It Begins

Two days of unseasonably warm weather last Sunday and Monday drove ProfessorRoush out of the house into the garden to begin what will assuredly be a solid spring of garden restoration, rejuvenation and redesign.  I roused this old sleeping garden gnome, covered as he was in the debris of daylilies and Echinops, from winter slumber, and put him to work alongside me puttering over and poking within the cold ground.

I began in the 55ºF heat wave of Sunday, sheltered from a brisk north wind on the sunny south side of the house, and I cleaned the bed bordering the patio free of dead iris and daylily leaves and the remnants of invasive annual grasses.  It was warm there, warm enough to shed the jacket and sweat a little while absorbing enough sun for Vitamin D synthesis and basking my reptilian brain in sunshine.  I always like to start garden cleanup here, so that the many crocuses and daffodils are not disturbed as they rise and will then flower freely and stand out in the neat clean bed.  The roses here will have to wait until closer to spring.   

Then, on Monday, as the temperatures rose past 60ºF, I jumped ship at work and rushed home to start on the beds surrounding the front (north) side of the house.  The cleanup bug had bitten me deeply by now, and after collecting the remains of Orientpet lilies, daylilies and other perennials, I became convinced that my first major act of the summer had to be the destruction of the two overgrown Thuja orientalis 'Sunkist' that border the windows of the garage.  Fifteen years young, the original plant tag had listed their ultimate size as 2' X 2', but obviously, despite an annual haircut and a more drastic trimming once or twice through the years, these 6 foot giants had overstayed their welcome.  Off with their heads!

There, that's so much better, isn't it?  Now the Orientpet's won't have to lean away from the towering encroachment of the Thuja and the whole area looks brighter and more in ordnung to satisfy my Germanic soul.  I'm not sure what I'll plant in their place, probably another mislabeled 2' X 2' evergreen, but I feel I've made a good start on the garden year.




I didn't stop at the evergreens, however, and made a clean sweep over the entire front bed, removing peony and Knautia debris, trimming euonymus, and freeing the forsythia to shine alone.  The wind is a little more brisk across the front now, but my soul is lifted and refreshed.  That is, after all, the goal of our gardens, isn't it?

Toad Behavior

So, there I was, rushing home from a trip to Kansas City at 4:00 pm. on a hot Saturday afternoon because I had to go out and mow in the boiling sun and be showered again by 5:30.   "Why," you ask?  Because Mrs. ProfessorRoush, always mindful of social opportunities, had asked me earlier in the week if I would go out to dinner Saturday night with a couple of old friends who were going to be in town.  Ever the indulging and doting husband, I had agreed immediately, not knowing that "going out to dinner" would ultimately also include a plan for visiting my garden prior to dinner.  My garden that I have abandoned to the heat of summer, sans weeding and mowing for three weeks.

The lack of regular maintenance is not as big a deal as you might surmise, primarily because our ample rains of early June ceased around June 20th and we haven't seen a drop since then.  All the prairie grass has stopped growing except for a small rim around the asphalt where the grass gets more runoff.  And weeds have stopped sprouting, except for my Ambrosia sp. nemesis which seems to merely require dehydrated concrete to grow.  So, except for finding a few giants that I've missed, the garden really wasn't too terrible, but I still couldn't let it be viewed in its current condition.

Anyway, at minimum, the fuzzy edges needed to be trimmed, and here was Mrs. ProfessorRoush, trying to talk me out of it, telling me the garden looked fine.  I responded poorly to the discussion, stormed out into the heat, and proceeded to perform my impression of a Tasmanian Devil from a Bug's Bunny cartoon as I rushed about performing emergency cosmetic surgery on the garden.

Why?  Oh why, I ask you?  Why didn't I just point out that impromptu visitors to my garden are no different to me than impromptu house visitors are to Mrs. ProfessorRoush?  She goes into a tizzy every time visitors are nigh, despite keeping a house so constantly clean that I could safely eat off the floors at any random moment.  That simple analogy would have so easily been game, set, and match in favor of ProfessorRoush.  Alas, it seems instead that I was close to testing out my theory of eating off the clean floors for awhile.  

(The toad picture, BTW, is merely for blog decoration and is not a comment on the actions of any individual mentioned herein.)

Mowing Bedlam

If my regular readers suspect that they have begun to determine a pattern in the "Roush Gardening Method," today's blog will remove all doubt and expose me for the gardening charlatan I truly am.  I know that some might apply the words, "cynical," "skeptic," and perhaps "shameful" to many of these blogs as I discuss emotionally-charged subjects such as Global Warming, organic gardening dogma, and WEE (Wild-Eyed Environmentalists).  Yes, I fully admit that I am sometimes unable to resist poking the Birkenstock herd as they meander across the garden drinking the Kool-Aide.

But truthfully, for all the "low-maintenance" hype I spew about my garden endeavors, the core basis of the "Roush Gardening Method" is simple laziness.  I don't aim for low-maintenance, I aim for "low-work," however that result can be obtained.

As an example, I resolved a few years back to limit the annual maintenance of my two mixed daylily and iris beds to the simple technique of mowing them once in the Fall or late Winter.  As you can see from the picture at left, the resultant bed has a nice clean look that took about 10 minutes to create at the end of the last growing season.  Please go ahead and ignore the variably-sized limestone edging that keeps the prairie fires out of my beds. Doesn't it look like a knowledgeable and dedicated gardener has been hard at work clearing this bed of plant debris?  I did not, as recommended in numerous books, take some nice hand scissors out to carefully and individually trim the iris into angled fans, nor did I remove the previous foliage from the daylilies.  I simply mowed off both at a height of 3 inches with a mulching, riding lawnmower (gasp!).  This resulted in a nice 2-3 inch layer of chopped mulch that matted down nicely and didn't blow to the next county over the winter.      

As you can see from the 2nd picture, the result, pictured during early daylily season in the middle of a hot summer, leaves little room for complaint, at least by me.  I get two solid seasons of bloom, iris and daylily, out of this bed, plus a little third bloom season due to some daffodils that pop up and cycle before the daylily or iris foliage is evident.  Yes, it is not a varied shrub border, but I have those in other places and they bloom in their own time and space. No, I wouldn't do this to a formal rose garden.   My daylily and iris beds are intended only for full colorful climax at the height of summer.  It is also important to know that I have not yet seen any disease nor detriment to the practice.  In fact, the disaster of the late Flint Hills freeze of 2007, which reduced the majority of my irises to soggy and very dead plants, will likely not be repeated as there is not much green growth yet to freeze.  KSU's advice in 2007 to "not-cut-back" the irises after the freeze, which I now believe was a mistake, will be moot for me in the future;  I don't have any iris foliage at this time of year to freeze.

I'll tell you a secret;  I also did this mowing technique on my peony plantings last fall and I'll show you those pictures in a later post as the peonies bloom.  Yes, it's true that my garden design is in some danger of becoming a set of display beds of various plants without architecture or form, but I'll make sure to keep some mixed beds around and there is always the formal rose garden and the shrub rose borders.  Anyway, I prefer to think of my garden as a symphony, with a set of sax notes here, a refrain popping up over there from the violas, and later a flute taking up the melody from the background.  As opposed to creating a jam session of uninhibited jazz players, if you'll allow me to continue the metaphor...

The success of this quirky methodology is encouraging me to try a different type of bed this year.  I'm planning a large garden bed of self-sown annuals that I'm going to try to keep the prairie grass and weeds out by hand, but to just mow down each fall to re-spread the mature seed heads.  We'll see, we'll see.