Shirley posted a question regarding a Purple Shamrock plant that she has in her house.  She said the directions that came with the plant say it is semi-dormant in winter and she would like to know if it needs to be put into the basement for the winter. 

Oxalis regnellii var triangularis is native to Brazil but prefers cool temperatures, especially while in bloom.  Generally it should be at 55-65 degrees (F) at night and not warmer than 75 degrees (F) during the day.  The plant should be fed every two weeks while the plant is growing with a balanced liquid fertilizer that is diluted by half.  When the blooming stops, feed every other month.  The shamrock is a bit different from other plants in that it grows from a bulb.

The shamrock will start to decline in appearance after awhile, but don’t worry. It is the nature of the plant.  Similar to tulips, shamrocks need a dormancy period.  It will come back to life again after the resting period is over.  In many cases people think it is dead and toss it out.  Give it a little time and you should have a flowering houseplant again.

Shamrock plants like to be in an area with bright indirect light.  Keep the soil moist and only fertilize while the plant is still looking vibrant. Eventually the plant will start to go dormant.  Stop watering the Oxalis and let the leaves naturally dry up and fall off.  Don’t pick the leaves off, let them fall on their own.  Once the leaves have done so, move the plant to a cool dark area for a four week dormancy period.  If you have a green leaf variety, it should be left for two or three months, but the purple variety only needs one month of dormancy.  You can bring the plant back to it’s original place, water it, fertilize it and you should have new growth emerging soon!

If you need to repot the shamrock, remove the plant from its pot by tapping the outside of the pot. This will loosen the root ball.  With both hands, massage the root ball to aerate the roots. This promotes future growth. Pick a pot that s one size larger than the old pot.  Make sure it is clean and dry.  Put a rock or broken piece of another clay pot over the drainage hole to keep the potting soil in. Add two or three inches of good potting soil that has some sand mixed in.  This will help with drainage and keep the dirt from becoming a hard clump.  Set the root ball into the soil and fill around the plant with more soil.  Firm the soil around the plant to keep it upright.  Lightly water and then add a little liquid plant food.

Keep a careful look out for spider mites.  Keep the soil aerated and the sickly leaves picked off and the plant should do well. 

While doing my research on this, I came across a web page that talks about oxalis as a whole. The person writing the page was not pleased with the oxalis because the one he or she has in their garden was taking over.  It appears that the purple oxalis/shamrock is not as aggressive, but if you are interested in reading up a bit more on what another type can do, click here.  I seem to recall a plant that I got one year at the end of the season. It was in a pot and I’m pretty sure it was in the oxalis family, but it didn’t have the shamrock leaves.  I left it in the pot and it was apparently a good thing.  I found out it was extremely aggressive, fortunately, not by example.

It was beautiful, but I made sure it didn’t get a foothold in the ground.  It did not come back this past year, so I must have been successful.

As for the houseplant kind, I will leave that to others.  My “boys” would like them too much.

Dig it!

Posted under General, Houseplants

As much as I want to get everything covered in October, I have to wait until around Thanksgiving to finish up. That is when I usually winterize my roses.  Well, most of them.  Some I leave to the whim of Mother Nature.

Different types of roses require different techniques for winterizing. 

My Sven and Ole roses were developed in Minnesota and are supposed to take the harsh winters we have.  Sven has survived a couple of winters although I think he gets some shelter from the spruce tree. 

Sven gets a little help from his friends.

Ole will be open to the elements, so we will test his stamina, ya-der-hay. 

It's not that I don't like you, Sven. I'm just making sure that the University of Minnesota did make you hardy.

The Knock Out rose should be pretty hardy, too.  I put some mulch on it last year and it came through fine.  I will probably do the same, but with straw this year, since I have some extra from the garlic-covering activity.  I do not trim the roses back in the fall.  You can wrap the rose with burlap and tie it securely with some rope.  I haven’t done that, but I might with my non-hardy ones.  I haven’t decided yet.

The Knock Out rose grew quite a bit at the end of summer.

Hybrid teas, grandiflora and floribunda roses are barely hardy here so they need a lot of protection.  The best way to do that is to start by removing all fallen foliage and debris.  This removes any diseases that may be harbored in the debris.  Next mound soil over the base of each plant, loosely tie the canes together with twine.

Image from homedepot.ca... only because I haven't done mine yet!

That keeps them from being whipped by strong winds.  Although, I did this last year with my Strike it Rick rose and the twine had been cut by one of the thorns in a couple of weeks.  This year I will use more twine… or use the burlap trick from the previous paragraph.  When the stems are under control, pile about 10 to 12 inches of soil at the base of the rose bush.  Don’t just dig around the existing plant…that will just uncover some of the roots which will then freeze.  Use soil from another area of the garden (like my vegetable bed) or use bagged dirt.  Then add a layer of mulch such as straw or leaves. 

Image from Better Homes and Gardens website

You can end it with another layer of soil to keep the mulch in place or cover with burlap held down by something heavy.  We have a bunch of bricks that we are using.  You can also use a chicken wire fence around each rose bush to help keep the soil and mulch in place.  The best time to do all of this is after the plants have been hardened off by several nights of temperatures in the low to mid-twenties.  That tends to be around Thanksgiving.

The Strike it Rich rose is on the left and the Firefighter one is on the right. I will definitely mound dirt on these.

This is a nice red rose that I got from a nursery that went out of business when a mini-mall bought the land. It is a World War II rose, but I don't remember the exact name. I've never covered this one and it comes back, but it is also sheltered by the spruce.

Now, climbing roses are harder to deal with because they are much larger.  If the rose is tied to a wall, trellis or fence, untie the canes and wrap them in insulating material, like you would wrap pipes to keep them from freezing.  Burlap would be fine.  Retie the canes to the wall, trellis or fence.  If the canes need to be cut back, go ahead and do it, but you want to limit trimming before winter.  Add soil and mulch to the base of the plant like you would for the floribunda.  If you don’t want to do this method, you can detach the canes from the trellis and lay the whole plant down on its side on the ground. 

This is called trenching. I've never tried it because I am basically too lazy to dig the trench and then part of the rose up to lay it down. (the photo came from HGTV)

Stake it in place and cover the whole thing with a foot or so of soil and mulch.  Then when the weather warms up in the spring, you can gently remove the soil and mulch and retie the rose to the structure it came off of. 

We got these from a friend of ours. By the process of elimination, I am assuming that these are climbing roses. Our friend, Bill, had them on an arbor and they aren't really a bush. And I've never covered them and they come back every year.

Our miniature rose will be covered with soil and mulch.

My one dollar miniature Chinese rose.

I don’t have any tree roses and it is pretty much for one reason only.  Winterizing.  Once I plant a rose, I don’t want to do anything more than to cover them up for the winter.  Tree roses need to be dug up and stored for the winter in a cool garage or basement.  You can also bury it similar to the canes of the climbing rose, but I would be afraid of hurting the roots.  Although, my local nursery’s rose lady tells me that she buries hers every year and they come back.  Maybe one of these years, I’ll try it.  A tree rose would certainly look good in the middle of my “rose bed”. 

Dig it!

Posted under Autumn

I stopped counting how many times someone asks me “What’s the winter going to be like?”  Well, I can tell you for sure that it will be a lot colder than the summer was, there will be snow and probably some ice and the nights will be really long.

Predicting the weather only a few days out is hard enough.  I don’t even try to go beyond that.  I’m just a Meteorologist.  If you want to go farther out than a week, ask a Climatologist.  They are the ones that look at the weather months at a time.  Or you could ask the woolly bear caterpillar.

The saying is that if the black bands are larger than the brown band then the winter will be harsh and if the brown band is larger, then the winter will be mild. 

Okay, Woolly Bear…. what do you have to say for yourself?

A little biology lesson:

The woolly bear caterpillar (or worm if you are in North Carolina) is the larval stage of the Isabella tiger moth. 

Isabella Tiger Moth

The caterpillar is actually one of eight or more species in the US that can be legitimately called woolly bears because of the dense, bristly hair that covers them.  But the black and brown one is the most common and well-known of the bunch.  It can be found through the US, Mexico and southern Canada but is not found in the rest of the world.  There are apparently two generations of the worm, one in May and one in August, but it is the fall one that we notice mostly because they are going across the road.  They are on their way to find shelter in dead plant debris where they will spend the winter as the larva.  They survive the winter freezes by producing a cryoprotectantin its tissues.  That is a substance that is used to keep biological tissue from freezing.  Click on the word to go to the Wikipedia definition.  Once the caterpillar emerges from its hibernation, it eats as much as it can, pupates (the stage where it actively changes form) and emerges as an adult. 

I don’t recall anyone ever looking at the moth and figuring out what the winter holds, so we will concentrate on the caterpillar stage. 

I know this will come as a shock to you, but the caterpillar doesn’t really care what the winter will be like.  It will be sleeping.  Most of the one’s I have seen have looked pretty even on the colors.  And someone showed me a caterpillar this fall that was completely brown.  (I’ll pick that one).  Mainly, though, the length of the bands is only an indication of the age of the caterpillar and the moisture levels in the area where it developed.

So what do the so-called “experts” say about the upcoming winter?

Well, that is a really good question.  According to an article in the middle of October from the Iowa City Press Citizen, Harry Hillaker (our State Climatologist) and Mike McClure ( a meteorologist with the National Weather Service in the Quad Cities) imply that we will be cooler than average for the winter and may have a wetter than average year, too.  Part of their reasoning is that we will be in a La Nina event.  This is a cooling of the Pacific waters off of South America, unlike El Nino which is a warming of the same waters.

The Climate Prediction Center issues outlooks all the time.  Their outlook for November, December and January is warmer than average or about average with precipitation at equal chances of above average, below average or normal for Iowa.

The Old Farmer’s Almanac says “Winter will be slightly colder than normal, on average, with below-normal precipitation and near- to below-normal snowfall.”

So, in other words, nobody agrees on what the winter will hold.  I think no matter what happens, we will still need our coats, hats and mittens.  And the snow shovels!

Let’s sit back and see what Mother Nature throws at us.

Dig it!

Posted under Autumn

Now that Mother Nature has killed off all of the tender plants, it is really time to get cleaning in the garden. 

The celosia still have some color, but the leaves and stems are dead. We pulled them up right after I took this picture. It looks completely different! Although, we got it done before the trick-or-treaters came by, so they didn't trample everything.

Some things I will actually leave alone. 

My hydrangeas.

Miss Kim. She is still hanging in there... although she is losing her leaves.

I leave Miss Kim alone in the fall since I want to see her lilacs in the spring.  I leave the hydrangeas alone for some winter interest and a place for the birds to sit on while there is snow on the ground.

The dogwood is really showing its colors right now. It looks sharp.

The freeze killed off the annuals in this pot, so we pulled them out, emptied the dirt and Dwayne rinsed the pots out.

They are drying out and will be stored for the winter.

There are still a few annuals that are clinging to life….

Yes, the grass is supposed to look like that. I am glad there is still a little color left in the pot.

Some things I will leave for the spring. 

None of these leaves are from our yard (although maybe a few of the front ash tree's leaves whipped around the house). I will leave them here, though, until spring. They will serve as a layer of protection from the cold. And it is always nice to pull the leaves away and see the bleeding hearts popping up.

And then there are the things that I still need to do….

The butterfly bush made it through the freeze, but I will eventually have to cut it back so that I can mulch it.

The snow did a great job of insulating the butterfly bush last year, but I think I will try some straw this year.  I have to put some down on my roses and cover my garlic, anyway. 

Garlic in with my roses.

The freeze deflated the garlic, but I'm not digging them up until next year, anyway....

Garlic is planted closest to the camera with turnips still hanging on farther away. There are a couple of beets that managed to hide from the rabbits, too.

And, of course, there is the cleaning of the tools to consider.  I’ll save that for another blog post.

I found a fall gardening checklist online at The Iowa Gardener.  Click here to access it.  You can follow all, some, or none of the items, but it is there if you want it.

Have fun cleaning up!

Dig it!

Posted under Autumn

Despite the fact that fall means the end of the growing season and that winter is right around the corner, it does have a few ups.  One of those is Halloween.  I love Halloween.  I like dressing up and I love giving out the candy to the kids… seeing their reaction…. looking at their costumes.  Of course, some of the little ones didn’t know what to make of the giant M&M….

While in college my best friend, Sandy and I (with help from her mom), made some M&M costumes. There is red, green, orange and brown. And, of course, Dwayne took this picture at the one time there are no kids on the street!

I went with the red because I didn’t want to wear the stiletto heels that Sunny thought I should wear in order to be an authentic “Green”.  And, no, I wasn’t as crabby as the real “Red”.  We made these before his personality, um, developed.

Now I have to start thinking about next year…

Dig it!

Posted under General, Humor / Fun