False Indigo in bloom

Just in time for the end of May and the end of the blogathon, the false indigo has bloomed. (I wrote about the false indigo first here in 2008, updated it here in 2009 and triumphantly reported its first real blooms here last year.)

Given its current state of bloom, I think I can safely say that the false indigo is here to stay:

In 2009, the year after I planted it:

In May, 2010:

May 29, 2011:

Haikus of the Day

Today is the second group blogging day (the first was on May 10, with the subject of favorite blogs), and it's group blog haiku today. I mentioned yesterday how I felt bad about not being able to read through more of the blogathon blogs, but I've decided that this might be my opportunity-- if everyone's blog post for today is only 17 syllables a piece, I might be able to manage that.

Here are my efforts.

First, the shortest possible version of Saturday's false indigo post:

The false indigo
is abloom in the garden:
purple smoke indeed.

As well as a sad garden discovery:

The cat from next door
has napped on my baby greens.
Leaves crushed into soil.

False Indigo, at last

Two years ago, I wrote about how I was trying to grow false indigo in my garden and not having too much luck at it.

The short version of the story is this. The false indigo already at the house when I moved in was in a crowded bed and not flourishing. And I took so long to figure out where to plant the new one I bought that it died. Bad me. I tried again. This time, things seemed promising, and the false indigo came up a second year and seemed to be on track . . . until something ate it.

Finally, 2 years ago, I bought one more plant, a kind of false indigo called "purple smoke" and put it in the main part of the garden. That first year, it was a single spindly stalk.

Last year, it had grown to three:

This year, though, turned out to be the year. If the false indigo tripled in size from year one to year two, it's more than quadrupled from year two to year three. I really am amazed:

I have taken umpteen photos of the false indigo, at varying times of day, trying to catch it in its glory, but I haven't quite managed it yet. I'm planning to keep trying, as long as it's in bloom.

But what this reminds me of is a saying someone told me about the first years in a new garden: "sleep, creep, leap." In the false indigo's case, that's certainly true. The leap was definitely worth the wait, and I'm delighted to be a witness to its ever expanding number of purple blooms. I always feel like I'm tempting fate to call anything a garden triumph, but for the moment, at least, this feels like one.

Garden Update

So, almost exactly 2 weeks ago, I wiggled the dead birch tree out, and that space, my new perennial bed, has been waiting for me to do something to it. I've been doing little things all along--I moved the lemon balm, for example, and I hacked away at more of the Greek oregano, though I still think there's too much there. And between yesterday and today, I bought perennials, some from the farmers market and some from Andrews Greenhouse in Amherst. (Andrews is a dangerous place to go during gardening season--they have a great selection, and their perennials are a bit pricey; so, you want to buy everything, but if you do, you'll have no money left.) I can't say I really planned it out in any kind of organized way, but I did think about colors (mostly pinks and blues) and heights and about what was already there and how things might fit in. This is how it looked a few weeks ago:

And this is how it looks now:

Five perennials went in today--2 different kinds of Campanula, a Coreopsis with pink flowers (I've never had one of those before), perennial Bachelor's Buttons and a Scabiosa (pincushion flower). You can sort of see them better here:

It's always funny to see a garden bed, especially one with flowers, in its early life, when everything is small and spaced so far apart. If I'm lucky, in a few years, it will have filled out. But some years things don't come back (my Platycodon--Balloon Flower--which I loved didn't come back this year, and so I had to put a new little one in its place), or you discover that they don't fit and need to be moved. It's always such a work-in-progress. (Or, sometimes, a work that can't progress. I bought some red bee balm as well, and I wanted to put it in next to the other bee balm, and when I started to dig, I learned that the reason that particular space is empty (and so seemed to need filling) is that there's an enormous slab of rock underneath. I wasn't up for uprooting everything in the vicinity, so I gave up pretty quickly and refilled the hole, but now I have to ponder where else the red bee balm might like to go.)

In other garden news, the False Indigo (knock wood) seems to like its new location. Last year, there was a single stalk, and this year there are three and even some flowers:


The lettuce, while tiny, is at least up:


The biggest of my three blueberry bushes is covered with blossoms; I'm still a few years away from being able to harvest any blueberries, but this gives me hope that someday I will:

You can see in the background to the right where a very large branch of my neighbor's tree fell during the winter. This is the problem with living on the edge of woods . . .

And in good community garden news, Alex spent a chunk of the afternoon over there turning over the second side, facing corn poppies and mint alike. I am very grateful (though he did suggest that I was going to wait to go back over there til he was done and then start planting things without consulting him. How he can think I might do such a thing, I can't imagine).

The one area where progress is less than stellar is in the asparagus realm. Last fall, the lovely Tibetan dug an asparagus bed for me where there had been lawn. Here's how it looked at the time:

The thing with asparagus, though, is that you have to dig trenches to put the asparagus in, trenches at least a foot deep and preferably 18 inches. I'm just a bit behind where I'd hoped to be by now . . .

I was even tempted to call him back and see if he could dig the trenches for me, but then I reminded myself that I did it myself a few years ago, so I can do it myself now. (And, realistically, I'm not going to be able to go down 18 inches, so I think a foot will have to do, and then I'll build the bed up from the top if I need to.) Hopefully, by the time I go back to work on Tuesday, the asparagus will be in. We'll see if I can swing it.

And that ends this week's garden update . . . There's supposed to be rain tonight, which is good for everything I just put in. And I am pleased with myself for managing to write this before 11 p.m. Now I can go putter some more in the garden without blogathon anxiety.

Happy Saturday.

Distractions

I've been absent for the past few weeks because I've been distracted by things big and small. A few examples:

Why a picture of half of my garage, you might ask. Well, this is a photo of absence rather than of presence. What is not in this picture--and what used to be in my garage--is my very large, very heavy, very expensive snow blower, which I bought out of necessity the year after I moved here, living as I do on the side of a mountain. I can't say I particularly liked the snow blower, but it did its job admirably, and we'd made some kind of peace with each other. And we would have had a long and happy life together if some person (or more likely, people) hadn't decided to help himself to the snow blower one day when I wasn't home. It was a particularly audacious theft, given that it had to have happened in the afternoon, and it would have required a truck and other paraphernalia to get the snow blower into the truck. The cop told me it was the third snow blower reported missing in the past couple of weeks, and since then, I've heard of two more. It seems unlikely that my little Western Massachusetts town is harboring a roving gang of snow blower thieves, but that appears to be the case. My insurance will cover a chunk of the replacement, which I'm not going to buy until the fall--hopefully, that will give me enough time to figure out a way to lock it up, given that my garage has no doors.

Thankfully, there are happier things to think about:

The garlic is up! I planted more than usual so I could use some as green garlic, but now, looking at it, it doesn't seem like as much as I remembered. Still, a healthy bed of garlic is always a nice thing in the spring, and I have some miscellaneous garlic coming up--from heads I didn't pull up last year--that I can also use as green garlic. I'm already thinking about that delicious green garlic soup I made last year.


The rhubarb is up too! I have it planted at the edge of my garden, and now it's still at the edge, but in a few weeks, it will become its dominating self. It's nice to have something grow so vigorously in the spring--it's very heartening when so many other plants are rather poky about coming out of the ground and presenting themselves.

That's my false indigo, take three, the one I planted last year in the spot I hope will become its permanent home. I'm not expecting a lot of flowers this year, but if the false indigo settles into its spot and is happy (and will give me flowers eventually), that's fine by me.


This last photo seems unrelated, I know. But it needed to be documented, and this was a good a place as any. I saw Andy the other day, and he told me he had a present for me from India. I really had no idea of what it was, and then he presented me with this fabulous bag. He's been doing a project on bags in India for several years now, first on jute bags, and now that jute bags are a dying industry, on the bags that have replaced them, most of which have images on them. (At some point, I may be able to link photos of some of the other cool bags he's found, but I can't at the moment.) He found this bag in Benares, and knowing my love for the Delhi Metro, he bought it for me (and then saved it to give to me now, which I appreciate).

We went on the Delhi Metro together--his first time--on New Year's Day this year, the day we were in Delhi before the endless fogbound trip to Benares. And I have no doubt that I went on and on about how much I love the Delhi Metro. I should probably write a separate post about how great the Delhi Metro is, but suffice it to say that it's Delhi's first real functional transportation system, and it's a joy. At the moment, the routes are fairly limited, but by sometime in 2010, it will be finished, and I will be able to hop on the Metro in Green Park or Hauz Khas and get to Connaught Place without having to argue with a single rickshaw-wallah. I eagerly await that day. In the meantime, I will be able to carry my bag advertising "Delhi's Pride" in anticipation. Thanks, Andy!

False Indigo, take three

I'm on a quest to grow false indigo in my garden, and I'm not doing a very good job of it.

The first time I heard of false indigo was 8 or 9 years ago, when an unfamiliar plant appeared in my plot at the community garden. It was one of those plants that was not obviously a weed but not obviously a perennial either. My neighbor, Frances, who knew quite a bit about perennials, said it looked like it might be false indigo, and maybe I should let it go and see. And so I did. It had light green leaves like false indigo and, later, a bluish flower, but eventually, it became apparent that it wasn't false indigo, and it had very long taproots to boot. So, before it got too big and unwieldy, I dug it all out. (I think perhaps it was some kind of wild pea, but I'm not sure.)

But when I moved to my house, I remembered false indigo and decided to plant some. I bought a pot of it at a garden center and then let it sit for months while I figured out where I wanted to put it. Meanwhile, I realized that, in fact, there was false indigo already growing in the bed outside my back door.

Except that there's lots of other stuff also planted in that bed, and the false indigo, which you can just see in the middle of the back row of plants, was a bit crowded and just not flourishing. Meanwhile, the new plant I'd bought died in its pot because I'd taken so long to decide where to put it. Yes, I am a negligent plant killer. At least sometimes.

So, I decided to try again. I bought another plant, and, at the same time, I decided to move some of the old plant along with the new one to a new bed, one where there would be more room for it to spread out. This time, I planted it in the bed beneath the stone wall that separates the part of the property where my house is from the part above where the cottage is. This bed was a bit shadier, but for awhile, it seemed like it was working. There were no flowers yet, but I knew that false indigo can take a few years to settle in. Last June, when I was visiting Abby in Burlington, we were lamenting the lack of blooming false indigo in our gardens. We saw some growing in front of houses in her neighborhood, and it was just gorgeous. Here's what it looks like when it's in bloom.


So, I was hoping that if I was patient and gave the plants time to settle in, I'd eventually have those lovely blue-purple flowers in my garden. Except that in the middle of the summer last year, something came and ate the false indigo. I have no idea what it was. I just know that one day, I went outside and found the plant chewed in half. The stalks were lying there, and something had chomped them, maybe thinking they were a tasty garden treat. I wondered if, perhaps, I was being punished for having let that false indigo plant die a few years earlier.

Anyway, I decided to try one more time. Last week, I went back to the garden center and purchased a type of false indigo called "purple smoke." And over the weekend, I planted it in the main part of the garden, where there is lots of sun. This is actually the spot I'd been thinking about for it originally. But I was waiting for the dead birch tree to come down (which Alex facilitated last summer, though you can't really tell from this picture--I'd still like to take the stump down another foot or so), and then I was waiting to get rid of the wild blackberries that were taking lots of space but not giving me any berries. It's just one stalk now, but I'm hoping that the third time will be the charm. If it doesn't work, I may have to resign myself to the fact that false indigo just doesn't want to grow in my garden, as much as I want it to grow there. I hope that won't happen. I don't want to feel spurned by a plant, if I can help it.

The other thing I keep realizing is that someone who owned this house before me really, really liked ferns. Last year I cleared out some of the ferns to make room for more plants, but when I was looking at the garden over the weekend, it was apparent that the ferns were starting to take over again. They're not nearly as bad as the mint, so I'm not going to whine about them, but I did think that if I'm vigilant with fern removal, then I could put some more perennials in here.