Lahr Symposium on native plants

The annual Lahr Symposium on native plants was held this past Saturday at the National Arboretum in Washington DC. I've gone for the last couple of years, and for more years than that to the native plant sale that accompanies it. It's a great event, and it's held at a great time of year - when spring is just getting underway. I always look forward to seeing the massive cherries in bloom at the Arboretum. Yes, I know they're not native, but aren't they magnificent?

This year two of the speakers, Darell Morrison and Bill Cullina, spoke about aspects of designing with native plants. Morrison, a Fellow of the American Society of Landscape Architects, talked about some of the large-scale projects he has designed using natives. Cullina talked about different botanical features of plants such as color, form, leaf variegation etc. can be used to advantage in the garden.

The third speaker, Kim Winter, talked about attracting wildlife to the garden. It was particularly interesting to me that she mentioned solitary bees. I had just recently read a short article about using small cardboard tubes as nesting cavities for these bees, and so it was already on my mind. She gave a link to a website I'll be exploring: pollinator.org.

I also got to go on a guided wildflower walk at the Arboretum's newly renovated Fern Hill wildflower garden. It was a chilly but sunny day, and many things were just starting to poke out of the ground, while a few things were already blooming, including Dutchman's breeches, trillium (the red one, I think commonly known as wake-robin), and one of my favorite shrubs, spicebush (Lindera benzoin) which has little yellow flowers and emits a spicy smell when the bark is scratched. Wish I had a place in the yard for one of these guys!

Tree Repair

We followed advice from the arborist and bolted the fig tree's torn limb back onto the main trunk. It required my handy husband drilling a hole through the limb and the trunk, and then fastening the bolts on while I held the limb up as tight as I could against the trunk. It looks pretty good! My only question is, as the trunk grows, do you need to remove the bolt, or do you just let the trunk grow around it? Perhaps it's just like a human having a piece of metal holding a knee or shoulder together.

More snowstorm damage

As the snow has melted off, more of the damage to trees and shrubs has been revealed. A large branch on my fig tree was ripped nearly off, and now I can see that the wound is pretty deep into the main stem. We've called an arborist to see if the tree can be saved.

And there's the arborvitae. I didn't know that they are often multi-stemmed - the one I learned in my woody plants class had a single stem. At any rate, the multiple stems all sagged in different directions under the weight of the snow - something not so dramatically evident till the snow was mostly gone.

The upside to this destruction is that I have more and more excuses to go shopping for native plants as replacements!

Big snow - the aftermath

We are still living with mountains of snow, albeit no longer the beautiful white fluffy stuff, but dirty old snow. As it slowly melts, damage to trees and shrubs continues to be revealed. My fig tree took a hit; one large branch is broken though still attached to the main trunk. We may have the tree service prune the limb off neatly when they come for other cleanup.

I'm happy that some of my less loved shrubs may be damaged after resting under heavy snow and ice for some time. I'm hoping that storm damage will make it easier to kill these non-natives off: nandina, privet, burning bush. The nandina was encased in ice for awhile that dripped from large icycles. That seems to have melted, and I'm afraid it looks surprisingly perky under the snow. One can only hope it may be weakened, at least, and a little easier to take out.

Way too much winter

 Our front walk - before shoveling

We don't live in the Midwest, but it suddenly looks like it. A couple of feet of snow very effectively shut down the Metro DC area, starting Friday when the federal government closed early in anticipation of this mammoth storm. Today is Monday and everyone is still digging out, with more snow expected tomorrow night. It's nice to be forced to slow down -- watch some movies, sleep in, enjoy watching the snow pile up, and figure you're not going anywhere for awhile.

 Oops

It's been pretty fun, except for the discovery on Saturday afternoon that three trees bordering our driveway had come down. One is resting on a powerline, one on the tail end of our car, and one along our neighbor's walkway. Amazingly, the powerline was not brought down, and we think the car may be undamaged. The neighbors were able to move the tree on their walk enough so they can get in and out of their door. So we're just waiting for the power company to move the tree off the line; then we can get a tree company to clear away the other two  trees. The trees, I've found out, are Leyland Cypress, and they have a bad reputation for growing very fast, being shallow rooted, and coming down in storms. Indeed!

One way to "green" your driveway

          

From seed to seedlings

Since my last post many of the seeds have become seedlings. On the tiny side: the rosemary and lavender. On the towering side (relatively speaking) the okra, now about 5 inches tall. And most amazing, each of the dwarf pea plants has a single white flower bud. What do they think they're doing?! Are they going to produce pea pods that are bigger than the plants themselves?

                    












Jan. 17 - Okra (foreground), Cilantro  (back left), Basil (back right)

Jan. 28 - Okra; Peas

John and Rachel's funky seed starting process

We have experimented with many methods, and various soilless mixes and seed starting mixes, in our adventures with seed starting. Now we are using what are called "Park Starts" from Park Seed Company. They are little plugs of sponge-like material. They are designed to go in a tray holding 60 of these starts. That assumes you'd like a rather large quantity of something, or several somethings, like lettuce or other greens, to set outdoors. But we've found that Park Starts work very well for starting almost any seed, and John has engineered a method for starting small quantities of seed using these plugs and the plastic containers which are used for Chinese takeout. He punches 4 holes in the plastic lid, and the plugs rest in these holes.  They are very easy to transplant into a 4 inch or larger pot later on. A plastic cup can sit on top as a humidity dome and is removed when seeds germinate.

On January 7 I started several sets of seeds using Park Starts. I put 2-3 seeds per Park Start into the little hole in the center of each plug. The only exception was the peas; with such large seeds, I only put one seed per plug.We give each plug one teaspoon of water to start with, and check daily. You want the plugs barely moist, but not too wet.

Already the peas are starting to unfold as seedlings - amazing. The others seeds: peppers, rosemary, cilantro, lavender, dwarf okra, will take varying amounts of time to germinate. I have started all of these seeds indoors before, using a bit more traditional methods, with the exception of rosemary, which I believe can take quite a long time to germinate. We'll see.

John started basil seeds on January 3, and the little seedlings have already got their seed leaves. In a few days he will choose the strongest seedling and carefully snip the stems of any other seedlings sharing the same plug. Basil has turned out to be an amazing indoor plant; John harvests it regularly from his tabletop growlight system at work.