Not an English garden

DH just got home from the local Farmers' Market. The kind, sweet, man that he is, he brought me a couple of gifts. Well, they are to share really, but I will still think of them as gifts. The first was a bottle of wine from our local winery, which just this year has got permission to sell at the Farmers' Market. The second was a beautiful plant for the garden.

How pretty!

What's that you say?
It looks like a weed? It's a thistle?
Well, yes, it is a thistle.

DH is hoping that the deer will find it inedible. I'm thinking I may have to change my policy on weeds in the garden. If it grows well and flowers and the deer don't eat it, it's not a weed! I wonder if we can find some purple thistles too?

Long weekend

Long weekend = trip to IKEA + lots of gardening. Good thing we have a large(ish) vehicle. Most of our neighbors have their mulch delivered in bulk, but we discovered it was cheaper to buy it bagged.

The kids are watching the Memorial Day parade in NYC on TV. We'll head off to see the local parade later and then on to a BBQ with friends.

Things I've learned about gardening

When I first arrived in the US as a graduate student I didn't think about gardening in the USA. It never occurred to me that I was going to stay long enough to have a garden here. I spent my very first Christmas in the US with the family of one of my undergraduate students in Ypsilanti, Michigan. Her aunt and uncle had spent the previous Christmas in the UK as their daughter was studying abroad there. My conversations with them were the first that I'd had with Americans in the US who'd spent much time in the UK. I remember very specifically that they commented "And the grass stays green all winter in England." Having not yet lived through an entire winter in the US, I thought they were a little strange. Isn't that what grass does - stay green? Nope, not here. It goes brown in the winter, and then again in the summer if it doesn't get vast amounts of water!

My first garden in the United States was a rooftop one. Sounds posh, like I had a penthouse or something, but sadly not so. I was working at a boarding school, and the fire escape that led out through my apartment went out onto a flat porch roof, about 4 stories up. It wasn't quite as private as it felt, but it was my little oasis. As soon as I moved in I decided I wanted to have a garden. I bought a lot of large plastic pots and saucers, and lugged tons of bags of pebbles (for the bottom of the pots) and potting soil up to the roof. I did check first with the maintenance department if it was OK to put several hundred extra pounds of weight on the roof and they okayed it.

I learned very quickly that the wide, flattish, bowl-like, pots needed to be watered too often. Ditto the smaller pots. Once a day watering just didn't cut it in the summer heat, and twice a day became too much like work, given that I did also have to work. The best ones were the largest ones I'd been able to find, and which were just about too heavy for me to move once they were full. Second discovery - ignore what the planting guidelines said in terms of spacing. When you put plants in a pot, you want to cram as many in as possible. Over-stuffed pots look far more impressive than sparsely planted ones. This also helps ensure that you don't have to do any weeding!

Pots that have water reservoirs underneath are wonderful. We have four out on the front porch right now. Two have peas planted in them, one has lettuce, and the other has flowers. No tomatoes this year. I ignored all the warnings about the tomato blight last year and planted tomatoes anyway. I don't think we got to eat a single one. The plants were prolific, but every single tomato went rotten well before it was ready to be picked. Don't think your garden will be immune from local diseases and bugs just because you love it and look after it!

Since we've had a real garden and not just one in containers, I've learned a few more things.

• The landscaping put in by the builder was intended to look good for the first 4 or 5 years. After that, most of what was put in grows too big for its location. We have some beautiful shrubs and trees that we will probably have to cut down because they were planted too close to the house or each other.
  
• Deer eat tulips as though they're candy. It's worth paying attention to which plants at the garden center are labelled "deer-resistant."
• Rabbits will eat all kinds of things, but they especially seem to love liatris shoots.
• Pay attention to the hardiness zones for plants. Buy plants that are guaranteed hardy for your area, unless you want them to die over the winter. Some plants that are too sensitive for New England winters can be grown here if you dig them up and move them into the house every winter, but that's too much work as far as I'm concerned. (See the exception below.)
  
• If you really like it, and it's not hardy in New England, it might be worth buying anyway because the south-facing flower bed at the front of the house is in a hardiness zone all of its own and stuff often survives there that you wouldn't expect. Last year we had dozens of wallflowers that had self-seeded there from the annuals I had planted the year before, and this year we had some pansies that survived the winter (only to get nibbled back to the ground by the rabbits!)
• Sometimes plants will survive multiple winters and then succumb unpredictably. Too bad. Plants are only temporary! Buy more!
• Sometimes it is worth digging plants up for the winter. I've overwintered geraniums in the basement for the last 2 winters, and it really wasn't difficult at all. Dig them out of the pot, wrap them in newspaper, put them in the basement and forget about them till March. The survival rate would be higher if I remembered to spray them with water occasionally over the winter, but that would mean remembering to do so and I have a hard enough time remembering to bring them out of storage in March in time to get them started growing again for the summer.
• If the 'soil' in your garden is mostly sand, you will need a sprinkler system for anything to grow.
• There is actually a point to the strip of mulch between the woods behind the house and the lawn, beyond separating the cultivated lawn from the wild plants in the woods - apparently it also helps reduce the number of ticks we might otherwise find in the lawn. Supposedly, they don't survive the trek from the woods across the strip of mulch to the lawn. Given that ticks can carry Lyme disease, anything that reduces our potential exposure to them is a good thing.
• No matter how many plants I think I need, and how much money I spend each year, I never have enough. Clearly this garden is going to be a very long-term project!
  

Visiting Michelle

My latest post is over here, at Michelle's blog, A Mid-Atlantic English. Go read that post and then come back!

In many ways, Michelle's my counterpart in the UK. She's been over there about as long as I've been over here, and we often seem to have similar opinions, issues and interests. (Before I ever visited her blog, I would sometimes refer to my accent as 'mid-Atlantic' - not entirely English, not entirely American. Of course that confused Americans who think mid-Atlantic refers to somewhere on the east coast of the US. Anyway, I was glad when I saw her blog to see that someone else describes their English the same way!) We're both having a bit of a think about gardening right now. Well, it's that time of year isn't it?

When I wrote my post, I didn't have any photos to send her of my wonderfully boring 'garden' as nothing is really growing yet. Here's what the perennial border looked like last week:

This flower bed contains hostas, daylilies and daisies, but as you can see, there's little sign of anything yet.

After a couple of days of 90˚F weather, there are finally some real signs of spring around:

This is a star magnolia. We have another magnolia but it's not due to bloom for another month. My parents bought us a gift certificate to the local garden center when they visited almost three years ago, and it took us until last September before DH and I could finally agree on exactly what kind of magnolias to buy, and more importantly where they would be planted so they wouldn't make his job of mowing the lawn more difficult (!)

Blackcurrants

One of my favourite summer fruits is blackcurrants. Unfortunately, it is very difficult to find them here in the US. Blueberries, on the other hand, which I never had when I was growing up in England, are very popular over here. Blueberries look very similar to blackcurrants, but taste very different. For years blueberries have disappointed me. I would see a blueberry pie being served and it looked so much like blackcurrant I would have to have a slice. Then I would realize it was indeed blueish in colour and not purple. I'd take a bite and be disappointed by the lack of flavour. Blueberries always seem very bland compared to blackcurrants.

It wasn't until recently that I discovered the reason for blackcurrants' rarity in the US is that many states banned blackcurrant growing in the early 1900's in order to prevent the spread of white pine blister rust, Cronartium ribicola, a disease affecting white pine trees, a mainstay back then of the timber industry. Today the use of white pine as lumber is rare and disease-resistant plants are available, but the antiquated ban on producing blackcurrants remained in effect pretty much nationwide until recently. Some states are now allowing blackcurrant plants to be reintroduced. In New York State it was primarily the result of the efforts of one 'gentleman farmer' who now runs a company that sells blackcurrant 'nectar', blackcurrants. I can now buy blackcurrant 'nectar' at our local supermarket! (I can buy Ribena too - but it is insanely expensive as it is imported. Blackcurrant jam too, imported from Poland, and worth the price even though DS has decided it makes very good PB&J sandwiches now that he's finally understood that the lumps in the jam are the fruit!) I could order frozen blackcurrants online at $5/lb, for a minimum of 3 lbs (plus shipping & handling of course!)

They even sell currant bushes via mailorder. The law in my state still says however:

"No person shall deliver within the Commonwealth from outside the Commonwealth any blackcurrant (Ribes nigrum) plant, root, scion, seed or cutting."

So no blackcurrant bushes in our backyard for the foreseeable future! Still, over the years I have gotten to like blueberries for what they are and appreciate that, unlike blackcurrants, you can eat them raw. In fact, I've decided that's mostly my favorite way of eating them, though I don't object if they're cooked into pancakes or muffins. Tonight's dessert was definitely one for blueberries though, not blackcurrants, as it did need raw fruit. However, I modified the original 'Real Simple' recipe slightly and the 0% fat Greek yogurt (instead of cream cheese and cream - thanks for the inspiration Mum!) along with the lemon zest (called for in the original) gave it some of the tartness I miss from blackcurrants.

The Lawn

The English lawn is so simple, and yet it takes a lot of maintenance to make it look so good. Supposedly, that was part of the point originally - the manicured lawn was more prestigious than the one nibbled by sheep or other livestock. When we moved to our current residence we inherited a gorgeous lawn that was the result of rather a lot of chemicals, and vast amounts of watering. The previous owner's liberal use of weedkillers created a monoculture that has been easy to maintain without resorting to chemicals. Despite the size of the lawn, we now dig dandelions out one by one rather than poisoning them.

We have very little topsoil - dig an inch or so down and there's nothing but sand, so it drains extremely fast and is very dry. Trying to get a nice green lawn is completely dependent on the sprinkler system, though we run it less often than the previous owner. Because of the weather, we haven't had to run the sprinklers more than a few days so far this year. (Yay! Smaller water bill!) The grass has been growing rampant, but has been too wet to mow as often as we would have liked. (Yay! Less spent on fuel for the mower!) Because of the damp, a new species has invaded the lawn that we haven't had to deal with before:


If I were braver, I would look this fungus up and try to determine if it's edible, because there's enough out there in the back yard for several meals, but I'm too scared I'll simply poison us all!

In the long run though, at least some of the lawn needs to go. We need a real vegetable garden. The kids are loving their garden on the front porch, but I think our choice of plants was ill-advised for container gardening! It's beginning to look like a jungle out there!

Bunnies

Torn between the delight of watching the wild rabbits in the garden and the annoyance of seeing said wild rabbits eating my plants, I realize I need a new camera with a better telephoto lens!

Mother's Day

My American Mother's Day got off to a pleasant start - I was told I had to stay in bed and not go downstairs until I was called. You won't find me arguing with the idea of some extra time in bed in the morning! DS stayed with me and we sat and read Frog and Toad together. Wow, his reading is getting good! He can't read little words like 'is' and 'on' (complains they don't have enough letters!), but has no problem with 'tricky' words like 'friend'!

Breakfast, when I was called downstairs to eat, was served in a much cleaner kitchen than I had left last night. We had scrambled eggs and bacon, toast, canteloupe, strawberries, and watermelon. DH and I had coffee and mimosas to drink. The children had orange juice.

I got my usual Mother's Day present - lots of nice plants. I had picked out most of them myself yesterday with the children, but they had also gone out with DH and picked out a couple of surprises - a rose bush and two flowering quinces. Most of the annuals will go in pots on the deck and front porch. The kids were disappointed I didn't plant them all today, but the weather forecast for the next couple of days is for temperatures low enough to damage the plants so I'll keep them in the garage for now. Last year the begonias got badly frost-bitten, and although they recovered they looked quite ugly for a while.



This afternoon I had a new experience. Despite having grown up in the UK and having been a house-owner here in the US for the last eleven years, I had never ever mown a lawn until today! I decided today was the day I should learn. (DH will get much ribbing when he tells people that for Mother's Day he let me mow the lawn!) As we have about three-quarters of an acre of lawn, we have a ride-on mower. It's not quite as easy as DH makes it look. It's not always easy to tell where you've already mown, or to see the wide swathes you've missed. After I thought I was done, DH walked around pointing out all the bits I had to redo. It took me longer than the hour it usually takes him, but I'm sure I'll get faster at it. Yes, I will do it again. With an mp3 player and some decent music or downloads from NPR, I don't think I'll find it much of a chore.

DH has just brought me a glass of champagne, so it is time to stop writing for tonight. I shall go and snuggle with the children as we read bedtime stories, then snuggle with DH as I finish my champagne. I am really an incredibly lucky person. I have beautiful, talented, adorable children and an amazingly loving, talented, and thoughtful husband. It's good to have a special day to celebrate, but really every day with my husband and kids is special.