From Useless to Delicious

My daughter and her family moved to Washington state for job and land reasons. They wanted to be able to plant an edible landscape and live where housing costs were lower then central California. The house they bought in an older subdivision northeast of Seattle had recently been spiffed up and landscaped to put it on the market. Not a single plant in the yard was edible, so they began a process of transition that may take them several years. With tall established trees in the back yard, and shrubs galore, there were many areas to evaluate! All the shrubs that did not produce food must GO! I was the beneficiary of the first round of removal when we went to visit two weeks after they moved in. I was able to dig out and bring home a van full of hosta, heather, barberry and other assorted perennials that I knew I could grow in Central Oregon. There were a vast number of unwanted plants that I did not have room for that had an uncertain future. The idea to call a landscaper and tell him, come-n-get-em, was put into play, but the said landscaper did not call back, (his loss) so the rest of the shrubs and plants in the front of the house were composted post haste! Also anything that resembled a juniper was also removed! In the place of the hosta dell is now a blueberry bed! Elderberries and other assorted fruiting shrubs have made their way into the yard as well as beans, tomatoes squash and corn. The transformation of their entire yard will take a number of years and much discussion but at least for them, it is a start! I was a little concerned about the opinion of the neighbors who seem to be really into ornamental shrubs and flowers! Maybe their family will pioneer a neighborhood revolution and more and more of their neighbors will follow suit! I will continue to update you as the Useless to Delicious tale unfolds.

September WHAT?

I know, really? Where did the summer go? I started out in the spring with these wild intentions of blogging my way through the summer and now that our short short summer is on the wane, I have done nothing! I have been busy building a business rather then working in my garden. Some years are like that I suppose. Right now the daylilies need to be cut back, the hollyhocks look silly because one or two of my deer buddies decided they looked better without leaves and the shasta daisies have flopped over. All the perennials need to be dead headed AND my veggie garden was mowed down by a chipmunk and his extended family. We also made a tactical error when we put the veggie bed under the eves of the shop. With no gutter the hail storms and thunder showers trenched the bed right in the center! We have a few tomato's from the greenhouse and that is about it. My energies were not in the veggie realm this year! Thankfully, not one daylily was eaten in bloom by a deer. I have no idea why they were few and far between this year but until just last week, they seemed to avoid my garden! The chipmunks on the other hand and the beetles have been busy. I do not have a single plant without bite marks, hail holes or nibble marks, but once I go at it this weekend with the clippers, most of that will be cut back!

Requiem for a Lavender

I had been expecting a bumper lavender harvest this summer because of the age and size of my plants. I was not expecting to discover that most of my mature plants did not make it through the winter! I left them in until Memorial weekend to make sure they were either really dead, or just mostly dead ...

(From the Princess Bride)
Inigo Montoya: He's dead. He can't talk.
Miracle Max: Whoo-hoo-hoo, look who knows so much. It just so happens that your friend here is only MOSTLY dead. There's a big difference between mostly dead and all dead. Mostly dead is slightly alive. With all dead, well, with all dead there's usually only one thing you can do.
Inigo Montoya: What's that?
Miracle Max: Go through his clothes and look for loose change.

With a lavender, they have little loose change but they all needed to be ripped out and replaced!
Most online sources say that quality producers like Grosso should bloom for 7-10 years and some farms in California say up to 12 years. Most of my plants were less then 5 years old! The problem? They were too wet and cold for too long. Normally drainage is not a problem in Central Oregon! My sister in Olympia Washington had the same problem on a larger scale. Due to the long cold wet winter she lost many shrubs. I am curious to know what happened in your neck of the woods! Comment on this post and let me know how the weather this year has made an impact to your Central Oregon garden!

Green is Green, a Common Sense Approach.

I know that in today's world people seem to use words to describe activities that help them categorize the activity better. For instance, Sustainable, Green, Organic and Natural are all words we use now to talk about methods of activity that have been around for thousands of years. The world was Green and Organic until about 250 years ago then the industrial age created a need for more food to be delivered faster. As a result, man got busy and technology, industry, and the age of doing things faster and bigger came into being. One of the by-products of the farming boom over the last 200 years is a myriad of products on the market for the home gardener.
At any typical garden center or hardware store you can find an array of products on the shelf all labeled with use me, feed me to your plants or spray me to get rid of the bugs.. etc. Some are plant or bug specific, rose systemic, aphid killer, garden vegetable food! They also come with warning labels and if you happen to spend time reading the fine print you may want to run screaming from the store.
Personally I ignore all of that stuff and do what I have always done! I never use anything on my plants but sunshine, water and a composted mulch. If an aphid wants to visit, fine, but if 1,000 of his buddies also want to visit I reduce the population with a shot of water from the hose and that usually takes care of the problem on that particular plant for the day. If you use common sense in the garden just like we should with our own bodies we know that feeding our plants natural food is wisdom. Look at the natural forests of the world! Who waters? Who feeds? Who sprays for bugs? Mmmm, how on earth did that forest make it thousands of years without your intervention? Talk about Sustainable! The forest survives natural disasters, bad weather, fires and not one person had to do a thing and yet it is filled with beautiful plants!
Some garden plants come as they were created and are usually labeled wildflowers or species, but most are cultivars bred to perform a particular way and far from the original plant or plants the breeder started with. Here is where a little research and common sense makes a huge difference to success or failure of a plant! Pick the right plants for your garden and they will not need much more then that good old dirt, sunshine, adequate water and good mulching. Another key is smart placement. I have shade and moisture loving plants in the front of the house where they are in shade most of the day and sun loving plants out around the patio where they receive at least 6 hours or more of sun. Drought resistant plants like Flax live happily at the very end of a sprinklers range so they are never too wet. Learning placement and soil requirements and what zone a plant likes to live in is more important then anything else when planning and maintaining your garden! No amount of artificial fertilizers or pesticides will help you if you put a sun loving plant in deep dark shade and wonder why it does not thrive! If you take a trip to Portland and fall in love with a gorgeous plant at a garden center, make sure it will also survive a sub zero winter unless you plan to bring it into the house with you in the fall! I do have a pot of Agapanthus that I overwinter in the garage. I love the plant but there are times when it seems like such a hassle to move it in and out. I also have tried many varieties of rosemary in the garden to no avail so I keep it in a pot also that goes in and out yearly.
Sustainable? Well, in Central Oregon, if you want a landscape that takes care of itself, I think rocks are in order. You do have to water unless you live in a place with a stream coming through your yard. Even a completely xeriscaped garden requires some water upon occasion. I am much too partial to daylilies and other perennials that need more water than is naturally available so we have an irrigation system in place that uses our field irrigation water. Thick mulch has always been the recommended method of keeping moisture in the ground so I top dress with compost every spring. The natural decay of the composted mulch adds nutrients and humus to the soil and gives the natural soil microbes a good meal. Healthy soil, moisture, sunshine and the right plants for your area will give you the greenest garden you can imagine!

Spring has sprung!

Winter seems to finally be on the wane! I am so glad that the daffodils and other early spring flowers have decided to show themselves in my Central Oregon Garden! It always amazes me to see primroses blooming on the ground even when the nights are in the teens! These hardy perennial plants seem to thrive on tough conditions. In the Central Oregon high desert, the ground can be frozen yet bone dry at the same time and these plants still find enough to live on and bloom! In spite of several snow storms and cold snaps, the daffodils and hyacinths are now blooming along with the forsythia.
Even though it has been cold and we wait impatiently for spring, it is still a wonderful time of year. As the days start to warm there is enough snow on the mountains to make the view driving toward Bend or Redmond fabulous! The Three Sisters show up against the skyline like nothing from anywhere else!
We just got back from a trip to Oklahoma City last week. The landscape there is flat and brown and dead except for the state tree called the Red bud tree. We saw them blooming bright purple in Bricktown next to the Cox Convention center and in landscaped areas around the city. According to the locals, the trees start out with red buds, hence the name.
We drove 90 miles to Ada from OKC to tour our corporate home office facility and on the drive there, not a mountain or hill to be seen and the trees on the side of the road all looked the same. Oregon has such bio diversity compared to the mid west states! We have so much to be thankful for even if it freezes at night until mid summer!

March is Here

I have heard it said that March typically comes in like a lion and leaves like a lamb! In past years March usually seems like a roaring lion all month. This year is deceptively different! Usually it is very cold and constantly windy. So far this month has been balmy! Crocuses and primroses are blooming, daffodils are in bud and the perennials are all showing little green shoots. The bleeding heart is out of the ground about 6 inches and the grass in the field is starting to show green. This first week of sunny days in the high 50's followed by cold nights is short lived though because according to the trusty online weather.com site, it is supposed to turn into snow or rain for the next 10 days. One thing I know for sure here on the high desert, we can generally count on the weather being unpredictable all month. Garden centers are announcing baby chicks and Costco is full of spring bulbs and bare root roses. Please do not be tempted to plant spring bulbs yet! It will snow again!

The other item to note is that the deer are now on the move again. The spring migration from the high desert in the east to the mountains in the west has them moving through our property daily. Today, on a drive north of Redmond, we saw a bald eagle and a half dozen deer out in a field along the Oneil Highway, but when we got back to our own side of town, we drove by a dozen deer within two miles of our property. It is too early to spray deer repellent, but I still need to keep an eye on their movements. We have plans to put in a vegetable garden this year so we must fortify the fences and create a deer free zone in order to expect any sort of harvest.

When to Plant in Central Oregon?

Today, it is a normal mid February day, sunny, but cold. The daffodils are up about 3-4 inches, and the primroses are blooming in spite of losing all their leaves to browsing deer. Early perennials are starting to show a few tiny leaves at the base of the dead sticks that will need to be cut back soon. Forsythia and Lilac buds are swelling and showing promise of things to come.
The local Costco store and garden centers are already stocking bare root plants and summer bulbs. I am not even tempted because in my yard the ground about an inch down is still frozen. It will be a few weeks before the ground is soft enough to plant shrubs or trees.
Back in 2005 we had an unusually balmy February. My husband had the pond dug out and used the extra fill dirt to create a base for a new patio between the house and the shop. The new flowerbed space that was created on the edge of the pavers got my gardening juices flowing! Wisely knowing that it was far too early to plant I held off until March when the stores were again bursting with shrubs and perennials. I was beguiled by all that I saw and purchased flowering quince, forsythia, lilacs and rose bushes. Two days after planting, it started to snow. It snowed for at least a week and the little bushes were covered. It stayed cold for another six weeks! The plants survived, but never seemed to thrive after that.
My best advice after years of struggle with the issue of when to plant in Central Oregon is to wait until April or May for bare root or potted shrubs. Wait, and I mean WAIT, until the END OF MAY to plant any hardy perennials and wait until JUNE to plant annuals outside. You can get by earlier with Pansies, but I refuse to grow them even though I really like them because they are irresistible to deer and I choose not to afford them a lovely salad. If you live near the river, in Redmond 15 miles to the north, or in what we call the Banana Belt on the north side of Pilot Butte, then you can sometimes get away with planting a bit earlier. Once your soil thaws and stays thawed, you can plant shrubs. Check with your local experts when choosing perennials, shrubs and trees. The folks at my favorite nurseries, Solar City Gardens and Landsystems, are a wealth of knowledge. If you live in a different area, do the same. Your local nurseries that have been in the area for over 10 plus years should be able to tell you what will do well and when to plant.
September is my favorite month to plant. We are located on the South East side of Bend on a windy hill. The weather going into fall is much more predictable than the weather in the early part of the year. Plants have more time to settle in for the upcoming winter without the huge swings in temperature typical to March through May and the irrigation system will still be on for another month. Most years, the irrigation canals provide water until October15th and we can continue to irrigate until the end of the month. The other reasoning behind this time of year is that the garden is usually in need of some late summer clean up at the end of most of the plants blooming season, and what a great time to re-evaluate what worked that summer and what did not. The daylilies that clashed with the poppies that should be moved, and so forth. The added bonus of working outside in beautiful weather is also a huge plus.