Somebody help me vote for clean water!

No, I don't mean the old Chicago way, where the precinct captain comes into the voting booth with the elderly lady and "helps her vote." Or helps her fill out her absentee ballot in the nursing home. Or helps the local imbibers to a drink for voting the right way. Not that kind of help.

And actually, I don't need help any more. I already voted. I love early voting. I'm kind of a voting geek. I vote in every primary and every general election. I always print out my sample ballot from the Cook County Clerk's office and use a highlighter to mark my choices, all the way down the judicial retention ballot. Then I trot right over to the village hall and get my voting done, and proudly wear my "I've Voted!" sticker to the grocery store.

But I did need help a couple of days ago when I was working on my ballot. I faced a near-total vacuum of information on the candidates and their stands on significant environmental issues.

For governor and senator, I read the news and I can make up my mind. For judges, I can look online and find recommendations from the Chicago Bar Association and the Chicago Council of Lawyers and other bar groups. It's the offices in between I need help with, all those obscure but hugely important jobs that lurk in the dark corners of the ballot where few voters venture.

For example, the commissioners of the Metropolitan Water Reclamation District of Greater Chicago. The what? The sewage treatment district. See, you're bored already. That's how this massive agency has managed to operate almost invisibly for more than a century, and to get away with so many outrages against your pocketbook, your rivers and your lake.

This is a $1.6 billion-a-year agency -- billion with a B -- larger than the CTA. It has the authority to tax you as much as it chooses. It is all that stands between you and cholera. It discharges upwards of 20 billion (with a B) gallons of bacteria-laden partially-treated sewage a year into the Chicago River and sometimes Lake Michigan. But your eyes most likely glazed over as soon as I mentioned it.

There is no elected official in Illinois -- not the governor who appoints the members of the Illinois Pollution Control board, not the U.S. senator who will vote on the budget of the federal EPA and the National Park Service -- who has such a direct impact on the environment of Chicago, the state, the Great Lakes and the Mississippi River and on the safety of all the people who live in the region as each of the commissioners of the water reclamation district.

But if you vote for any of those candidates at all, you're probably going to pick the one who sounds Irish (or Greek) or the one whose name reminds you of your favorite second-grade teacher. Or whoever your precinct captain told you to vote for. That's what most people do.

I am so jealous of Michigan for having the Michigan League of Conservation Voters bird-dogging the environmental credentials of candidates for everything from the state legislature to the Michigan Supreme Court. We have nothing that comes close.

There is no functioning Illinois League of Conservation Voters. Apparently there used to be, but it has faded to where it doesn't even have a website. And there's nobody else reviewing candidates in an orderly and rational way on environmental issues.

There is a hugely important mayoral election coming up in February to replace Mayor Richard M. Daley, who (love him or hate him) has been the most powerful force for green since Jens Jensen. All sorts of achievements in this city and region could go south very fast, depending on the outcome of that election. And yet we don't have any organization that makes educating voters on environmental issues its business.

Sure, we have local environmental organizations. But few of them endorse candidates. After all, they're going to have to work with whoever gets elected. And even the groups that do endorse, such as the Sierra Club and the national League of Conservation Voters, stick to federal offices. They don't drill down to the level of a local sewage treatment district -- no matter how many states' drinking water it contributes sewage to.

So in order to mark my ballot for three candidates for water reclamation district commissioner, I had to fumble all over the internet -- to the candidates' own web sites, to newspaper endorsement editorials, to candidate questionnaires and the transcripts of interviews by newspaper editorial boards, to the few news stories I could find from the dailies and from local weeklies. I was basically a single-issue voter: I would only vote for candidates in favor of disinfection, with no waffling.

You would figure that a sewage treatment district would be in favor of disinfection, wouldn't you? After all, it was epidemics of disease from bacteria in sewage that led to the founding of the water reclamation district (as the Sanitary District of Chicago) in 1889.

And yet the current commissioners have spent $13 million fighting new Illinois Pollution Control Board rules that would require the district to fully disinfect sewage before dumping it in the Chicago River or Lake Michigan, even though disinfecting sewage is standard practice just about everywhere else in the country, according to this Tribune story. Between 60 and 100 percent of the river's flow consists of partially-treated Cook County sewage, and the majority of commissioners don't think it's worth making sure that murky water is safe for people or wildlife.

I was determined to help shift that majority to one that insists on disinfection.

How did I vote? Normally, I figure how I vote is nobody's business. But since there's so little information about this race available from other sources, I'll tell you:

I voted for two Democrats, Mariyana T. Spyropoulos and Michael Alvarez, and a Republican, Paul Chialdikas.

Chialdikas still worries me -- not because he's a Republican, but because he's already decided he's against closing the Chicago River locks to keep Asian carp from entering Lake Michigan. The Asian carp problem is a murky mess, and there's a long way to go, in the courts and in the laboratories, before we know what to do about it. But I will always err on the side of protecting the lake. And I don't like a candidate for public office telling me he's made a decision on a scientific issue before the science is in.

Still, I voted for Chialkdikas because he's for disinfection. And the other Democrat, Barbara McGowan, is an incumbent who, despite a lot of doublespeak in endorsement interviews, has been voting to resist disinfection. She's such an old-school regular Democrat that she doesn't even bother to have a website; she depends on the boredom and disinterest of voters to keep her in office. For most commissioners for more than a century, that has worked just fine.

Spyropoulos is an incumbent too, but a recently appointed one, and she looks smart and good.

Alvarez is new to office. He, too, is a regular Democrat -- he's endorsed by all the ward committeemen and other pols. But he seems aware of watershed issues, and he's for disinfection.

Why didn't I vote for a Green Party candidate, you ask? Because I want my vote to count. I'm a born-and-bred Chicagoan. I'm a pragmatist. I vote to make things happen, not to feel morally superior.

The bee in my bonnet is that it took almost an hour for me to figure out how to mark up my sample ballot for these three candidates alone.

If friends of the environment in Chicago and Cook County want officials who get it -- at the water reclamation district or City Hall or the County Building or the state Capitol -- they had better not depend on voters being willing to spend hour ferreting them out. Or depend on voters understanding why a vote for commissioner of the sewage treatment district matters.

If the lawyers, defense and prosecution, criminal and civil, can get together to decide which judge candidates they think will uphold the law -- or at least which ones they think won't -- and make a handy list, somebody ought to do the same for the environment.

I hear that local environmental organizations are starting to get together and try to agree on a green agenda against which the mayoral candidates can be judged. But that's not going to do much good unless there is someone to keep track of who says and does what on those issues and to communicate what that means for voters.

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.

Stories on houseplants, Lurie Garden

This coming Sunday the Chicago Tribune will publish a story of mine on taking houseplants indoors for the winter.

And I don't believe I ever posted a link to my Tribune update on the Lurie Garden in Millennium Park and profile of its new executive director, Jennifer Davit. It's sort of a companion piece to my recent profile of plantsman Roy Diblik, who grew many of the perennials for the garden.

Podcast of radio show on Daley green legacy

We had a lively discussion this morning on the Mike Nowak Show about the green legacy of Chicago Mayor Richard M. Daley, the relationship between his environmental vision and the politics of his rule and where he succeeded and failed. I blogged about it a couple of days ago in this post.

On WCPT today were Mike; me; Erma Tranter, director of Friends of the Parks; Henry Henderson, former head of the Department of Environment and now with the Natural Resources Defense Council; Ald. Joe Moore (49th); Christy Webber of Christy Webber Landscapes; and Mick Dumke of the Chicago News Cooperative.

There was general agreement that blue-bag recycling has been a dismal failure and it's a disgrace that Chicago doesn't have citywide recycling, although there was some disagreement about why we got into that mess in the first place. Everybody loves Millennium Park, although not everybody has forgotten the waste, corruption and delay in getting it built. You can find many more points of agreement and disagreement in the podcast here.

Whoa, it's dry out there; new shrubs need help

I have planted a bunch of new shrubs in the last couple of weeks, and I also have a big first-year perennial planting that I want to send into the winter with a good root system. This has called my attention to the fact that it is really dry out there.

In the near west suburbs we haven't had meaningful rain for at least a month. I realize that parts of the Chicago area (mostly north) have been soaked by big thunderstorms in recent weeks. And this morning I spoke to somebody in Minneapolis who was bragging about their plentiful rainfall and stunning fall color. But not in my garden. Fall is when it is supposed to get cooler and moister, but it's about 75 degrees in my garden today and headed higher, and in places where I haven;t watered, the soil is dry 6 or 8 inches down.

I'm using soaker hoses on the shrubs -- a long, slow soaking of about three hours today, and then I won't water them again for a while. When you plant a shrub (or any new plant, really), the way you encourage the root system to expand and take hold is to 1) provide enough water to meet the plant's immediate needs and 2) encourage the roots to reach out and away from the root ball, searching for water. Thoroughly soak the area around the plant and then wait a week. The plant will use up all the water in the immediate area and then, in a couple of days, it will start reaching out with new roots to gather water from the neighboring soil.

Of course, in the first two or three days after I plant a shrub I water every day, to help the plant get over the shock. But then I start stretching the intervals. The soaker hoses put water only where I need it at a rate that can really soak in and not run off.

What is worst for plants -- including lawns -- is very frequent brief sprinkling. If you do that, the water stays in the top inch or so of soil and never really soaks down and spreads out. As long as you are constantly giving the near-surface roots water, they have no reason to grow out and deep to find water elsewhere, and the root system remains shallow and skimpy. It doesn't expand enough to store sufficient water and food to make it through the winter. It also doesn't develop enough to find water in summer, if you should happen to go away for a week or forget to water.

Many people forget to water in fall. They're tired of yard work. They assume it will rain. They figure once the leaves fall, the trees don't need water any more. But plants need good root systems with plenty of water stored up in them to survive Chicago winters. Evergreens need to store lots of water in their needles and stems to resist drying winter winds.

And there's another factor: Frozen soil actually protects the roots of plants during winter dormancy and stores water than can help them sprout in spring, But if there isn't water in the soil, it can't freeze.

That's why I am always attentive to watering in fall -- but especially when I have new shrubs to baby and when I'm not getting any help from Mother Nature.

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 green will Chicago be after Daley?

I was in San Francisco in mid-September when Richard M. Daley announced he would not run for another term as mayor of Chicago. "You're losing your green mayor!" people said to me.

That's his nationwide reputation, as the mayor who not only got Chicago back in working order as the one Midwestern city that resisted Rust Belt corrosion, but who made it a national leader in environmental initiatives.

I'll be one of several people discussing Daley's green legacy, as well as what happens now, on Mike Nowak's radio show Sunday from 9 to 11 a.m. It's on WCPT, which broadcasts on several frequencies: 820-AM, 92.5 FM, 92.7 FM, 99.9 FM. Here's Mike's blog post about it.

Also on the show with me and Mike will be Ald. Joe Moore (49th); Henry Henderson, director of the Midwest program of the Natural Resources Defense Council; Christy Webber, owner of Christy Webber Landscapes; Mick Dumke of the Chicago News Cooperative; Erma Tranter, executive director of Friends of the Parks; and Kim Wasserman Neito, coordinator of the Little Village Environmental Justice organization.

I've been thinking a lot lately about Daley. He's such a dominant figure in the city in recent decades that I think many people don't really realize where he stops and the city itself starts. When I was growing up in Hyde Park, that's how we felt about Old Man Daley, Richard J., the mayor's father. My family belonged to a breed -- "independent Democrats" -- that defined itself largely by opposition to that Daley.

When this Daley is gone, I think a lot of people will be amazed at how much that they have taken for granted goes with him. And many of those people will be environmentalists.

Daley started out as mayor in 1989 with, it seems, not much more environmental awareness than a determination to clean up the littered and dismal downtown and to plant more trees. He likes trees. And he was convinced that if the city looked well-cared-for, people would respect it more.

From there, his two decades in office and his personal will have made Chicago in some ways notably green (although calling it "the greenest city in America," as some do, is surely a stretch).

Under Daley, the city has planted more than half a million trees. It has 7 million square feet of green roofs and roof gardens, sparked by the green roof on City Hall that captured the imagination of the nation. It has Millennium Park -- a vibrant, galvanizing, interactive 24.5-acre open space in the middle of downtown, itself a green roof built over railroad tracks that have sliced between Chicago and its lakefront since the 1840s.

The park system that I remember from my childhood, run as a patronage fiefdom under this mayor's father by Edward Kelly, who thought the park district's highest mission was running the Golden Gloves boxing tournament, has been transformed -- not in every way, but in many.

The airport that disfigured the lakefront is swept away, and the 3,000 acres of Northerly Island have been returned to parkland. Not just in Lincoln Park and Grant Park, but in Columbus Park, Humboldt Park, Washington Park, there are mulched trees, sweeps of reconstructed wetland and prairie, imaginative perennial gardens.

There are more pedestrian bridges to the lakefront. There are more parks, mostly neighborhood pocket parks. But there are also Ping Tom Park in Chinatown, along the once-forgotten industrial south reaches of the Chicago River, and Stearns Quarry Park, which transformed a Bridgeport limestone quarry into a prime spot for birding, picnicking and reflecting on Chicago's ancient and recent past. Parks once strewn with broken glass and run for the benefit of payrollers now have advisory boards and nonprofit conservancy organizations.

The landmark Garfield Park Conservatory, designed by pioneer landscape architect Jens Jensen in 1908 and falling to ruin in the 1980s, is saved, its glass replaced, its collections thriving, surrounded by a tranquil landscape, and become not only a center for education about urban gardening but a catalyst for attempts to bolster the surrounding neighborhood.

We have a river walk from State Street to Lake Michigan along what was once a sickeningly polluted industrial canal. I still wouldn't go swimming in the Chicago River, but beavers do.

We have our south-end-of-the-loop museums connected into a continuous sweep of parkland that beckons people to the lakefront.

We have NeighborSpace and GreenNet, organizations that have been crucial to the bloom of community gardens on vacant lots that in the city of my childhood simply sulked under weeds inviting crime. We have a Department of Environment in City Hall. We have a Chicago Center for Green Technology. We have a Chicago trees Initiative. We have a huge solar power plant on the South Side. We have a Chicago Climate Action Plan.

We have a Great Lakes Compact and a Great Lakes & St. Lawrence Cities Initiative to give cities a united voice in protecting Lake Michigan and its sisters. And the mayor whose father planned to build an airport on landfill in Lake Michigan joined up.

We have planning ordinances that insist on green spaces and plantings in parking lots, and a planning department that backed down Donald Trump and made him include a public riverfront park in his not-nearly-as-bad-as-it-could-have-been Trump Tower.

And we have all those flowerpots, those median strips and downtown planters. It was in the 1990s that I first started hearing from out-of-towners, "Oh, you're from Chicago! That's a beautiful city!" I was a little startled. My Loop was the Loop of the 1970s and 1980s, when you didn't go downtown at night. The only beauties Chicago had to boast were an under-appreciated lakefront and the steel-framed buildings of Louis Sullivan and Daniel Burnham. But by 1995 or so, these people were talking about the beautiful flower beds.

Chicago now gets 1.3 billion visitors a year (in 1985 there were 8 million) and international visitors spent $2.7 billion here in 2009. When I was young, you never heard German on Michigan Avenue, only at somebody's grandmother's house. And in drawing all those people to visit a city that (at least in the tourist areas) feels clean, safe and attractive, those flower beds have been a powerful factor.

The flower beds are the most down-to-earth example of one of the most significant things Daley has done. He has raised the expectation of what our built environment will be like. He has established a standard that says: You will have plants, and you will care for them.

If you walk around Streeterville on a summer's day today, you will see planters everywhere, not just in places where they are required by law. Plantings have become one of the ways landlords compete; meeting the standard of plantings has become one of the ways a business shows it is seriously in the game in this city. And of course meeting that standard has been a huge boon to the landscape design and maintenance industry in Chicago, for whom Richard M. Daley is a patron saint.

But those plantings are not just an ornament; they are a powerful signal of an attitude. It says that living things matter. It says that nature matters. It says that the human world includes more than just people and the things they build. It says that the environment matters -- the immediate environment, here on the sidewalk, and the larger environment, Chicago in the world. Daley didn't do all the green things in Chicago. But he established a climate in which green things can happen.

He didn't so much have a vision as learn one. The planters along Michigan Avenue weren't Daley's idea; they were created -- and paid for, and still are -- by merchants along the Magnificent Mile. But when Daley saw the positive effect they had on shopping and tourism between Illinois Street and Oak Street, he said, effectively, "I like that. Make that happen all over."

He may have been raised to like trees -- "What trees do they plant?" was his autocratic father's scornful retort to critics -- but Richard M. Daley was not elected as a tree-hugger. Environmental issues were scarcely mentioned in his 1989 campaign.

Mayor Harold Washington had more far more grasp of environmental issues. But he was hamstrung before his death in 1987 by the poisonously racist opposition of white aldermen and by his own obligations to black ward bosses who felt they alone had elected Chicago's first black mayor and they had a right to claim the spoils.

But Daley, once he was elected, seized on this green thing and ran with it. He decided to make it his legacy to Chicago. In the patronage-padded city departments, among the featherbedders and the bored time-servers, he carved out places in city departments for idealistic and knowledgeable people, hired from all over, who understood environmental issues, planning, landscape architecture. He drove them hard and tossed them overboard if they screwed up or annoyed him. But he encouraged them to be curious and imaginative and ambitious.

Somebody suggested he go to Germany and look at those green roofs. He did, and the next thing you knew there was a green roof on City Hall. He listened to the ideas he heard, picked the ones he liked and put his will behind them. On many of the issues we vaguely collect as "sustainability," he became a convert.

So, Richard M. Daley is my perfect mayor, right? My heart is broken, right? Actually, my feeling are pretty mixed.

I fear for my city, and for what it stands to lose under a mayor who does not share Daley's green values or have the will to make green things happen.

But there's also a lot to blame him for.

Soldier Field, for one thing. If Millennium Park is renamed after Daley (which seems probable) it seems only fair that we rename Soldier Field after him too, so that part of his cherished legacy will always be the toilet-bowl-in-a-Roman-ruin excrescence on the lakefront. The McCaskeys would have blinked; they weren't going to move the Bears out of Chicago, and he could have and should have pushed them to a new stadium site away from the lakefront. But he suddenly and inexplicably caved.

That's one of the worst things about Daley: He made things happen, or not happen, by fiat, by his order and often by his mood or caprice or tantrum.

Back in 2003, for example, I never doubted that Northerly Island ought to be parkland, as envisioned in the Burnham Plan. I had been irritated that Daley hadn't shut down Meigs Field when he first had the chance, instead of giving it a five-year extension. But even I was shocked to open the paper that morning in April and see the aerial photo of bulldozers and huge Xs gouged in the runways.

Daley was tired of arguing about Meigs Field. He decided to make that park happen, right away, without any more of this tedious legal procedure. So it happened.

"The mayor wants this to happen," one person in City Hall would say to another. That would shut down all argument. It would happen.

There's another bad thing about Daley: He has been the force behind everything, so environmental activists have never really needed to organize to persuade anyone else about anything in the city. You could either lobby Daley or cheerlead for Daley or attack Daley. But all eyes were always on the 5th Floor. That's how the Old Man operated, too, and when he died, we found out how ill-prepared his autocracy had left the city for democracy with a small "d."

Yet the same Richard M. Daley whose iron will sent bulldozers in the night to reclaim Meigs Field for the people somehow couldn't find the political gumption to institute a real citywide recycling program or replace the city's antiquated system of flat-fee payment for water with meters that would bill according to actual use and reward water conservation.

I smell a reason: Though Daley felt free to impose his vision at the edges of city life, he knew that most people in the neighborhoods couldn't care less about green roofs or regional cooperation on Great Lakes issues.

But garbage collection and water bills hit people where they live, literally. It's one thing to encourage the relative handful of starry-eyed greenies to install low-flow toilets and tote their recyclables to bins at public works yards. It's another thing to inconvenience every voter in the city.

It can't be a coincidence, either, that recycling falls under the Streets and Sanitation Department and water meters would fall under the Water Department -- two of the old-line patronage havens that remain largely unreconstructed since Daley's father's day.

Daley's monopoly of government came from three sources: by grasping, using and adapting the remnants of the old machine his father ran; by making business interests happy with his businesslike operation and masterful exercise of power; and by co-opting former opponents.

Latinos were made happy with appointments. Lakefront liberal progressives were made happy with, among other things, parks and green roofs.

Daley outright appointed more than two dozen aldermen over his 20 years, often because their predecessors went to federal prison, in the Chicago way, for various forms of corruption. He soon built a near-unanimous majority in the City Council and strong support in the state capitol, including among suburban Republicans who just wanted a city government they could do business with.

He took over the schools, he took over the parks, he took over the CTA, all theoretically independent units of government, but under Daley run by his appointees and by his orders.

There may have been more community gardens than ever before, and more community task forces and community advisory boards, but every decision that really mattered was made on the 5th Floor of City Hall.

So if Daley gets praise for green things happening, he also has to wear the jacket for what didn't happen. Chicago still has air-polluting coal-burning power plants within its borders. The CTA can barely keep its trains running, much less expand the public transit network enough to make a dent in traffic, congestion and the resulting pollution. Recycling is a joke.

But still. This city is a world different than the city I grew up in, and much of that is due to Richard M. Daley. Yet when I got home from San Francisco and tackled a week's worth of newspapers, I found nary a mention, in all the words spilled over Daley's announcement, of the influence of his green initiatives on the city.

Reporters and columnists in Chicago swim in an acid bath of cynicism about Daley and government in general. It's all they breathe. As far as they are concerned, a story about local government is a story about politics, power, clout and corruption.

Not that their cynicism is unjustified -- there's ample evidence that the deep-rooted patronage, corruption and self-interest that have shaped Illinois and Chicago since settlement are thriving.

But that cynicism leads most reporters to dismiss all of Daley's green leadership as "wrought-iron fences and flowerpots." The only question they ever ask is who got the contract for the fences. With the exception of Blair Kamin, the Tribune's architecture critic, they almost never pause to wonder whether the flower pots might actually do some good.

So what happens now? It's scary. There's a lot to lose, because so much of what Daley has imposed can melt away when Daley is gone.

So many of Daley's green initiatives were forced onto businesses and aldermen, and they can't wait for him to go away. From developers who don't want to set aside open space to restaurateurs who don't want to bother with plants for their sidewalk cafes to aldermen who want to have the only say on what gets built in their wards, everybody's got something they think is an unreasonable demand that they can't wait to get out from under.

And there are all those sweet jobs in the Department of Environment and in the Park District that could go to somebody's brother-in-law or campaign contributor instead of somebody who knows the issues.

I'd like to think that what follows is an era of open government, sweet cooperation on important issues, including environmental ones, and robust democracy. But as with most Chicagoans, my only memory of small-d democracy is the toxic Council Wars era in the Washington administration. It was not encouraging. And though it may betray my Hyde Park liberal independent upbringing, I have no hope whatever that government under a weaker mayor will be more progressive than government under a strongman. But most likely, that's what we're going to get.

The bottom line is this: It is now up to the voters to decide how green they want this city to be. It's no longer up to Daley.

Green ideas and environmental efforts won't come out of City Hall any more. We won't be able to sit back and wait for somebody in City Hall to have an idea, convince the mayor and get his backing to make it happen.

If people care about parks, about recycling, about Lake Michigan, about the lakefront, about coal-burning power plants, about energy conservation, about community gardens, about invasive species, about green roofs, about wildlife habitat, about Asian carp in Lake Michigan, about neighborhood open space, about making a Chicago Climate Action Plan more than a plan, they will have to make that support clear to whoever ends up running for mayor.

And they will have to remain vigilant as the new mayor is tempted, as he or she surely will be, to water down what has been achieved and avoid facing the challenges that are still out there.

It's going to be a lot more work.

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.

Watch out for those nasturtiums

I'm jumping in late to a project called SeedGROW. This is a collective effort in which a lot of garden bloggers agreed they would all grow the same kind of nasturtium seeds this season and report on their progress. I got the seeds, but had decided to opt out of participation because the variety sent out by Renee's Garden Seeds, Nasturtium 'Spitfire', has bright red flowers that didn't fit in with my planned color scheme.

But I have something to say that may possibly be relevant, so I am going to slip in a post on the last possible day.

My plan was to add nasturtiums to the boxes that line my 3rd-floor back porch, in which I grow my herbs and small container-variety tomatoes. I thought it would be nice to brighten the alley by adding nasturtiums tumbling down over the railing.

The vision was for a pastel mix of cream, pale yellow and pale apricot, and bright red didn't fit my aesthetic vision. So while I didn't plant the 'Spitfire', I collected various delicately-colored varieties and tucked the seeds in between the herb and tomato plants when I planted the boxes.

Well, the things romped. I was regularly watering and fertilizing for the sake of the other plants, and the nasturtiums got the benefit. Very early, they got so bushy that they were shading out the tomato plants and the basil. I had to keep whacking away at the nasturtiums to give the other plants a chance.

Soon I realized I was having to water a lot more this year than previous years. These are "self-watering" boxes -- also called "sub-irrigated" -- meaning they have a reservoir beneath the soil, from which the soil and roots wick up water. In previous years, this had allowed me to water the boxes less often. But not this year. I realized that the nasturtium root systems were taking up a lot of space and sucking up a lot of water.

I fought nasturtiums all summer. By fall, when I started to remove spent tomato plants, I realized that the boxes were solidly packed with roots. Today -- with temperatures in the high 30s -- the basil has packed it in but the nasturtiums are still romping.

The lesson for me: Nasturtiums (and I'm sure this is true of other varieties) don't play well with others. I have a clear set of priorities for those boxes right outside my kitchen: herbs and tomatoes. I want those plants to thrive. Never again will I afflict them with nasturtiums.

If I want color in the alley, I'm going to have to provide nasturtiums with their own pots where they don't have anything to bully. I'll try to coax them to grow out between the balustrades, and once they get out there into the sun, they will presumably romp. And my poor tomatoes and basil won't have another burden to bear.

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.