There's always something to do in the garden

How do I know? Well, this afternoon I locked myself out of the apartment with a bag of recycling in one hand and a bag of garbage in the other. The neighbors weren't home so I couldn't get at a spare key. I figured I had a couple of hours to kill until somebody came home from work or school. What to do?

Well, garden, obviously. But without my keys I couldn't get to the trowels and weeders and shovels and clippers in the basement. Now, normally I leave tools strewn everywhere. There must be dozens of pairs of pruners in the top 6 inches of my garden soil. But apparently I had been seized with a spasm of entirely uncharacteristic tidiness because I checked all my usual deposits and all I could find was a pair of gloves. From the evidence, it seemed I had put all my tools away where they belonged. I'll make sure I never do that again.

As a stopgap, I scrounged a plastic picnic knife from a recycling bin down the alley and went to work. I figure it was about as much gardening equipment as my ancestors in Africa had a few hundred thousand years ago. I could deadhead daffodils and tulips. I could clean up last year's dead stalks. My little plastic knife wasn't much of a weeder, but ladybells and creeping Charlie pull up pretty easily when the soil is moist, as it is now from our several days of rain.

And that magic gardening thing happened: For an hour and a half or so I forgot all about every other thing and just concentrated on what I should do next, on the next weed to pull, on whether that sprout was a weed or a precious perennial, on noticing the swelling buds of the first lilies and the mock orange, on collecting some dead leaves to add a soupcon of carbon to the compost bin to balance the nitrogen from all the weeds I'd just pulled.

Kneeling and weeding, I spotted all sorts of new things. I had thought I was death to clematis, for example, but now I saw that two different plants I had long since given up on, one white and one lavender, are blooming in the lilac bushes. As with a lot of plants (and some people), I guess the key to success with clematis is to leave them the hell alone.

I rode a river of bright new ideas for things to divide or move. I was in no position to execute them without a trowel, any more than I could install the 50 or so plants that have been waiting for the rain to stop and me to get my head out of my resume long enough to get them in the ground or into pots. But sometimes the best bright ideas are the ones you are in no position to execute.

When a neighbor turned up with a door key it was almost a blow. I had a large mental stack of things I was supposed to be doing indoors and weighty things I needed to cope with, but I stole another half an hour in the garden (now armed with a digging knife) and got a few annuals tucked into a bed before I was reminded of a place I had to be.

This weekend, I won't be gardening either. All those plants on the patio will have to wait while I attend a gathering of garden bloggers from all over the country who are convening in Chicago this weekend. The irony is inescapable, but at least I'll be with people who can talk about gardening. It's supposed to rain again anyway.

Got a garden question? I recommend you call or e-mail the Plant Clinic of The Morton Arboretum in Lisle, the Master Gardeners of the University of Illinois Extension or the Plant Information Service of the Chicago Botanic Garden in Glencoe.

All contents of this post are copyright Beth Botts. Feel free to link or share a brief excerpt with a link, but please do not reproduce photos or any other part of this blog without my express permission.

A happy hosta saga

Recent correspondence:

To: Chicago Master Gardener volunteers
From: Beth Botts
Re: Hosta rescue

Come to the Chicago Master Gardener meeting at the Garfield Park Conservatory Tuesday evening, May 26, and get free hostas!

Or else!

In the back seat of my car I have approximately 9 gazillion hosta plants in very muddy plastic bags. After the meeting I will happily turn them over to any Master Gardener for school gardens, community gardens, personal gardens or, in fact, any purpose whatsoever.

Any hostas remaining in my car when I leave the Garfield Park Conservatory parking lot will be composted.

Do the right thing! Save a hosta! or six! or a dozen!

FAQ

What kind of hostas are they?

There are four varieties; I don't know the names because they were in my garden when I moved there. The majority have largish (not huge) green leaves, bloom with white flowers in midsummer and mature to clumps about 3 feet wide and 3 feet tall. Some have narrower, darker green leaves, get only about 18 inches tall and have lavender flowers quite late, like September. The other two are green-and-white variegated kinds; I don't remember when they bloom or what color.

Are they easy to take care of?

They're hostas. If you plant them in decently rich soil in part to full shade and water them until established, they can survive anything except Round-Up, nuclear holocaust or digging them up and composting them.

Are they good clumps?

They vary. As the afternoon wore on and the supply of plastic bags diminished the clumps got bigger. But they all are big enough to establish nicely in your garden.

Are they in good condition?

They should be. I left them in the car with the windows open and I think it's raining.

Do I have to plant them in a community garden?

No. You can plant them in a school garden, in your own garden, in your neighbor's garden, in your mother's garden or in the parkway. You can give them away or trade them for a plant you really want. You can hawk them at a stoplight. You can forget about them on the porch until they die and then compost the remains. I don't care. I just want them out of my car.

If I can't pick them up at the meeting, can I get them some other time?

No. I need the car for something else Wednesday. Any hosta left in the car dies.

Are you really that ruthless?

You betcha.

Why are the bags muddy?

I was digging up and dividing hostas in the rain. It was an inherently muddy situation.

Why were you gardening on Memorial Day?

It was too rainy for cookouts or parades.

Why did you dig up so many hostas?

I was looking for a place to plant a little hydrangea in a 4-inch pot, and I said to myself, "Well, if I just move that one clump of hostas," and one thing led to another. My yard is almost all shade and I have hostas like some people have mice.

Are there really 9 gazillion hostas in the car?

Yes. I counted.

You did not.

OK, I'm guessing, based on the fact that I used every single plastic grocery bag in my house and scientific studies have determined that the average number of plastic grocery bags in an American household is approximately 9 gazillion.

Why are the hostas in the back seat?

Because I should have gotten the hatchback.

After you dug up and divided enough hostas on the sidewalk to fill the back seat of a 1995 Honda Civic sedan up to the back window, was the sidewalk very muddy?

Did my neighbors put you up to this?

Where did you plant the hydrangea?

What hydrangea?

The happy ending: Despite torrential rain Tuesday evening, all the hostas were adopted in the parking lot, bound for community gardens as far away as University Park. Someday, the car may be vacuumed.

If you are interested in going through training to become a Master Gardener volunteer with the University of Illinois Extension, click here.

Got a garden question? I recommend you call or e-mail the Plant Clinic of The Morton Arboretum in Lisle, the Master Gardeners of the University of Illinois Extension or the Plant Information Service of the Chicago Botanic Garden in Glencoe.

All contents of this post are copyright Beth Botts. Feel free to link or share a brief excerpt with a link, but please do not reproduce photos or any other part of this blog without my express permission.

New gig with Chicagoland Gardening

I've just signed on to be a Senior Editor at Chicagoland Gardening magazine. That means I'll be consulting, writing some, brainstorming. Not a full-time gig, but I will be in the magazine (in a form still to be brainstormed about) starting in late summer.

For those of you who don't know, Chicagoland Gardening comes out six times a year and is available at bookstores, garden centers and Whole Foods or by subscription ($17.95 a year). Carolyn Ulrich is the editor, Bill Aldrich (ex-Chicago Tribune, like me) is the publisher. I've been a subscriber since they started the magazine more than 10 years ago.

The magazine's web site has a lot of excellent information: Chicago-area garden events, retail sources and public gardens. Give it a look.

Got a garden question? I recommend you call or e-mail the Plant Clinic of The Morton Arboretum in Lisle, the Master Gardeners of the University of Illinois Extension or the Plant Information Service of the Chicago Botanic Garden in Glencoe.

All contents of this post are copyright Beth Botts. Feel free to link or share a brief excerpt with a link, but please do not reproduce photos or any other part of this blog without my express permission.

Tribune column: Dividing daffodils

While I'm no longer on staff at the Chicago Tribune, I'm still writing a weekly column for the paper's House&Homes section. Here's a link to today's column. The top issue: Dividing daffodils.

Got a garden question? I recommend you call or e-mail the Plant Clinic of The Morton Arboretum in Lisle, the Master Gardeners of the University of Illinois Extension or the Plant Information Service of the Chicago Botanic Garden in Glencoe.

Crab apples and other memories of Hyde Park

A crab apple tree blooms on the Promontory Point by the lakefront in Hyde Park, May 2009.

Dropped by the old neighborhood last weekend and came across this crab apple tree, one of the last bloomers, against a background of the sparkling blue lake. The Promontory Point at 55th Street is the beating heart of the Hyde Park neighborhood, really, at least of the part of the neighborhood whose beating heart isn't the University of Chicago quadrangles. The Point is where Hyde Parkers walk, bicycle, meet, argue, protest, lie in the sun, argue, swim, barbecue, argue and gaze for hours at the far horizon of that blue lake.

Crab apple trees always make me think of Hyde Park. In the 1960s they started blooming all over the streets I walked on the way to school. They were being planted in an effort to replace all the grand old trees that had been torn down along with grand old houses in the urban renewal program. Crab apple trees are pretty tough and hardy; they grow fast; they make a big splash in the springtime; and they show the world that people in a community care enough to plant a tree.

My mother was one of a group of activist gardeners in the activist 1950s and and 1960s in Hyde Park. She and I were in Hyde park last weekend to drop the 50th anniversary version of the Hyde Park Garden Fair, since she was one of the original members of the Garden Fair Committee of the Hyde Park Kenwood Community Conference back in 1959.

Mom makes it clear she was not the leader of the effort--she gives that credit to Sophie Rudin and Molly Salmon, both gone--but she was one of the group that set out to make gardening easier and more accessible to citydwellers in a neighborhood where there wasn't a garden center for miles around. They commandeered the central mall of a newly built shopping center for a weekend in May, filled it with plants for which they had shopped at area nurseries and dispensed advice and help along with the annuals, perennials, shrubs and crab apple trees. Mom, like all the moms, volunteered her kids to schlep plants and run errands. I have very early garden fair memories.

The garden fair still takes place in that same spot and is a major fundraiser for the community conference, which has been a center of community activism (read: arguing) since the early 1950s. There's a mum and bulb sale in fall too. The garden fair is still an all-volunteer effort, and it still attracts children, university students, old Hyde Parkers, new Hyde Parkers, people who have been buying their geraniums at the fair for 50 years and people who didn't know they wanted a garden until they walked by all those plants on the way to the grocery store next door, and found a neighbor who was there to help them figure out how.

Got a garden question? I recommend you call or e-mail the Plant Clinic of The Morton Arboretum in Lisle, the Master Gardeners of the University of Illinois Extension or the Plant Information Service of the Chicago Botanic Garden in Glencoe.

All contents of this post are copyright Beth Botts. Feel free to link or share a brief excerpt with a link, but please do not reproduce photos or any other part of this blog without my express permission.

Hyde Park Garden Fair, May 2009

Hear me on the radio Sunday, May 24

I not only garden and write, I talk. Some people think I talk too much. But I don't talk anywhere near as much as Mike Nowak, which is why he's a radio host and I'm not.

Nonetheless, I will be trying to get a word in edgewise on his gardening-and-greening radio show this Sunday on WCPT, 820-AM, between noon and 2 p.m.

Mike says he is going to make a concerted effort this Sunday to get people to call in with gardening questions, which he and I will answer to the best of our ability. So if you have questions about your plants or your garden, have them ready and call 773-838-WCPT (773-838-9278) between noon and 2 p.m. Sunday. If we don't have the answers, we'll make something up.

Think of it as the "Car Talk" of Chicago gardening.

Got a garden question? I recommend you call or e-mail the Plant Clinic of The Morton Arboretum in Lisle, the Master Gardeners of the University of Illinois Extension or the Plant Information Service of the Chicago Botanic Garden in Glencoe.

All contents of this post are copyright Beth Botts. Feel free to link or share a brief excerpt with a link, but please do not reproduce photos or any other part of this blog without my express permission.

Radishes are a crunchy spring delight

Among the delights of my porch pots are radishes. They are among the most satisfying vegetables you can grow because they happen so fast. Three or four weeks, depending on the variety, the conditions and the weather, will get you from a seed to a peppery, crunchy snack.
Apart from baby greens such as lettuce and spinach eaten when young, there's hardly another edible plant that comes so close to instant gratification.

A lot of people don't plant radishes because they dislike the overbearing pungency of the large radishes they occasionally encounter as restaurant garnishes or in relish trays. But there is a wide range of radish varieties, from the very mild, sweet and barely peppery to extremely zippy. They aren't all red; there are purple and white ones, too. If you browse catalog Web sites such as Cook's Garden, Renee's Garden Seeds, Johnny's Selected Seeds and John Scheepers Kitchen Garden Seeds you can find a radish to suit you. I like them pretty snappy and enjoy their bright, fresh crunch.

Mild radishes are a great crop for children because they get something to eat from a seed so quickly. But don't choose a strong variety that will be a yucky vegetable turnoff. Most radishes get stronger-flavored as they age, but children are unlikely to leave them in the ground that long.

The ones I planted in the porch pots are a French variety with a white bottom, which, if I can bring myself to leave them alone long enough, will become more thumblike than round. Sort of like fingerling radishes. That makes them easier to slice; you get more fairly uniform slices per radish.

Another thing many people don't seem to know about radishes is that you can cook them. I like to slice them about 1/8 inch thick and then saute them in butter until there are just touches of brown. Add a little salt and pepper, and you're golden. Very French, I'm told. You also can toss radishes with olive oil and roast them alongside a chicken as you might carrots, potatoes or turnips. The bright red color of radishes will fade during cooking but they take on a sweetness and their pungency often is moderated.

The leaves also are edible. They share the peppery quality of the roots. When very young, just a couple of inches long, they can be added to salads. When they get older, they will need a little cooking. Young radish greens can be simply sauteed. But I often steam greens in the microwave in a loosely covered container with a tablespoon or two of water (just briefly for young ones, up to 10 minutes for tough fall and winter greens such as kale) until they are barely wilted but still bright green. Then I saute them briefly in oil in which I have already sauteed garlic and sprinkle on a bit lemon juice on for a finish.

Of course one of the great virtues of the radish is that it can be planted very early in the spring, in the first week of April or so, as soon as the ground can be worked. Like other early spring crops, the seeds take a while to germinate, but once they do, they gallop. You can direct-sow radish greens in a Chicago spring in the same place where you plan to plant your tomatoes or peppers and squeeze out a crop before the soil is warm enough for the summer vegetables. Radishes really need full sun, so they are maturing a bit slowly in my porch containers, where they are shaded by the balustrade.

When you pull radishes, it's wise to cut the greens from the roots and store the two parts separately. A big bunch of radishes with greens is photogenic, but as long as the root is attached to the top it will keep trying to supply the plant with water and nutrients. Sever that connection and the roots will keep longer--which is why, in grocery stores, radishes usually are sold without their tops.

Photo: The first young radishes from my porch pots.


Got a garden question? I recommend you call or e-mail the Plant Clinic of The Morton Arboretum in Lisle, the Master Gardeners of the University of Illinois Extension or the Plant Information Service of the Chicago Botanic Garden in Glencoe.

All contents of this post are copyright Beth Botts. Feel free to link or share a brief excerpt with a link, but please do not reproduce photos or any other part of this blog without my express permission.

Springtime in Chicago

Last weekend we had frost warnings. Today we might flirt with 90 degrees. That's spring in Chicago for you.

The distinguishing characteristic of Chicago weather is not that summers are so hot or that winters are so cold or that we get a lot of snow. Any of those things might happen, or not. Our climate is characterized above all by extremes and extreme variability. We share the "continental climate" of the Great Plains--meaning we are far from the moderating influence of an ocean current, so storms and winds and battles between high pressure and low pressure have nothing to tell them to keep it down. They can let 'er rip.

We have the added complications of Lake Michigan and the Great Lakes, which are a heat sink (in winter) and a cold sink (in summer) that creates a barrier to weather moving from west to east. Cool air coming from Iowa crashes into a reservoir of warmer air over the lake, and a noisy disagreement ensues. Or vice versa.

And because the Chicago area is so large it is remarkably varied, with the narrowest range of possibilities near Lake Michigan and a much more exposed and rigorous climate 20 or 30 miles away. There can be almost a month's difference between the last average frost date near the lake--as early as late April--and the average last frost date out in the far western or northwestern suburbs. And even within those numbers is a lot of variation: "average frost date" is just an average, and like all averages it can conceal some funky numbers. One year's very late or very early frost can skew the average quite a bit.

And that's not to mention every garden's microclimates. A spot at the foot of a slope is less exposed to wind that one at the top. A balcony on the east side of a building is more protected from the prevailing wind than one on the west. My narrow garden, on the north side of a 4-story building with a 2-story building and a fence on the south side, gets hardly any sun but is very sheltered. The narrow bed out by the garbage cans, on the other hand, gets lots of sun but dries out much faster.

What does this all mean for gardeners? Four big things:

1. Know your garden. Watch it. Pay attention to where the wind comes from, how fast soil dries out, how the sun moves, where the shadows fall. Pay attention to weather readings from as close to your garden as possible -- the O'Hare temperature means less to me, for instance, than the Midway temperature, and the lakefront temperature means very little.

2. Mulch. Apart from its many other virtues--adding organic matter to the soil, discouraging weeds--an organic mulch is a great protector and insulator, and does much to smooth out the jagged variations of Chicago weather. It holds in moisture against drying winds and insulates the soil against temperature swings. It will help plants stay dormant in spring when the weather gods mischievously pop a 60-degree day in winter between bone-chilling freezes and will keep soil cooler in August when it feels like it's still above 90 at midnight.

3. Choose native plants as much as possible. One of the things that Midwestern natives are adapted to is crazy weather. They have learned over 10,000 years of evolution not to take a January thaw seriously and to grow long, deep roots that can survive an August drought. You don't have to be a purist about this, but expect to have to fuss more over many non-native plants than over most natives, and expect to lose more of them.

4. Keep a long memory. Most people don't remember much past last winter or last summer, so they are always shocked when it's "colder than normal" or "hotter than normal." But around here the only thing that is normal is wild fluctuation, from week to week and from year to year. To be a Chicago gardener is to keep your knees loose and your mind open and to expect anything. And remember: Any time a plant dies, it's a chance to try something new.

Got a garden question? I recommend you call or e-mail the Plant Clinic of The Morton Arboretum in Lisle, the Master Gardeners of the University of Illinois Extension or the Plant Information Service of the Chicago Botanic Garden in Glencoe.

All contents of this post are copyright Beth Botts. Feel free to link or share a brief excerpt with a link, but please do not reproduce photos or any other part of this blog without my express permission.

Green Festival is pretty pale

I volunteered as a University of Illinois Extension Master Gardener Sunday at the Green Festival at Navy Pier. I enjoy my occasional sessions of answering garden questions as a Master Gardener; there's always one you can't answer right away, and the research means you learn something. We also were demonstrating how to dry herbs in paper bags, and it's nice to spend a few hours surrounded by the aroma of rosemary, thyme and basil.

After my replacement arrived, I had time to walk the show, which I didn't get a chance to attend last year. I was unimpressed. There were booths from environmental organizations and education programs scattered here and there, but overall it seemed like a big shopping mall, complete with food court.

Sure, the jewelry, clothing, fancy soaps and cheese were all locally made or fair-trade. The kitchen countertops were made from recycled glass. And the Best Buy exhibit was showing off compact fluorescent light bulbs and TVs that use less energy. Some of the talks focused on practical steps toward a more sustainable way of living, though many more seemed to be about how to make yourself feel good in one way or another.

Overall, it seemed less an event to focus on real environmental issues and action and more of a pretext for a sort of morally pretentious consumerism. "Save the world by shopping" is a proposition that didn't go over well with me when President Greorge W. Bush made it after the Sept. 11 attacks, and it doesn't go over any better coming from the other end of the political spectrum.

And apart from us and our herbs, and the booth of Pizzo and Associates, the natural areas restoration firm out in Leland (I had a nice chat with Jack Pizzo), there was hardly a plant to be found. The "green" in "Green Festival" is not the kind that comes from chlorophyll.

Got a garden question? I recommend you call or e-mail the Plant Clinic of The Morton Arboretum in Lisle, the Master Gardeners of the University of Illinois Extension or the Plant Information Service of the Chicago Botanic Garden in Glencoe.

All contents of this post are copyright Beth Botts. Feel free to link or share a brief excerpt with a link, but please do not reproduce photos or any other part of this blog without my express permission.

For a gardener and a garden, time to start growing

Finally, the sun has come out. What a dark, damp spring it's been! Until now, there's hardly been a day that wasn't too cold and wet to work the soil. It has been too chilly for most annuals and vegetables to be planted, even in my many pots.

I have coleus and plectranthus cuttings that I've been nursing along all winter burgeoning off the kitchen windowsill, lanky tomato seedlings crawling up from under their fluorescent lights and tender young elephant ears reaching longingly for the sun outside the windowpane. But it has just kept raining.

If you can't garden, I thought, maybe it's time to blog. So here I am.

I'm a longtime newspaper reporter and editor. Well, we know how it's going with newspapers. So it's time for me to find new adventures in writing, gardening, greening, horticulture, sustainability, whatever comes next.

I know it will have something to do with plants. The day I learned my life was making a sharp turn, I came home and watered those tomato seedlings. The next evening, my dining room piled with the hastily bundled baggage of a career, I couldn't go to bed without pinching back the coleus plants to keep them bushy.

After a long night I rose hoping for hours of cleansing, exhausting, distracting, mind-clearing gardening. But it rained. All I could do was thin the lettuce, radishes and spinach that were holding space in the 3rd-floor porch containers until I could plant the tomatoes and make myself a spirit-lifting salad of tender young spring greens with a lemon vinaigrette.

A day or two later I went out to visit my mother in Indiana. Sure, I got the hugs and cookies and bountiful advice. But then she hustled me into the car to rescue some wild lupine, the preferred plant of her beloved Karner blue butterflies, from a house-building site (yes, there still are a few). It was raining (of course) and I struggled so hard to dig nice big clumps that I broke her shovel handle. We slipped and slid and got stuck with spines from the native prickly pear cactus. She reminded me that last year this time we were at another construction site rescuing spring beauty. We dripped and splashed and laughed.

There's spring beauty all over my garden this year. It doesn't know its circumstances have changed and it's suddenly in the suburbs. It just knows it has rich soil with plenty of beneficial microorganisms, not too much sun, not too much shade. It's found a great new spot and it's thriving.

That's what gardening will do for you. It reminds you that life goes on. A garden needs you when you feel unneeded and anchors you when the world is aswirl. No matter what else is going on in your life, there's something to do in the garden.

The plants don't care who you work for; they don't know or care if they have a gardener at all. But they can tell if they have the right soil, enough sun, enough water. They know when they've landed in the right spot. And a gardener who can make a spot right can be rewarded with great things--even wildflowers blooming on what once was itself a suburban construction site.

This is my chance to find a new spot, to see what new conditions I can thrive in. It's my new spring. And the signs are good: there's been plenty of rain, and now the sun is out.

Photo: Spring beauty (Claytonia virginica) in the garden. Photo by Beth Botts.

Got a garden question? I recommend you call or e-mail the Plant Clinic of The Morton Arboretum in Lisle, the Master Gardeners of the University of Illinois Extension or the Plant Information Service of the Chicago Botanic Garden in Glencoe.