August Ramble: Taking Stock

I entered this year’s gardening season with unbridled optimism. I swore to buy no new plants, but dozens miraculously seemed to show up on my doorstep, and nothing brings a smile to my face more than planting. Then there was that nasty freeze in early April that seems to have dealt a blow to many of our tree fruits like apples and pears, but that has to be balanced by the record crops we saw in the previous two years. Spring settled in and the temperatures were acceptable and, while the days were on the dryish side, we got enough rain to get things going.Then it got dry and then it got even drier and downright hot. My drought monitor or drought index is a narrow swath of lawn in front of my house where a new water main was put in nearly 15 years ago. The backfill and topsoil used to fill in the trench wasn’t the same as the surrounding soils (I didn’t own the house then), so now every summer when we lack rain the lawn dies out just in that area. And it did.

But I had a bag of grass seed and I couldn’t bear to see the brown, so I screened some topsoil, raked out the dead grass, spread the soil, seeded and mulched. Yes, it was a bit early and yes, it got hotter than hell when I was done, but a few days later it began to rain. And it rained on my little piece of heaven every afternoon for four days in a row and my little grass seeds are moist, happy and sprouting a week later.

But going back to early July … around the 5th of July the Japanese beetles show up. They have been regrettably reliable, but this year: not a single one. Then around the 15th, a few, but I figured that with the parched soil the grubs just never developed and I had dodged a bullet. I had my sprayer ready as well as my arsenal of spinosad and pyrethrin but no beetles. Then—Bam!—in early August they all hit at once. They always show up first and do the most amount of damage to my hibiscus “Cherry Brandy,” which has put up with the onslaught every summer since it was planted in 2007. I don’t have a clue why they like this particular plant so much, but the foliage ends up looking like Swiss cheese. Thankfully the flowers come much later and are unaffected—but not so on the shrub hibiscus some 100 feet away. There are five of these in the Chiffon series and the blues get hit the worst. They don’t seem to touch anything else on the property and I have no clue where they come from, but I hate JBs more than any other insect.

My ritual is to go out with a one-quart sprayer at high noon and hit the visible ones with pyrethrin. In minutes they’re dead, but skip a day or two when it’s sunny and hot, and anything in the hibiscus family is subject to being Swiss-cheesed.

And then there was the crabgrass. It never shows up in the main part of my lawn but always on the shoulder of the road and driveway. Those are the only two places where I put down a small swath of pre-emergent herbicide, but I got lazy this year and decided to test my theory that if you do a pre-emergent for two years in a row you might be able to get away with skipping the third year. I did. Happy to say I had no crabgrass outbreak and only a few plants showed up that were easily hand-pulled. I won’t push my luck though, and next year the pre-emergent will go down again but I may do this only in alternate years. It’s a bit chancy but so far I like my odds.

The chipmunks and rabbits have been so very depressing. The periphery of every part of my gardens shows signs of damage from the rabbits snapping off stems, with the lobelia reduced to stubs and echinaceas unceremoniously pruned. I was just astonished at the damage the chipmunks did to the lily flower bud and there was even more damage. But the chipmunks actually taught me something. They had been digging at the base of one of my lily plantings and left behind some tiny bulblets that clued me in to yet another pilferage they were involved with. They’d dig around the lily stem down to the spot where the bulb and stem join and they’d rip off the tiny quarter-inch bulblets that were growing. Easy enough to stop that practice with a granular repellent, but they’d left behind a half dozen bulblets and I continued their digging and came up with a dozen more. All of them are now lined out in the nursery, where I hope to have a row of new Asiatic lilies in a few years. That is, if I can keep the chipmunks away.

And now, with our quite regular afternoon or evening deluges, I’m so happy I took the time to do so much staking early in the season. All of my taller plants, from coneflowers to cardinal flowers to phlox and even the Joe Pye weed, were all staked in such a way that the ties, which encircled the plants, could easily be slid up the stakes, allowing for higher and higher support as the summer progressed. Of course this means using tall stakes and that’s always a challenge because you need to be able to hide them or to slip taller ones into the same spots, but so far so good and the garden doesn’t seem to have a case of the droops. At least not yet.

And for those of you following the plight or path of the monarch butterflies—I too have been planting to attract them. For a few years I’ve been adding an Asclepias incarnata (swamp milkweed) here and there. Well, much to my delight, I noticed monarchs on both “Cinderella” and “Soul Mate” on the flitterers’ northern migration. These are both great plants, but what a dividend to see these butterflies stopping by and feeding and possibly laying eggs as they headed to points north earlier in the summer.

Alstromeria or the Peruvian lily is a very popular cut flower and for years there have been whispers of it being hardy here and even in colder zones. Two years ago I planted Mauve Majesty, Freedom, Koncajoli and Sweet Laura in my upstate garden, and they’ve all survived, so I’m pretty confident they’ll do well out here. Don’t coddle them—they tolerate some light or high shade for part of the day and may need some staking, but they seem to be doing really well.

Time to take a really close look at your lawn. What do you see? Weeds, bare spots, mole tunnels? We’ll take a closer look at your lawn next week. Until then, keep growing.