Design

Last night was the full moon. It was the Harvest Moon -- the full moon closest to the Fall equinox. It was beautiful here - bright, rising about 8:15 pm, and creating plenty of moonshadows. The nocturnal symphony here in the Southeast is somewhat muted because of drought, but there are still plenty of field crickets singing and tree frog choruses. I had a group out with me, and one of the sharp-eared participants could hear the squeaking of bats as they left for their night hunting. I think my hearing is still good, but I couldn't hear what she did. A young boy was enamoured of my calling for barred owls -- who cooks for you, who cooks for you -- and kept calling himself -- he and his mom thought they heard a reply, although I think it was a bit of wishful thinking. I told the story of how my mother liked to read to my sister and me one of our favorite nighttime stories -- Wait until the Moon is Full. This is a lovely children's story about a mama raccoon, who wants her ch...

The Lobelia x speciosa and the Monarda 'Raspberry Wine' have new homes next to the bird bath. Searching for an appropriate site (of course, there's no place that's really damp enough normally), my gardening partner suggested that the area under the big oak might be good. It is currently getting full sun for several hours in midday, which may be ideal for these species, although I'm not sure what the sun's angle is in spring. We have our bird bath and bird feeders there, my containers have done quite nicely with the light levels, so I thought, why not? After all, I clean and empty the bird bath at least 4 times a week; it might as well help something grow (in addition to the oak, that is). I set about digging up an area for the two Lobelias , the Monarda , and a Heuchera , all of which I thought would be perfect for that level of partial shade. I nixed an attractive Euphorbia that I had bought recently, since our friendly squirrels had chewed one in one o...

Since we finally had some rain and it's cooled down, I'm feeling hopeful that fall really is a good time for planting. A quick run up to two local nurseries (actual nurseries, not just the garden centers at the big box stores) found me nabbing some good additions for my fall garden. A lobelia, set aside for a butterfly-gardening client who never showed up, caught my eye. These plants had beautiful large blue spikes, were being visited by carpenter bees and butterflies, were flowering in small pots and were labeled Lobelia x speciosa 'Fan Blue.' In spite of not really having appropriately moist soil anywhere, I thought I'd try them. They were half-price, anyway. I also picked up some selections of one of our native asters, Aster novae-belgiae (New York Aster), a pot of society garlic ( Tulbaghia violacea ), some Viola, and a couple of pots of Spanish lavender, which flowered profusely in one of my containers this summer, and was heavily visited by bees. A...

My mom's house in Texas was nestled on a woody, juniper-filled hillside in a upscale neighborhood in NW Austin, only marginally "landscaped" above and below the house. The deck extended over a scruffy lawn (no sun, of course), so from the deck, it was easy to throw the odd banana peel or lettuce leaf into the scrubby forest. She wasn't a gardener, so there was no need to create compost, but I think it appealed to her thrifty ways and sense of environmentalism. Her mother was a gardener, though, so maybe she had composted back when the vegetable garden was a source of food for a good bit of the winter, after canning. I still remember being impressed by the jars of canned beans and tomatoes in Grandma's cellar and the vegetable gardens and berry patches that she had when I was a child. Even before I was a gardener, I enjoyed putting our vegetable and fruit scraps in a compost heap, being environmentally-inclined myself. We had established one within one of our s...

An unaccustomed visitor dropped by the bird feeders yesterday. His markings caught our eye. Beautiful white eyestripes, a rosy breast and flashy black and white feathers. He avidly zipped through a lot of black sunflower seeds, while watching alertly in all directions. The normal cardinals, titmice, and Carolina chickadees were seemingly a bit perturbed at the large intruder. When I looked him up in our bird field guides, he turned out to be an immature male, so had the rosy breast, but not yet the solid black head of the adult male. Here in Upstate SC, rose-breasted grosbeaks are visitors briefly in the spring and fall, as they pass through from their summer breeding grounds in the mountains to the lowcounty. There was no hope of getting a photo, since he was so skittish. But this lovely photo of an adult male, taken by Rhonda Weldon, from Hanceville, AL -- the first place winner in an Outdoors Alabama contest shows you what attractive birds these are.

Amazingly the rain last night was over three inches, and it wasn't hard to imagine the garden giving a sigh of relief. But more remarkable was the early morning mist, and as I went out the front door to walk, a huge web was sparkling with dew. The walk around the botanical garden was amazing. There were spider webs everywhere -- on the grass, in the trees, in shrubs.... I don't think I've ever seen so many. Coming back home, I was able to get a couple of good shots of the porch web, and then discovered the two above the vegetable garden. Another remarkable thing is when I went out later, all of the webs were gone. I had never really given any thought to spider webs as being temporary, but many garden orb-weavers build webs in the evening and take them down in the morning (I found out after a bit of web research).

It's been a tough summer in the vegetable garden. The late freeze in April, the drought and heat for most of the summer, and now really low soil moisture levels combined with higher soil temperatures, make it hard to coax along even the fall greens. Seedling in the flats are coming along OK, but the seeds sown directly in the garden are taking their time. I haven't been optimistic enough to plant anything in the satellite garden, as I think the thirsty woodchucks will appear out of nowhere to devour any young kale, chard, or lettuce plants that manage to germinate. But we've just had a lovely downpour for quite awhile, thanks to some left-over moisture from the hurricane in the Gulf, and hopefully got at least 1 1/2 inches, maybe two. This would be excellent for recharging the soil layers farther down. I'll sow another set of seeds of greens and lettuce tomorrow, I think....

In this summer of extreme heat, and severe drought here in South Carolina, it's hard NOT to think about drought-tolerant plants. We have tried to establish a low-water use landscape, but that doesn't mean no water, especially with recently planted perennials, shrubs, and trees. We've both gotten really tired of dragging the hoses around to water these young plants that we don't want to lose, but anything planted this year needs water to survive the high temperatures, hardly any rain, and too much wind conditions that we've had. Our plants would normally thrive, after establishment, on normal rainfall, but rainfall this summer has been anything but normal, and even the toughest drought-tolerant perennials have wilted in the late afternoon sun. Trees, with their much more extensive root systems, and shrubs haven't been much affected, and certainly reflect their higher drought-tolerance. Conditions this summer have me thinking about waterwise gardening (a 'n...

After pulling out spent beans & tomatoes a few days ago, I started readying those spots for fall plants. I like to add more compost, a bit of organic fertilizer, and lime, depending on how each block looks (not very scientific or orderly), but some vegetables are more demanding than others, and almost all vegetables are much more fussy than the tough perennials, shrubs, and trees that we like to grow in our garden. Spinach (along with beets and chard) prefer a much more neutral soil (almost 6.5-7.0) than ours tend to be here in the SE, so adding more lime is helpful, at least over the long run, although it would have been best to have added it some months ago! Pelletized lime is the easiest to use in the garden. In fact, one of the harder things I've had to learn about vegetable-growing is that vegetables tend to be nutrient and water 'hogs' -- and have generally been selected to grow tasty fruits and leaves for us to consume, and take up plenty of nutrients and water i...

We were lucky at the end of August -- lots of folks around us didn't get the welcome relief of the heavy thunderstorms that added over 2 inches of rain to our garden. The state drought response team has just raised drought levels to severe in SC - here in the Upstate (roughly the expanse in SC between Atlanta and Charlotte, NC), it's particularly bad. Our garden is a low-water use garden (except for the pampered vegetables and the much less pampered container plants), although they do make do with hand-watering and don't have soaker hoses that run for hours on them. A neighboring county is calling for water conservation, and only watering lawns (!) before 5 am. In my opinion, it's a bit much to water lawns at all, but we're not lawn people. We have brown patches that have developed in our Zoysia lawn areas. But we're still monitoring plants that have been planted in the last few years, and watering them regularly. Anything that's been planted in the la...

I finally sowed some seeds of fall greens in flats and in the ground on Monday. I was a bit late for timing of some of the larger fall vegetables (the ones that take longer to mature) but I'll be able to harvest the fast-growing lettuces and baby mustards within the month, and hopefully get a cut-and-come-again second harvest. Cilantro and argula are also two fast-growing and tasty greens. Transplanting red cabbage seedlings and attractive kales from the garden center are another way to get a quick start on a fall greens garden. If the first frost doesn't come too early, I'll almost certainly be able to harvest the hardier kales, collards, mustards, and (slightly-protected) spinach through late fall, and again in spring. Here's a container of young spinaches that overwintered last year and provided some tasty early spring salads. Brassicas -- the mustard greens of various sorts -- grow incredibly fast, and with luck will provide some excellent fall and winter greens. ...

When we first moved to the south over 20 years ago, I had never eaten kale, collards, mustard greens, or turnip greens. I don't recall eating much spinach either, as a child, since it was largely available as the canned sort. And my mom was a decent, but relatively uninspired plain cook, from a farm cooking background. Although I grew up eating broccoli and green beans (frozen), my education with vegetables and fruits started in the SF Bay Area markets during my graduate school years. I first had fresh brussel sprouts (good), fresh mushrooms (delicious), fresh local Gravenstein apples (great), peaches, apricots, and plums straight from the Central Valley (fabulous), and learned about so many unusual vegetables in the Chinese and other ethnic restaurants that were springing up in the late 70's and early 80's in the melting pot that was the SF Bay Area even then. But moving to SE Georgia in the mid 80's was interesting in a different way. Southern cooking with its gre...

We received so many inquiries regarding our last post on the Hollywood Regency style, we thought we expand on this subject a bit further. If you are looking for the Hollywood Regency style, Kelly Wearstler is the reigning queen. Her latest project in Miami's South Beach, carries her distinctive look as seen here: Another designer that does this theme quite well is Jonathan Adler. You've probably seen his lamps and porcelain products everywhere. JA is a bit more fun, more flamboyant and in our opinion, maybe not as refined as Kelly Wearstler is. Let 's look at a few new products we found at the Las Vegas Market that are great for this look: This bed from Julian Chichester is to die for: This nighstand is very refined, very pretty in person: This bookcase is divine: More products similiar to this can be found at www.julianchichester.com

We've had fun watching the hummingbirds whizzing around the garden lately. Right now, it seems that we have five. An adult male, 3 females, and a juvenile male. The adult male has just arrived, probably passing through on his way south, but the others have been here for a while. The females chase each other around, but fairly companionably, and they seem to be friendly with the juvenile male. Yesterday, it almost looked like one of the females was the 'mom' and the juvenile male (he only has a few red feathers on his throat) was wanting her to feed him. We have two feeders near the porch, where we eat during nice weather (basically April to October), with an additional feeder on the other side of the house. But there are also the nectar-rich flowers of the Salvias ( S. guaranitica and S. coccinea ) and the coral honeysuckle ( Lonicera sempervirens ) and the Buddleja flowers for nectar. There are lots of insects, too, in our garden. My gardening partner has been bu...