What Could Possibly Go Wrong!

Last week I wrote about visiting some of the hidden gardens in the Northside. I’m sure there are so many more to see. I like to see young gardens as well as older, more established ones. The freshly planted landscapes have a neat and tidy look and breathe hope for the future. Plants are smaller and more spread apart with fresh mulch. If the gardener was lucky they were able to install an irrigation system before the plants were added. At these early stages th

e gardener has more to worry about. Keeping the new plants watered while they establish their roots, learning how to use their new irrigation system and checking for plants that might have gotten planted too deep or the plant settling too deep after watering them in.

It’s also a good idea to pull the mulch back off of the plants crown, the place where the plants stem meets the soil. If soil or mulch gets all over the crown a slow death for the plant begins. While you are checking and pulling mulch off where it is too deep allows you a great opportunity to drop some slow release, organic fertilizer around those areas to help boost the root growth which is really what matters during the plants first year. It is of the utmost importance to pull that hose out when the time comes to really get those plants watered deeply during that first summer. It is easy to forget that when you run one of your irrigation zones for 30 minutes the only thing that gets wet is the plants foliage, which some of the water runs down the stems to actually get to the soil about an eight of an inch deep and the mulch gets wet which does nothing as far as watering the roots goes. The top of the ground might look dry but it might fool you, often the root zone is still drenched from the clay soil below it not allowing water to go anywhere as quickly as it should. It pays off to get your hand down there to se if it has dried out enough to water again.

Overwatered plants are a worse situation than under watered plants. Underwatered plants can have something done about but overwatered plants, specially once they are showing signs of being overwatered are in trouble. The thing is overwatered plants appear to look just like an under watered plant which causes gardeners to add more water in hopes to bring the plants out of their sad wilt. Adding water to this situation only makes things worse and could eventually finish the plant off. New responsibilities to protect your investment during that first year are worth your efforts. After that first year you can relax a bit and let the plants take over.

Older gardens are more relaxed and are fun to visit as well. Usually an older, more established garden will have some shade, either shading the ground from weeds and harsh sunlight or shading your head. Shade provides more diversity opportunities in the plant material and usually some pruning techniques have been put into use. I love to look at different pruning styles and techniques. Some people like their plants to have a looser, more natural look and some people like things to be pruned and cut high and tight, it’s really a personal choice as far as the look you like in you own place when it comes to shaping.

There are general rules of thumbs to go by as far as timing of pruning either at the end of a plants bloom cycle and at the beginning of a plants season to shine so check out the timing of the plants you are working with. A few wrong moves with the timing can lead to fewer or no blooms the following season, done right you can get blown away when the time comes to impress.

Mimi and I have a yard that we have been extensively gardening for 15 years. We tend to cover large swaths at a time then give it a rest, plant some trees around the yard for a few years and concentrate on some details. When we are ready with a plan we will hit another big swath and make beds by joining together the trees that were planted. Our yard has many stages of planting from 15 years old to some beds that were created a year ago and everything in between.

Hollidae Morrison is a great friend of ours and a fellow gardener who has done an incredible amount of work to increase awareness about native plants and pollinators for the people of Mississippi. She has a great deal influence on the planning of the gardens at The Mississippi Museum Of Art. Hollidae, along with a group of very knowledgeable and hard working gardeners, has provided a place that people can go for inspiration or just to enjoy a walk through a botanical garden style setting. Back in February, Hollidae asked Mimi and I if we could be ready to have a tour in our yard with these folks plus a second group from The Garden Club Of Jackson. No pressure there! We agreed on a June date which I love since by June most things have flushed out and lots of things will be in full bloom.

We had a wedding party for my son and his wife last year to garden towards, we enjoyed gearing everything to be perfect for their wedding date in October. My daughter is getting married this coming October but in her home town of Greenville, South Carolina. We weren’t sure what we would be gardening towards until we got this request so we jumped on the opportunity. It’s more fun for us to have a date to garden towards and these groups of folks coming to see our garden are some very important people to Mimi and I. We know these fellow gardeners from their shopping with us over the years, from visiting their gardens on garden tours and from just hearing about the wealth of experience and knowledge that each of them hold. My time with some of them goes all the way back to when I was a pip squeak helping to load their cars back in the days when I was growing up at Green Oak Nursery. In a way some of them raised me up in the garden world so you can imagine how important it was to us for everything to be perfect for their visit.

We had March, April, and May to make it happen. Everything was going smoothly and the weather was being kind for all three of those months. We planted flowers that would be great for that time of year, got everything mulched nicely, cleaned up the edges and boundaries we were giddy with excitement as the date approached. In the back of my mind, I knew it was time for something to break or have a bad weather event that laid things down or something. I had few little things happen like some irrigation pipes needing repairs but I was preparing for a disaster. I just couldn’t guess what it might be. The answer began to reveal itself 8 days before the tour date.

My septic system decided it would give me a hard time by beginning to emit a stink that wouldn’t do. I called the company that we use for septic work, I had the system cleaned out last summer so I knew it wasn’t that. After he checked the system and found that everything was working as it should he started asking me questions. He wanted to know if I was still using Gain laundry detergent like he told me to years ago, yep, I was. He wanted to know if I was using as minimal amount of bleach when washing whites, yes sir, I am. He asked what else I was doing that winds up in the grey water. I told him that I had finally found relief for my leg cramps by taking Epsom salt baths every night for the last two weeks. “Thats it! You can’t do that!” I was killing all of the beneficial Bactria and microbes in the tanks with the salts. Of course I would find a remedy that works after 25 years of leg cramps that I wouldn’t be able to use.

He told me to go buy 4 cans of nothing fancy dog food and flush half a can every morning until it’s all gone, that would be 8 days, perfect if it works. The smell was completely gone by day 6 so we were feeling pretty good about everything, the date was getting closer, we had 5 days to go when our pond heard about us feeling good about it. The pond decided to turn, ponds do this from time to time, it causes small ponds to have a murky look with algae bloom and weird bubbles that had a terrible effect on our scene since the pond is the center of everything in our back yard. Mimi and I looked at each other and laughed, sort of, more like a grimace. This is the thing that was going to challenge us, finally, the answer to “what could possibly go wrong?”.

We found a pump and an aerator system and put extra speedy delivery on it. It would barely show up in time. I went to the nursery that day and got our sump pump. I ran the sump pump 24/7 until the aerator showed up, it seemed to be helping a little, just getting some oxygen moving and moving the sludge towards the edges of the pond. It wasn’t working good enough. We received notification that our big box of stuff had arrived at the house. I left work immediately to start putting it all together so we could crank it up as soon as possible. It was easy enough to put together, even with the directions being mostly in Chinese and the drawings seemed to be drawings of some other aeration system, I figured it out. I hooked up two 100 foot hoses to the pump and swam the aerators out to the middle of the pond while Mimi was on the side of the pond “guiding” me in the direction I need to go, “farther! farther!” After that brief swim I realized I was in worse shape than I thought I was. She had to help me get out of the pond over the wooden seawall. I was out of breath but excited to see the two places where the aerators were bubbling away.

The next morning (Saturday) the pond top was clear as a bell. We were so happy and Mimi was giving me the sweet eyes that i was hoping for. We went on to work with all systems running, feeling successful. I came home a from work a little earlier than usual to find the real disaster. During the day the water had heated up and the aerators had pushed a layer of ammonia gasses from the bottom of the pond to the top. I managed to kill every fish in the pond. Hundreds of bream were floating and stinking to high heaven. Buzzards were starting to form a line at the buffet. Something you might not know about me is that I tend to jump in to everything with both feet. I don’t usually read directions or forums about the stuff I’m doing until way after the deed is done. When I found a good forum about pond aeration the first thing I read was to go slow and easy, like 15 minutes the first day and maybe 20 minutes on day two and so on and so on. I read that the fish would die off in stags if I ran it too long. The bigger the fish the more oxygen it would need so they would die first. The medium size fish would be next and the youngest of them would go last. I had no choice but to get my nets and our kayak, some contractor bags and start spooning the stinking fish out of there before every Buzzard in Madison county heard about the ever growing buffet at the Martinson's house.

This was Saturday afternoon, the tour was going to be Monday morning. I filled 3 contractor bags with stinky fish, when I quit for the evening I had gotten all the floaters but more were starting to pop up. I started again first thing Sunday morning, filled up 2 more bags with the medium size fish. I scooped more fish twice more that day and felt like there couldn’t possibly be any more fish in our pond. We went to bed that night feeling like we cleaned up this mess right in the nick of time. Monday morning when I woke up it was raining and lightning pretty hard and the younger fish were floating just like the forum promised they would. The ladies were scheduled to be there at 9:30 that morning so I no choice but to do one more skimming and clean up in the rain. By this time it had just gotten funny to us, I had a serious look on my face but on the inside I was laughing at how predictably unpredictable life can be, especially when planning an event that really matters.

We got the place cleaned up and got ourselves cleaned up and calmed down right about the same time the first car pulled up. We had over 30 people show up and we toured for about 2 hours. No one knew what had happened until we came across a half a bream randomly left there by some carrion eater. I went ahead and fessed up to the group of the shenanigans that were happening just minutes before their arrival. We had a good laugh about life in the garden, you just never know. The sun came out and it turned out to be a wonderful tour with a great group of gardeners. Gardening is a blast if you let it be but you will be better off if you allow yourself to laugh at yourself when crazy things happen, and they will. Mother Nature will remind you who is really in charge if she suspects you need a reminder.

Good Luck! Happy Fourth of July, I am hoping your plans to have a gathering in your yard aren’t too predictably unpredictable. We will be in Philadelphia to tour Longwood gardens along with all of my siblings and their spouses and visit Mias new in-laws and outlaws. I can’t wait to see those gardens, I’ll tell you all about it when I get home.