Signs of Spring

Are we all nuts?

Garden Rant of the Year


I will never understand why anyone would bag their leaves in fall and bring it to the curb - instead of composting them... or why wrap your shrubs for winter or neglect plants at groceries and builter supply stores?

BAGGED LEAVES
"Reduce, Reuse, and Recycle" also applies to gardening.
Go for a walk into any forest and reach down or kick the dry leaves to one side and notice dead leaves underneath, push them aside and notice decomposed leaves under the dry leaves push those to one side and notice a rich black earth yielding an abundance of nutrients to the forest ecosystem. Imagine this soil in your garden?

Your plants will grow like crazy! Leaves decompose relatively quickly pile leaves onto your garden in the fall thickly and by spring they will be nothing but a a thin layer of decomposed leaves which need to be turned into the soil.

Repeating this year after year will make your soil richer than before just like the soil in old growth forests.

What waste it is to just rake up one of nature’s best to be burned later when you can put it to use in your garden.


WRAPPED SHRUBS - SOOOOO UGLY

The "gardening industry" and so-called "landscapers" seems to have found a new method of cash-grab for the slow winter season: Sell as much burlap, styropur cones and twine as possible! They will tell potential customers if they don't wrap their shrubs they will be injured and die in winter. What a nonsens!

Have you ever seen a wrapped shrub in the wild? Did your grand parents wrap their bushes and shrubs for the winter? For sure not...

If you are choosing plants for your garden according to the zone in which you live, you do not need to protect your shrubs, and even if you loose a branch or two in an ice storm - so be it! It's all nature. Why do we try to play God?

What you CAN do is to mulch around tree trunks and shrubs and water them very well before heavy frost sets in.
That's all.


WHY LET THEM DIE?

Plants at grocery stores, building suppliers and the like: We all know not to ever expect much from the grocery store plants, as they're usually completely neglected, baking on hot tarmag, dry and limp looking if not half (or totally) dead.
But I am asking why are they selling plants at all, if they do not care for them. It makes me really mad to see those poor flowers and plants dying, and I ask for a supervisor and tell them what I think about their neglectence.

Sometimes they admit it and give orders to water the plants. One can only guess their mark-up if they can afford to let the plants die. Even worse: I often heard they will return them to the growers.

We should neglect these reckless sellers too and buy only at nurseries that take care of the plants - which benefits later in your garden.

Images of the most reliable shade-loving plants

HOSTAs come in a huge variety of colors from dark-green, blue-green, yellow or white rimmed leaves. Find more images on this website:
http://www.shadyoaks.com/GeneratedItems/Pages/Hosta3.html

HEUCHERAs - Variety of Coral Bells, Heuchera Georgia Peach

Happy Planting!

Shade Gardens

Shade gardeners have a great number of gorgeous plants available to them. Here is a list of wonderful plants that will thrive in three to four hours of sun or less.



FLOWERS

Coral Bells (Heuchera)
For show-stopping color in the shade garden, coral bells are unbeatable. Recent breeding has produced plants with foliage in just about every color imaginable, from coppery orange to pure black; deep purple to chartreuse.
Coral bells do great in part to full shade, and form low mounds of foliage. They also produce flower spikes of delicate, bell-shaped blooms. Depending on the cultivar, coral bells are hardy in zones three through nine.

Astilbe (Astilbe)
Astilbes (hardy in zones four through nine) grow wonderfully in part to full shade, as long as they are in nice, moist soil. It produces feathery plumes in white, pink, purple, peach, or red in late spring through summer. Astilbe also self-sows readily, but the seedlings are unlikely to look like the original. In a naturalistic, informal setting, this can be a very attractive look.

Bleeding Heart (Dicentra spectabilis)
Bleeding Heart is an old-fashioned, absolutely beautiful plant for shade gardens. In spring to early summer, delicate, dangling flowers will appear, looking like rows of heart-shaped lockets. Bleeding Heart blooms in shades of white, pink, purple, and red, and grows up to four feet tall and three feet wide. It dislikes summer heat, however, and may go dormant if it is allowed to dry out. Not to worry--it will come back just fine in the spring. Bleeding heart thrives in part to full shade in zones two through nine. If it gets sun, morning sun is preferable to afternoon sun, which can be much too hot.


SHRUBS FOR SHADED AREAS

Kerria Japonica: (K. Japonica): If you have a wooded lot with dense shade, this is the summer shrub for you. This tough, disease free, small woody plant bursts into a mass of golden blooms in early summer, continues intermittently all summer, then explodes again in fall. Looks lovely under the trees in a woodland garden. A real show-stopper, the Kerria Japonica will give you years of pleasure, as it slowly grows to a mere 5 feet.
Kerria Japonica is evergreen all year, in all but the most northern gardens. Zone:5-8

Cornus racemosa (Grey Dogwood) zone 4 (1.5-3m) This easily grown shrub has white flowers, followed by white berries on red stalks and purple fall foliage.

Corylus spp. (Hazels) zone 5-9 (3-12m) These shrubs can have various forms from twisted corkscrews to regular pyramidal growth and they produce nuts in the fall.

Hamamelis virginiana (Common Witch-hazel) zone 4 (5m). This fall blooming shrub produces yellow flowers about the time other trees are losing their leaves.

Or plant the variety that blooms in February / March: Hamamelis mollis Boskoop - Chinese Hazel The best antidote to winter is a planting of Witch Hazels. This genus of five species of upright, spreading shrubs or small trees provides the first big display of color, beginning in late February or early March and continuing for six weeks or more depending on the season (the flower petals sensibly curl up if the temperatures plummet). They need at least four hours of sun.

Hydrangea arborescens 'Annabelle' (Snowhill Hydrangea) zone 2b-9 (1.3m) grows well in deep shade, and bears large trusses of white flowers in August and September.

Kalmia latifolia (Mountain-Laurel) zone 4 (10m) is an evergreen shrub with pink, white or red flowers in mid-June.