My Half Acre of Paradise

My little milk jugs have some more seeds sprouting in them now. I mentioned a few days ago that the Alyssum were sprouting. Now I also have the California poppies sprouting, and just the beginning of some action with the Lychnis. I think the Callirhoe are starting to sprout, too, because I believe I’m seeing a few little “tails” poking out of the seeds — the beginnings of a root.

Also, I took some cuttings from the petunias growing in my basement and started trying to root them last night. I had some of them sitting in a cup of water for several days, and others I took straight off the plants. We’ll see which method works better, if there’s any difference.

I bought a remote thermometer for the greenhouse two days ago, so I can see how the temps are going at night and during the day. It’s not very hospitable yet! It got to 29° last night and 107° today (even though the outside temp probably barely hit 50°). It needs a night heater and it needs a thermostat and power for the fan and vent so it can automatically ventilate when it starts getting too hot during the day.

This is pretty cool. My wife made a deal with a neighbor who was wanting to get rid of a greenhouse he made some time ago when he was in the glass business. It’s made with strong aluminum framing, all welded together, and real glass — frosted on the sides and clear in front and back. It’s not really big (about 4′ x 8′), but it was darn heavy, and I had to get six guys to lift it over the rose hedge and carry it about 30 feet to its place. Glad it made it intact!

Now, I need to learn stuff about using a greenhouse! I want to find out how to ventilate it well when it gets too hot inside. I’ve heard that there are solar or other devices that don’t require a power hookup and will open vents when it’s hot. It has a power fan installed, but it’s made for regular house electric power, and I don’t want to run a long extension cord all the way out there. I also need to learn what works well for night time heating.

Anyway, this is awesome! I’ve wanted one for a long time, and since my wife finally prevailed on me to finish our basement, I needed a new place for raising little plants, instead of the handy south window in the basement.

Last week, I sowed some additional seeds in my little milk-jug winter-sowing containers. I sowed:

• Penstemon smallii (from a generous trade with a local GardenWeb-er)
• Blue-eyed grass (Sisyrinchium montanum, also from a GW trade)
• Iceland poppies (seeds from a neighbor)

Today, I checked the containers, and the Alyssum have begun sprouting. Here’s a photo of my little jug farm. I put them under the swing so they could get shelter from the midday sun but still have morning and evening light. But then again, I may want to move them, because they won’t get any rain in them this way.

This was my backyard last Sunday (March 16) in the morning and then the same shot late that afternoon. Here’s to hoping that the snow is gone for the season! On Tuesday, we were supposed to have a pretty cold storm, and it was for a few hours, but then it blew away and warmed up again that very afternoon.

Oh yeah, here are the first flowers of spring, our crocuses:

Kendal from the Utah Gardening Forum at GardenWeb.com organized a seed exchange this Saturday. He created a very nice flyer to advertise the event but had no place to upload it, so here are two versions:

• Poster version
• Version with tear-off reminders

It’s too bad I can’t make it, but I hope the event goes well! I’d also like to see a live plant exchange in early May.

I posted a message in the GardenWeb roses forum about how to prune my Ruby Meidiland roses. I’ve been cutting the canes back to 18″ or so at the end of each winter, but I thought I’d read somewhere that they do well with little or no pruning. Here’s the best answer:

Ruby Meidiland belongs in the landscape series of Meidiland roses. I’ve grown Scarlet, Alba and Fuchsia Meidiland for the graceful cascading effect with hardly any pruning, except dead canes. Arching canes build upon arching canes resulting in fountain shape when they mature. Oldest canes (usually closer to the ground) eventually die out. Awkward growing canes can be tied to other canes or pruned as I see fit. Any portion of the canes or branches that are 3 years or older and have had no blooms or no new canes sprouting from them can be pruned if I have time to prune them. 2-4 year old canes flower best.

These are large rose shrubs that need lot of space to show their full cascading potential, and they’re not supposed to be pruned back to 18″ every year, unless you have space constraint and want upright growths – but then there many other roses for smaller space. You have a great Meidiland hedge. Cascading effect can be quickly achieved if you just deadhead the spent clusters and let the new growths take shape.

I’m going to let them grow naturally this year and just remove some dead or crowded canes. I hope some new canes sprout from the crown so I’ll have more naturally arching ones instead of arching ones that come off of an 18″ base cane. I’ll see how it goes this year and report back at the end of the season on it.

I’m trying winter sowing this year, although I’m a little late getting to it. I’ve been busy working on my basement, trying to get it framed and then hoping to finish the whole thing this spring.

Winter sowing is basically planting seeds inside a plastic container (I’m using gallon milk jugs) and letting them sit out in the cold so they can freeze, thaw, warm in the sun, freeze again, etc. This freezing and thawing breaks down tough seed coatings and allows the seeds to germinate when they’re naturally read to start growing. The seedlings are hardier and stockier than ones grown indoors under lights. Not everything can be winter sown — tender summer annuals are usually not viable this way, although you can use winter sowing containers to sprout them in mid-spring. There’s a whole lot of info about winter sowing on the GardenWeb Rocky Mountain forum and at www.wintersown.org. There is also a GardenWeb winter sowing forum, but I don’t frequent it (yet!).

Anyway, here are the seeds I sowed today:

• Echinacea ‘Ruby Giant’ - a very large purple coneflower with non-drooping petals
• Lychnis ‘Rose Campion’ - gray with red-purple flowers
• Alyssum ‘Oriental Nights’ - a low purple annual
• Callirhoe involucrata - also called purple poppy mallow or wine cups
• California poppy ‘Summer Sorbet’ - the pink poppy I’ve grown for a few years
• Coreopsis ‘Mahogany Midget’ - a short annual type with deep dark red flowers
• Thymus serpyllum - creeping thyme, with pink flowers
• Vitex agnus-castus - the “purple chaste tree”
• Syringa reticulata ‘Mandshurica’ - a tree lilac; I think it has white flowers
• Aquilegia caerulea - Rocky Mountain Columbine - blue and white flowers

I will have three more containers ready tomorrow. I’ll try to remember to take a photo to show what I’ve done.

A friend asked a question on a forum about what I’m pruning these days, and I thought I’d share the answer here. This is based on what I have in my yard:

It’s good to prune any shrubs now EXCEPT those that are spring flowering shrubs. Things like forsythia, flowering cherry, or others that will flower early in the season should NOT be pruned until after they flower. Otherwise, all the flowering wood gets cut off.

Shrubs that need hard pruning

Butterfly bushes (buddleia) need to be pruned down hard to short stubs to make them grow back and flower best. But mine are now about 6 years old, and I can’t cut them to the ground anymore. They have thick stumps at the basal clump. Cutting them down to about 12″ or so works fine.

I have some yellow-twig dogwood shrubs that will need fairly hard pruning (about 18″ high) this month — they get these awesome bright red branches in the winter, but if you don’t prune them hard in early spring, they won’t grow all the new branches that turn brightest red. Also, the spirea bumalda shrubs need fairly hard pruning now, too. I’ll leave them about 12″ tall. Other things I’ll be pruning hard in the next few weeks include a blue arctic willow shrub (pruned like buddleia), blue mist spirea (caryopteris), and some ornamental grass clumps (I have blue oat grass), which will get cut down to about 6″ tall (OK, they’re not a shrub, but I work on them when I’m doing spring shrub pruning).

Any time now is safe to prune roses. I have a hedge of floribunda roses that I’ll prune to about two feet high and thin out some of the branches as well as removing the dead canes. A lot of people say to prune the roses when the forsythia blooms, so by that measure, I still have some time. But really, I think it’s fine any time now. Other roses need different pruning, and I’d encourage you to search google for pruning advice on your particular kind of roses (hybrid tea, grandiflora, shrub roses, English roses, climbers, etc.). I will say that I also have some Ruby Meidiland roses, which are a fairly low shrub-type rose with long, arching canes, and I’ve read recently that they do fine with no pruning. I’ve been pruning them each spring so far, and I might just try only removing the dead or criss-crossing canes this year and see what happens.

Shrubs that need more moderate pruning (most everything else, except the spring-flowering ones)

I have a lot of hibiscus shrubs — the deciduous Hibiscus syriacus kind. I cut about 1/3 of the top back and make a nice rounded shape on top for them. That’s a safe way to prune most shrubs that are either summer flowering or are not grown for their flowers, like “burning bush” euonymus, English laurels, privets, and so on.

Spring-flowering shrubs

For the forsythia, flowering cherries (sand cherries), and some of my viburnums, I just wait until after they’ve flowered to prune them. I may wait a while and do it in mid-summer if I’m busy, but it would be best to do it right after flowering to avoid making them waste too much energy growing stuff I’m just going to cut off anyway.

Fruit trees

I do the fruit trees every year at this time. Peaches or nectarines need about 1/3 of last year’s growth removed so they’ll produce enough new branches this year for next year’s fruit. They only flower and fruit on wood that grew last year. It’s also important to open up the center of these trees so light gets in to ripen the fruit. Apples and cherries aren’t so picky, because they’ll flower on old wood, but I still prune something on them every year to control their size and shape. They don’t need the same open-center pruning as peaches and nectarines — they’re supposed to be a “modified central leader” shape, which is easy to envision but seems harder to implement when you’re actually hacking up your own tree. :-) Anyway, I have some in various shapes, including multiple leaders, and they still produce fruit very well.

Here’s a good link on pruning apples that I recently saw linked from a GardenWeb post, which will be helpful to anyone growing apples. And I just found a pretty good guide to pruning peaches and nectarines here. It’s a PDF file, so you can get a nice printout from it.

Ornamental trees

I don’t always prune shade or ornamental trees every year, but I will be trying to hone my artistic skills on some Japanese maples this month. Those are challenging, because they can look SO much more beautiful when done right, and I don’t want to mess them up! For most shade trees, I think it’s most important just to remove criss-crossing branches and branches that are too low and then just let the tree take its natural shape.

If any readers have questions, post them in the comments, and I’ll respond.

I mentioned in my previous post about the call from Utah Valley Magazine. The article just went online and you can see it here. It’s fun to see my kids in the center of the spread — a cute photo of them after picking some apples. There’s also an article on the following two pages about a guy named Alan in Lindon who grows a tropical paradise in his backyard. Pretty cool stuff!