Hi! We're Here!

Imagine that your doorbell is ringing early on a Sunday morning when you are just trying to start the day quietly and calmly with the newspaper and a little quality time with Mrs. ProfessorRoush (okay, not the actual latter person, but somebody else close to you).  And it turns out to be your persnickety insert here (parents, brother, sister, mother-in-law, cousin etc.) arriving unannounced for their visit several weeks early.  And you haven't cleaned the house or made up their room yet and the yard needs mowed and the dishes are piled in the sink and the dog left you a present on the dining room rug.

Think about all that for a while and you'll have a small inkling of how I felt yesterday when Mrs. ProfessorRoush called to tell me that my new roses had come in and asked me what I wanted her to do with them.  Yipes!  Like many other rose-lovers, I had jumped at the 50% off sale that Heirloom Roses announced a week or two back and I ordered seven rose bands at that time.  Yes, I knew that it was the wrong time of the year to order roses for planting in Kansas.  I was counting on slow order processing in a time of increased demand, and on the promise by Heirloom that "once my order was reviewed by staff, I would receive an updated confirmation with details on the expected shipping date and the official order number."  I planned to follow through on their offer to make adjustments to the shipping date, if necessary, once they informed me of the likely time of arrival. 

There was, however, no followup email confirming the order, and now I've got to figure out how to keep seven baby roses alive indoors (which I'm not very good at) until the +100F heat wave breaks here in Kansas (which may take until the end of August at this rate!).  Planting these greenhouse grown plants outdoors right now would be approximately equivalent to applying a blowtorch to their tender leaves.  I would expect their survival time to be numbered by hours, whether I placed them in shade or in sun and regardless of watering schedule.  So, indoors they are and indoors they'll stay for, at the least, several weeks while the calendar moves closer to the Autumn Solstice. An incredibly sunny window, an old aquarium, and, I'm certain, some chemical fungal preventatives will be required.   On the plus side, these are incredibly vigorous and healthy looking plantlets, perhaps the best that I've ever received by mailorder from any nursery.  Even with that, I'll be lucky if the seven innocent little green creatures aren't seven brown sticks before I get them outdoors.

The names of my new roses, for the interested, are 'Amiga Mia', 'AppleJack', 'Chorale', 'Gentle Persuasion', 'Fruhlingsmorgen', 'Scabrosa', and 'Souv du President Lincoln'.  Yes, I'm still on a Griffith Buck rose kick. Thank God I showed some uncharacteristic restraint and narrowed my initial list down from 25 roses or so to just these seven infants.  Mrs. ProfessorRoush would have been quite unhappy if her entire kitchen cabinet space had been converted into a nursery once again. 

Where the Ratibida Grows

Wandering the cow pasture this week, I noticed that a small clump of Ratibida columnifera, also known as Mexican Hat or Prairie Coneflower, has established itself just north of the fence line near my house. Finding Ratibida there was a surprising occurrence in my pasture, though after I thought about it, hardly a mysterious one.  Ratibida columnifera IS native to Riley County Kansas, as is a cousin, Ratibida pinnata (the Gray Coneflower).  The local Prairie Coneflower is, however, supposed to have only yellow-colored rays, as does the longer-rayed Gray Coneflower in this area.  The plants that I found, a small clump about 4-5 feet around, is identical to the species form found farther south, with yellow and red-brown rays dropping down from the disk as you can see pictured at the right.  

 

Don't lose any sleep over my find though, okay? This clump is a colony, I believe, of a Ratibida that I planted from purchased seed about 8 years ago in my garden beds. I grew it one year and one year only, hoping to see a large gorgeous, drought-resistant plant, but the small flowers and dusky coloring were disappointing so I spade-pruned it and never grew it again. This Prairie Coneflower has had the last laugh, though, because it re-seeded itself away from the controlling gardener's eyes. The newly found group exists in an area about 100 feet from the original planting, where at one time there was a cow watering tank and where the ground was previously chewed up by the cloven-hoofed dunderheads.  The disturbed ground probably gave this perennial plant a beachhead to grow in, and it has likely existed without my knowledge ever since.  At least I believe that to be the explanation because I've never found it growing elsewhere on my own or my neighbor's pastures.

I may have to give this formidable little creature another chance in my garden.  If it can survive in competition with the native prairie, through drought and cold and wind, unaided for a number of years, then it can probably do well in my native wildflower bed.  There, I might learn to appreciate it for what it is;  a survivor.

The DripMaster

I'm proud to announce to gardening civilization that I have joined that adventurous set of gardeners who have created actual irrigation systems all on their own. Yes, I am a newly-minted and self-proclaimed DripMaster. I have taken that first step onto the ever-downward path of water conservation and without so much as an "Obi-Wan" to guide me.  Before you know it, I am sure I'll be buying Birkenstocks and tie-dieing my old gardening shirts.

This past Sunday, in the early morning hours before the heat rose high enough to fry bacon on my landscape rocks, I opened the RainDrip Landscape Kit that I had purchased on sale and on a whim a couple of weeks back.  Breathless in my fear of the unknown, I laid out the myriad of "T-connectors" and "pressure-reducing" valves and "1.0 GPH drippers" and  quarter- and half-inch tubing and began to sort through the foreign language of the manual.  Like all "how-to" manuals, this one started with a suggestion to carefully plan the layout of the drip irrigation system on paper beforehand.  At that suggestion of course, like every good do-it-yourselfer, I laughed and tossed away the manual.  Who's got time for planning?

  

To experiment with drip irrigation, I chose a bed new to my garden this year, one that Mrs. ProfessorRoush and her smaller sidekick had complained was a step "too far"  in my secret plans to take over the yard.  This one currently has a few 'Matrona' sedum divisions and about nine new Griffith Buck roses that are struggling in the Kansas sun.  I've been hand-watering this area all spring and summer, turning aside my usual policy of letting my garden plants live or die on their own in the certain knowledge that it has been way too dry this spring to give the tiny roses a fighting chance.  Knowing that I've got 8 or 10 other roses already ordered to add to this bed, I thought setting it up for irrigation might save this gardener from withering in the coming August alongside the new roses. 

  

 
About an hour or so after starting, I had the entire system finished and dripping away, just before the temperature hit the 100F degree mark and I started dripping away alongside it.  The starter kit was quite sufficient to create the system for this small bed and yes, I planned for expansion to the new roses once they are planted.  In fact, the 50 foot main tubing in this kit was enough to start a system in another bed, but I ran out of drip heads before I could finish that one.  The bricks in the picture above are temporary until I can purchase stakes to hold the curves in place.  I think I'll be smart and not bury the thing under mulch until the new roses come in and are planted. And, since I know that you are wondering, No, I did not run drip irrigation to the 'Matrona' sedums in the bed.  I know that they'll do fine on their own without the extra watering and I am, after all, the DripMaster. 

Vindicated

Thank you, Associated Press. I know that I haven't talked about it here, but I've secretly spent the past month or so feeling like a complete gardening failure because of the lack of fruit set on my orchard trees and other fruiting plants.  Strawberries were first, lousy this year in both number and size.  Two cherry trees in my yard bore nothing.  The blackberries were a mediocre crop at best.  And, looking at the peach and apple trees, I've got one apple tree ('Winesap') with about one-third the normal number of apples and my 'Jonathan' and 'Gala' trees are completely apple-less.  And I can count 6 peaches on three trees.  Mrs. ProfessorRoush is quite upset, particularly at the loss of the strawberry crop, and I have caught her sneaking in produce from afar.

I have been trying to assuage my guilt about not harvesting a decent fruit crop by blaming it vociferously on our late frost this spring and the on dry fall and winter of last year. I have been avoiding entry to the part of my garden that includes the orchard. And I've been avoiding talking to other gardeners about their fruit harvests, fearful that I'll be proven inadequate by comparison and laughed at.  I was considering, for a time, wearing a scarlet "G" on my chest, the very symbol of gardening shame. Recently, the gardener's refrain of "it will be better next year or the one after that," has been constantly running through my head.

But this weekend the local paper ran an Associated Press story out of Lawrence, Kansas, and there it was in black and white; "A few days of subzero weather in late February has decimated the fruit tree crops in northeast Kansas, sharply reducing the apples, peaches...."   Ahhh, thank you Experts. near and far, for making it all better for the amateurs. They've officially blamed my lack of fruit on a phenomenon called "winter kill," below-zero temperatures that destroy the developing ovaries.  More importantly, I now know that everyone around here is in the same boat and we are all now free to commiserate and moan and gnash our teeth together, rather than hiding the knowledge of our insufficiencies in the closet with the family's eccentric Aunt and the funny Uncle. 

In the same article, the Experts blamed the strawberry loss on a different mechanism; a cool and wet spring followed by a sudden heat that scorched them just as they were ripening fruit.  Me, I don't care why it happened anymore, I just care that something or somebody other than the garden caretaker was to blame.  And I can tell Mrs. ProfessorRoush that it wasn't my fault and show her the article.  She'll believe that, won't she?