Yardening August 2015

I have a question about Passiflora incarnata (Passion Flower, Maypop). Does it die completely back to the ground in the winter, or is it like Loncira sempervirens (Coral Honeysuckle), which produces new leaves all along the previous year's vine?

Maypop dies to the ground and emerges late, around Swap time usually, LOL. And can emerge up to ten feet away from where it was the previous year. Is yours doing OK? I have volunteers...

I feel it is such a waste to see people here with half acre lots and NEVER see them in the yard doing anything but mow. Zero flowers for even bird and bug help. Well, except some tiny ground level stuff I guess. Maybe they are going for Cricket Habitat certification. The natural state of land here is forest. Why don't they get somebody to plant a few trees and mulch it all. Don't even rake leaves, let them lay. Oh well, Monday morning grumpiness!!!

I think a beautiful, well mowed lawn is, sort of, a status symbol to some.

I have no such feelings--but i do like my lawn when it is freshly mowed too.
I just never get around to edging it....
I look to the left---and i look to the right and my neighbor's walkways and driveways
are beautifully edged...BUT--they pay someone else to do it all.

Here--$40 is the going rate. Mind you--our lawns here are relatively small.
Development size....

Pic from April, 2012. I show this to people "sell" Milorganite...
to those that never heard of it. It is the only time of year that I fertilize my lawn.

g.

I don't look at keeping a nice lawn as a status symbol. I view it similar to the way I view gardening. A labor of love.

My lawn right now looks okay from a distance but an up close look and you'll see it's about 30% weeds, clover being the biggest culprit. I just moved in earlier this year and the landscaping has been my biggest time consumer so far. The lawn is a process. Give me until next fall and it will look like a golf course. I take great pleasure in creating a beautiful, thick, lush, green lawn.

Muddy Maypop pop up all over the place but they are very easy to weed out.
LOL Sally, What would always get me was people that bought woodland and then cleared the property of pretty much all the trees. If you wanted a field to build your house then buy a field.
Our neighbor cleared everything off of his property, not like there was much there in the first place but he took out all of the few bushes. Nothing but grass I think he would gladly macadam
the whole place if he could. He does have a bee allergy so I could understand some of this but taking out the Russian Olives on the edge of his property but he even took out the few small evergreens on the other side.

Sally, here at work we have 5 acres that is 90% lawn. We don't even do a good job making the lawn look nice. It gets mowed every two weeks by a company that doesn't do a very good job. For the money we pay, we could buy 3 B&B trees every two months and plant them. We do have about 30 red maples that line the property and 5-6 linden trees but that's all pretty boring.

Cam, to each his own! A lush lawn is beautiful. A great backdrop to bigger plantings, like white walls in a museum. And fairly sterile, which also appeals to many people. No place for creatures of most kinds to live.

Holly, you're a girl after my own heart...

Seq4, I will hope somebody there gets a crazy notion of 'greening' the company and plant a meadow, at least. Unless the mowing contract goes to the CEOs son in law...

We have about 30 acres here where I work. About half is nicely landscaped with at least 50 varieties of trees, countless shrubs and perennials and a good many annuals. They used to water the lawn but budget cuts came about 5 years ago. Still looks pretty good because they contractor does spray for weeds and edges it but it does get brown during dry spells. All in all, a very nice lawn and landscaping to enjoy.

By the way, the other half of the property, they let it grow and it is a nice place for wild animals to live. I've seen many deer, squirrels, rabbits, groundhogs, and dozens of species of birds, even a couple of hawks, living on the property

Cam sounds like a nice use of the property.
I agree that lawn does make a nice backdrop for a garden.
Cam my neighbor has one of those beautiful lawns, I on the other hand have mostly mowed weeds. There are all kinds of different plants that make up our lawn. I have lawn envy. I would like what lawn we have to be grass just grass without all the clover and other things that creep into my flower beds like wild strawberry and creeping charlie.Our lawn is definitely not a monoculture. But I will admit that the clover does keep all the rabbits out of my flower beds. They seem pretty happy with the clover in the lawn and don't do much damage in the flower beds.

No mowing contract for the son in law but the local township might have some ordinance against a meadow.

Holly, Yes... when I rid my lawn of all the weeds, I plan to not treat an inconspicuous area so there is a nice clover patch for rabbits to munch on. Trick will be to keeping it under control so it doesn't take over the rest of the yard again.

Townships should encourage places with huge lawns to do something else, reduce pollution from gas mowing, and support wild birds and insects. Too many people see meadow and think "Snakes!! I'm gonna die!!"

I'm happy to observe less mowing of highway centers and fringes.

Steady rain sprinkles and showers down here by the Bay this morning; nice.

Looks like most of us have a really good chance of rain tonight and tomorrow. REALLY looking forward to September/October with those soaking rains that last for hours and hours start up again.

For years we let the area that is now the Veggie garden just go and grow. We were too busy to keep up with a Veggie Garden and finally just let it go. We ended up with a small meadow that Ric cut back once a year usually late fall or early spring. It was pretty unsightly, not your picture of a lovely meadow mostly perennial weeds. One day Ric thought he would make me happy by cleaning it up in the middle of summer. I almost had a fit, there were Indigo Buntings in there every day, he had on idea at the time that they were frequenting the not very lovely meadow. I think if Ric ever decides not to have a big garden we may plant the whole area with meadow grass and Queen Anne's lace.

I hear you Sally. I can never understand why, in PA, the center median has to be grass and weeds. Better yet, the triangle areas between the highway and on/off ramps. A couple years ago the PENNDOT crews chopped down mature oak trees for no reason in these areas. You couldn't even say it was a safety thing because they were so far from the road and uphill from the driving lanes.

I'm not sure my wife will go for the whole 'I'm saving the environment by not having a lawn' thing. It's a good argument but she holds fast that we 'need' to have a lawn.

Has anyone else noticed the new rain/bog gardens in the median of I-95 near DC?

They've replaced the grass with shrubs/trees and some sort of a bioswale to remove the pollutants from rain water before it drains into the bay. I remember seeing a small sign that described the plantings but it was really hard to read while driving 65 mph.

Nothing handles foot traffic like turf grass, though. It's great for garden pathways and for playing badminton in the yard, but it seems to be an impractical planting for highway medians.

Sally, the Maypops are doing very well, thanks. One half of the starts are in the ground (see the nice green leaves on the bottom left in this photo) and the other half are in a pot because I wanted to buy another trellis or other support for them first. The planted Maypops are sharing that arch with a newish Lonicera sempervirens, which I'm training to cover the arch, and a Clematis which never grows more than 4 feet per year (growing up from the other side).

I realize that I should move the planted Maypops and give them their own trellis or other structure to grow on, and I happen to have some wooden ones that'll do just fine until I find something else I like. If I were faced with the prospect of extricating woody vines, I wouldn't want to use a temporary trellis, but now that I know they die down to the ground anyway,,,, no problem!

That sounds pretty cool SSG. I'm glad they are doing something responsible. It would be awesome if it caught on and carried elsewhere.

The latest weather front has once again been a bust for us so far. For the month of August to date we have had only a trace of rain, perhaps 0.02 inches total, not enough to make a whit of difference.

Based on the hourly predictions and the radar map when I went to bed, I thought we would get at least an inch and a half of rain last night. Rain gauge says 1/4 inch. Radar shows the rain above us now, how did it get past us without dumping a bunch ? Grrrrrrrrrrrrrr.

Sounds like I got it all last night, sorry guys. When Mark washed his car AND I watered on Sunday, we made sure we got therain lol

Lucky you Sally. We also got shafted. Our two day rain total so far has been .39". They are saying thunderstorms this afternoon but I'll believe it when I see it.

Well, I checked my other rain gauge before I left for work and it registered just under one inch. So appears we got more rain than I thought and one of my rain gauges is useless. :)

We got about 3/4" late Sunday/early Monday....all that watering I did during the weekend paid off!

The front that passed through yesterday afternoon broke apart over the local mountains and a discontinuity in the line passed over us without leaving a single drop. As soon as it crossed the Potomac it reformed into a continuous band that swept across the entire state of Maryland. Its August 12th and still just a couple of hundredths of an inch of rain total at our house. Getting really dry here.

oh, drat! Weird and frustrating that that happens.

Yeah, we got squat from that system yesterday afternoon also. Storms to the north of us, storms to the west of us, storms to the east of us, diddly-squat here. Blech. Not complaining too much though, have had a lot more rain the past month than David and Pat.

Looks like we have a two-ish day reprieve on the hot weather. Come on, Autumn !!

After autumn comes winter. I'm not hurrying that! It already feels like September out there.

Eh... I dislike the heat and humidity more than cold and snow. I need to retire to a place that has eternal Spring/Autumn. :)

when you find that magical place, drop us a line!!!
Isn't that the place where it routinely rains, one inch per week, but only in the wee hours of the night?

Oh man, I hate the cold but love the snow. I'll take heat and humidity over cold any day. I am looking forward to autumn and seeing all the leaves change though. This is the first year for me to say that. Normally I dread the fall because that means winter is coming.

I'm seriously considering the Pac NW or San Diego as retirement places, Sally. No drastic heat, no drastic cold. The northwest would get plenty of rain, where San Diego, not so much. If I stay on this coast, I'm thinking the coastline of North Carolina for mild winters and the heat and humidity of summer slightly off set by the ocean breezes. About 11 more years to decide. :)

The problem with the PNW is that it doesn't rain much during the growing season, especially June, July, and August. I've always wondered how they do their summers with no rain. Do they have to water things constantly? Also, depending on where you go in the PNW, you might not be in a high enough heat zone to grow some of our favorite summer perennials we have here.

I believe the Pac NW is ag zone 8. Yeah, their dry season is the summer and it rains around an inch a month for those three months but I'll be retired... I'll have about 12 hours a day to water. LOL And the gardening season is longer than here, about 8 or 9 months. I think I would like it there a lot.

Yes, USDA zone 8 indeed. AHS heat zone 2 and 3.

http://www.mischelsgreenhouses.com/assets/images/HeatZoneMap_lg.jpg

PNW is a great place but I think the perfect climate for me would be the Greenville/Spartanburg area of South Carolina.

Yeah, I thought about SC too, just think it's a bit too far south and a bit hot and humid for my tastes. The more I think about the coast of NC, the more I like that idea. Just have to be prepared for the occasional hurricane.

Yeah coastal NC sticks out like sore thumb. It's tough down there because you have the storm surge from the ocean and the sound.

Yep... I imagine flood insurance is pretty steep.