DryStoneGarden

ribes sanguineum & physocarpus capitatus

I didn’t get the greatest photo, but I find this juxtaposition pretty funny. First off, it’s a mistake on several levels. It’s in a planting outside a sub-development, and I’m sure that a landscape architect designed the planting with all Ribes sanguineum (flowering currant), but the contractor accidentally installed one Physocarpus capitatus (Pacific ninebark). There’s only one ninebark in the whole planting, and the two plants look similar when young so it would be an easy enough mistake to make, and there’s no way someone would intentionally plant this–it looks like Two-Face from the Batman series. There’s also no way anyone should have hedged these plants, but for some reason people seem to think it’s appropriate.

The mistake does make for an interesting, if slightly unfair, comparison. When they are not hedged, ninebarks have beautiful new foliage in the spring; the new leaves have almost the same effect as flowers, and the flowers are nice when they come later in the year. The plants are fast and tough and a good native habitat plant. I like them; we have one in our own garden. But they are not for every garden. The form is kind of rangy and thickety if you don’t prune it frequently, the bloom should be deadheaded, and the leaves can get tired and yellow by mid-summer with no fall color before they drop.

And ninebarks just can’t compete head to head with a Ribes; few things can. Ribes sanguineum is beautiful and native and fast and tough and a great habitat plant, and it will thrive in virtually any spot where you’d put a ninebark. It’s good for habitat and genetic diversity reasons to plant the ninebark (most Ribes in retail nurseries are from just a few cultivars), but most people, and most clients, will prefer the Ribes. We do plant ninebarks- like I said, we’ve got one in our own garden (along with two Ribes)–but we’ve probably installed six or eight Ribes for every one ninebark. I’m sympathetic to the native plant enthusiasts who want as much diversity and habitat value as possible in gardens, but sometimes it comes down to just looking at two plants side by side and picking. Fortunately, we don’t always have to pick between the two, and we do sometimes find gardens for ninebarks. Ninebarks are nice, they just aren’t awesome.

I put a few photos of the hedged ribes mound that the landscape architect was intending. I don’t really understand the urge to turn two perfectly nice Ribes shrubs into a single Ribes shrub mound. (more…)

mache, corn salad

Tiny little mâche. The plant in the photo is approaching harvest size, and it’s still dwarfed by the trowel. I added the trowel for scale, but it reminds me of Spinal Tap, “Our Stonehenge monument was in danger of being trampled by DWARVES!”

I find mâche is really easy (although slow) to grow and a pain in the neck to harvest and totally worth it. You have to pick and clean a bunch of little plants to make one single salad, but it has the best flavor of any single green, it’s supposed to be really healthy, and the ease of growing it completely makes up for the effort of harvesting. Our plants are all volunteers from the first batch I grew a few years ago, the only effort with growing them has actually been to keep them properly thinned so they can reach a decent size; I’ve thinned ours at least four times this year. They can apparently be a bit invasive–one of the common names, corn salad, comes from it’s tendency to naturalize in agricultural fields–though I don’t think they are a problem in the Bay Area.

Last Christmas, the organic market near our house was selling 4 ounce packages for $13. That was early in the season and unusually high, but even at half that price, it’s gonna be on the list of things I have to grow for myself. It kind of fascinates me to think that someone could charge so much money for something that is so easy to grow.

FromSeedToTable has a post about golden corn salad, which I’ve never grown, but sounds worth trying.

ryan 3/14

Roots!

But it feels like most people plant them as if they were. We see tons and tons of sick, unhealthy plants, especially trees and shrubs, that have been planted by well-meaning, and sometimes even professional, gardeners who bury the root crowns of the plants. It’s reached the point that we automatically check if the crowns are buried whenever we look at someone’s garden. Nine out of ten times, if a tree is sick, the crown is buried. I’m not sure why people plant that way. I probably did it years ago, too, but I don’t remember the thinking behind it. I guess the plants seem more solid when their trunks have a lot of dirt holding them in place. Also, I think it might be because people’s first gardening experience is with a tomato.

Tomatoes are one of the few plants that actually benefits from having the root crown and stem buried. If you bury the root crown (the spot where the stem or trunk meets the soil and starts to put out roots) and the stem of a tomato plant, the branch nodes will form new roots and you’ll get a more vigorous plant. If you bury the root crown or stem of most other plants, the stem will slowly rot and the plant will die. It can take a long time, sometimes years, for a plant to die from a buried crown, so a well-intentioned gardener might never learn why their plants tend to mysteriously kick the bucket. It’s the most common cause of problems when we consult on sick plants, and I have a theory that it’s one of the most common causes of black thumbs. I know at least one black thumb gardener who was losing plants for that reason.

A few plants, like tomatoes, benefit from being planted a bit deep. I have a short list, which I hope to add to over time, of those plants below. Let me know of any I should add to the list. (more…)

The blues in the striped agave and Festuca californica are a pretty obvious match. Festucas look really nice this time of year, especially next to Arizona flagstone and terra cotta pots. We put the agave there to stop me from stepping across the narrow planting bed. You can’t really top agaves for crowd control.

We grow a lot of basil for pesto, freezing large batches using the ice cube tray method (a revelation when I heard about it: mix your pesto, leave out the cheese, freeze it in ice cube trays, then store the cubes in ziplocks, defrost a cube at a time and serve, preferably on a baguette with a poached egg and cheese), but we like parsley pesto just as well or even better than the basil stuff and we’re able to have it fresh year-round. I used to deride the parsley batches (2 cups parsley, 1 cup olive oil, 1/3 cup walnuts, 2 cloves of garlic, salt, pepper in a blender) as poor-man’s-pesto, but now I think I prefer it; it tastes really fresh and green, and it’s much easier for us to grow, not caring about our lack of summer heat. Last year’s parsley plants are starting to bolt, so I planted the next batch this past week, six plants. With any luck we can keep production going without any significant lag.

Throughout the winter we get people asking us if their tree or shrub is still alive. Plants sometimes fool us people in the Bay Area when they drop their leaves, and the frosts of winter often cause tender evergreens to suddenly look dead, and then in the spring there is sometimes one plant in a garden that doesn’t leaf out when all the others do, making everyone wonder if it is still alive. It can be hard to tell. Last fall, I planted a Spiraea “Anthony Waterer” that my dad has prematurely declared dead twice already.

We have an easy method for diagnosis: Scratch the bark with a fingernail or blade. The branch should have a bit of green under the bark if the wood is still living, but it will be hard and gray if the wood is dead. Dead wood won’t come back to life, but if there is green wood, we just cut out the dead and wait.

There’s a saying in back-country first aid: No one is dead until they are warm and dead. The human body has the ability to go dormant in extreme cold, and not even doctors can tell the difference between death and extreme stasis; frozen people have occasionally revived after days without a detectable pulse. Plants have even greater dormancy and regenerative powers than humans, so we generally apply that same rule to plants, with June as the approximate plant equivalent of warm. No leafless plant is dead, until it is June, leafless, and dead.

ryan 1/11