Planting Ramps

This is my new ramp patch. I know, I know, they're all flopped over and pathetic. But when I planted a dozen grocery store ramps last year, they did the same thing. The leaves tried to stand back up, but then quickly withered away when a drought rolled in. Then, half of them surprised me by putting up seed heads.



And then this season, half of them - perhaps the same plants that flowered last year - came back!



Look at what a cheapskate I am. Here, slumping ramps decorate the feet of a rescued rhododendron, which may or may not survive being ripped out of my neighbor's flowerbed.

I have planted perhaps eighty ramps so far this season. At $12 a pound, which is about 40 ramps, and a 50% success rate, I'm game. Especially since it keeps me from splurging at local nurseries, where I'm as likely to spend more on a single plant.

If I were planning ahead, I would order a few hundred ramp bulbs from the Ramp Farm, which is the only ramp farm in existence. But of course then I would have to wait until next year, when it's the time for shipping dormant bulbs. Or I would have to try seeds. Again.

Uh-uh. I require instant gratification. So I'll take my losses and support the local Whole Foods.

Tentacle Porn

Tell me, what do you see in this juniper? Is it dead spots of foliage? Orange flowers, strangely out of place? Some sort of flamboyant pine cone?



. . .or squid?




Or perhaps small, wet muppets?



There isn't much in the natural world that gives me the creeps, but this one has been added to my list. Just imagine for a minute that your skin blistered up into two-inch spherical nodules. Then one day, you got in the shower, and the moist air triggered the vile things to exude orange tentacles of goo.



Yeah, now you get to share my nightmares.



And now that I have caused you to regret eating breakfast, let me reassure you that this bizarre fungus is a plague only to apple orchard owners, and to those who prefer their shrubbery not to appear infested with sea anemones. It's called Gymnosporangium juniperi-virginianae; or, for the rest of us, "cedar apple rust".

If I could get over the creepy nature of such an organism, I would be fascinated by its parasitic life cycle, which requires alternating between junipers - which it festoons with tentacles - and apple trees - which it doesn't.

You are most likely to see this in the spring, in wet weather, where apple trees and native junipers are in close proximity. In this case, my neighbor has a small orchard, inherited from the farmer who used to own this land, and some standard suburban shrubbery. This is likely why her apple trees have such poor yields. I'll have to let her know - right after I finish yaking up breakfast.

Ick

Today I spent a half hour cleaning the woods of poison ivy. I picked up a deer tick for my trouble. I wish I knew which plants they tend to climb on. But I suppose if they are anything like the wood tick Gabe is looking at above, on our screen door, they'll climb whatever they find themselves at the foot of.



Really? The screen door? The inside of the screen door? You are one dumb bug.




I guess I've lost my energy for getting all squeamy when encountering ticks. The best I could muster was a tired sigh. I fetched a wood chip to carry the critter, and learned something new: playing with wood ticks is rather fun.

What amused me so was transferring the tick back and forth between the screen and wood chip. How easily the tick rolls from one surface to another! The way they grab on is somewhat like a monkey crossed with Velcro.

I'll be getting a poison ivy rash on my elbow in a few days, no doubt, since I let a vine smack me there. But I think it will be worth it. The infestation back there diminishes every year. Now if only I could say the same for the ticks.

Gardening for the Greater Good

If I seem to have fallen off the face of the earth with regards to posting on the blog, it is with good reason. I've been planning the build day for Franklin's first community garden along with my fellow committee members. That build day was today, and with an amazing group of volunteers we managed to finished 44 - 4'x10' raised beds that are roughly 2' tall working from around 9am to 3pm with a nice hail storm as a break.

The build has plenty of rough spots, but based on the results I feel like I did a pretty good job as the build leader. Not something I think I could handle every weekend, but oh so worth it seeing the design made real. I would like to send an extra special thank you to my lovely wife Michelle for letting me dedicate the time necessary to get this done. No small feat with a 2 year old and newborn at home. Thank you Michelle, I love you!

I captured a time lapse so you can see the whole day in about ten minutes. So much fun, so tired:)

My lawn looks awful. . . .

But at least it has dandelions. . . .




. . .




. . .and about a million teeny blossoms of Whitlow grass.

Pussytoes Surprise!

Walking by my pussytoes, I had another moment of *squeee!*



They are blooming! And the flowers are much prettier than I expected. (I grew these for the foliage, not the blooms.)



Aside from the slow growing, these were already my favorite ground cover. Now they are even more so.

Pink! Maybe it's something about having a baby girl, but I've never been quite so enamored of the color pink.

These are Antennaria dioica, I think. I should have kept that dang seed package.



And what a nifty five-sided shape. I hope I get seeds!

Trillium

My two eenie weenie trilliums are guarded by a teepee of sticks. A determined deer won't be stopped by such a pitiful measure, but my hope is that this will prevent casual browsing.



The flower turns out to be a lovely, deep maroon.

Unless I am mistaken, which is a possibility, this is Trillium Cuneatum, also known as toadshade. I should have kept better records. But for all I know the seller didn't even know exactly which type of trillium they were selling. At the time I bought these, I didn't know how smarmy plant dealers could be. Most likely these were taken from the wild.

My mother bought trilliums recently. At three or four bucks a piece, she thought they were expensive. I had to be the one to give her the bad news: hers were likely dug from the wild, too. It takes years to grow these from seed, and no grower could make a profit at four dollars a pop.

Her anti-deer measures have got mine beat, though. She uses netting to wall off large swaths of her yard. I may try the same, eventually.