Armchair Gardening

It's pretty cold and windy here today, with temperatures in the 40's.  I suppose I shouldn't complain, as so much of the country is buried in snow at the moment, but it still feels darned cold to me, and the wind just goes right through you.

So any gardening done today will be of the armchair variety.

This month's Garden How-To magazine shared some great links for gardeners, two of which I was especially interested in. 

Gardener's Supply Co. is one of my favorite catalogs, but I didn't realize, until I read about it in Garden How-To magazine, that they have a Kitchen Garden Planner.  

You can either choose one of their pre-planned vegetable gardens or you can create your own using their online tool.  

It's pretty neat -- you drag the vegetable or herb you want on to the garden plan and it spaces them out appropriately, so you know how many you can plant in your bed.  You can save your plans and print them out.  The site also provides all sorts of tips and information about planting and growing vegetables and more.

For the past few years in addition to blogging about my garden, I have kept a garden journal, with the specifics of what I plant, when I plant it, how it does etc. etc.

Well, that's always the plan anyway....  But it seems like every year I'm gung ho for a couple of months, then I slow down a bit and finally, but the dog days of summer, I have abandoned my garden journal entirely.

What starts out as a great idea ends up being barely legible because of my increasingly bad handwriting, and also not user friendly, as it's not easy to find information if I want to look up something I wrote about, but can't remember when.  In addition, at the end of the year, my dear husband kindly offers to scan every page for me, so I don't have to keep stacks of paper lying around.

So when I read in Garden How-To magazine about GreenThumbJournal.com,  I had to take a peek.   

The site allows you to keep a journal with as much or as little information as you want.  It's online, it's searchable and it's FREE.

You can log the weather, your observations, gardening activities etc.   You can also browse other people's journals, share photos of your garden etc.

I'm really going to try and keep up with this.  Even if I just do short "observation" posts, such as making a note of when something starts leafing out, I think it will give me a great record of the progress of the garden.  And it's a record I'll be able to access, not one that will get stacked up in the attic and not looked at again.

Do you have any favorite tools for planning and keeping up with your garden -- either digital or otherwise? 

Words and photographs by Jayne Wilson, Green and Serene, Jayne's Country Garden.

Welcome 2014 -- A Plan of Action

It's hard to believe I've been blogging about the garden I'm creating since 2010.  And now here we are in 2014.

I have to admit I let it slip a bit in the past year.  In my first year of blogging I posted 90 times! That may have over achieving a bit, and the next two years I posted around once a week.

Last year I only posted 35 times!  As I said, I let things slip.  

I think I actually let the gardening slip a bit too.  There were things that probably should have been pruned back to encourage more growth etc. that just didn't get done. Weeds were allowed to take hold where they weren't wanted etc.

I've been lucky enough to have some time off work between Christmas and New Year's and was able to spend a little time doing some clean up in the garden.

I didn't want to completely rip everything out, because I wanted to leave some cover for the birds, and to leave some seed heads standing.  But I got some tasks done like trimming back the milkweed etc.

I find if I do a little bit at a time, those little bits add up and eventually things get done.  This year I'm going to apply that to my gardening too.

Instead of waiting until I have all day to take on a task, I'm going to take a few moments here and there and chip away at the task until it's done.  

I'm hoping that way, the garden will still look nice and I won't be a worn out. sweaty wreck.

It's not actually a New Year's Resolution, more a "Plan of Action" but I think the garden (and I) will benefit.

And along the way, I'll try and make a point of blogging about it on a more regular basis.

Starting with this short little post today.

The island bed looking frosty on Christmas Eve

I wish you all the best for you and your gardens for the coming year. I look forward to seeing your progress.

Words and photographs by Jayne Wilson, Green and Serene, Jayne's Country Garden.

Garden Bloggers Bloom Day - December 2013

 As usual, I had completely forgotten today, being the 15th of the month, was Garden Bloggers Bloom Day.  Garden Bloggers' Bloom Day, or GBBD is hosted by Carol at May Dreams Gardens and I only remembered about it when I saw a GBBD post on a blog I follow by Dorothy at Gardening with Nature.

Before I even read Dorothy's post, I had "rescued" a newly emerged Monarch butterfly that was lying on the ground near the bird baths I was filling.  It didn't look so good and when I put my hand down to it, it climbed on board.  So with this butterfly sitting on my hand, I looked frantically around the garden looking for a flower with some nectar for him.

Luckily I discovered that although most of the Dallas Red Lantana has succumbed to the freeze we had at Thanksgiving, there were still a few blooms in the sheltered area underneath the Southern Wax Myrtle.  I put the butterfly there and hoped he would be okay.
 

 Then I read Dorothy's post and saw that, among many other plants she has blooming, she happened to have some hanging baskets of pansies.  It occurred to me that pansies would be a simple addition, they would offer some color in the garden that would probably last until spring and they would also offer nectar to any other butterflies that happen to pass through.  

So I hit the road to Lowe's and was pleasantly surprised to find that they hadn't completely cleared out the garden center and filled it with Christmas trees, as many places do.  I purchased some 12 packs of different colored pansies and headed home.

Incidentally, as I drove back into my subdivision, I saw a Monarch butterfly floating around the pansies planted in the bed at the entrance.  I like to think it was the one I had "rescued" earlier in the day.

I planted them in containers, among the frostbitten Lantana I'm hoping will come back in the spring, and I planted them in the island bed.

Not much, I'm afraid, but more than I had in the garden 12 hours ago -- and the nice thing is, they will last well into the spring.

Happy Garden Bloggers' Bloom Day!

Words and photographs by Jayne Wilson, Green and Serene, Jayne's Country Garden.

Project Feeder Watch

 One of the things I have enjoyed the past couple of winters is being able to participate in Project Feeder Watch, a citizen science project organized by the Cornell Lab of Ornithology. 

It's very simple to participate, there are just a few easy steps.

1) Choose your count site -- in my case, it was my own back yard, but I could also count at places like Kleb Woods where they have feeders if I wanted to, I suppose.

2) Choose your count days.  You have to select two consecutive days -- obviously, for me, the weekends are the natural count days.  The Feeder Watch program runs from November 9th through April 14 and you can count as often as every week if you wish.

3) To count the birds, you need to count the number of birds that are visible at one time.  So if you see three birds together, and then another two later on, you would log three, not five birds.  My problem was trying to count the number of house sparrows, of which there seemed to be hundreds, but I think I counted them out to 23 along the wall - by far the most prevelent bird in the garden this winter.

4) As the project is called "Project Feeder Watch", you have to make sure you only count birds that are attracted by your feeders, birdbaths, or other habitat you provide. So things like the these geese I photographed flying overhead back in November wouldn't be counted.

Nor would these Mourning doves, as they sit on the telephone wires.

But I *was* able to include this Cooper's Hawk who visited twice over the Thanksgiving weekend. 

OK so he was probably more attracted by the birds at the feeders than the actual feeders, but he was there, on the bird bath and he stayed long enough for me to walk up to within eight feet of him snapping photos, so I counted him!

I think the sparrow who had been holding his breath under the Savannah holly breathed a sigh of relief when I took a step too close and the hawk flew away. 

Find learn more about Project Feeder Watch and how to join in, visit http://feederwatch.org/

Words and photographs by Jayne Wilson, Green and Serene, Jayne's Country Garden.

New Bird for my Life List

I'll be the first to admit that I'm easily distracted. Case in point, this morning my husband and I were about to sit down and have a cup of coffee together when my eye caught something unusual out in the back garden.

It didn't look like the usual run of the mill birds that visit our garden, but I need to get new glasses, so I was unsure as to what it was.

Coffee forgotten, I ran to get my camera and proceeded to snap photos of it -- through the blinds!! 

Most of the photos were pretty lousy, with an area of blur at the top and bottom, caused by the aforementioned blinds I was trying to shoot through.  But a couple of them came out well enough for me to attempt an identification.

I love the search feature on WhatBird.com, that allows you to check off various attributes of the bird you are trying to identify, such as the location, it's shape, size, color and identifying marks, and comes up with a range of possible bird identifications.

I believe this to be a Loggerhead Shrike, Lanius ludovicianus, also called the Butcher bird.

Click on the pictures for a larger, more detailed version.

The Loggerhead Shrike feeds on small vertebrates and invertebrates using the hooked bill and is known for its habit of impaling prey on thorns or barbed wire.  So I'm guessing he wasn't in my garden because of the bird feeders....

 While I'm not organized enough to actually maintain a "Life List" as serious birders like to do, but it was sort of neat to see and identify a bird I had never seen before.  I'm also glad I was able to get a couple of photos of it.


Words and photographs by Jayne Wilson, Green and Serene, Jayne's Country Garden.

Brand New Monarch

We've had quite a lot of success with our certified Monarch Waystation, but with all the milkweed, caterpillars and chrysalises (chrysalii??) I've never actually seen a Monarch emerge.

Until today, that is.

I noticed yesterday that one of the chrysalises had turned color, so I knew it wasn't going to be long.

I went outside this morning, meaning to get a photo of the almost black chrysalis but when I got out there, I was too late for that particular photo, but right on time for the rest of the show!

I stood a couple of feet away, fascinated, and snapped several photos.

I was a little bit worried because although it was nice and sunny today, it was also quite windy and I thought the butterfly might get blown away before it was ready to fly.

In fact, after being buffeted around for half an hour or so, it did get blown down. I went outside and didn't see it so I assumed it had flown away, but actually my husband noticed it on the ground.  I put my hand down next to it and it crawled on to my fingers!

Thinking that what it needed was nourishment, I walked it over to the Dallas Red Lantana and set it down on the plant. The area had the double advantage of being in the sunshine and also protected from a lot of the wind.

It seemed to sit in one place for quite a while and I worried again that something was wrong, and that perhaps the episode would end the same way it did last Christmas when a Monarch emerged and was unable to fly.

 
But about 30 minutes later I went outside again and as I raised the camera to take another photo, the butterfly fluttered up and away over the wall.  Later still, I spotted a Monarch flying around in the garden looking strong and healthy.  I like to think it was "my" Monarch and that my humble little Monarch Waystation is making a difference.

We've still got three more chrysalises that I know of and I hope all goes smoothly for them too. 


Words and photographs by Jayne Wilson, Green and Serene, Jayne's Country Garden.

Repotting the Angel Trumpet

 In the corner of our garden, by the bird bath, we have a lovely bushy green Brugmansia, or Angel Trumpet. 

 It was in a container and was doing so well that I scarecely gave it a thought.  However, after the recent rains I happened to look closer and realize the container was full to the brim with water. It wasn't draining for some reason.

I carefully laid it on its side to let the excess water drain out and soon realized why it wasn't draining. At some point I had apparently moved it and forgotten to set the saucer back underneath it and the roots had grown through the drainage holes.

Because one of the roots had broken as I laid the pot over to drain it, I was left with no alternative but to repot it.  First, of course, I had to do some surgery to get rid of the big chunk of root that was holding the plant in the pot. (below you can see the rest of the root in the ground -- no wonder the plant had looked so nice and healthy, look at the size of the root!)

I repotted the plant in a huge container into which my husband had drilled some additional drainage holes on the side.  I'm hoping that will provide it with drainage while stopping it from rooting in the garden.

After that, it was up to the plant.  I watered it and set it back in the border and hoped it would make it. By morning it had dropped a ton of leaves, but the ones it retained looked okay.  When I got home from work, it looked awful, nothing but a few droopy leaves at the end of the stems.

Next morning it looked better and I checked the moisture level and gave it another drink.  By the time I got home from work it was drooping again.

I really thought I was going to lose it, but eventually it seemed to pull through.

It's just a shadow of it's former self at the moment, having lost so many leaves,  but it's got lots of new little leaves budding out so I'm hopeful that it will eventually look as lovely as it did before.  Perhaps it will even grace us with some blooms next year.

Wish us luck!


Words and photographs by Jayne Wilson, Green and Serene, Jayne's Country Garden.