Turning Inward--Home and Garden Solace

Out in the greenhouse, I went to pull something I thought was a withered bud off Hibiscus "The Path."

It was not a plant part. It was a huge female Bold Jumping Spider (Phidippus audax). And she had something in her jaws.  A brown marmorated stinkbug! I cannot imagine eating one of these, but maybe if you avoid the stink glands, you're good...This one was on a bud, sucking the life out of it, before its career was summarily ended by Ms. Phidippus.

I love jumping spiders. I hope this one makes a million babies. I'll put them all in my bedroom with the orchid collection. I let jumping spiders sit in my hand and zoop around on my arms and I have never, ever had one try to bite. No, they look up at me as if they understand that I am their friend.

I've had a bad bug year in the house. Zillions of Asian multicolored ladybugs. And way too many  brown marmorated stinkbugs. I hate them both with a passion. Here's what stinkbugs do to my orchid flower spikes INSIDE MY HOUSE. They pierce them and suck all the juices. This would have been an Encyclia cordigera flower spike with 5 incredibly fragrant lilac flowers on it, but for ONE stinkbug that I found on it. Ladybugs will pierce and chew orchid spikes too! I haaaate them so.

In past years, I bought yards of pale green tulle netting and made growing bags for the plants. It was a real pain because the stinkbugs and ladybugs still managed to find their way in. 

This year I hit on a more efficient protective device. It's Saran wrap, taped around the stem of the flower spike, with plenty of room for the buds to grow inside their makeshift protective bag.

It's ugly as hell, but it works. I have to look at bagged flower spikes for months. But oh, when they bloom! It'll all be worth it. 

In years past, before ladybugs and stinkbugs. This, my friends, is what's at stake. Encyclia cordigera:

Not only are they cool looking, they smell like muguet in heaven.

For some reason, stinkbugs leave Phalaenopsis bud spikes alone. They like to kill off rare orchids instead. Here's a fabulously graceful, full spike of 13 on its way. I've had this one for about five years. I remembered to use  orchid fertilizer late this winter. Duh. They do better if you feed them!

Next day, more are open. It's that ever-changing thing I love about growing plants. Checking in on them, seeing what's changed. Seeing the results of a well-timed feeding.

I like this strangely colored mini. It's more blue than magenta.

And this little clownface opened yesterday, and made me laugh. The whole plant isn't 5" across.

Speaking of mini, I'm in love with this supertiny aroid, Syngonium podophyllum "Mini Pixie."

The plant to the far left is the mother plant. I've had it since I took a cutting off my niece's plant, Thanksgiving 2017. And it still isn't 4" tall. I've split all these babies off it, and each one makes a gorgeous little specimen, variegated broadly with white. They're like microminiature caladiums. I have heard that people use this plant in fairy gardens. This is not a fairy garden, LOUISE. It is a planter with some very small plants and an oversized toad in it. Because Homey don't do fairy gardens. Well, I will put a toad in a planter, but that's as far as it goes. 

Another thing I'm growing in the house is sprouts. Many kinds. My very favorite, though, are sunflower. These are ready to harvest. You start them by sprinkling black oil sunflower seed atop moist potting mix, vermiculite or orchid mix, and you cut them off at soil level with a scissors when the shells finally pop off. It only takes about 10 days to get them to harvest. If you let them grow too long they'll get true leaves, and those are hairy, and not so good to eat. But the nutty flavor when you harvest them right after the shells pop off is amazing. So, so good. Anyone can do this. You don't have to live in the country! Just put them near a sunny windowsill and they'll turn into food.

The lettuce plants in the tower room ranch all bolted when Phoebe came home, but we got maybe six big salads out of them before I yanked them out of their planters. New understudies in the greenhouse here. I've got the planters all refreshed and ready. I'll grow them on the front porch from here on out, until October/November, when I'll have a new cohort ready for the winter tower room fun.

Outdoors in my shade bed, I'm watching these Virginia bluebells. When they are in full bloom, I figure the woodland plants will be, too. Then it'll be time to hit the trail! This year, I'll have both kids and Shila (at a distance) with me. Bliss. Heaven. 

Our daffodils have been absolutely spectacular this year. 

Phoebe's been making elegant bouquets. She says we have 13 varieties. I have never bought fancy bulbs. I have, however, dug a few here and few there at the margins of old cemeteries and abandoned homesteads, preferring to shop the heirloom section of the Earth's variety store.

Many firsts this year. We've tackled a bunch of spring chores much, much earlier than usual, simply because the weather seems finally to be breaking a bit, and we're here, and I have help and the time to do it.
The vegetable garden is cleaned up (with a team of three!), fully tilled, and I planted the peas this morning!! In order to get this done, I had to get the bonsais out of there.  I heel the bonsais into the vegetable garden in early winter. I take them out of their pots, dig a pit and sink them about a foot below ground level, and they do just fine. These are the small ones.

The big maples are getting really big.  I-can-hardly-lift-them now big. The one on the left is 43" tall. The right-hand tree, also my oldest at about 37 years, is about 38" tall. Scale is deceptive here. 

I'm so excited to see them leaf out slowly. It's the most beautiful thing to watch. Sometimes I'm so busy in spring I can't even get them potted before the leaves unfurl. This spring is different. I'm busy, but with different things. The things that fill my heart. Getting these trees out where I can talk with them and watch them change every hour is the thing.

Right now, this is my best looking tree. But things change.



This smaller one has real potential. I love that sideways sweep it has.



I've only got four potted maples to tend now. You may remember I sent the fifth out the meadow to become what it was born to be. It was so dang big, and it was trying to get out of its pot, getting taller and taller. I gave it a bigger pot and it started sending out crazy straight sprouts, headed for the stars.



The obvious thing was to liberate it, and put it out by Bill, where it gets daily visits and watering when it needs some.

I was most gratified to have a shaft of sunlight fall on this tree just as I was composing its picture.

 It is so very beautiful now. I can't wait to see it become a full-sized tree, like the two liberated bonsais in our yard. I mean, I can wait.  I want to wait. It'll just be fun to watch it all unfold.

This western red cedar that I got in maybe 1987(?) when it was about 8" tall has grown into the most beautiful specimen, complete with sweet little blue cones in season. It was given to me by a gentleman I knew in Connecticut who I'm sure is long gone. He asked that I remember him as long as I have the tree. His name was Dodie and he was wonderful. Loved bluebirds and used to put orange halves on dowels around his yard for the orioles. It was in his yard that Vanna, my Savannah sparrow, was found, rendered flightless by a cat. I kept Vanna for 17 1/2 years, effectively defining the possible life expectancy of that species. That's how Dodie and I became friends. Vanna is long gone, too, but the tree and my memories live on.

Thirty-three years on, here's that cedar you gave me, Dodie. It's 21" tall now. 

Still taking care of it, and the bluebirds too. They are initiating clutches earlier than any year in the 27 I've been keeping records. Birds are always telling us things. Those of us who listen to them have to tell the rest of the humans. 

Orchid School: A Few Pointers

There's a whole lotta pottin' goin' on on Indigo Hill. 

Nothing like about 10 days in the 80's in mid-October to get me out and washing orchids! It's the kind of thing that I have to be in the right mood to do. If I'm in the right mood, it's fun. Not in the right mood: endless wet drudgery. 

What? You don't wash your orchids?  Every couple of years, I repot mine. I knock them out of their pots, rinse every bit of medium off their roots.  Before I put them in new medium and clean pots, I wash their leaves with a hard spray of cool water, rubbing away scale and the sugar deposits they leave. Then I clip off anything rotty: brown spongy roots, old withered pseudobulbs if they're the type of orchid that makes pseudobulbs. 

This year, I'm potting everything in nice long-staple sphagnum moss. It's the blonde stuff that comes in dried bricks. I'm using sphagnum not just because it's way cheaper than Aussie Gold. I'm using it because I've noticed that the best, firmest, greenest roots are forming in the orchids I've potted in sphagnum. They're healthy and not rotting because they've got ample air in this light weight, non-packing medium. For some fine pointers on sphagnum quality, go here.

Your results may vary. Sphagnum works well for me here in Ohio. If you live in a super-humid place,  you might do better with coco fiber medium or even bark. 

I'm sprinkling some Aussie Gold medium into the sphagnum, but overall it's 90% moss.  I soak the moss before packing it loosely around the roots. 

I took the opportunity to hack up a massive jewel orchid that was overgrown and flopping out of its pot. In the center is the mother plant. All around it are the long floppy stems I snapped off at their joints. I got 13 of 'em, and put them all to root in moist sphagnum in another container. 

I noticed that jewel orchids seem to send down roots to about 5" deep in the pot, then quit. The growth habit is to spread, laterally. So what they want is a pot that's wider than it is deep. Not having one of those, I put some  spacers in the form of deli containers and lava rock in the bottom of a big 10" pot, and heaped the sphagnum medium atop that. That should help get air to the roots, and encourage good drainage.

Mother plant to the left, nicely trimmed back and now with room to expand, and cuttings to the right. Discarded stems at bottom. I didn't use any rooting hormone because this is one badass orchid...I think those cuttings will root without any help. 

Add Bacon and sun, and you get happy Zick. I like to say that plant propagation is my only vice. I would happily develop some more, but opportunity is lacking. 

This is what jewel orchids do in midwinter! I love them best in candalabra bud.

But when those little white flowers open: Redonk!! It's too much.

The nice thing about this plant is the glorious velvety leaves with deep maroon reverse. Also the fact that it cannot be stopped, and I've never found an insect that bothers it. So I'm propagatin' on with my bad self.

I have 32 orchids, and tending to them all took parts of three days. I feel incredibly lucky to be able to spend the time it takes to tend them.  I'm not replacing my big orchids as they slowly pass on. I don't need more stuff to care for. But the collecting urge is still strong, so I'm downsizing. The only orchids I buy any more are the mini Phalaenopsis that I find at the grocery store. I love them so.  They fit on my kitchen windowsill: big plus.  I can add just one or two more without too much crowding. And the bunch of them in midwinter, going nuts on my kitchen sill, gets me through February.

If you're an orchid connoisseur, don't walk by ones that look like this one, below.  It may not be the most striking in color, but it's got a secret. It's got Phalaenopsis schilleriana in its parentage, which you can tell by its lightly mottled leaves, pale pink coloration, and heavenly incredible paradisiacal FRAGRANCE. Muguet from Venus.

These get to sit on my drawing board, and get picked up and inhaled about 60 times a day.

Since orchids in grocery stores rarely are warm or happy enough to emanate any fragrance, the other tipoff for P. schilleriana is the little moustache at the bottom of the flower's lower lip. 

This one's a real dandy--beautiful leaves. You probably won't find a beauty like this in a grocery store. But these are the characteristics that say it's going to be fragrant. Keep in mind that they may not emanate if the ambient temperature is under about 75 degrees. When mine bloom in mid-winter, they rarely emit any fragrance. But ohhh those midsummer and autumn blooms.There's a wee schilleriana at my elbow right now.

House Update: Moving Into the Red

What a blast, to upload these photos taken morning after morning, in varying light and glorious autumnal skies, to see the transformation of our shabby tired-looking house into a spiffy new barn. Before and After Remodeling was getting busy with it. 

Everybody liked this vining red mandevilla, and Aaron painted primer carefully around her 

as foreman Craig looked on.

I didn't realize I have such a penchant for hot colors until we painted the house red. This tangerine hibiscus makes my heart sing. Against barn red, hm. They're fighting with each other.

Maybe I'll pull her out a little farther from the siding. This is why we love container gardening. It's movable color, movable beauty.

In addition to having the house re-sided and painted, we were replacing nine windows. These windows had been shot for years. The seals were all broken, and they were permanently fogged when we bought the house in 1992. You couldn't see nuffin' out of them. They also had ugly metal dividers down the middle of the view that you couldn't see in the first place, which made it all even more discouraging. 

I countered this by making the inside view as terrific as I could. 

Foggy windows, fabulous orchids.

When time came to put the new windows in, I insisted on being present, to be the one to move the orchid collection out of the way, the one to put the plants back in their precise places. You know, because some like more sun than others, and some like to be cooler and shadier, and only Mother knows those things. Or cares.

Donny and Jessica, if I seem fussy about those orchids, which look like piles of straplike leaves now when they're dormant, this is why. They're well worth getting all fussy about. Obviously, orchids like fussy people like me to fuss over them.

So I moved all the orchids onto the bed to wait for the new windows to go in. One already had--see the window in the right corner?

We hit our only major snag with an inattentive Lowe's employee who somehow managed to turn our order for single-pane crank-out windows into dopey dual pane slot windows. Seven times over. I walked into the bedroom to find this. My view was bisected by a six-inch divider, the window split into two narrow portals. Ummm, no. Nonononono noooo. That's the kind of window you put in an institution where you don't want people crawling out of them and escaping over the fence in their backless gowns. Why would anyone, especially nature freaks, want a huge metal panel smack down the middle of their view? Ack! Send them back! Begone!

This mess-up by Lowe's would result in almost a month's delay in window installation. Rats. But these things happen in any big project. I took it in stride; I think Donny was a lot more worked up about it than I was. And there was plenty for the Before and After crew to do in the meantime. 

There was a hiatus while we worked at the Midwest Birding Symposium in mid-September. A lot happened while we were gone. We drove up the driveway on Sunday afternoon, holding our collective breath, to find this...aieee!!

Wow. Just wow. What a huge difference the horizontal Hardie board makes on the old part of the house. Running it all the way to the ground was definitely the right move. At long last, the two pieces of our intentionally crazy house are pulled together into one.

The other thing that jumped out at me when the house was finally transformed was the golden arbor vitae on the corner near the front door. Man, it looks so beautiful against the red. It looks like we planned it, to set off the house. I just thought it was pretty so I bought it and planted it when it was about six inches tall. But now it's all grown up with a brick-red foil to glow against, and it sings. So does the Japanese maple on the far left, which happens to be a bonsai that I planted out in the yard. It's about 30 years old, just like the ones in my collection, but it's 100 times bigger than they are. That's what a little root room will do for you.

The Bacon approves. More on The Bacon to come. He liked being part of this project!