Signs of spring: bunnies in the garden

Bunnies are not especially welcome in the garden, especially the vegetable garden. But they can be pretty cute. One warmish day recently I watched as a bunny seemed to be nibbling at the roots of a large thyme plant at the edge of my garden. I was only a couple of feet away, but he/she ignored my presence. After awhile I noticed that the bunny was not just nibbling but digging. As I watched, that rabbit excavated a sizable hole under the plant.

Beginning the nest

Digging in

Cleaning up

The finished product

I thought I remembered reading that cottontails don’t burrow, and wondered if it might be a nest for babies. I checked on the internet, and that seems to be the explanation. There was another rabbit hanging about, and there was some chasing, frolicking, and at one point the second rabbit made a sudden and amazing leap right over the first one. All part of courtship, apparently. But since that time, she has not returned to the nest, and there are no babies. So maybe she decided she didn’t like our location after all. And after I had actually planted out some of the lettuce we’d been growing indoors, just for her!

Daylight Design at the DC Home and Garden Show

This past month has been spent in a flurry of activity, preparing to exhibit my husband's Sunstation growlight  systems at the Washington DC Home and Garden show this past weekend. We needed to get lots of plants started from seed, so that we could show off the versatility of the system with an interesting mix of plants at different stages of growth. Our show photos didn't turn out well, but here's what one of the Sunstations looked like before we dismantled it and packed it up for our exhibit.

Greens do very well with this semi-hydroponic system; we had lots of beautiful lettuces - a gorgeous heirloom  called "Garden Ferns" from Renee's Seeds is one of our new favorites. Some other things we're trying for the first time: Round Baby Carrots, and a compact pepper called Baby Belle. (We've successfully grown full sized peppers indoors, but we're really interested in anything that's compact.)

Our most interesting challenge is tomatoes. No problem getting them off to a good start, and they are one of the most popular vegetables to grow under lights for eventual planting outdoors.  The question is, can you grow a tomato to maturity indoors that will taste as good, or almost as good, as one grown outside? Right now we are trialing Zebra Hybrid, Early Wonder, Totem Hybrid, Better Bush, and Cherry Sweetie. We were trying to pick those that would grow into compact/patio size plants, but this last appears to be a full size plant, so we've been pruning it. It actually looks terrific, and has some small tomatoes on it, as do several of the other plants that were planted earliest.

So all this was very impressive for the garden show; we had a lot of interest, took some orders, and had great fun talking to people. It was all very energizing. I love indoor seed starting and growing. But now the outdoors is stirring. Birds are returning to the feeder, I've planted peas inside my new chicken wire fence, and yesterday on my way home from work I saw a single daffodil blooming. I'm hearing the siren call of spring!

Mental gardening

Most gardening in our climate at this time of year is indoors. At our house, indoor gardening is of two types. One is starting seeds and experimenting with growing vegetables under lights. (More about that in another post.) The other is what I call mental gardening, a combination of reading, planning, and looking out the window, trying to see past the patches of crusty crystallized snow.

A pre-spring day

I was doing a little mental gardening this weekend, thinking about what might go into an unexpectedly vacant spot in my front perennial bed. The occupant until recently was a multi-stemmed Arborvitae that once again had been splayed to the ground by the weight of a wet snowfall. The same thing happened last year, and I was tired of fooling with that tree! Plus the 10 foot tree was totally out of place at the edge of my mostly native plant bed. We had already scheduled a tree service to prune dead wood off our two large shade trees, and they kindly agreed to cut the Arborvitae at no additional charge.

I'll have a stump to dig up, and space for something new. A small native shrub would be nice - something that won't get too tall or spread aggressively. Out came the books:  Native Plants of the Northeast by Donald J. Leopold; the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service's guide to native plants of the Chesapeake Bay Watershed, and the Brooklyn Botanic Garden's Great Natives for Tough Places. So what will it be? Bush honeysuckle? New Jersey tea? Sheep laurel? - an evergreen, that would be nice. In the end it will depend on what's available when I start hitting up the native plant sales this spring.

And then, surprise! Mental gardening gave way to real outdoor time.  The sun came out yesterday, it warmed up a bit, and suddenly spring really did seem not so far off. I got out for a good half hour, picked up some downed branches,  did a little pruning, yanked out some ivy, and tried to avoid the mud. The garden season begins!

When green isn't good

Green is a color that really stands out in the winter garden, since there's not much of it, and it can be a beautiful sight. Snow on conifers? Lovely.  

Red osier dogwood with bamboo. Photo by Rachel Shaw

But in my yard there's a fair amount of winter green that is not good. Some of the most invasive plants I battle are evergreen, in particular English ivy and bamboo. It took two years to kill the thick vines of ivy that had bullied their way almost to the canopy of our two largest shade trees. Ripping out the normal sized vines as they sneak across the ground is ongoing. I've wrestled up to the surface the bamboo rhizomes that embed their gnarly fingers underground, sending up little flags of green shoots at unexpected locations.

The visibility of this unwelcome green in winter is an opportunity, I've realized. In the summer these plants can hide in the lushness of all the other green growing things. Not so in winter. Time to put on the boots and gloves, get the pruners, and attack while I can see the enemy clearly!

Winter rest

Although I love gardening, I do appreciate the respite that winter brings. No more nagging sense of all the things left undone in the garden. The garden gets a rest, and so do I.
 

Coneflowers in Winter. Photo by Rachel Shaw

Winter is traditionally the time to look at seed catalogs and garden books, to reflect and to plan, and to wait for spring. It's a time for resolutions, and I do have a few. I recently read Weedless Gardening by Lee Reich. I plan to follow many of his directives, including gardening "from the top down" by building up the soil and tilling as little as possible. I  want to put down plenty of mulch early in areas where I won't be planting. And I plan to use the torch weeder on the driveway early in the spring, before those first weeds have gotten a start.

Nevertheless, I don't expect to have a weedless garden. My most important resolution? To take time to enjoy the garden I have, and not worry too much about its imperfections. And actually, for my life as a whole, ditto.

All the leaves are down...

Photo by Rachel Shaw

I admit fall is not my favorite season, mainly because of what follows all too soon. But it has its charms on  lovely mild days when the light is just right and the leaves have a golden glow. 

Raking leaves used to be one of the things I enjoyed about fall, and still do, though I’m doing a lot less of it. More and more people are making the case for not raking, or raking minimally, or composting raked leaves rather than bagging them. They make the case that leaves make a nice mulch, and and are a source of nutrients. After all, that lovely humus in the woods builds up naturally; it doesn’t come out of a plastic bag! 

So last year I raked only our small patch of grass, and left the beds pretty much alone. This year I’ve heard another good reason to let the leaves remain: they are protection for overwintering insects, including caterpillars. OK! Good enough for me. 

I do keep an eye out to make sure there aren’t too many maple leaves mounded around individual plants, as they have a tendency to form a dense wet mat. And I probably should have thought sooner to scoop up the leaves off the little patch of erstwhile lawn that I'm trying to convert to moss. I'll keep sweeping leaves off the flagstone front path, so it won't get slippery with leaves when it rains.  Otherwise, no raking.

And here’s a link to a beautiful blog on leaving the leaves, as well as on different styles of gardening: http://www.ecosystemgardening.com/leaves-in-wildlife-garden.html

Certified Wildlife Habitat

Photo by Rachel Shaw

 This summer I decided to look into getting my yard certified as wildlife-friendly through the National Wildlife Federation. I'd seen the occasional "Certified Wildlife Habitat" yard sign, and thought it was pretty cool. Plus, the entire City of Rockville, MD, where I live, is trying to get certified, so I thought I'd do my part.

Photo by Rachel Shaw

Certification, it turns out, is not that hard. It is a self-certification process, relying on you to honestly report whether you meet certain criteria. These include such things as providing sources of food, water, cover, etc.;  there are various ways you can meet these criteria. There is a $20 fee for certification, and a $30 fee if you want the standard yard sign. To me it was well worth it, just for the value of being able to say, yes, this is important to me; I want my yard to be a haven for wildlife.