It's Not Work, It's Gardening!: June 2018

The Fabulous Color of Japanese Maples

>> Friday, June 29, 2018 – color, japanese maple

Ah, that wonderful, colorful foliage of japanese maples: browns and yellows and reds. Is there a better tree for autumn color?

Oh wait, it's only June.

Casual Visitor

>> Thursday, June 28, 2018 – deer

We all love visitors to our gardens, right? We want them to be comfortable, feel at ease, enjoy their visits.

Well, not always. Sometimes they're just maybe a little too comfortable.

Late last fall I put the bananas (Musa basjoo) to bed for the winter, as I do every year. I did things differently that last time, doing as little as I could to protect them. Yes I mulched with leaves, but this time I didn't create a cage to fill, cover it with plastic, or anything else. I just put a minimal amount of leaves and hoped for the best.

Well, the winter was not mild by any measure, especially if you're a tropical herbaceous flowering plant. I was curious to see how my "protection" worked, and what would emerge come spring. As seen above in a photo taken a month ago on May 24, everything is fine!

Bamboo Cleanup Number One

>> Tuesday, June 26, 2018 – bamboo, winter damage

One of the reasons that I've been posting so infrequently so far this summer (yesterday's post was my first in about two weeks!) is that there are a lot of projects left out there, and it's either do or write about it. (Time to catch up a bit!) One of those projects is bamboo maintenance. The dry fall and winter combined with a couple of extended spells of bitter cold took a heavy toll on many of the bamboos and there are many dead culms to remove.

What makes this task tricky though is some species take a while to wake up, and it's not always easy to tell what's dead until later in the spring. Case in point: this Phyllostachys virella. About a month ago I finally decided that this one was not coming back.

Ash

>> Monday, June 25, 2018 – trees

There is a bit of a panic right now in Missouri, especially in parks and neighborhoods where ash trees were planted decades ago -- my own city and street included. The Emerald Ash Borer has arrived, and that means that our ash trees will soon be a memory only. I'm not too worried about our forests, as only about 7 percent of the trees in our about 15 million acres of forests will be affected, and I'm not even too concerned about my own garden.