Here are links for more information on topics that came up Sunday when I was guest hosting the Mike Nowak Show on WCPT.
Mike's website
Organic Gardening magazine
Chicago Tribune compost story
Chicagoland Gardening magazine
Landreth Seed Co. saga
Growing Home building a new farm
Bike the Calumet 12-mile bike tour Oct. 16
Garfield Park Conservatory
Conservatory events, including Plant Rescue Sale
Open House Chicago, and its Green Trail
Report: The Future of the Indiana Dunes National Lakeshore
Ways to discover the nearby Indiana Dunes National Lakeshore:
Learn (official national park site)
Volunteer: National Parks Conservation Association, Save the Dunes
Paddle: Lake Michigan Water Trail
Fantastic Fall Orchids Show at Chicago Botanic Garden
My take on houseplants
Kilbourn Park Organic Greenhouse vegetable gardening class
Chicago Botanic Garden's Windy City Harvest and Green Youth Farm
Mike will be back next week, from 9 to 11 a.m. Sunday on WCPT, 820 AM in Chicago.
Sunday, October 9, 2011
Friday, October 7, 2011
What's in store for the Indiana Dunes National Lakeshore?
One of the things I've been working on this summer was writing a recently released report for the National Parks Conservation Association on the future of the Indiana Dunes National lakeshore. I'm just the wordsmith, not the policymaker, but I do have a close and longtime interest in this national park just an hour from Chicago. I knew it before it was a national park: My mom, Lee Botts, was one of the activists in the Save the Dunes Council who pushed for the park until it was finally established in 1966. She wasn't the kind of mom who left the kids sitting in front of the TV.
My parents discovered the Dunes shortly after they came to Chicago from Oklahoma as newlyweds in 1949. I have many memories of the Dunes and the campaign to save them and shape a new national park around Northern Indiana's steel mills and other development.
Assigned to sit at a card table at the Hyde Park Shopping Center Saturday mornings, at the age of 8 or 9, collecting signatures from shoppers on a petition to urge the passage of federal legislation to establish the park (passed in 1966). Riding in a DUKW (the WWII-era amphibious vehicle) in which my mom was touring around a bunch of congressmen, with sand blowing through my hair.
Staying in a friend's creaky cabin on stilts right on the beach at Porter Beach, with a potbellied stove and sand blowing against the rattling windows, part of an artists' colony that had been a retreat for Chicagoans since early in the century. Long gone now. One of many cabins and old tourist inns and campgrounds where we spent a week or a month in the Dunes in the summers of my childhood, my brothers and I free to roam through woods and swamps and dunes, bitten by bugs and encountering snakes, turtles, herons, raccoons.
Singing around the campfire in 1969 at the farewell celebration picnic at the patch of precious woods and marsh owned by our dear friend, artist John Hawkinson, the last holdout who had fought hard to keep it and the best remaining part of the Dunes from being bulldozed for what is now an Arcelor Mittal steel mill.
Carrying a picket sign at the dedication of the Port of Indiana in 1970, one of a handful of women and children from whom the Indiana National Guard had lined up troops in force to protect the guest speaker, Julie Nixon Eisenhower. She gave a speech all about jobs. We were mourning the precious dunes and woods that had been lost forever to build that port.
Long days spent lazing on the beach, and many hikes through Cowles and Pinhook Bogs, the Inland Marsh, Miller Woods, and all the other marvels away from the beach that are now in the park. Illicit winter toboganning outings down dunes in the snow. Sweeps of trillium and lupine in springtime.
The two summer homes we enjoyed for a few years each, leasebacks, which owners had sold to the National Park Service for the park but were allowed to use for up to 25 years before they were torn down. One was an oddly constructed hovel of pink-painted concrete blocks in the middle of the woods near a trickling creek, hand-built by a guy who sold us the lease, and who proudly told us he had cut down 200 trees to make space for a three-hole miniature golf course in a lawn in the middle of the forest. We would rather have had the trees, and we gradually let the woods have the lawn back.
A later leaseback had been the home and clinic of a quack doctor in the 1920s, who had fled to the Dunes, when it was still regarded as something of a wilderness, after losing his medical license in Chicago. He had a large organic vegetable garden on top of a dune (that's not what he was a quack about) and what my mom called her million-dollar view, over a small wetland and the first dune ridge to the broad expanse of Lake Michigan where the sun set behind the distant skyline of Chicago. We enjoyed that view and the nearby beach for a dozen years until the lease was up.
Both those houses are gone, torn down to let the sites return to nature. My brothers and I have hiked back to find scarcely any evidence there ever were buildings there. That's good. The whole point of all my mom's efforts, and those of all our friends who fought to save the Dunes, was to salvage as much as possible of the unique landscape, even where the land had already been developed, for the public and the future.
The Indiana Dunes National Lakeshore has its troubles: budget cuts, transportation issues, invasive species, arguments over how it should be managed. One of the big problems is that though Chicagoans and Illinois Sen. Paul Douglas fought hard to establish the park, Chicagoans nowadays don't have much sense of connection with it. Many people in the Chicago area today don't know there is a national park an hour away, or lump it together with Indiana Dunes State Park.
But the park also is a triumph and a wonder. It didn't all get bulldozed for steel mills and industrial ports. There's far more support for it today, even within industry in Northwest Indiana. There's a lot more support for conservation in general in the region today. I'm hopeful for the future of the park.
Lynn McClure, Midwest director of the NPCA, will be talking about the report and the park with me Sunday when I guest-host the Mike Nowak Show (all about gardening and environmental issues in Chicago) from 9 to 11 a.m. on WCPT-AM 820 and FM 92.7 (north), 92.5 9 (west), & 99.9FM (south). It's also streamed online. Other guests will be talking about the Garfield Park Conservatory, Open House Chicago, and fall and winter vegetable gardening. Give it a listen.
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.
My parents discovered the Dunes shortly after they came to Chicago from Oklahoma as newlyweds in 1949. I have many memories of the Dunes and the campaign to save them and shape a new national park around Northern Indiana's steel mills and other development.
Assigned to sit at a card table at the Hyde Park Shopping Center Saturday mornings, at the age of 8 or 9, collecting signatures from shoppers on a petition to urge the passage of federal legislation to establish the park (passed in 1966). Riding in a DUKW (the WWII-era amphibious vehicle) in which my mom was touring around a bunch of congressmen, with sand blowing through my hair.
Staying in a friend's creaky cabin on stilts right on the beach at Porter Beach, with a potbellied stove and sand blowing against the rattling windows, part of an artists' colony that had been a retreat for Chicagoans since early in the century. Long gone now. One of many cabins and old tourist inns and campgrounds where we spent a week or a month in the Dunes in the summers of my childhood, my brothers and I free to roam through woods and swamps and dunes, bitten by bugs and encountering snakes, turtles, herons, raccoons.
Singing around the campfire in 1969 at the farewell celebration picnic at the patch of precious woods and marsh owned by our dear friend, artist John Hawkinson, the last holdout who had fought hard to keep it and the best remaining part of the Dunes from being bulldozed for what is now an Arcelor Mittal steel mill.
Carrying a picket sign at the dedication of the Port of Indiana in 1970, one of a handful of women and children from whom the Indiana National Guard had lined up troops in force to protect the guest speaker, Julie Nixon Eisenhower. She gave a speech all about jobs. We were mourning the precious dunes and woods that had been lost forever to build that port.
Long days spent lazing on the beach, and many hikes through Cowles and Pinhook Bogs, the Inland Marsh, Miller Woods, and all the other marvels away from the beach that are now in the park. Illicit winter toboganning outings down dunes in the snow. Sweeps of trillium and lupine in springtime.
The two summer homes we enjoyed for a few years each, leasebacks, which owners had sold to the National Park Service for the park but were allowed to use for up to 25 years before they were torn down. One was an oddly constructed hovel of pink-painted concrete blocks in the middle of the woods near a trickling creek, hand-built by a guy who sold us the lease, and who proudly told us he had cut down 200 trees to make space for a three-hole miniature golf course in a lawn in the middle of the forest. We would rather have had the trees, and we gradually let the woods have the lawn back.
A later leaseback had been the home and clinic of a quack doctor in the 1920s, who had fled to the Dunes, when it was still regarded as something of a wilderness, after losing his medical license in Chicago. He had a large organic vegetable garden on top of a dune (that's not what he was a quack about) and what my mom called her million-dollar view, over a small wetland and the first dune ridge to the broad expanse of Lake Michigan where the sun set behind the distant skyline of Chicago. We enjoyed that view and the nearby beach for a dozen years until the lease was up.
Both those houses are gone, torn down to let the sites return to nature. My brothers and I have hiked back to find scarcely any evidence there ever were buildings there. That's good. The whole point of all my mom's efforts, and those of all our friends who fought to save the Dunes, was to salvage as much as possible of the unique landscape, even where the land had already been developed, for the public and the future.
The Indiana Dunes National Lakeshore has its troubles: budget cuts, transportation issues, invasive species, arguments over how it should be managed. One of the big problems is that though Chicagoans and Illinois Sen. Paul Douglas fought hard to establish the park, Chicagoans nowadays don't have much sense of connection with it. Many people in the Chicago area today don't know there is a national park an hour away, or lump it together with Indiana Dunes State Park.
But the park also is a triumph and a wonder. It didn't all get bulldozed for steel mills and industrial ports. There's far more support for it today, even within industry in Northwest Indiana. There's a lot more support for conservation in general in the region today. I'm hopeful for the future of the park.
Lynn McClure, Midwest director of the NPCA, will be talking about the report and the park with me Sunday when I guest-host the Mike Nowak Show (all about gardening and environmental issues in Chicago) from 9 to 11 a.m. on WCPT-AM 820 and FM 92.7 (north), 92.5 9 (west), & 99.9FM (south). It's also streamed online. Other guests will be talking about the Garfield Park Conservatory, Open House Chicago, and fall and winter vegetable gardening. Give it a listen.
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.
Thursday, October 6, 2011
It's dry out there. It's still important to water
I know it's hard to focus on gardening when we're busy enjoying what will surely be the last summerlike weather of the year. But these warm, sunlit days with no rain clouds in view mean: No rain. And that's bad news for our gardens. We're in a real dry spell -- Tom Skilling says it's our longest for seven months -- and the plants aren't done for the season. They're working hard on their roots and they need water to do it.
Trees, shrubs and perennials need to store water in their root systems as they go into winter. For evergreens, it's a special problem: They must have their needles full of water to avoid drying out in winter winds, and they do photosynthesize a little bit on warm winter days and need water to do it. So it's especially important to keep watering evergreens right up until the ground freezes.
I have a whole mess of perennials and shrubs that I just divided or transplanted so I need to be especially assiduous about watering. These plants only have a few months to grow enough roots to make up for what I whacked off, and they can't do it without water. So my soaker hoses aren't going in the basement any time soon.
If you feel the need for a refresher course after our rainy August: When it was dry this summer I wrote long posts on how to water and what to water with.
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.
Trees, shrubs and perennials need to store water in their root systems as they go into winter. For evergreens, it's a special problem: They must have their needles full of water to avoid drying out in winter winds, and they do photosynthesize a little bit on warm winter days and need water to do it. So it's especially important to keep watering evergreens right up until the ground freezes.
I have a whole mess of perennials and shrubs that I just divided or transplanted so I need to be especially assiduous about watering. These plants only have a few months to grow enough roots to make up for what I whacked off, and they can't do it without water. So my soaker hoses aren't going in the basement any time soon.
If you feel the need for a refresher course after our rainy August: When it was dry this summer I wrote long posts on how to water and what to water with.
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.
Wednesday, October 5, 2011
On the radio Sunday: the conservatory's future, cool green places to visit, our neighborhood national park, fall and winter veggies
Once again, I'll be hosting the Mike Nowak gardening-and-greening radio show this Sunday while Mike goofs off. Actually, I think he's going to his high-school reunion. One of the big ones. Multiple decades. I hope his Twitter and Facebook friends won't waste the opportunity this presents for commentary and discussion.
Meanwhile, a lively group of guests will join me Sunday from 9 to 11 a.m. on WCPT-AM 820 and FM 92.7 (north), 92.5 9 (west), & 99.9FM (south). And of course, streamed online to the world. I last hosted the show a couple weeks ago; here's the podcast.
This week, I'll be chatting with Mary Eysenbach, director of conservatories for the Chicago Park District, who will fill us in on the state of the hail-damaged Garfield Park Conservatory and plans for its future. "One Pane at a Time" is the theme for the fundraising campaign (donate online here) and parts of the conservatory are open for visitors. We'll find out from Mary what we can look forward to visiting this fall and winter while the repair work proceeds. And she'll give us the scoop on the Plant Rescue Sale Oct. 22.
The conservatory is one of the stops on Open House Chicago, an all-weekend free event Oct. 15-16 ("100 sites, 48 hours") that allows visitors behind-the-scenes tours of important and historic buildings and other sites in the city. We'll talk with somebody from the Chicago Architecture Foundation about the event's Green Trail, which includes 17 sites of special note for their environmentally-aware architecture or their interest for landscape design and architecture or gardening. The trail is one possible way to winnow down the choices in this great (free!) opportunity to see the city from new angles.
Did you know there's an important national park an hour from downtown Chicago? A lot of people don't, which is one of the things I'll be talking about with Lynn McClure, Midwest regional director of the National Parks Conservation Association, who will remind us of the wonders of Indiana Dunes National Lakeshore. I wrote a recent report for the NPCA about the future of the national park and one of the needs identified by the group's policy wonks is for more Chicago folks to discover, enjoy and support their neighborhood national park. Lynn will be able to talk about all there is to enjoy, including the first stretch of the Lake Michigan Water Trail, which leads from Chicago right there. Got a kayak? You also can take the train or even drive.
Angela Mason, director of community gardening for the Chicago Botanic Garden, will talk to us about fall and winter vegetable growing. Is there anything you can still plant? How long can you leave root crops in the ground? How do you extend the season for greens? When should you harvest Brussels sprouts? She'll also talk to us about the garden's Windy City Harvest and Green Youth Farm programs, which train workers for urban agriculture and work with teenagers to raise crops for farmer's markets. She'll let us know what they are harvesting and what are the good sellers this time of year.
And of course we'll have Rick Di Maio to tell us what to expect in the weather department (this balmy weather is getting me nervous about my houseplants).
Call in with your questions about fall and winter vegetable gardening or other topics during the show to to 773-838-WCPT (9278).
You also can tweet your questions and comments to my Twitter feed (@chicagogardener) or Mike's (@mikenow) and, of course, there's Facebook.
Valiant producer Heather Frey and I will try desperately to keep up with all this social media while she pushes all the buttons and makes the sound effects and music and stuff happen and I try to remember which microphone I'm supposed to talk into.
After the show, a podcast will be posted on Mike's web page, Mikenowak.net.
See you on the radio ....
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.
Meanwhile, a lively group of guests will join me Sunday from 9 to 11 a.m. on WCPT-AM 820 and FM 92.7 (north), 92.5 9 (west), & 99.9FM (south). And of course, streamed online to the world. I last hosted the show a couple weeks ago; here's the podcast.
This week, I'll be chatting with Mary Eysenbach, director of conservatories for the Chicago Park District, who will fill us in on the state of the hail-damaged Garfield Park Conservatory and plans for its future. "One Pane at a Time" is the theme for the fundraising campaign (donate online here) and parts of the conservatory are open for visitors. We'll find out from Mary what we can look forward to visiting this fall and winter while the repair work proceeds. And she'll give us the scoop on the Plant Rescue Sale Oct. 22.
The conservatory is one of the stops on Open House Chicago, an all-weekend free event Oct. 15-16 ("100 sites, 48 hours") that allows visitors behind-the-scenes tours of important and historic buildings and other sites in the city. We'll talk with somebody from the Chicago Architecture Foundation about the event's Green Trail, which includes 17 sites of special note for their environmentally-aware architecture or their interest for landscape design and architecture or gardening. The trail is one possible way to winnow down the choices in this great (free!) opportunity to see the city from new angles.
Did you know there's an important national park an hour from downtown Chicago? A lot of people don't, which is one of the things I'll be talking about with Lynn McClure, Midwest regional director of the National Parks Conservation Association, who will remind us of the wonders of Indiana Dunes National Lakeshore. I wrote a recent report for the NPCA about the future of the national park and one of the needs identified by the group's policy wonks is for more Chicago folks to discover, enjoy and support their neighborhood national park. Lynn will be able to talk about all there is to enjoy, including the first stretch of the Lake Michigan Water Trail, which leads from Chicago right there. Got a kayak? You also can take the train or even drive.
Angela Mason, director of community gardening for the Chicago Botanic Garden, will talk to us about fall and winter vegetable growing. Is there anything you can still plant? How long can you leave root crops in the ground? How do you extend the season for greens? When should you harvest Brussels sprouts? She'll also talk to us about the garden's Windy City Harvest and Green Youth Farm programs, which train workers for urban agriculture and work with teenagers to raise crops for farmer's markets. She'll let us know what they are harvesting and what are the good sellers this time of year.
And of course we'll have Rick Di Maio to tell us what to expect in the weather department (this balmy weather is getting me nervous about my houseplants).
Call in with your questions about fall and winter vegetable gardening or other topics during the show to to 773-838-WCPT (9278).
You also can tweet your questions and comments to my Twitter feed (@chicagogardener) or Mike's (@mikenow) and, of course, there's Facebook.
Valiant producer Heather Frey and I will try desperately to keep up with all this social media while she pushes all the buttons and makes the sound effects and music and stuff happen and I try to remember which microphone I'm supposed to talk into.
After the show, a podcast will be posted on Mike's web page, Mikenowak.net.
See you on the radio ....
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.
Time to move houseplants indoors
We're being suckered by a stretch of balmy weather in Chicago right now. Temperatures in the 70s, flirting with 80s, are predicted for the next several days, until about Tuesday, it looks like, with nothing but sunshine. For those of us who move our houseplants outdoors for the summer, this sort of weather in October is really dangerous. The temptation is to leave the plants out to enjoy the warmth and sunshine as long as possible, but that's a major risk: At any moment the weather could turn and overnight we could have a houseplant massacre. After all, our typical average first-frost date is about Oct. 15.
I have gotten about halfway there: I have the houseplants repotted (yes, I know it's better to do it in spring, but for logistical reasons I always end up doing it in September) and waiting on the back porch landing. I haven't been able to bring myself to haul them indoors -- it seems so cruel. Also, indoors is three floors up, and hauling pots upstairs is work.
I don't have any exotic orchids in my collection, any signed-first-edition houseplants. My houseplants are more along the lines of the battered paperbacks you pick up from the freebie box outside used bookstores. Most were grown from cuttings from other people's houseplants; some, despite their plebeian geneaology, are precious to me because the cuttings came from people I loved.
But even common-as-dirt houseplants like mine -- spider plants, pothos, Tradescantia zebrina (the plant otherwise known as wandering racial slur), purple heart vine, athyrium, peperomia, Moses-in-the-cradle, Chinese evergreens, begonias, jade plant, Ficus benjamina, asparagus ferns, snake plant (a.k.a. mother-in-law's tongue), a couple of kinds of true ferns, prayer plant, a few others I can't bring to mind right now -- are mostly of tropical or subtropical origins. I'm trying to overwinter some coleus and tuberous and flowering begonias this year too, to save money on annuals next spring.
The majority of these plants are native to the shady understory of tropical forests. That's why they can tolerate the darkness and warmth of living rooms. They have no defenses against a Chicago frost, and even the nighttime temperatures we've often had so far, in the 50s and occasionally 40s, are probably stressing them.
Repotting and dividing houseplants in fall is another stressor, although my plants love it outdoors and many grow to lanky or unmanageable proportions. Houseplants do go dormant, although it's a more subtle dormancy than you see in, for instance, a sugar maple that abandons its leaves to hunker down or a hosta that lets its top growth wither to preserve its roots. Houseplants just slow their growth in the autumn and rev up again in spring. Dividing and transplanting them in fall, when they are trying to start taking it easy, and forcing them to grow new roots when they're getting sleepy is a challenge. I'm glad they get a few extra days in the sun, and I've given them a mild shot of fish emulsion (another reason to leave them in the open air until the perfume passes).
When I repotted them and divided them, I checked the plants carefully for bugs, especially the undersides of the leaves, where lurkers often lurk. I gave them a hard shower from the hose to wash off any tiny insects or eggs. I watered them good, but I'm letting them dry out well before I water them again to avoid the saturated soil that leads to fungus gnat problems.
Some leaves were a little tattered from being munched on during the summer. All my houseplants serve as somebody's food supply outdoors, and they end up with holes and raggedy leaf edges. I simply cut any unsightly leaves off. Outdoors is actually the healthiest place for plants, pest-wise; whatever insects may munch on them become food for a wide variety of carnivorous insects, and the plants rarely sustain significant damage. Indoors is far riskier because there are no predators to control the populations of plant-munchers. That's why I try to be really careful to check for insects before I bring them in.
In an ideal world I would have a place to quarantine houseplants that have been outdoors for a few weeks to make sure they aren't bringing in pests. Also in an ideal world, I would gradually bring them in for a few hours each day to acclimate them to the much harsher conditions they will have to survive indoors -- far less light, for example, even in my sunniest windows (outdoors there is no roof). But I am not going to haul 25 plants up and down three flights of stairs each day. So my plants are just going to have to tough out the shock. Usually the ficus loses a lot of leaves before it recovers, but a ficus will lose leaves if you give it a hard look.
This rugged treatment explains why I only bother with common, sturdy houseplants. I don't have the conditions or the temperament to baby anything.
I do hedge my bets: Every fall I repot the divisions and give them to friends and family. That way I can go back and beg a cutting if something goes wrong with my mother plant (had a begonia near-death experience last winter). I also have a steady supply of backup cuttings in glasses of water on the windowsill. Over the years the old pool of friends and family has become largely saturated with spider plants, pothos and prayer plants, so I've had to make some new friends to soak up the annual surplus. Worse things could happen.
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.
I have gotten about halfway there: I have the houseplants repotted (yes, I know it's better to do it in spring, but for logistical reasons I always end up doing it in September) and waiting on the back porch landing. I haven't been able to bring myself to haul them indoors -- it seems so cruel. Also, indoors is three floors up, and hauling pots upstairs is work.
I don't have any exotic orchids in my collection, any signed-first-edition houseplants. My houseplants are more along the lines of the battered paperbacks you pick up from the freebie box outside used bookstores. Most were grown from cuttings from other people's houseplants; some, despite their plebeian geneaology, are precious to me because the cuttings came from people I loved.
But even common-as-dirt houseplants like mine -- spider plants, pothos, Tradescantia zebrina (the plant otherwise known as wandering racial slur), purple heart vine, athyrium, peperomia, Moses-in-the-cradle, Chinese evergreens, begonias, jade plant, Ficus benjamina, asparagus ferns, snake plant (a.k.a. mother-in-law's tongue), a couple of kinds of true ferns, prayer plant, a few others I can't bring to mind right now -- are mostly of tropical or subtropical origins. I'm trying to overwinter some coleus and tuberous and flowering begonias this year too, to save money on annuals next spring.
The majority of these plants are native to the shady understory of tropical forests. That's why they can tolerate the darkness and warmth of living rooms. They have no defenses against a Chicago frost, and even the nighttime temperatures we've often had so far, in the 50s and occasionally 40s, are probably stressing them.
Repotting and dividing houseplants in fall is another stressor, although my plants love it outdoors and many grow to lanky or unmanageable proportions. Houseplants do go dormant, although it's a more subtle dormancy than you see in, for instance, a sugar maple that abandons its leaves to hunker down or a hosta that lets its top growth wither to preserve its roots. Houseplants just slow their growth in the autumn and rev up again in spring. Dividing and transplanting them in fall, when they are trying to start taking it easy, and forcing them to grow new roots when they're getting sleepy is a challenge. I'm glad they get a few extra days in the sun, and I've given them a mild shot of fish emulsion (another reason to leave them in the open air until the perfume passes).
When I repotted them and divided them, I checked the plants carefully for bugs, especially the undersides of the leaves, where lurkers often lurk. I gave them a hard shower from the hose to wash off any tiny insects or eggs. I watered them good, but I'm letting them dry out well before I water them again to avoid the saturated soil that leads to fungus gnat problems.
Some leaves were a little tattered from being munched on during the summer. All my houseplants serve as somebody's food supply outdoors, and they end up with holes and raggedy leaf edges. I simply cut any unsightly leaves off. Outdoors is actually the healthiest place for plants, pest-wise; whatever insects may munch on them become food for a wide variety of carnivorous insects, and the plants rarely sustain significant damage. Indoors is far riskier because there are no predators to control the populations of plant-munchers. That's why I try to be really careful to check for insects before I bring them in.
In an ideal world I would have a place to quarantine houseplants that have been outdoors for a few weeks to make sure they aren't bringing in pests. Also in an ideal world, I would gradually bring them in for a few hours each day to acclimate them to the much harsher conditions they will have to survive indoors -- far less light, for example, even in my sunniest windows (outdoors there is no roof). But I am not going to haul 25 plants up and down three flights of stairs each day. So my plants are just going to have to tough out the shock. Usually the ficus loses a lot of leaves before it recovers, but a ficus will lose leaves if you give it a hard look.
This rugged treatment explains why I only bother with common, sturdy houseplants. I don't have the conditions or the temperament to baby anything.
I do hedge my bets: Every fall I repot the divisions and give them to friends and family. That way I can go back and beg a cutting if something goes wrong with my mother plant (had a begonia near-death experience last winter). I also have a steady supply of backup cuttings in glasses of water on the windowsill. Over the years the old pool of friends and family has become largely saturated with spider plants, pothos and prayer plants, so I've had to make some new friends to soak up the annual surplus. Worse things could happen.
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.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)