Bonnie Blodgett: Bounty in the city, good…
Submit to Stumbleupon (Opens in new window)
Bonnie Blodgett: Bounty in the city, good thistle, bad thistle, and hard times for the shallow-rooted
By Bonnie Blodgett | bonnieblodgett@gmail.com |
My friend Patricia Ohmans took up gardening shortly after moving into an old frame house in Frogtown with her husband and two young kids.
That was 30-some years ago. One garden, even a double-lot garden, wasn't enough.
Bonnie Blodgett
In addition to tending her own quarter-acre plot, she has created several others. At present she runs two community gardens and a community-gardener support network called Frogtown Green that boasts a paid staff and a robust crew of interns.
It doesn't just garden. FG arranged for the acquisition and planting of 500 free trees for the community, with 125 more trees coming soon, and it runs a summertime environmental workshop called Frog Lab at neighborhood rec centers.
Each of these ventures, in a roundabout way, grew out of Patricia's first such startup, Frogtown Farm.
FF was the brainchild of Patricia and her husband, the novelist and recently retired journalist Tony Schmitz. They wanted to turn an abandoned Wilder campus into a much-needed recreational park and garden serving the whole Frogtown community.
Food gardening was a cornerstone of the original plan. The City of St. Paul bought in, to the tune of $1 million, and Patricia and Tony moved on … sort of.
Our Village, a community garden that's all about food, is now run mostly by people who live nearby, many of them right across the street. About half are Somali. An apartment building they live in overlooks the garden that feeds them fresh fruits and vegetables.
The garden site itself sits on the "campus" (to use 21st century parlance) of an import-export business whose owners are as entrepreneurial as Patricia is.
Margie and Terry Commerford's generosity and vision enabled the garden to be created in the first place, in the shadow (at sunset) of their handsome offices and warehouse.
What began as a handful of empty raised beds cobbled together by volunteers almost a decade ago now produces a cornucopia of vegetables and fruits representing the range of the gardeners' ethnicities.
They include enough cherries for Patricia to brag that she is planning to make cherry pies, as well as buckets of basil and lavender, plus cilantro, okra, yard-long beans … well, you get the point.
The Commerfords added their own decorative touches (these are mostly in the form of pine trees) and invited another skilled neighborhood gardener to grow vegetables that she sells to restaurants and co-ops.
Patricia's plots are fertilized with compost, not chemicals, and hand weeded. The biggest challenge, she says, is watering. A neighbor who let the group use his outdoor faucet (to hook up their hoses) received a $300 bill from his landlord. Such is life in a time of drought.
There's thistle and then there's thistle
The biggest nuisance is thistle.
Sadly, Patricia's nemesis is not the sort of thistle used in salads or herbal remedies. It is native to Scotland, prickly and invasive and useless.
The most despised of these exotics are bull and musk thistle.
You can tell a native from an exotic thistle by looking closely at the foliage. Exotics' leaves are green on both sides. Natives' leaves usually have whitened wooly undersides.
Exotic thistles also tend to have heavily branched stems and more flower heads on each one. Timely deadheading is about all that will slow their spread apart from pulling them up by the root.
Knapweed is the other scourge of Our Village gardeners. But that's another column. Getting back to thistles, which are, after all, prettier than knapweed …
Natives like Canada thistle (Cirsium arvense) and tall thistle (Cirsium altissima) are the "good" thistles. They provide nectar for Monarch butterflies. Goldfinches wait to nest until the first thistles bloom, and line their nests with the soft down.
There are many thistle imitators. Misty globe thistle (Echinops ritro) is a popular native that has powder-blue flowers and soft grayish-green foliage on 2- to 4-foot stems. It is the kind of plant architects love, owing to its spiky texture and perfectly round flowers. Yin and yang.
Sea holly (Eryngium) is like globe thistle but more surreal in appearance. The word "sea" refers to its blue flowers, whose long skinny petals emerge from a protuberant center like spokes from the hub of a wheel. It vaguely resembles an octopus.
Best of all is that these two thistle imposters, just like real thistles, don't mind dry weather.
Who isn't hankering after plants like that right now? We're going on weeks without a drenching rain. Shallow-rooted plants are in the worst peril.
Shallow-rooted suffering
But I wasn't thinking about the shallow roots of my Japanese katsura trees as I lugged hoses to the desperately desiccated astilbes.
The elegant katsura is surprisingly tough. Rated hardy only to Zone 5 and said to need full sun, my three trees all flourished under the canopy of a huge bur oak tree.
Among my large and growing tree population, it was a Japanese larch that got my attention. An evergreen with deciduous tendencies (it drops its needles in the fall), this ordinarily lush and feathery-foliaged specimen began turning brown in early July, just as grass turns brown when it goes dormant.
Was it, too, going dormant? Or was it dying?
Then I noticed that the oaks were dropping acorns way ahead of schedule.
Then a river birch's falling yellow leaves began to carpet the garden floor, and the two columnar white pines' needles began dropping.
I had also been worried about the newly planted DeGroot junipers, the elm and maple and linden saplings.
What watering I could do using the last of the rainwater in my four indispensable rain barrels was now focused on saving the newbies.
Meanwhile, the suffering of the shallow-rooted Japanese katsuras went unheeded. Until …
A random check on a parched water feature (turns out that claws of a thirsty raccoon had punctured the liner), which is not far from where the katsuras' long arching limbs form a natural arbor, upended my priority list.
The arbor resembled, to my eye, a crime scene. All that was missing was yellow tape running from one trunk to the next.
The trees appeared to have some life left in them, but how much?
Frantic, I ran for the garden hose, used in emergencies only. The trees responded by showering the earth with what resembled fairy-tale-gorgeous gold coins, the kind that might have been tossed out of a gilded carriage by passing royalty.
Even as some of the trees' branches were bare, those whose leaves were merely curled up and pale seemed to perk up.
It was then that I remembered the shallow root systems of these beautiful trees. This is why they were suffering so acutely. It was for the same reason the astilbes were dying.
The bur oaks in my yard are a hundred years older than the (also shallow-rooted) maples I planted 10 years ago. I do water the latter, as their all-important job is to block my view of a hideous power pole. Though they are gaining on the oaks in terms of height, they will never achieve the oaks' great age.
Oak trees have long thick roots that grow straight down, not sideways, and probe for water where it still exists even during serious droughts. Their immense root systems get first crack at whatever moisture is available.
This is among the hard lessons every gardener must learn through experience. It just seems counter-intuitive that dry shade is harder on plants than full sun, even during a drought.
Make that ESPECIALLY in a drought.
Why? The driest of dry shade is created by the oldest and largest and densest of all tree canopies, whose roots are the longest and thickest of all tree roots.
Here in our "oak savannah" region of the world, this means oak trees.
What other plants get special treatment during dry spells? Edibles, of course. Food before beauty, I always say.
Irrigation systems are de rigueur if you run a CSA (Community Supported Agriculture) operation. Organic farmers are incredibly ingenious when it comes to designing water storage and delivery systems. My New York farmer made it a priority this past spring to put the previous owner's homemade drip irrigation system back online, only to have the whole farm flooded out by monsoon-like rain that is finally letting up.
The only certainty regarding our "new" weather is uncertainty. And don't let anyone tell you (even if that someone works for the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Association, as did a young Airbnb guest of mine whose buddies persuaded him with some help from yours truly that he was wrong) that weather and climate are not the same thing.
This is a misleading but oft-made comment, meant as a sop to climate deniers. Weather and climate are just words. In the "before" times, they were used to distinguish the study of day-to-day activity in a particular region affecting temperature and precipitation, from the study of long-term and big-picture conditions in a particular part of the world.
"How's the weather" is what you ask if you want to know if it rained today in, say, New York, not "how's the climate?"
But when weather is set apart from climate in a discussion of the greenhouse effect, as in, "We don't know if the fires in Oregon are climate-related because it could also be poor forestry management that caused them," put on your skeptical face and push back.
Just because "weather" changes continually, whereas in recent centuries the planet's climate has been pretty much the same, doesn't mean the two are not inextricable.
On any given day in this age of climate breakdown, the greenhouse effect is having a huge effect on the weather— to the extent that weather is defined by climate change.
It is causing "normally" hot times of year to be hotter, formerly "freak" storms to be commonplace, and every region on Earth to be experiencing weather dramatically different every day of the year from the weather it would have experienced if the planet were not wrapped in a blanket of carbon dioxide and other so-called greenhouse gases that are trapping the sun's heat and causing every bit of turbulence below it, from light winds to harsh gales and from soft drizzles to monster hurricanes.
A summer day that happens to be like summer days used to be (last Saturday, for instance, which bought everyone outside to exclaim in wonder at the clear blue sky and "normal" heat and humidity) is that way, too, because of climate change, which Is changing even weather that seems the same into weather that isn't.
Apropos of all that, why end on a sour note? Patricia tells me her merry band of idealists came up with a clever way to demonstrate how neighborhood residents can prevent rainwater from going down the storm sewers instead of where it can do some immediate good.
And apropos of THAT, remember this:
If you use chemicals on your lawn and garden they will descend into the sewers too, and only make the work of those trying to keep our water safe to drink and rivers clear that much harder.
As they used to say back when all this started, "be the change."
Bonnie Blodgett: Collapsed evergreen shrubs? Leave Dr. Nature in charge of rehab
Bonnie Blodgett: Winter dreams: What I'm going to plant in 2023
Blundering Gardener
Bonnie Blodgett writes a weekly garden column for the Pioneer Press during garden season.
bonnieblodgett@gmail.com
Another St. Paul resident shows video of plow knocking down trash, recycling carts
White Bear Lake officer shot three times during warrant arrest, hospitalized in stable condition
2023 Pioneer Press Treasure Hunt Clue 4
St. Paul charter school closed during threats investigation
Actor jumps through window to escape house fire in Stillwater
St. Paul City Council approves $84K to disassemble, store Justus Ramsey House
Boy, 6, run over by school bus during afternoon drop-off in Brooklyn Park
City investigating rogue snow plow driver in St. Paul who bulldozed trash and recycling bins
Walz's budget: Tax rebates of up to $2,600, plus $11B for schools, housing, workforce, more
Walz's budget: Tax rebates of up to $2,600, plus $11B for schools, housing, workforce, more
Putting the name to the blade: MnDOT opens voting for this year's snowplow naming contest
Meet the canine king and queen of the St. Paul Winter Carnival
Music and Concerts |
Minnesota Orchestra announces $655,575 operating loss, down from a $6.3 million loss in 2021
Arts |
Minnesota team takes top honors in World Snow Sculpting Championship
Theater |
Penumbra Theatre founding company member Terry Bellamy dies at 70