Speaking on pruning to garden clubs

Back from the Garden Writers Association annual meeting in Raliegh, N.C. It was an intense, garden- and learning-filled experience that has inspired a bunch of posts that so far are all on my head.

But right now, after sleeping for 12 hours to make up for days of sleep deprivation (garden writers are an early-rising, hard-charging bunch), I have to 1) go buy some groceries for breakfast and 2) get ready for my talk tonight on "Pruning: The Good, the Bad and the Ugly," to a meeting of the Palos Heights Garden Club. It's at 6:30 p.m. at the Lake Katherine Nature Center, 7402 Lake Katherine Drive, Palos Heights.

Here's the writeup I did for their newsletter:

"As leaves fall, many gardening chores wind down, but prime pruning season is yet to come. Beth Botts, longtime Chicago Tribune garden writer and senior editor at Chicagoland Gardening magazine, speaks on shrub pruning technique, tools and timing. She'll take a close look at a couple of shrubs that seem to confuse some gardeners, including hydrangeas and lilacs."

I'll also talk on the subject at 1 p.m. Oct. 7 at a meeting of the Garden Club of Oak Park and River Forest at the 19th Century Club, 178 Forest Ave., Oak Park.

Hope to see you there!

A peek at a Chicago organic greenhouse

Here's a video about the Kilbourn Park Organic Greenhouse, a mecca for Master Gardeners and Chicago vegetable gardeners in general. Fab spring tomato transplant sale. Run by the mighty Kirsten Akre. Find out about their activities at the greenhouse's blog.

Thanks to Sue Gasper of the Chicago Master Gardeners for the video link.

Rain at last

We've finally had rain -- and the right kind: long, slow and soaking. I counted less than an inch in my yard, but that's an inch more than we've gotten in the last month or so. I take full credit: I finally broke down and set up a sprinkler on the lawn yesterday, first time I had watered the lawn all season. So of course it rained. You're very welcome.

I don't think anything, even the grass, has really suffered much from a few rainless weeks. We had so much rain earlier in the summer that there was a deep reservoir of water in the soil. I just succumbed to a primitive, atavistic urge to water the lawn. I feel like an ex-smoker who's backslid. But hey, the president is having trouble quitting too.

Here's hoping that there is plenty of good rain the next couple of weeks, and then a couple of nice dry weeks in early October so I can plant the couple of hundred bulbs I have already accumulated. I have planted bulbs in the rain; I have planted bulbs through melting snow in a warm spell in January. But that is not my choice of bulb-planting conditions. Dry and sunny, between 50 and 55, with migrating geese honking overhead, please.

Plants do need watering in the fall. A lot of people sort of give it up on it as the season dwindles and the plants lose their blooms and leaves. But even though the top growth has died back the roots are still growing. Evergreens resist winter kill much better if they have lots of water stored in their needles and root systems. Any tree or shrub planted in the last two years, and any perennial planted this year, needs diligent watering going into its first winter, because it probably hasn't had time to grow a big enough system of feeder roots to glean enough water from rainfall.

Bulbs need watering too. They go into the ground dormant, but then they need to immediately start growing roots, I was recently told by Scott Kunst, who owns Old House Gardens in Ann Arbor, which sells heirloom bulbs. They need those roots to store enough water to get going in spring. And if they don't get water in fall they can't grow the roots. So it's important to plant bulbs in well-drained soil, but it's also important to water when you plant them and keep watering regularly until the ground freezes.


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.

Teachers: Think about bulbs

Many teachers like the idea of making gardens part of their teaching. Gardens have a lot to teach -- about plants, about soil, about science and math, about patience, about responsibility, about food. And many teachers, when they think garden, think vegetables. They want to use a school garden, like the White House vegetable garden, to teach about nutrition and the pleasures of wise eating. And they figure the appeal of growing something you can eat will keep kids interested.

But there are practical problems with this approach. One is that many teachers don't know much about gardening and don't know where to start. Vegetable gardening isn't rocket science, but there is a learning curve. And the easy vegetables that are best for beginners -- radishes, lettuce -- are not high on the average kid's list of favorite snacks.

Another big problem is that the normal Chicago-area school year doesn't fit well with the vegetable-growing season. Assume that you start vegetable seeds in the classroom in the winter to plant outdoors in the spring. Seed-starting is magical for kids -- watching a little bitty brown nubbin turn into a little green sprout on the windowsill (especially if you do the seed-starting in transparent plastic containers so they can watch the roots grow).

But when it's planting-out time in Chicago in the middle of May, the school year is almost over. The kids will never see a crop. The vegetables will likely die over the summer with no one to water and weed.

And the few vegetable species that you can plant outdoors earlier in spring so kids have a chance to eat what they grow are . . . well, lettuce and radishes. And spinach. Yum.

To ease these difficulties, I have two suggestions:

1. Ask for help. The University of Illinois Extension educators and Master Gardeners volunteers help a lot of school gardens get started (find your local office here). They can help you figure out what it's practical to try. The National Gardening Association has a fine web site on the topic, kidsgardening.com. And out of Lake County, Anne Nagro runs GardenABCs.com, a forum about learning gardens for parents, teachers and volunteers.

The Chicago Botanic Garden has curriculum help, training courses for teachers and an online School Garden Wizard to help with the planning. The extension also has a site on planning a school garden.

2. Try bulbs. The kids can't eat them, but they can certainly plant them. They're easy, they're pretty and they coincide perfectly with the school year: You plant them in October and they bloom, depending on species, from March through May.

You don't need a lot of space or even a plot of ground; with the OK of the principal and the janitor, bulbs might be tucked into the existing school landscape. Or perhaps (with permission) into a nearby park.

Imagine a cluster of crocuses planted right by the school door, poking their tender shoots up even while there's still snow on the ground. Imagine the kids watching and monitoring and measuring and anticipating until the flowers open their brave petals in March. Couldn't you teach to that?

Check out the Bulb Project. It's a web site on planting bulbs with school children, sponsored by the U.S. Netherlands Flower Bulb Information Center, the press information office of the Dutch flower bulb industry. There are suggested projects and plenty of information about bulbs to get you started.

Another component of the project is asking garden retailers to sponsor bulb-planting projects at schools. There's one funding source to consider. It doesn't have to be an expensive project, if you can borrow some digging tools, can get some compost donated and have a hose available. $200 or $300 would buy quite a few bulk tulip and daffodil bulbs.

Bulbs have an interesting biology, which can certainly provide plenty of science lessons. You could dissect a bulb and see the layers, like an onion's, and figure out what they are for. You could force some bulbs, such as paperwhite narcissus, crocus, early daffodils or hyacinths, into bloom on the classroom windowsill in winter or early spring.

You could discover how bulb-forming plants reproduce (hint: there's more than one way). You could discuss why the pointy end (ideally) goes upward in the hole (and why it's not actually essential). You could talk about why the bulbs don't bloom in winter and how they know when it's time to start growing. You could chart the expected bloom times, collect data on when the plants actually sprout and flower and monitor the weather to search for explanations.

And it's not just biology. Kids could study up on the Netherlands, where most of the bulbs sold in the U.S. today are grown, and then on the countries where the bulbs actually evolved -- Turkey, Iran, Afghanistan. Show them the stylized tulips in the design of a Persian rug and have them design their own rugs. Learn about the how bulbs were imported to Europe and how the Dutch grow them today. Teach about the wild tulip market bubble of the 1600s and compare it to other bubbles -- real estate? stock market, anyone?

But the best lesson from bulbs is the sheer wonder that a dry, brown, often shriveled and ugly thing can go in the ground in fall, when leaves are dropping and the world is turning gray, seemingly dead or at least in a coma, and, when it's ready, become something wonderful. Like a child.

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.

Got a blank fence? Farm on it. Or espalier

I was researching an article on permaculture when I came across this idea that I just loved from Suszanna Forsling of Iowa. She bolted rain gutters along her fence and used them to grow greens.

I expect she has to water some, since the gutters don't hold a whole lot of soil. But lettuce that is going to be eaten young and tender doesn't have a large root system.

Another approach is the living wall systems (here's another one) that are becoming more available now. Basically, they are planting pockets arranged in a grid that you can hang on a wall or a fence. The Wicker Park Garden Club used them on pillars at the 2009 Chicago Flower & Garden Show. I've mostly seen them used for succulents or perennials, but I don't see why you couldn't grow greens in them.

There are so many tiny courtyard and townhouse gardens that would be so much more lovely to sit in if their tall, claustrophobic blank walls bore anything green, especially something that could become salad.

I have a blank cedar fence bordering my front yard, but unfortunately, it's in shade too deep to grow vegetables, even greens. I am having some success in softening its appearance by turning a couple of viburnums --one arrowwood and one juddii -- into espaliers. I used viburnums because I thought they had the best chance of making it in the deep shade (climbing hydrangea had already failed in that spot) and because I once saw a patio in Pennsylvania immensely improved by a viburnum espalier.

Though overhung by the next-door maple, both shrubs are putting on slow but steady growth with limited sunlight. This is not formal, geometrical espaliering, like they do with fruit trees; I pretty much let the branches go where they will, as long as it's more or less in the flat plane. As you might expect, I get more growth on the side that is toward the light.

Every couple of months I go out and prune off any stems that have sprouted in directions I don't approve of. Then I loosely tie the greenstick ends of properly oriented branches to the fence to support them and suppress any temptation they might have to alter their direction. I use small brass screw eyes from the hardware store, which easily screw into the soft cedar without pre-drilling, and soft jute twine with enough slack so the branches can move easily in the wind.

I've used both green and natural-colored twine and I don't find either color is highly visible; the green fades to natural eventually anyhow. The key to discreet ties when you are espaliering or staking is to snip off any fluttering loose ends.

I find that this espalier business is not about bending the branches to your will. It's about selecting the ones that already are growing in the direction you want -- usually a flat plane -- and pruning off all the rest. It's about editing, not directing.

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.

It's awfully dry out there

A few weeks ago, meteorological pontificaters were carrying on about how this had been the coolest, wettest summer in decades. But it has hardly rained at all lately; according to the Illinois State Climatologist's office, northeastern Illinois has had just 4 percent of normal precipitation in the last 30 days. And today's weather page offers no hope of more than scattered sprinkles for the next week, at least.

So in the last week or so, for the first time all summer, I've been watering. Fortunately, the temperatures really were cool this summer; we didn't have any of that blasting, bloom-killing heat in August, and I've still got plenty of bloom going--not just Japanese anemones, but impatiens and roses and nicotiana. The impatiens are a handy soil moisture gauge. If they look wilty it's time to stick a finger in the soil and see if I can feel dampness. Ten days ago the tip of my finger came up dry, so I started watering.

A lot of people forget to water in fall every year. They just sort of lose interest in the garden, or figure that because the blooms have faded the plants are done for the season. But fall is an important root-building time, and that takes water. Plants need to be working on growing feeder roots and storing water for the winter. It's especially critical for trees and shrubs that have been planted in the last couple of years, but all woody plants and perennials -- including fall-planted bulbs -- need watering until the ground freezes.

My goal is to water long and deep and not too often, so the water gets down into the soil and encourages the roots to reach. I use a timer attached between the hose and sprinkler that I can set to cut off after an hour or 90 minutes, so I don't have to hang around. I often set the sprinkler up in the morning on my way out somewhere.

I use a combination of soaker hoses and pattern sprinklers. It's an odd-shaped yard, so I am constantly finagling to try and get the water only where I want it and not on the sidewalk.

This year I haven't watered the lawn once. It's not a whole lot of lawn, and I'm not aiming for a putting green. So I let it fend for itself, except for an occasional compost dressing and reseeding with mixes that include a lot of drought-tolerant fescues.

The grass hardly even went dormant this season, and when reseeding and patching time came in late August I couldn't find any bare spots. That's the kind of lawn to aspire to: the kind that thrives on total neglect, doesn't grow so fast it needs mowing too often, needs no watering except rain and doesn't take up any more space than necessary.

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.

Asail in the Lincoln Park Lagoon

Okay, this is just cute container gardening. Or should we call it water gardening? The Park District and a contractor, Moore Landscapes, have converted an old rowboat to a floating planter in the Lincoln Park Lagoon. It will be up until mid-October. See a description here from the American Public Gardens Association newsletter.

The nearby Lincoln Park Zoo lagoon is in the midst of being restored (or rather converted; I don't think it was originally a natural body of water) to a more or less natural state, hospitable to birds that migrate through there. And although the end result is likely to be lovely, the process ain't pretty (See a picture here, as reported by EveryBlock.) So it's nice to have something lighthearted and fun going on in the other lagoon nearby.

At trade shows, one of the trends I've seen in the last couple of years is floating islands for water gardens -- essentially, chunks of a substrate material, usually some sort of plastic mesh, that can support a growing medium and plants. The idea is partly that the plants' roots will help purify the water. But I don't think the Lincoln Park Lagoon rowboat has any object beyond fun.

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.