The end of the growing season is nigh

I'm afraid the last two balmy T-shirt days have been the last we'll see of summer. Weather people are predicting nighttime temperatures down into the 30s this weekend -- which means today is the day I need to scramble around and get all my houseplants into the house.

These tropical and subtropical babies such as anthurium and zebrina and pothos and ficus have loved living outdoors all summer on the shady patio, and they are at their peak of lush and happy. But nights in the 50s are already a strain on them and a touch of 30s will turn them to blackened mush.

Regrettably, moving my houseplant collection requires carrying each one of them up three flights of stairs, so I have some weightlifting ahead of me today.

Especially since they'll all be wet. I always give the houseplants a brisk cold shower with a stiff spray from the hose before I move them, to try and get rid of any insect spores or eggs that might catch a ride indoors. Outdoors, there are insects predators and other competition that keeps pests in check. But in the comparatively barren environment of my apartment, any pest that got a foothold and hatched in the warm heated air could just romp.

The other problem is finding space for them all somewhere near a window. I have a collection of folding tables to deploy.

Ideally, I would gradually acclimate my plants to the lower light conditions of the indoors by moving them inside for a few hours each day over a week or so and then out again, so they have a chance to adjust their metabolism and their expectations of sunlight.

But with three flights of stairs in the way, that is not going to happen. So my houseplants just have to stand the shock of an abrupt transition. This often causes a major leaf drop, but I have settled on a policy of not owning houseplants that are too delicate to have a good chance of survival under my particular conditions -- including the twice-a-year-trip between worlds.

The other thing I do is hedge my bets by taking cuttings. Since I usually prune the houseplants on the way indoors anyway, I'll be sticking a bunch of cuttings today. That way, if something doesn't make it, I'll have a little backup plant that I can nurse along.

Mu houseplants are not just winter companions; they are workhorses. I use houseplants extensively as sources of filler plants in the garden, nurturing cuttings in winter and spring that I can use in containers and in the ground. Variegated spider plants bring a spark of white to the shade. Purple heart vine and striped purple zebrina (the plant that has the unfortunate common name of wandering Jew) become sprawling annual groundcovers that provide quite a lot of color all season (as long as you like purple). Asparagus ferns, ivies and pothos are backbone container plants. A coleus plant nurtured through the winter can yield dozens of cuttings for colorful foliage.

Sometimes I take cuttings from pelargonium (geraniums), depending on the competition for window space. Since they are so cheap in the spring, they are the ones I don't take cuttings from if I can't fit everything in. But if you find just exactly the right color of red or pink, taking cuttings from geraniums is the easiest way to make sure you get the same color next year.

Personally, I've never had much luck saving entire geranium plants over the winter. I have known people who managed to keep them dormant in a cool basement, but our basement is heated and, I've learned, nothing stays dormant down there.

I also have a lot of elephant ear and caladium tubers that I want to overwinter. Lacking that magic cool-but-not-freezing space, I'm hoping I can prevail on a friend to let me stash a box or two of tubers in her garage until March. But I'll wait until the frost kills their top growth to dig them up and deal with them.

My other problem is basil. Predictably, only at the end of summer have my basil plants really started to thrive. I have armfuls, and those plants will never survive a freeze.

I'll dry some of the other herbs -- rosemary, thyme, oregano -- and let the parsley, sage and chives keep going for a while, hopefully until Thanksgiving. But the basil is totally tender. I've made pesto in the past, but this year I think I'm going to try a different method: Chopping up the basil, stirring it into a little water and freezing the mixture in ice-cube trays. I'm told that if I keep a bag of those cubes in the freezer, I can just drop one into a dish when I want some fresh basil flavor. We'll see how it works.

Here's a story on perennial herbs I recently had published in the Chicago Tribune.

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.

How to find a green landscaper or designer

I wandered out to Cantigny in Wheaton the other evening to the annual meeting of the Midwest Ecological landscaping Association. This is a trade group of Chicago-area tree care companies, landscape architects and designers, nurseries, lawn care firms, growers and other horticultural businesses, as well as some nonprofits, with a special interest in sustainability. (Full disclosure: I'm a member and occasional consultant.)

The happiest talk at the meeting was about MELA's demonstration project at O'Keeffe School on the South Side, where member firms, led by Lynn Bement, who operates as the Organic garden Coach; Pam Wirtz of Grace Landscaping; Grace Koehler of Pizzo & Associates; and MELA executive director Carol Becker, have helped 8th graders rework and reclaim a weed-choked and moribund school garden as a vegetable garden, community space and memorial to a friend who was tragically murdered. Troy Law was just 10, a 5th grader at O'Keeffe, when he was murdered in 2006. Here's a Tribune story about him, the kids and the garden.

MELA had been looking for a place where its members could put into practice the principles of the Sustainable Sites Initiative. One of those principles is reusing as much as possible of the existing plant material, so the kids and grownups salvaged perennials and shrubs. They also built benches out of recycled lumber that once was a deck, project to which certain 8th graders ("The Drill Team") took enthusiastically.

"Our children are changing. Their attitudes are changing" as a result of working on the garden all spring and summer," said teacher Emily Kenny, the science chair at O'Keeffe. "They have taken ownership of this garden." School gardens often have that effect on kids.

But enough warm and fuzzy stuff. Here's the practical information promised by the headline of this blog post (lacking an editor, I can revel in the freedom to bury the lead waaaaay down). If you're looking for a lawn-care firm, a landscaper or a landscape architect or designer, one great way to start is by looking at the membership directory at its Web site.

That doesn't mean you will find someone who never uses pesticides or always plants native plants. There is endless debate about what "sustainability" in the green industry means, and even those who want to do the right thing often struggle to figure out what that is.

MELA has no requirements or certifications for membership, other than a willingness to try and move the "green" industry in a more sustainable direction. So you can't assume that a MELA member firm practices entirely organic lawn care, or whatever your own criterion is.

But you can bet that if a company joined MELA, they've at least given the topic of sustainability some thought. They should welcome questions about what, specifically, they would do to care for your property sustainably. And hearing questions from potential customers will probably help them think about what they do.

I've suggested MELA for years to readers who asked me how they can find a garden designer or lawn care firm; trade associations are always a good place to start. But the organization is only now trying to actually promote its membership to the public. You can find the member directory at the web site, melaweb.org; click on the "Community" tab, not the far more likely "Membership" tab. (Yes, there are aspects of the user experience that need some work.)

MELA was co-founded (as he is always happy to note) by my friend, radio host Mike "No Shrinking Violet" Nowak. Its executive director, Carol Becker, will be on the Mike Nowak Show on WCPT (820 AM) this Sunday from 9 a.m. to 11 a.m. to promote MELA's membership, so listen in if you want to learn more about the organization or about hiring a professional. (Late note: I now hear that teacher Emily Kenny of O'Keeffe also will be on the show.)

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.

Changing climate for Chicago-area gardens and natural areas

Interesting article in today's Tribune by Bill Mullen on Chicago Wilderness' report about the changing Chicago-area climate, the impact it is expected to have on plants, wildlife, native species and natural areas and a plan of action.

The gist: The climate has already changed; our area already has a warmer, more volatile weather pattern than it used to. Those changes will only increase; and they will have a big impact on local ecosystems. (And gardens.) The very definition of a "native species" is changing, because the climate to which many plants and animals were native is going away.

I do have one bone to pick: Bill erroneously conflates the USDA climate zone map with the 2006 Arbor Day Foundation map, which shifted the zones north (putting most of the Chicago area in Zone 6).

The Arbor Day Foundation issued its map because it didn't feel the USDA map, issued in 1990, reflected the way the climate had already changed. But the revision was controversial because many experts felt it was based on too few years of weather data.

The USDA has been on the verge of issuing a revision of the official zone map for several years, but still hasn't actually done so. In the meanwhile, gardeners be warned: The 1990 map remains the standard in the horticulture business, including books, catalogs and plant labels.

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.

Botanic garden science building wins LEED award

Rice Plant Science Center, November 2009

We've all been to the Chicago Botanic Garden, but most visitors don't get to the new (about a year old now) Daniel F. and Ada L. Rice Plant Conservation Science Center.

The elegant building just won a major award for its green architecture, as detailed in this blog by Blair Kamin, the Chicago Tribune's architecture critic. It has all the bells and whistles -- solar panels, recycled materials, careful climate control, LED lighting fixtures, the works.

It's about a half-mile walk from the visitors' center past the lovely McDonald Woods, or you can take the trolley. But the center is well worth a visit for a gardener, especially since it's right by the evaluation gardens run by Richard Hawke and the new plant breeding operation run by Jim Ault. All these sites will become easier to reach in a year or so after they finish a new bridge across the lagoon from Evening Island, the New American Garden-style garden designed by Oehme, van Sweden and Associates.

I've toured the science building several times during the past year and attended a couple of events there.

It's an actual laboratory, with scientists working behind plate-glass windows on various botany, ecology and conservation science projects. (My mycological friend Greg Mueller is the garden's VP for science and academic programs.) There's a seed bank vault -- the botanic garden is a partner of the Millennium Seed Bank project, responsible for collecting and storing seeds from the native species of the prairie.

In the tall, airy lobby there are LED screens with computer games explaining various plant and conservation concepts (you can pretend to be an ant or battle invasive plants).

But for me, the coolest thing about the building is the green roof. There are actually two, flanking the pop-up glassed-in top story of the lobby. And they are both not only green roofs -- with all the stormwater-retaining and insulating properties of a green roof -- but evaluation gardens for green roof plants (which makes sense, since Chicago is something of a green roof powerhouse these days).

The south side is for the standard range of green roof plants: chiefly sedums, with various other perennials in a pleasing geometric arrangement laid out by Oehme and Van Sweden.


The north side is for native plants.


Both sides had been planted about a year when I took these pictures in July.

The view over either roof toward Evening Island is to die for, especially near sunset. It's lovely even in snow. But it's serious business up there.

Sensors for temperature, wind direction, rainfall and other metrics stick up through the planting medium (we don't say "soil" when we're talking about green roofs, because they use special lightweight mixtures with arcane formulas). There are more sensors buried beneath. The idea is to figure out which plants do best in which conditions, and Chicago certainly offers a wide variety of weather conditions for testing purposes.

One thing that Richard Hawke, the plant evaluations manager, is exploring up there is depth: How much planting medium do green roof plants really need? On each side, there are sections growing at soil depths from 4 inches to more than a foot. In July, I was struck that prairie plants on the native side seemed to be perfectly happy in 8 inches of soil -- pardon me, not soil, planting medium. I pointed out to Greg the apparent contradiction, since the big strength of prairie plants is supposed to be their long, deep roots. Being a gardener as well as a scientist, he pointed out that plants always have a capacity to surprise you.

When I first visited the building in November 2009, the plugs had gone in only three or four months before. There hadn't been a real hard freeze yet, and of course the garden in Glencoe is near the lake, so it's in a little milder microclimate than many of us have.

On the non-native side, most of the sedums and other perennials were still vigorously growing.


But Richard pointed out to me that on the native side, nearly every species was safely dormant.


It's a survival strategy. The plants that had evolved in the boom-and-bust, anything-goes Midwestern climate had genes that told them not to take chances with autumn frosts.

The science center has another distinction: It sits on stilts in the middle of a bioswale. Think of it as a very large, beautifully planted puddle, a place where rainwater that falls on the building and the surrounding land can collect and take its time soaking down naturally into the water table rather than being routed into a storm sewer.

It's the least the building can do. After all, the entire site of the botanic garden (the land is owned by the Cook County Forest Preserve District) is a wetland, its waters a byway of the Skokie River, its islands man-made, starting in the late 1960s. It seems doubtful that under today's laws you could get a permit to plow up a natural wetland to make a botanic garden. But it's there now, so we might as well enjoy it.

The garden's conservation science program has grown enormously in the last decade or so, especially in response to the many questions raised by the growing threat of climate change. It needed its own space. The garden should be congratulated for building such an interesting and responsible one. The next time you're up there, pay it a visit; it's open to the public from 9 a.m. to 5 p.m.

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.

Article on naturalizing bulbs

Just had an article on naturalizing bulbs published in the new issue of Organic Gardening. Buy the issue to see the lovely pix (which I can't take credit for).

Profile of Roy Diblik

Somehow I forgot to post a link to this article I wrote back in August for the Chicago Tribune about Roy Diblik, one of the Midwest's true perennial gurus and one of its nicest guys.

A sad end for the tomato season

It's official: I've given up on the tomato season.

There are folks who, in this hot summer, got bumper crops. But by and large, they are growing their tomatoes in the ground, and were in the few magic places where it rained plentifully but not enough to flood.

I grow mine in sub-irrigated planter boxes on the third- and fourth-floor porch landings of a Chicago-area apartment building, with slanting part-day sunlight, under a roof. And for tomato plants in those conditions it's been brutal.

I grow my tomatoes there because my garden is all in the shade of buildings and trees, and the porch is the only place that gets any sunlight to speak of at all. There have been summers when I was still harvesting tomatoes at the first frost. But not this year.

On day after day of 90-degree-plus, the plants transpired water vapor desperately through their leaves. And I couldn't keep enough water in the reservoirs of those planter boxes to supply their gasping roots. In July I finally got around to mulching all the container plants with cotton bur compost, which helped some.

But by August--even with daily watering--the tomato leaves were shriveling. Blossom end rot and splitting were epidemic, because there was no way I could keep a steady water supply going without standing next to the plants with a garden hose. And there's no hose up there.

The coup de grace was when I went to Michigan for a week in the middle of the month. I watered everything to capacity the evening before I left, but without much hope. I suppose I had already more or less given up. It turned out to be one of the summer's hottest weeks, and when I returned, it was to crispy golden plants. There were a lot of ripe tomatoes and quite a few green ones, but it was clear those plants had been killed in action.


Seconds after this photo was taken, the rear tomato slipped through the porch railing to splatter theatrically on the alley asphalt four floors below.

So, where did I go wrong? Let me count the ways:

1. Wishful thinking. You simply can't fit two tomato plants into one Earth Box or Gardener's Supply tomato planter box. There's not room for enough soil to deliver moisture to all those roots. When I do garden talks I always tell folks that a tomato plant needs as much soil volume as a 5-gallon bucket in order to hold enough moisture to get through the day. Two plants to a box doesn't even come close.

2. More wishful thinking. I planted about twice as many different tomato varieties as I actually had room for, mainly because I had not been able to resist starting from seed about three times as many as could possibly have fit. Now, I am not the first gardener to do this. In fact, it is a rare gardener who does not do this, most if not all years. But this year I really came up against my limits to growth.

My growing conditions are marginal at best. The only soil is what I haul up there. The only water is what I haul out there. There's a railing that partly shades the young plants. There's a roof that keeps all but angled sunlight from reaching the landings. Yet on the 4th-floor landing, in a space about 3 by 6 feet, I crammed eight tomato plants in two planter boxes and four large sub-irrigated pots. So not only were the plants shaded by the roof and railings, they were shading each other. And it was a struggle for me to reach through and around all the pots and jungle-like growth to get water to them.

The result: few, slow-ripening tomatoes on straggly, rangy plants, with more growth than was going to pay for itself in tomatoes. And all those stems had to be supported by leaves that frantically transpired water in the hot days, sucking up water that I had to tote from the kitchen. Since the water supply was erratic -- by the end of a hot day, even these "self-watering" containers had dry soil -- blossom end rot and splitting were inevitable, although some plants were more afflicted than others.

3. Failure to face reality. I keep trying to grow indeterminate tomatoes in a spot that is manifestly unsuited to them. In particular, I keep trying to grow 'Sun Gold,' because of the incomparable flavor of its intensely orange cherry-sized fruits. But I just don't have room. The huge, sprawling plants grow through the railing out into the open sunlight.

This presents me with a choice: I can risk my life trying to reach out to harvest tomatoes at the end of yard-long stems four stories above the alley; I can risk my life trying to prune them; or I can leave them alone and carry gallon after gallon of water to nurture tomatoes that will only fall and splat on the cars parked below.

This was the year I told myself sternly, "determinate varieties only." I prowled catalogs for cultivars with "bush" in the name. I ran down seeds for 'Red Robin' and 'Tiny Tim,' cultivars with short internodes bred specifically for baskets and containers. I was determined not to do any tightrope-walker pruning this year. But I couldn't make it stick.

My mother suddenly gave me a bunch of seeds to start for her. There was a last-minute swapping of tomato transplants among gardeners. In the May rush my resistance weakened and I ended up with too many plants on my hands. I gave a bunch of transplants away (to a friend who gave them out as party favors at a brunch, and isn't that a cool idea?) but I still couldn't resist going a cultivar too far. Or three or four.

But next year, by gum, I'm determined: determinate only. Yes, that means no heirlooms. But that's what my situation requires.

4. Blaming myself for the weather. No, it wasn't the hottest summer Chicago has ever had, but it was hot. There were unusually many days in the 90s -- too hot for tomato plants to set fruit -- and too many nights when it didn't really cool down. My friends with gardens in the ground had a tough year too; some got flooded but most just couldn't keep up with the watering. Perennial plantings carefully designed to be drought-tolerant suffered too; a friend told me the other night that she'd had a bed die out that made it through the drought year of 2005.

You can't fight the weather, and you especially can't fight the extremes of Midwestern weather. But what I've learned is that in my confined, limited conditions, I have even less margin for weather variation than most folks. I need to be truly realistic about how much sun I have, how much soil volume I can provide and how much watering I'm willing to do.

I had a good crop this year from the 'Red Robin' and 'Tiny Tim' plants in window boxes with the herbs along the 3rd-floor porch railings; in fact, while the 4th-floor plants have given up the ghost, the window-box tomatoes are still bearing. But that's because in choosing those varieties, I matched the capacity of my planting space.

Of course I'm not going to let any of this stop me. I've already yanked out the tomato plants and sowed those planters with spinach and lettuce seeds for a fall crop. I will give a whole planter box next year to 'Bush Champion,' which did a workmanlike job in difficult conditions, and I'll hunt for a hybrid I've heard of called 'Bush Brandywine.'

And I'll have more room under lights to grow cuttings for the shade garden, since I'm not going to start anywhere near as many tomato plants. Of course I'm not.

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.