Yet another festive spring day

So much for my plans today for pruning my apple trees


root-pruning my raspberries


uncovering my artichokes


or working on my rock border


Honestly, what's a person to do with a weather forecast like this?


a) notice there is no mention of snow
b) notice it's predicted to be 61 tomorrow. This will probably happen. It is a nutty climate we have here.
All I can say is, it's a good thing I watered last weekend.

Goodbye to the Three Sisters

No, not The Three Sisters, the familiar mountains seen on our evening skyline about 20 miles west of town. They are still there, in all their snowy winter whiteness.

The Three Sisters I refer to are -- or were -- three tall white birch trees that we inherited with the rest of the plantings, when we moved into this house 32 years ago. We loved them, with their graceful, pendant branches of bright green leaves that turned a glowing yellow in the fall; their white papery bark that contrasted with summer grass and shone silver on sunny winter days.

European white birch, Betula pendula, was a popular landscaping choice in Bend gardens in the first half of the 20th Century. The previous owner of our house probably planted these three, nicely clumped together in the middle of the lawn, in the early 1960's, right after our house was built. Birches are not long-lived trees at best, and have their character flaws. As we discovered soon enough.

After our initial oohings and aaaahings over our beautiful trees, we discovered that birch trees are messy and brittle! They drop a continuous litter of twigs, branchlets and alas -- aphid rain. Better known as honeydew. I think it's really aphid pee. This falls as a continuous light spray on anything and everything (and everybody) standing within range of the branch canopy. It creates a clear coating of sticky stuff which then turns black. Charming.

Still, as a true laissez faire (ie fairly lazy) gardener, I learned that if I just waited a month or so, the local ladybugs would crank up on laying eggs, babies would hatch and soon devour most of the aphids by summer's end. Plus, the honeydew is basically sugar, so it rinses off with a stream of water from a hose.

And so the seasons came and went, all of us happy here in the forests of Northern Russia. I mean, here in the desert of Central Oregon. Hmmm -- what's wrong with this picture? Let's see, how are those two climates similar? Siberia: long, cold winters with cool, wet summers vs Bend: not-so-long, dry winters, with hot, dry summers.......

The trees did ok for a long while, but a few years ago they began to get The Dwindles. Branches started turning black and dying, every year a few more. Our tree guy, Andy, came out to prune off the dead branches (before they fell on us) and look for causes. No bugs, no obvious diseases.

Year by year the branches died, and then the tops starting dying. Bronze birch borers struck the county hard, and countless huge, mature birch trees around town died practically overnight and were cut down. Andy looked and looked but couldn't find any borers in our trees. The mystery deepened.

Finally this year I had had enough of the increasingly pathetic-looking trees. All three tops were dead and their demise seemed inevitable.


We concluded that the trees had suffered stress over the past 10 years, following a careful, but apparently not quite careful enough, house expansion which put the walls within 10 feet of the tree trunks. They looked lovely through the living room window. But alas, the trees were not happy.

So we called in the tree wizard and his crew (Andy's Gang) and they arrived bright and early yesterday morning to take down the Three Sisters. One last shot of the trees, from garden level:


Then the lads put tires and plywood sheeting over the garden and windows.


One down, two to go



It was quite exciting to watch. Mark, up in the tree, tied each section to a rope before cutting, then lowered it, using a pulley attached to the other tree, to Steve, the catcher, below.


It was messy


a giant pile of pick-up-sticks?


Steve cut up the logs into rounds


stacked them for firewood


and hauled the branchlets to the chipper (aptly named 'Tornado' brand)


Not everyone was pleased with the events of the day. The Brave Rupert hid under the bed. Alex went under too, to see what was happening.


Andy (our hero), still looking unsuccessfully for birch borers


The results? Here are some Before and After photos for comparison.

Before

After

Before

After

The verdict? I LOVE the new look! Lots of light, lots of space, and hmm, a new place to play.

Glovey..... oh, Glovey......

I started gardening by accident, and it didn't take long for me to realize I had to do something about my poor hands. My mom was the gardener in the family when I was a kid, and my unconscious role model. She never wore gloves that I remember.

I am a pianist. And while I am not the least bit vain about my hands in the conventional sense (fingernails as short as possible, no paint) I find gardening is probably not the ideal sport in terms of presentation and preservation of my physical apparatus. And while I love the feel of mud squidging through my fingers -- I then want it off my hands ASAP.

So. Gloves seemed like the answer. I started with el cheapo green and yellow canvas gloves from the hardware store. In my first garden, in the perennially wet clay soil of the redwood forest, gloves were soaked through within a minute. Being a bit slow to grasp the possibilities of owning multiple pairs of gloves, I philosophically gardened with my single pair of wet gloves.

When we moved to Bend, my garden soil changed to dry, abrasive, volcanic sand. Canvas gloves now stayed dry but the fingers wore through in a week or less. Thinking leather gloves would be sturdier, I visited the small local glove company ('Hunters: we'll buy your deerskins!') and bought a delightful pair. They lasted no longer than the canvas ones. I tried heavier leather, but I couldn't grab things and after they got wet, they dried stiff as boards

Through the years I tried various kinds of other gloves, some suggested by friends,


constantly trying slight variations on the basic two kinds, but never really satisfied.

It wasn't until about 10 years ago, during a house renovation, that I spotted the gloves of my dreams. The builder boys all had these great-looking work gloves: knitted backs and rubber-coated palms. "Do they come in size Small?" I asked and found that they did. All those years, the perfect gardening gloves had been hiding in the building supply store!

At this same time I had a secondary revelation: I could own more than one pair of gloves at a time! Think of it: wear one pair until they get filthy, then pull a new pair out of the drawer and wash the first. I felt like quite the spendthrift, heading to the checkstand at the hardware store holding 3 (three!) pairs of new gloves at a time. (Can you tell I'm not much of a shopper?)

A few years later I was given a free pair of nitrile-coated garden gloves at a garden show. Same tough-as-nails palm and finger coating, but light, flexible and thin enough to almost forget I was wearing gloves. Eureka!


I continue to adore my Atlas gloves, while occasionally using something warmer for cold weather garden tasks that don't involve actual contact with the soil


There's one slight issue I haven't fully resolved. Can you spot the problem in this photo?

Due to my being right-handed, I guess, I tend to wear out right gloves at about twice the rate of left gloves. What to do with the orphans? I have yet to find a use. But I can't bring myself to throw away these perfectly good gloves.

Yesterday I received a new pair of gloves to try. I won them in a contest on one of my favorite garden blogs

http://www.gardenrant.com/


They boast 'Toughtek-reinforced palm and fingertips ..... a carabiner hook ...... ventilation panels that wick moisture'. Made by a company called Womanswork ('custom fit for women'). I'll give them a try and keep you posted!

Imbolc

Most people I know, gardeners included, tend to think of March 20/21 -- the Vernal Equinox -- as the 'first day of spring', just as June 20/21 is thought of as the first day of summer, and so on. We gardeners, at least, should know better. Especially for those of us who live in a climate where 'spring' is of necessity a rather elastic term for the several months of .... varied .... weather leading up to summer, a keener eye set to subtler signals than a mere calendar date are needed to track the seasonal changes.

When I started gardening, I certainly thought in these more traditional terms. I read books and made my plans and charts based on what I gleaned from their pages, not having had any personal experience of gardening as a child, other than eating what my mother grew in the back yard. The urge to start gardening hit me quite suddenly and unexpectedly, just a couple of months after getting married. I was going through some of my parents' old books that summer and found my mother's copy of the Sunset Western Garden Book, probably the 1933 edition. Like lightning, I was struck with the nesting urge and proceeded to draw up the first of the possibly hundreds of garden plans/seed lists/planting schedules that have filled my garden journals in the nearly 40 years since.

For the record, said 'nesting urge' resulted in no human children, but I have had plant babies in abundance. Here's a photo I sent to my grandmother (Arabella, this blog's namesake) entitled 'your first great-granchild and me' in January 1974.



I was as proud as any parent of my darlings, which I always thought of as my children. Many early photos of me in the garden show me in similar embrace -- with tomato seedlings, fondling my first ear of corn, hugging a sprig of apple blossoms. My poor sweetheart soon became resigned to being dragged out in freezing cold or rain to gaze upon a field of freshly dug soil, then pulled along, foot by foot, to admire 'this will be carrots ...... over here will be onions ...... this is where the tomatoes will go next month ....'

As the years have passed, if I have shown no signs of waning enthusiasm for gardening, I have at least stopped pestering him like this. Well, not often. Now I take my wee digital camera out, point, shoot and pester YOU, dear readers, with such shots! Hahaha



The photo shows a wee, wee spinach seedling, just popping up in the garlic bed a couple of days ago. On a whim I had thrown some spinach seed in an empty space at the end of the bed, after planting the garlic and shallots last fall. Being either lazy or wise, I have learned that the easiest way to gauge planting dates for early vegs like spinach, peas and hardy greens, is to pay attention to when overwintered volunteers germinate on their own, and then plant more ASAP. Here's the result:


If this first sowing freezes or rots, it doesn't matter. It's certainly not taking the place of anything else, at this time of year. I never seem to plant spinach early enough, so maybe this year I will be lucky.

The point is, for me, and in my garden and climate, the old tradition of honoring the four other seasonal markers -- the so-called Cross-Quarter days, or Celtic Fire Festivals -- makes more sense as a garden planning device than the more obvious and well-noted Equinoxes and Solstices. Imbolc, the first festival of the ancient year, was celebrated at the point halfway between Winter Solstice and Vernal Equinox, on February 4 or 5. I have heard this described in other traditions as the time when 'the back of Old Man Winter is broken.' Modern American pop culture has trivialized this as 'Groundhog Day' but ignoring this silly, shallow media non-event, I am reminded to stop my winter dreaming and get on with serious garden planning for the new season just ahead.

Sure, we will have months (and months and months -- sigh) more of cold weather. But starting in late January/early February, we and the plants notice lengthening days. In the greenhouse, I begin fertilizing the wintered-over flower pots -- geraniums and other stalwarts -- and begin to take an interest in what might be sprouting out in the garden.....

Get a Grip, Ned....

or, there's no need to panic just because I loaned my favorite seed catalogs to a friend, and am now going through withdrawal .......

When I first started gardening, at the tender age of 21, I was pretty much on my own for inspiration and information. No internet, no knowledgeable neighbors; just my mother (300 miles away and in a vastly different climate zone) and the garden books I found at the library. At the time I lived in a mild-winter area (northern California coast) and could pretty much plant year-round. I killed lots of plants and murdered a lot of seeds in my first stumbling efforts but had fun anyway. With the wisdom of hindsight, I can say that beginning gardeners should just plan on this happening, no matter where they live.

A few years later when we moved to Central Oregon, things got a bit dicier. The neighbors all said, 'you can't grow anything here' but I ignored them and planted anyway. A lot of things died as the local axiom 'frost is possible any day of the year' proved to be true. Blackened squash and bean vines in July -- oh my!

But I was determined and found a few resources for encouragement: legendary local OSU Extension Service agent, Marvin Young (with his list of vegetables that would indeed grow here), and a wizard gardening friend or two who astounded the community with beautiful perennial flower and vegetable gardens in the face of the common wisdom against such bountiful potential.

The only local source of seeds was the occasional rack in the hardware store, and there wasn't much of a selection, nor were most of the varieties particularly well-suited to our crazy climate. I became a seed catalog junkie, welcoming into my home the standard Burpee and Park seed companies back when they were still smallish and family-owned, along with a growing crowd of newcomers and new-to-me oldtimers: Johnny's, Nichols, Gurney's, Stokes..... I was soon able to turn up my nose at the pitiful local offerings, and order varieties that showed actual promise of surviving our short growing season. With the birth of the heritage seed movement, options expanded again: Seed Savers' Exchange, Seeds Trust (then High Altitude Gardens), and many more. Now there is an embarrassment of riches in the seed catalog world.

Early in December, I looked forward to the catalogs, which began to show up in my mailbox right after Christmas. They come earlier now, but I still feel a tingle of anticipation when the first one arrives. In my early garden journals, I noted the date of the first entry in what I thought of as the Seed Catalog Sweepstakes. I'm a bit more blase nowadays, but I still love to see them piling up on the shelf, awaiting the day I have time to sit down and start making lists of things I need. Want. Lust after. Whatever.

Luckily, I have help in sorting it all out.

A Walk in the Winter Woods

We are so lucky to have a beautiful forested park right outside of town. Shevlin Park was gifted to the city of Bend by one of the big lumber companies in 1920 and most of its 650+ acres are undeveloped. Just the place to go on a sunny winter day for a walk with my sweetheart.



As we are in the middle of a classic El Nino winter (most West Coast precipitation occurs south of us, bringing torrential rains to California and a mild, dryish winter to the Northwest) there is very little snow on the ground at our elevation (4000 ft). Skiing continues to be great just uphill from town, but for a less strenuous outing on our Thursday day off together, we took ourselves here.

Winter walks are a time to see the bare bones of the landscape -- nature's hardscape, and the remnants of last summer's greenery as well.

The park consists of a long canyon, with a paved road along part of the valley floor, and trails along the creek, the hillsides and on the canyon rim.





It's a favorite destination for mountain bikers, runners, walkers, and people on leashes. Since it is a wildlife refuge, dogs are required to be leashed, but I'd say the majority of dog owners let their dogs run free as soon as they leave the entrance and simply carry the leashes, obviously considering the rules don't apply to THEIR dog. I don't quite get this, so I assume they know best: that it is they who need to be on the leash.....

There's a covered bridge, a large group area with big shelter, a couple of very low key picnic areas, including one in Fremont Meadow, named after explorer John C. Fremont, who camped in the area during his 1846 expedition.

There's a creek....




and an interesting cast of characters.

The Rock People...


(Bigfoot?!)


Trees with history...



and ex-trees.... This one fell across the trail during a big windstorm last winter.



These are all that's left of last summer's wildflowers...





Manzanita is evergreen...



I love its smooth red bark and sturdy round leaves..


On our way back towards the car, we took the trail on top of the rim, which goes through a burn. No pine needles underfoot, just mud and lots of tracks. Footprints of joggers, hikers, bike tires, dogs...



and these...


hmmmmmm, definitely not dog prints. Bobcat or a young mountain lion. There have been a lot of cougar sightings in the park in the last 10 years or so. My intrepid sweetheart, who rides there several times a week during the season, has never seen one. But he says he won't be surprised if and when he ever does. Conventional advice when coming upon a mountain lion is to stop, make oneself look tall, and slowly back away. I suspect it would be tough to ride backwards, so I hope the looking tall would be enough.

The day after we took this walk, it snowed several inches and the trails and park were buried under a new blanket of white. After a few warm, sunny days, it's clear again. We'll probably head out there again soon.