Compost Musings

YES I compost, YES I do, YES I compost, how about YOU?

Sorry.  Some of the enthusiasm I occasionally run into when I talk about composting within earshot of the WEE crowd (Wild-Eyed Environmentalists) brought to mind an old cheer from high school basketball games when I thought about starting this particular blog, and that led to memories of friends and classmates who were high school cheerleaders or "pom-pom" squad, and that, of course, revived other old enthusiasms and left me mentally wandering....but I digress.

Actually, to be truthful, I was late to the composting game as a gardener and I still do it haphazardly.  For the first years of my gardening life, I was fond of throwing the weeds back down where I pulled them and letting nature do the work (I still do, to the chagrin of my wife, if I'm weeding far from the compost pile).  I am certainly not a religious convert to the organic-only mindset and, forgive me Gardener, but I routinely sin and don't compost many items which are compostable.  I don't, for instance, walk my wife's coffee grounds down the hill in the freezing Kansas wind to add them to the pile.  Nor the banana peels, or eggshells, or wilted celery.  My desire to compost, I'm afraid, ends at the onset of cold weather.  Just last week I read a locally-written article on how we should turn our compost piles every month in the winter.  Really?  I don't know about you, but here in Zone 5B, my compost pile has been frozen rock solid for the past three weeks and it'll likely remain that way through March.  I wonder if the local writer has really gotten out and tried to turn his compost pile lately, or if he was reading and passing on information written in Britannia or southern Texas?

Towards my salvation, though, over the past several years a good friend who lives amidst the trees has provided me with as many bags of fresh  fallen leaves as I can drive away with.  Routinely, that means that in making the compost pictured above in my makeshift compost pile, I've added about 50 large bags of leaves to the mix annually.  In fact, as you can see pictured below, I have several bins where leaves remain half-rotted until I begin cutting summer grass and pulling weeds.  I mix in the leaves with the green fresh material as it becomes available, and then turn the pile back and forth between bins until finally, all those bushels of leaves and grass become the pictured half-bin (2X4X4) of mostly compost.  

I certainly don't make great compost, however.  Somehow, I never reach the black, crumbling texture described in all the books, even though my soil thermometer tells me that I reached the prerequisite temperatures at least twice this year.  Perhaps, being intrinsically lazy, I don't turn it enough since I probably only turn it completely about 3 times in a summer.  Sue me, I just can't face turning the compost pile when the July sun is high and the temperatures start at 90F and end up at 109F.  And I probably don't water it enough. Although I try for the "wrung-out" sponge dampness, I mostly see repeatedly watering the compost pile as a bit of a waste of water in a landscape where water is a precious commodity during the summer. And maybe I fail because I mix in whole leaves and grass clippings and I don't chop them up fine enough. 

But, even half-finished, the plants don't seem to complain when they're mulched with my meager offerings.  And I trust the ingredients of my compost enough to put it on my vegetable garden, in contrast to the local municipal compost.  The latter, while free and available in large quantities, tends to have a bit of gravel, bottle tops and rubber items occasionally mixed in.  I might not mix my partially-aged compost into the soil for fear of losing a little available nitrogen, but the worms seem to appreciate its presence as a mulch. 

I'll leave you with this very deep thought:  however reluctantly and imperfectly, I suppose all gardeners eventually compost.

'Rugelda' Sounds Regal

In choosing a rose for my not-quite-weekly focus, I had several refined and delicate roses in mind earlier this week, but at the last minute, I thought "Hey, it's time I displayed 'Rugelda'."  And indeed, it is time and perhaps past time.

I've alluded to this somewhat little-known rose before in other posts, but I've never fully expressed my admiration of it.  'Rugelda', or 'KORruge', is a hybrid rugosa bred by the great rose breeding family W. Kordes and Sons in 1989.   While not known well in the United States, she perhaps has more recognition in Europe and she won an award of Anerkannte Deutche Rose (Anerkannte means "Recognized") in 1992,  A cross of 'Bonanza' (a yellow and red blend 1983 shrub by Kordes) and bright red 'Robusta' (a 1979 rugosa hybrid by Kordes), 'Rugelda' really doesn't exhibit the textured leaves of the rugosas, but I've always felt that it has some of the nicest glossiest mid-green foliage of all the roses I grow (next to 'Prairie Harvest'). That perfect disease-free foliage has been described as "holly-like" and it certainly has a bit of that look and indestructibility to it.

'Rugelda' is a double, bright yellow rose made unique by the unusual pink edges of the petals.  She fades to a more graceful lighter yellow and open form as she ages.  Cane hardy to at least Zone 5b by personal experience and, according to one website, perhaps into Zone 3, I've got two 'Rugelda's' that have survived now upwards of 10 years without winter protection or spraying.  'Rugelda' is trying to be a climber and annually puts out strong, lean canes up to 6 feet tall.  She is one of the roses that I cut back to about 4 feet each fall so that the long canes don't whip about in the Kansas wind.  Sge is also one of the roses I am most wary about being around; the thorns are wicked, much like the 'Robusta' parent, and really reach out to grab idle bystanders.  Fragrance is moderate in my garden, but reports on the Internet range from little fragrance to very fragrant.

 

If 'Rugelda' has a unique feature that sets it apart, however, it has to be the perfect hybrid-tea-like form of the buds in contrast to the normal blowsy open form of other Rugosa's.  That beautiful red/yellow coloring of those buds does not hurt them either.  Take a good long look.   Don't you want one in your garden?

Perpetual Garden Fantasy

A recent post on Gardenweb.com threw me for a momentary loop, but it also turned my thoughts and outrageous fantasies in a new direction.  A simple post from someone talking about his Old Garden Roses being in the peak of bloom seemed innocuous until I thought, "Wait?  What?" and checked the date on the post, and found the date to be correctly listed as the end of November.  Further investigation, of course, revealed that the writer was based in Australia, where evidently early summer has just arrived.  Easy sometimes to forget that the world has gotten a lot smaller with the Internet, isn't it? 

  From: http://www.anbg.gov.au/gardens
/research/hort.research/zones.html

But dream with me a minute, won't you?  Imagine that suddenly you've won the lottery and have riches beyond your wildest dreams.  Planning to buy that yacht for around the world sailing?  Thinking about that trip to Egypt and the Orient to see the Seven Wonders?  Well, it occurred to me that a great choice to spend my unearned gains would be a second home, Down Under.  I suddenly have visions of two seasons of 'Madame Hardy' every year.  Two glorious summers of waves of Old Garden Roses with no need to wait around to see the browning buds and the onset of August blackspot.  Two periods of delicious fragrance from 'Madame Issac Pierre', 'Variegata de Bologna' and 'Salet'.  Two summers a year in the garden.  

And why stop there?  If it's a really big lottery win, homes in Texas, Kansas, South Dakota, and Canada might be in order as well;  four seasons of Madame Hardy in the northern hemisphere and then another season or two in the southern.  Just follow the wave of rose blooms northward, and at the northern end fly to the opposite pole of the earth and start over.  Or back to Texas again to see the succession of daylilies start up.  Bored as the perfect blooms of  'Madame Hardy' fade?  Just a short skip in the private jet and you're back to 'Harison's Yellow' again!  Think those surfers in the documentary "Endless Summer" had it good?  "Hey man, those 'Charles de Mills' blooms look pretty rad, dude" could become our new mantra.

'Ballerina' at Denver Botanical Gardens 06/24/10

I do have to confess it's not the first time a similar thought has occurred to me.  I've always joked with friends that when the rest of the world finally broke me, I would run away to a secluded cabin in Montana.  On a trip this summer to Denver Colorado in late June, I chanced to visit the Denver Botanical Gardens and came upon a most gorgeous display of old garden style roses. Thinking that I'd come across some new David Austin varieties that I'd never seen before, I took a long look at the ID tags and realized that I was seeing the same old garden roses that had bloomed in my garden a month earlier, at  roughly the same latitude, just at 5000 feet higher in altitude and one month later.  At that moment, my crumbling escape cabin in the Rockies got mentally surrounded by a few acres of imaginary roses. Blooming, healthy, disease-free imaginary roses.

While I'm dreaming, do you think it's too much to ask that the cabin would be in a magic deer-free zone of the mountains as well?         

Seeds of a Trellis Future

One of my fall projects, just completed, was to place another walkthrough trellis structure on the beginning of the path down from the back of my garden to the cattle pond, hoping to define that view and the walk as one of my garden entrance or exit points. My trellis's are certainly not things of beauty, made to take advantage of standard commercial lengths of treated posts, lumber, and lattice, but they are quite functional and easily built (and easily cemented into the ground so they won't blow away within the first week of creation). I already have one similar trellis at another point leading from the garden, covered from both sides with different varieties of Wisteria, but I was thinking for the second trellis of something more like a grapevine, or climbing rose.

Passion Flower /Maypop seeds

However, serendipity has stepped in and I've now decided that the second trellis will be covered with annual and perennial vines obtained for the perfectly affordable price of $0.  On one side, I'm going to plant seeds from a Passion Flower vine (Passiflora sp), obtained simply by picking up a mature fruit dropped in late September from the vines at the KSU Gardens. I cleaned these rather unique seeds with their golf-ball textured exteriors from the slimy fruit and dried and stored them.  At the Gardens, they completely cover a long stretch of chain-link fence and flower over a long summer season. Because of their size and perennial nature here, I suspect the species of which I purloined seeds is Passiflora incarnata, or the "Maypop," a common species in the southeastern US. This subtropical variety of this mostly tropical family is cold hardy to  -4°F (-20°C) before its roots die.  At least, finally, I'll have some passion in my garden and be able to enjoy the fruit of it.

  

Hyacinth Bean Vine seeds

On the other side, I'm going to plant some Hyacinth Bean vine seeds gifted recently by a fellow Master Gardener.  The Hyacinth Bean vine (Dolichos lablab) is a fast-growing annual with maroon sweet-pea type flowers that blooms in mid-summer.  It is certainly not a new find for the world (it's also known as Indian Bean, Egyptian Bean, Chinese Flowering Bean, and Pharaoh Bean), but I'd never heard of it myself until the beans were thrust into my hands at a local meeting.  I also had to resort to the Internet to lear about them, as I couldn't find them at all in my not-inconsiderably-sized reference library. Hyacinth Bean is drought resistant, and the only cultivation tip that it seems to need is to soak the seeds overnight before planting (which I would do with any bean seed as a matter of habit anyway).  It is reportedly used as food for both humans and livestock in some parts of the world, but several sources caution that the beans (that look like small ice cream sandwiches) must be boiled carefully, changing the water twice during cooking, to allow one to avoid the toxic cyanogenic glycosides they contain.  I don't know about you, but I'm not about to provide Mrs. ProfessorRoush any poisonous beans that I expect her to feed back to me.  I don't think I've done anything that might lead her to a simple cooking "mistake", but I always find it better not to tempt fate when one can avoid it.