The Circle, Part 2

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To continue on about the plants in my cul-de-sac circle, there are several other plants that have performed well in the full sun, hard-pan clay conditions. In the forefront of the photo above with the purple blooms is Nepeta 'Walker's Low', Catmint. I just added Catmint last year and it is turning out to be a bit larger than I had figured on, but I have the space and am happy to have it growing well. Shearing it after its first wave of blooms will bring on rebloom.
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To the right in the photo, the taller yellow blooming plant is the ubiquitous Hemerocallis 'Stella d'Oro' daylily. My enthusiasm for this plant had dimmed over the years. There are a lot of patches of it in this garden and they could really use dividing. I get 1 good flush of blooms and then next to no rebloom, a clear sign of needing to be divided. Likely I will just gradually replace some of the plants with other yellow blooming plants like Helenium or Heliopsis.



This photo shows a closeup of Allium sphaerocephalum, Purple Drumstick. It is a good naturalizer. I started with 25 bulbs of this back in 2001 and I have lots of large clumps of this throughout the garden. I love the color of it and the only downside is that the foliage gets really ratty as the plant is blooming and as the color fades in the bloom, I've found it's best to just cut the whole plant down to near the ground.

Also in this photo and others of the garden, you can see the soft purple stems of Perovski atriplicifolia, 'Russian Sage'. This is a great plant and is really doing beautifully this year with all the rain we have had, although it can for sure handle drought conditions. It makes a terrific backdrop for the other plants in the garden and it truly a no fuss and easy to grow plant.



Another common plant, but one that I didn't grow until recently is Echinacea purpurea 'Magnus', Coneflower. I added several plants last year and they are forming nice clumps this year. I also spread around some of the seeds around last fall, and I have baby plants showing up here and there. I would like to experiment with some of the new colors of Coneflower but I have heard a lot of negative comments about how well some of them perform, so for now I'll stick with these unless of course I run into a great sale.



I have several grasses that grow well for me, one of which is Festuca ovina glauca 'Elijah Blue', Blue Fescue. I have lost a couple of these plants due to the clay but generally if I cut them back hard in the very early spring, they will rebound really well with lovely new blue foliage. I also grow Schizachyrium scoparium 'Blaze', Little Bluestem. It is a taller blue/green grass that gets a lovely red tint to it in the fall.

Some other plants that do well for me are Coreopsis verticillata 'Golden Showers', an unknown Butterfly Bush, Caryopteris clandonensis 'Longwood Blue' and Achillea 'Terra Cotta'. In looking at the garden now, mid July, I need to add some more late summer, early fall blooming plants. As I mentioned earlier, I think, Heleium or Heliopsis would be good additions and maybe a white blooming coneflower. I'll have to see what I can find at the nursery clearance sales.

Hanging out with Hawks

The other day my dog Blazin and I were in my front yard where we have a couple of large trees. I happened to glance up just as a really big bird took flight from one of them. My dog turned and looked at me, like what the heck was that? I realized it had to be a hawk. The next evening as I was at my kitchen window, doing the dishes, I looked out and saw a hawk sitting in a tree. Wow, 2 sightings in 2 days, that was a bit unusual for our neighborhood.
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The next evening as my family and I were having dinner on our deck, we noticed 2 hawks on some brush in our neighbor's yard. This time we were able to grab the binoculars and check them out. As we were observing them, 2 more hawks went flying by. 4 hawks!!! We thought how crazy is that. Then we saw one hawk alight on a fence railing with a critter in his talons. He then flew off and left it there.

Over the next several days, there were more hawk sightings and we finally figured out that 2 of the hawks were smaller and obviously the offspring of the larger hawks. The parents were teaching the young ones how to hunt. The kill on the fence was set up for the young hawks to practice on.

One evening as my husband sat on the deck he witnessed a bird flying by with a hawk in hot pursuit. The bird escaped and the hawk paused briefly on our deck railing to as if to contemplate where he went wrong.

Nature up close and personal like this is pretty cool, I wish the hawks lots of luck, especially in taking out plenty of the voles that like to terrorize my garden plants.

Kroger Mega Sale and me

I have been interested in doing more with coupons over the last couple of months in an effort to save money. Some of my favorite couponing sites are listed in the column on the right. Today, after lots of consulting, especially with Becky’s very extensive list of the best deals over at nickels-n-dimes I ventured out to my local Kroger’s for their 10 item Mega Event. The picture above shows what I bought and my grand total for all this was $18.53. I purchased 21 items, 20 of which were on the Mega list. When I first checked out my total was $29.33 with a total savings amount of $32.24. More...

I knew that wasn’t correct, so I just went right to the service desk to sort things out instead of holding up the line at the check out. Turns out 3 of my items didn’t come up as part of the sale. Some of the signage was confusing and the customer service cashier took the items (right product, wrong style or size) and went and got the correct items. Taking off the items, that weren’t on sale and adding the ones that were and giving me another $5.00 Mega sale credit, took off an additional $10.80 for the total of $18.53. So all in all, a pretty successful shopping trip.

I found it pretty tricky to try and coordinate my e-coupons from Cellfire, Shortcuts, etc with my paper coupons. My understanding is those are not supposed to double and some of my paper coupons were better since they doubled, so I am not sure I will load e-coupons again. They are fine if you don’t have the paper ones, but I don’t want them overriding my paper coupons if I am only buying 1 of a certain item. Also 2 of my Cellfire coupons didn’t load on, but I didn’t find that out until I checked the receipt more thoroughly when I got home.

P.S. In searching the web, I have discovered that there is quite a controversy over whether or not it is permissable to stack e-coupons and paper coupons and it seems to be far from settled. I'm not sure at this point whether I will conitnue to try and use e-coupons or not.

The Circle

One of my favorite gardens, really isn't mine, at least the ground isn't. We live on a short cul-de-sac, and we were the first house built on the street. There was a grassy circle with a fireplug in the middle of it, in the center of the cul-de-sac. Once I got interested (obsessed) with gardening, I quickly started running out of room in my own yard for new beds. Over time, I started planting in the circle. The soil was awful, clay and dry as a bone with full sun. I didn’t want to spend a lot of money on plants for a garden that wasn’t really mine, so I started experimenting with buying inexpensive plants and seeds and seeing what would survive in such conditions.
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I have killed a lot of plants in this bed over the years. Gaillardia ‘Goblin’ actually grew for several years in the circle but as it is relatively short lived, it did eventually start dying out. I didn’t replace it because I always found it a pain to deadhead. Scabiosa ‘Butterfly Blue’ did relatively well but was also very tedious to deadhead, so as it passed on, I moved onto other plants. Veronica ‘Sunny Border Blue’ a 1993 Perennial Plant of the Year winner, always got mildew so badly, I eventually pulled it out. I tried a couple of Campanulas; ‘Superba’, Chettle Charm and ‘Blue Clips’. The ‘Superba’ would look really ratty after blooming and the low growing Campanulas were again hard to deadhead. I had several Coreopsis grandiflora selections ‘Early Sunrise’ and others but they got mildew and tended to die out.

So what have I grown that has worked? I have many reseeders, which I grew from seed that have been great plants. Probably the #1 plant, at least in the spring is Linum lewisii, Blue Flax. The bed is a sea of blue in the spring as the flax has reseeded all through out the bed. After a few months, I simply shear the plants back in half to get rid of the seed heads and I still get sporadic rebloom during the summer. Oenothera missouriensis, Evening Primrose is another great plant that spills over the edge of the circle onto the pavement.(Click on the photo of the circle at the top of this post, to see it as the yellow blooming plants around the edges.) It forms these ridiculously huge seed pods and I wouldn’t really want it in the beds in my yard but it is great plant for the circle. Nigella reseeds all over but I have a love, hate relationship with it. Lovely when it blooms, but then the whole plant dies and has to be pulled out. Verbena bonariensis is a graceful, tall plant but it seeds around like crazy and I usually try and remove as many of the plants as I can in the fall to cut down on its world domination. It's seen in the picture above in the foreground. And even though it is tall, it can be used in the front of beds as it is called a see-thru type plant. Aquilegia ‘Biedermeyer’, Columbine has done well in the circle and reseeds well and there are lots of different colors that come and go from year to year.

Another pretty prolific reseeder is Asclepias tuberosa, Butterfly weed. I didn't really know that about the plant before I grew it, but I love the orange color and other than trying to keep up with removing the seed heads to help it rebloom, it is pretty carefree. To be continued....

Little grey worms - ugghh!

I am in my garden everyday, checking things out and it never ceases to amaze me when I completely overlook some massive invasion. I have a nice patch of Lysimachia punctata 'Alexander' in a front bed, aka variegated yellow Loosestrife.

Last night, I glanced at my plant and noticed that the leaves were quite lacy and not in a good way, they were full of holes. My first thought was the dreaded Japanese beetles had been attacking my plant. It is that same kind of damage that they afflict on my Ampelopsis 'Elegans', variegated Porcelain Berry vines and grape vines. However on closer inspection I found a different culprit, little grey worms and as it turns out there were hundreds of them.
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Frequently you will read that often you can ignore an invader in your garden as it will just yield a few leaves with holes in them. I try and follow that when I can and be as kind to the environment as possible. I started in handpicking the worms and dropping them in soapy water. When I would touch them they would roll up in a ball and drop to the ground. So I hit upon putting some newspaper under the plant and shaking the branches, to cause the little creeps to drop in piles on the newspaper and then I dumped that into the soapy water. I literally spend a half hour, shaking and dumping.

Today, I rechecked the plant and found more worms, so it is onto phase 2. I sprayed the plant with Spinosad. Spinosad is classed as an organic insecticide. I think it has a fascinating history, here is a snippet from Wikipedia: "The active ingredient is derived from a naturally occurring soil dwelling bacterium called Saccharopolyspora spinosa, reportedly collected from soil in an abandoned rum distillery on a Caribbean Island in 1982 by a scientist on vacation. It has not been found in nature since that time, and was subsequently described as a new species." So how cool is that, on vacation, scoping out an old rum factory and you discover a new species and one that can help the average gardener get rid of nuisance pests in an environmentally friendly way.

I haven't been able to ID my invader yet but hopefully the Spinosad will do it's thing and it will be a moot point. I will just have to mark my calendar for next July - check Lysimachia for worms, just like I had to mark it in April - check Columbine for sawfly, which was another devastating first this year. The Columbine sawflies are the reason I got the Spinosad and they are really bad, it's not holes in the leaves, it is literally no leaves at all.

Ravioli lasagna with homemade ricotta

So I decided I wanted to make an old recipe I've had for awhile last night for dinner. The recipe calls for ricotta cheese, which I never have on hand, but I had recently read in Good Housekeeping that fresh ricotta is easy to make.
So I gave it a go and it turned out to be pretty easy. You can find the recipe here The only changes I made were to use 2% milk instead of whole milk and to cook it just to a simmer, about 200 degrees instead of a full boil as some other recipes on the web suggested.
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Once I had the ricotta made, which this recipe yielded the exact amount I needed, 15 ounces, it was onto the Ravioli lasagna. I thought I would find the recipe I use on the web and link to it, but I couldn't find it. So here is my version:

Ravioli Lasagna

Serves 6 -8

1 jar 26 oz. spaghetti sauce (I usually use Prego with meat)

10 oz. frozen chopped spinach, thawed and squeezed dry

1 1/2 cups shredded mozzarella cheese, divided

15 oz carton ricotta cheese (or make your own or use cottage cheese)

1 tsp. Italian seasoning

1 egg, slightly beaten

1 25 oz. pkg. frozen cheese or meat ravioli

1/2 cup Parmesan cheese, shredded

Preheat oven to 400 degrees. Combine spinach, 1/2 cup mozzarella, ricotta cheese, Italian seasoning, egg and 1/2 cup Parmesan cheese. Spread 1/2 of the spaghetti sauce in the bottom of a 9" or 10" baking pan. Arrange 1/2 of the frozen ravioli in a single layer on top. Top with cheese mixture, then the rest of the ravioli. Top with the additional spaghetti sauce. Finally sprinkle 1 cup of Mozzarella on top. Bake for 30 minutes. Let stand 10 minutes to cool and set up. Sprinkle with more Parmesan before serving.

Of Migraines and Marigolds

It occurred to me yesterday, that starting a personal blog might be a good idea. Last night at 3:30 am, I had even more time to reflect on that as I was awakened from my restless dreamings to a throbbing migraine. I've had migraines since my teens and there has always been a lot of ebb and flow to them as to frequency. Lately I seem to be in the flow stage... lots and lots of flow.

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I've also have had many prescription meds for them over the years, right now I take Maxalt-MLT, a pill that dissolves on your tongue to supposedly cause less nausea and mostly that is true, but not last night. Suffice to say, last night was in my top 10 of worst migraine pain.

But fortunately after several hours, the medicine finally kicked in and all I have today is a migraine hangover. Sooo, what about the title of this blog, where are the marigolds?

As I ruminated about this blog last night, I decided I wanted to start a blog that focused on some of the things I love, one of which would be gardening and some of the things I don't love, one of which would be painful things. So today starts the random wanderings In the Garden of My Mind, things I love and things I don't and everything in between.