crave.

Photo credit: Casey Pike

By Carol White, UNH Cooperative Extension Master Gardener

I love summer. I live for it. For about 30 years or so I have spent the summer solstice in my garden, usually with friends, watching the sun set, the fireflies flit forth, and the pale moon come glimmering in the sky.

Sometimes we were a wild bunch. Oh yes, with cookies, lemonade and iced tea. In the years when I had hundreds of rosebushes we would walk barefoot on rose petals and have masses of roses in vases, buckets, and once or twice, we stuffed pillows with rose petals and slept on them that night. Cleopatra, eat your heart out!

At midsummer I feel sorry for people in more southern areas where night falls like a window shade. Bang-daylight's gone. In the days of the rose garden I kept thinking that it might, just might, be possible for a unicorn to appear out of the cool, blue, firefly-lit twilight. None ever did, but now I think they may prefer to make a more striking entrance from the hemlock-scented darkness of the northern forest surrounding my rather small clearing. They'd certainly be welcome.

I think anyone living at this latitude feels the same way about summer: make the most of it. When I visited cousins in Husqvarna, Sweden in midsummer (the only possible time to spend time there according to my aunt), the light lingered on until after 11:00 p.m., as families all over Sweden celebrated summer with huge meals of crayfish and boiled potatoes, eaten picnic style in yards or parks with paper lanterns shaped like suns and moons dancing overhead. (And akvavit, let's not forget the akvavit, true Scandinavian firewater.)

Oddly enough, the crayfish reminded me of home. The native Swedish crayfish all succumbed to some dread disease many years ago and were replaced by stocks from the U.S. and, of all places, Turkey. But guess where the best and strongest crayfish came from? Yep, right here in New Hampshire. I travelled how many hundreds of miles to eat New Hampshire crayfish boiled with dill?

I haven't had it since. Perhaps if a bottle of akvavit turned up?

Like many New Hampshire folks, the Swedes are mad gardeners. I know the English have the reputation as a nation of gardeners, but even in Sweden's capital city the most modern, black glass pyramid of an apartment building had pots and pots of veggies and flowers burgeoning on ultra-modern balconies.

Little red garden houses in the middle of a garden plot are ubiquitous on the outskirts of the cities. Those who can have slightly larger red houses in the countryside or on the scattered islands of the tideless Baltic. No one stays inside on a summer evening.

Just like home. On the solstice evening this year I grilled my dinner on the deck, drank something fizzy, and sat watching the light slowly fade. Here in the Lakes area I can always count on volleys of fireworks as darkness finally falls. The fishermen who stay out on the lake, where it is light long after darkness falls under the trees, call to their friends on the shore, homing in on their docks and moorings.

As the dark deepens, stillness comes. If I sit quietly enough, long enough, I often think I just might see, well, probably not a unicorn, but the bears enjoying these long summer twilights, too.