Emptying the Greenhouse

Oh, the greenhouse was crammed. And the weather predictions were for upper 80's and low 90's over the weekend. Yiiikes. I was not about to allow all the plants I'd been growing all winter to be fried. Ever since the fan broke in my greenhouse, I've been trying to get it emptied and planted out before it gets really hot. I hated the drone of that fan anyway, and if it's hot enough for it to be running, it's too hot for the plants. At least that was my rationale for not having somebody come out to install a new fan. So I had the devil chasing me to get the Pod emptied before the big heat hit.

I have to say I was as pleased with my plants this year as any. I was a good girl and pinched back the geraniums instead of letting them all get huge. I toughened my stance on bringing in big huge pots of flowers from the yard. It would only be cuttings this year. And I didn't go nuts--just one or two cuttings of each.

One difference this year from others is that I switched from giving liquid fertilizer (Peter's, dissolved in water) to Osmocote, which is fertilizer bound up in round, time-release pellets. You mix it into the soil and it does its work steadily and slowly as the months go by. What a difference. Instead of the huge spurts of top-heavy growth, I got slow, steady, sturdy growth in my plants.

Gartenmeister fuschia, the first time I've grown a decent specimen indoors. Yay!

Heliotrope, which smells like cherry pie. It's now out in the flower border. Rabbits don't like it. Yay again.

The poet's jasmine loves Osmocote. It was looking sickly and yellow, and Osmocote and some pyrethrins brought it back from Red Spider Miteland. It has a heavy, musky scent all its own. I crave it. And it blooms year 'round. What a dinkum plantie.


These are the geraniums I can't live without: star geraniums in red and hot pink, little bitty Grey Sprite, Occold Shield with its chestnut-splotched chartreuse leaves, Vancouver Centennial with its chestnut star-shaped leaves edged in chartreuse; Rosina Read in pink, Wilhelm Langguth with its white-bordered leaves, Frank Headley with its ridiculously white leaves and salmon flowers. The list goes on. At one time I had 28 varieties of miniature and dwarf and fancy-leaved gerania. They are my weakness. Well, one of my weaknesses. People of passion have many weaknesses.

But now it was time for them to go back out in the big world.
And so I planted them in nine planters and five baskets, all to keep them out of the reach of wabbits. Wabbits are huge geranium fans. They like them so much they chew them into tiny bits, leaving a neat pile of leaves and stem chunks where once there was a plant. Leaving me jumping up and down, firing my sixguns fruitlessly in the air like Yosemite Sam.

So what's a geranium freak to do? Why, elevate them, of course. You're never going to get rid of rabbits. The really precious plants go in hanging baskets, and the rest in planters, which are themselves elevated to about 18 inches, which is high enough to deter all but climbing rabbits (and they sometimes do climb to get to them). RRRRRR. Chet Baker. Where are you when they are doing that?
Sleeping? Cooling my tummeh in the green grass? I do not know. Rabbits are crafty. They do it at night, when I am asleep in my Jedd Bed. That's what I think. You cannot blame me for what the bunnehs do, Mether.

Here is my HotPot, with a red star geranium (so called because the leaves and flowers are like pointy stars), Occold Shield, and Vancouver Centennial. I put it next to the cool Bird Spa, and get photos of warblers in the crazy foliage. By September, Vancouver Centennial will look like a chestnut and chartreuse waterfall over the whole pot.
And here's the Cool Pot in the shade of a birch, with Gartenmeister fuchsia and a pink and purple fuchsia I love. Other than having to spray them with pyrethrins or insecticidal soap every couple of days for whitefly, I like growing fuchsias. Once they go outside, I don't have to spray them any more, nor do I want to, because the hummingbirds are visiting then.


You can see the elevational element in all my plantings. Of necessity. I'd love to have planters right on the ground, but then there would be no plants in them. And forget planting geraniums right in the ground around here. Gone, overnight. Good thing I like planting in containers, huh?


Mary Alice, my giant hibiscus tree, was made into a standard by rabbits, who ate every bit of foliage they could reach.
She's too tall now for rabbits, and the spicebush swallowtails love her so much.
I'm forever carving away at this miniature Ficus benjamina "Too Little." It's waist high to me now, and it's easier to keep the scale under control on a small tree. Still and all, scale and ficus go together like white and rice. They're awfully sticky plants, with all the scale pee dropping from them. Bleh. Still, it makes a very nice miniature tree. I guess it qualifies as a tropical bonsai at this point.


Phoebe got this jade tree as a tiny cutting from her first grade teacher, Mr. Jennings. Marty's gone now, cut down in his prime by cancer, but Marty the jade tree, and our loving memories of him, live on. He was an amazing teacher, a loving disciplinarian, and he taught those first graders to read in nothing flat.

That's an awful big jade tree, six years later. Chet can stand in Marty's shade.

Speaking of trees, I've trained a little gardenia into a great big standard with a braided trunk.
Every stem tip has a flower bud. It killed me to keep pinching it back to keep its nice round shape, and it ticked the plant off to have its new growth continually pinched off, and I knew as I did it I was preventing the possibility of flowers, and I haven't smelt a gardenia flower since way last summer, but... when this thing finally bursts into bloom after a year of pinching and training it will all be worth it. Woo!

Meanwhile, the bonsais are all potted up and leafing out beautifully. I gave them a huge root pruning this spring, which always gets them going strong.


My favorite. Or one of them. A Japanese maple, perfect subject for bonsai. This one, in the pot 25 years. A coon knocked it off the deck and split its trunk in 1993. I thought it would die, but I taped it together with electrician's tape and hoped for the best. This is the glorious result. I suppose I owe that coon.

The tree comes up to about mid-thigh on me, just FYI.


The bleeding heart has expanded beautifully. Bill indulged in some little solar lamps that delight us all out of proportion to their cost. We love to sit out in lawnchairs and watch them come on, just as the whip-poor-wills start to sing. Nepeta "Walker's Low" and King Alfred daffies. Too bad I don't have cats, that catnip is rampant. (But I don't miss them ).

I hope you've enjoyed this little tour of my gardens, container and otherwise. They make me feel alive.

Two of My Favorite Things

This is what our backyard looks like. It has looked like this for much of the winter. I love this picture; it's like some magical winterscape, certainly not like our southern Ohio backyard usually looks.

Yesterday, Bill asked me which present I thought was the best ever. I had to think long and hard about that one; he's given me some very cool things. I had to say that the greenhouse has given me more concentrated and long-lasting joy than anything else he's given me (outside Phoebe and Liam, of course). We were limiting it to storebought things, after all. And Th' Bacon don't count. I bought that puppeh myself.

But the little wide-angle 18-55mm image-stabilized Canon lens he got me for Christmas, along with my new Canon Digital Rebel XSi camera body, is a close second. It takes pictures like the landscape above. If my photography of late seems to have improved, well, that lens is why. The body helps, too, but the lens is the key. I love this lens. It reminds me of the cool landscapes I could get with my little point-and-shoot Olympus 750 back in the early years of this blog ('05-'07).

Look at that picture again. Do you see the junco in flight? Did you see it right off the bat? Well, here's a cropped-in view.Yes, I love this camera and this lens.

And I love my greenhouse, my little Garden Pod. Bill bought it at a garden show where he was hawking Bird Watcher's Digest's wares. It's a prototype, and as far as I know it never went into production. Too bad. It's the most wonderful thing.
On a subfreezing February day, it is my tropical island, steamy and sweet with the scent of heliotrope and jasmine
bouncing with the color of hibiscus (this is Mary Alice, my peach-colored hibiscus standard)
and bright with the promise of buds (here's Grey Sprite, a miniature geranium with coral flowers).
Geranium "Bolton" was developed in and named for a town near where my sister lives in Massachusetts. Her friend Ann gave her a cutting of "Bolton" some years ago. When Chet Baker was a puppeh he accidentally broke a piece off the plant, and I promised to root it and grow it, and when I got home, I did.
Ann is gone now and sorely missed, but "Bolton" lives on. Barbie, if you ever want "Bolton" back, I've got it. It's a great geranium, big and robust and beautiful.
The "Renegade" series of geraniums are lovely, chocolate leaved. They come in this delicate pink as well as fuchsia and red. I keep over the ones that do well for me.

I've had this Mammillaria cactus for over twenty years. Last year, it finally budded some offshoots around the base. Who knows why it suddenly decided to do that? If I can, I'll propagate it from them. It's a wonderful plant.
Once I got a greenhouse, it began blooming nearly year-round. I put it outside in a dry spot over the summer, and bring it in the greenhouse in winter, where it lives atop the gas heater. Hot and dry, just like a cactus likes it. And it repays me in tiny magenta blossoms.
I thought you'd like a trip into the steamy little Garden Pod on an icy February day. I sure did.

Defying Death in the Greenhouse

One of my chief methods of beating Old Man Winter at his depressing game is standing in my Garden Pod, breathing the oxygen created by dozens of potted plants. I just went out and took stock. Seven of them I bought, albeit years ago in some cases. All the rest I've propagated from cuttings or been given by friends. So should it be in a greenhouse. It's full of plants I love, plants that bear association with people and places in my life. For an audio musing on this topic, please listen to my NPR commentary, "Rosemary is for Remembrance."

Some of the Pod denizens are plants I just couldn't say goodbye to in November, when it finally got seriously cold. They were thriving, and I couldn't let them die. I've been pleasantly surprised by the beauty and floriferous nature of this Rebel chocolate-leaved geranium (pale pink blossoms, on the floor in the photo below). I have to admit that selective breeding does produce some real wonders, like this nearly-perfect geranium. The blossoms hold well without shattering; they're nice and full and round; the leaves are gorgeous, and this creature has not stopped blooming since May. I'm so glad I hauled it in. And I made a cutting, just in case, and it's doing well, too.
Early Saturday morning, I awoke to the sound of coughing, miserable children, as I had for the last four nights. Both Phoebe and Liam are dreadful ill with sore throats, congestion, headaches, coughs, and fevers. They're marginally better tonight (Monday), but I'm pretty sure this is a viral illness, as it's not responding to the antibiotic they were prescribed. I dose them twice a night with palliatives. I finished my rounds, blearily measuring ibuprofen and cough syrup, and realized that it was cold. Much too cold for 6 AM. I checked the thermostat, 58 degrees. It had been set to 67. I raced to the cookstove, fully awake, and turned on the gas. The ignitor clicked, but the burner didn't light. Oh, crap, oh crap, oh crap, the gas is off. Must move fast now.

We heat with  natural gas, from a well on our land. It comes through an orange plastic pipe from a welljack out at the end of the meadow. Homegrown natural gas is great when it works, and it's free. Consider that for a moment, free heat...when are you all moving to southern Ohio to be my neighbors??

When it cuts off, though, you have to act fast, and you have to know what to do. Bill hurried out to the regulator, pulled the pin, and with a prayer, listened for the hiss that would mean the gas was operative, but just off thanks to condensation in the line (a hazard when temperatures fluctuate wildly in the winter).

My greenhouse is heated with gas. It's a little plastic pod that does not hold heat in the least.

I have two variegated bougainvilleas in that greenhouse who are right below Charlie and my tankful of emperor tetras on the hierarchy of my favorite creatures. Bill gave me the first one for my birthday three years ago. They remind me of Mexico, where in 2005 we had one of the happiest vacations of our married life. They make me happy. They take me back to a frost-free place and time in my life.

I looked at the thermometer. Twenty-two degrees outside.

I put on a coat and went out to the greenhouse, strangely calm and collected, for what was going on in my poor head. Twenty-two degrees inside the Pod. Breath panting, showing in the black night air. Bougainvilleas, geraniums, basil, fuchsia, ficus, cacti, succulents, gardenias, hibiscus, abutilon, heliotrope, mandevillas. None of them hardy, all of them standing at 22 degrees.
I lit the pilot and cranked the heater up to six. I prayed. Although there was a slight scent of green leaves dying on the air, none of the leaves were crispy, and none were translucent--the kiss of frosty death. I prayed some more, stayed with them, like a priest at their dying bed. But I stayed calm. In previous greenhouse disasters, I've curled up in a fetal position and howled. Not this time. I knew somehow my friends would be all right. I felt as if someone had his hand on my shoulder, though I was alone. Dad? Old Man Winter? God? I don't know. But someone helped me and my beloved plants. It almost felt like all that love defied the frost.Red Satin mandevilla, proudly grown from a tiny cutting last winter. I let the mother plant, 15' high, die in December, clinging to the house in a freezing wind, knowing I had her children inside.I've had this Mammilaria cactus for 16 years. It blooms all year 'round. And it loves living atop the little gas heater in the greenhouse. Can't think of another plant that would appreciate furnace-like heat. Every plant has its niche. Sorry about the photo's orientation. Sumpin' happened in iPhoto. May have to do with the 13,000-plus photos I've dumped there...must delete, must delete, can't delete. Must.

Throughout the morning, I kept checking on my plant friends. One abutilon wilted completely, but by 4 pm it was fine. I lost a couple of leaves on a young Vancouver Centennial geranium; a couple of shoots on a Frank Headley fancy geranium. That, my friends was it. How these tropical plants survived 22 degrees, I will never know, but I trust my thermometer and my eyes and the condensed fog of breath that I saw hanging before my face in that frigid greenhouse in the predawn dark. Tonight, it's supposed to plunge back down to 8 degrees. On just such a night about five years ago, before I converted the Pod to gas heat, I lost everything, including 28 varieties of miniature geraniums, when the electricity cut off. You can be sure I'll wake a few more times tonight, to smooth a brow and give medicine, to arrange covers, and to listen for the whirr of the furnace, doing its job. I look like holy hell these days, hair sticking up like Clay Aiken's, huge dark circles under my eyes, but my poor sick coughing kids are on the mend, and my greenhouse is still growing and thriving, and that's something to keep a hopeful old girl going.