Hey there. Your roving reporting is checking in. I am in the fair city of Chicago for a couple days, taking in the IGC Show. Several thousand gardening peeps will be here to discuss the latest and greatest innovations in the garden center business. I am not talking big box stores, I mean the independent folks. Tomorrow is a 14 hour bus tour of the finest, most innovative nurseries in the Chicagoland area. As if I could be any more exhausted. Nothing like being over stimulated for several days in a row. With all things gardening. And more gardening.

Of course, you know and I know, I dropped the trug on posting 365 on gardening. Would you believe me if I told you I never once stopped gardening and not a day has gone by that I have not been consumed by gardening in one way or another? Please, believe me. I’ll be able to ’splain later. Wait, let me show you now:
The Rocky Mountain Gardeners’ Resource Guide. 384 pages. Covering 600,000 square miles. THAT’S what I’ve been doing.

So, I owe you a few days of catching up. OK, it will be hard, but I’ll go to 12 garden centers tomorrow and report back to you. They are serving fresh pie at one. Yes, I’ll let you know how that goes.

BTW, I am here to present on the Top Five Hot Button Issues and Gardening in the Intermountain West:Goldilocks and the water issue: too much or not enough; hitting pay dirt; going native isn’t pretty (enough);the land of fruit and nuts; and I WANT IT NOW! I’ll elaborate later.

If you have a pressing concern you’d like me to take up, on your behalf, with these nursery folks, just say the word.

Gardening 365, and its the 227th day.

Greenhouse Workshop & Tour
presented by the Banbury Institute and Idaho’s Bounty

EcologyPears

Saturday March 6th & Sunday March 7th

With Dale Bates of Living Architecture
& James Reed of Onsen Farm: Winter Gardens

Workshop: Saturday March 6th – 9:30am to 5:00pm
Dale and James will facilitate this two day Greenhouse Workshop and Tour. Bring your projects or ideas and share them with others in the group. You will be exploring a variety of greenhouse concepts, along with looking at several existing working greenhouses in the area.
The workshop will be located at Steve and Kathleen Wilson’s home in Bellevue Farms (South of Bellevue) at 122 Quarter Horse Dr.

Tour: Sunday March 7th – 12:30pm to 4:00 pm
We will meet at Arden Schmit’s farm in Gooding at 12:30 to explore his greenhouse, then we will drive to Onsen Farm: Winter Gardens, from where we will start a walking greenhouse tour.

Cost:
$35 for the whole weekend or $25 for Saturday’s workshop only, payable to James Reed. Please call James to register at 208.543.9987 or 208.720.0673 or email jamescreed@mindspring.com

$10 for Sunday’s tour only, payable to Idaho’s Bounty Co-op.
Please call Julia Augustus to register at 208.721.1412 or email jaugustus@idahosbounty.org

Carpooling to the tour will take place from the Wood River Valley and Treasure Valley. Please bring water, a sack lunch or snacks if needed, and wear appropriate outdoor clothing.

EcologyPears

Please contact me with any questions or comments.

Sincerely,

Julia Augustus
Idaho’s Bounty
208.721.1412
jaugustus@idahosbounty.org

No wonder I am tired of gardening. But wait! I’m making a comeback, maybe today and tomorrow only, but a two day respite is better than no respite.

Along with my sound advice channeled via KD Lang, don’t smoke in bed, let me add, don’t research nasty giant stinging creatures just before you go to bed. To wit: this ugly bastard

This creature has been swooping around the Lily Pond, scaring the crap out of me. Apparently, mostly harmless, until you read up on it, going through all the flying insect/wasp websites…just before going to bed. Then it will creep you out for HOURS.

Back to the garden. Not much of anything is happening. I have lots of Sungold cherry tomatoes, just like last week. The gold raspberries are starting to make their autumn comeback. I harvested 5 figs. The apples that should be turning red are turning red. I have about a half dozen small green eggplants coming along slowly. That’s it, my friends and fellow gardeners. The rudbeckia Goldstrum looks like its ablaze and it still makes me smile, especially at dusk. Ya know why they painted school buses that color yellow -its a screamer.

My friends who’ve had a better go of their vegetable gardens are bringing me lots of tomatoes. Indy, you could send me some of those green beans. Dee, whatcha got over there, girl?

The artichoke plants have withered and died. They were trampled one too many times by my lovesick springer who dances back and forth along the fence trying to get the attention of the big old blond next door. Her name is Sally and she’s a yellow lab. That’s where I’d planted all my green beans. They came up about 3 or 4 inches and poof! To resolve some of the dog stepping, we’re making plans to do a good sized raised bed (fenced) for veggies next year. I am hoping we could get it built this fall so it would be ready to go in March. But you know what they say about the best laid plans?

Meanwhile, this little burst of coolth, coupled with a gander at the bulb plantings of Jacqueline van der Kloet at the New York Botanical’s Seasonal Walk, has me contemplating the bulb catalogs. I know I swore off bulbs. Just for one year. Yet, here I am, already plotting plotting plotting. Such is the optimism of a gardener.

Until Week 25,
the head gardener at Ranch du Bois

Dear determined gardening friends, Indy and Dee in particular,

If anyone saw my garden this very minute they would be shocked and dismayed. SHOCKED! I tell you.

The new sandstone retaining wall is about half finished. Some of the rudbeckia have escaped the perennial borders and are growing in the middle of the lawn. Yet, in those same perennial borders, you can find big gaping empty places where I finally got fed up with poor performers and ripped them out by their heads. Fair warning to the tomatoes: if they don’t get their act together and start producing, they, too, will meet an untimely death at the hands of the head gardener.

What really got my knickers in a twist today was the chomp, chomp, chomp and clickety click of the G.D. grasshoppers. Some of these nasties are 2 and a half inches long. They are eating huge holes in my plants and shredding the garden. There are over 1000 varieties of grasshoppers in North America. Oh joy. Plus,the voracious black vine weevils have stripped my Otto laurels and left nothing but the midribs of some leaves…and their telltale pinking-shear bite marks around the edge of the other leaves. Seems to be an especially bad year for these bugs. I checked with my other gardening pros, and they are all fighting the fight against these two evil doers.

I live 30 feet from the Boise National Forest and the Foothills with a capital F. Eradicating the pests is akin to putting out a fire with a teaspoon of water. The hoppers are sitting across the street, thinking, whoaaaaaa, look at that oasis of tastiness a few hops away! And the hordes descend. Part of this is my fault and I know it. I have a good layer of mulch on all my perennial beds in an effort to retain moisture and this in turn, makes a perfect hiding/breeding place for the weevils and nice green plants (even though they are quite drought tolerant) look like a smorgasboard to the hoppers.

I have a couple of plans in place: the first one includes a serious dusting of the patio containers with diatomaceous earth. I will follow that application with a spray of Safer brand Insect Soap & Pyrethrin. Both of these controls are considered organic. If these tricks fail, I’ll know in a day or two and will pull out the big guns. Next up, Neem oil w/the insecticidal soap. My only other options are unacceptable: remove the mulch (not gonna do it, mulch is there to aid in moisture retention and I spent hours and $$ putting down the mulch); and/or soil drench with stuff that is so dang toxic, well, even I won’t use it.

Even the dog has done his part to help with the plague of hoppers. He stalks them for hours, catches them in his mouth, carries them over to the lawn where he spits them out (Good Boy!) and rolls on them. Slow but charming.

Not much else is going on this week in my garden. The Sun Gold cherry tomatoes are prolific. I picked an BIG tomato yesterday, I think it was Black Brandywine (tag is lost, of course). It made a fine contribution to a delicious BLT. So much so, I declared this week the Official Week of BLT sandwiches. Oh, and I have some long thin eggplants trying to ripen.

We had one of the coolest days on record for Boise in August. It was all of 60 degrees on Friday with a lot of much loved rain. Here we are, in the desert, and after two days of coolth and a nice rain, people were bitching for summer to return.

And that, friends and gardeners, is life in the Wild West, Week 23, of the 2009 garden at Ranch du Bois. Cowboy up!

Your pal,
Ida

Not to be left out of the big doin’s, here’s my little upload for Bloom Day, July 2009-a small selection of what is blooming in the garden at Ranch du Bois. It is blazing hot and hard to photograph all the lovelies right now. Heck, its hard to even LIKE the lovelies when it is 100 degrees in the shade.

Here and there you will also find: Veronica ‘Royal Candles’, persicaria ‘Firetail’, miscellaneous salvia greggiis, a brown turkey fig, delosperma ‘Table Mountain’, hesperaloe, eryngium, penstemons, agastaches, and tomatoes.

Dear Carol and Dee,

Once again, I am amazed: WEEK 18??? What the heck? July 5th? Where do the days go? Days, where do the weeks go?

Not a great deal to report from Ranch du Bois. Rasberries still producing in spite of high 80’s/90/s heat.

I cannot WAIT till the day I can write to you two and tell you I am in knee deep in tomatoes and getting sick of them. I find myself staring at the tomatoes, saying to them under my breath, “Grow, dammit!” I am one of those people would not be caught dead buying tomatoes from a grocery store. If I buy them, ever, they are locally grown and from a farm stand. We just don’t use sliced tomatoes out of season. So, it is with bated breath I wait for the warm ripe tomatoes from the garden. All I can think of is how good some Insalata Caprese would be right now. That’s the simple salad of sliced tomatoes, torn basil, and sliced fresh mozzerella. I have the fresh basil and some mozzerella on hand. Come ON tomatoes!

I pruned the apple espaliers yesterday. I filled up an entire garbage can with the branches. There aren’t a lot of apples, in fact, I was pretty darn disappointed. There might be a couple of dozen apples, and that’s the extent of it. I do know the dog has made off with the Granny Smiths from the bottom branches. I noticed some of the cottony mildew in the congested, areas – those places really needed to be cleaned up and opened up to the air and sunlight. I sent a boatload of earwigs scurrying. I hate those critters.

The dog has also helped himself to the low hanging fruit on my new fig tree. I’ve raised it up on a double stacked pot until I can figure out a stable, out of reach place for it. Bad dog.

True confessions: I counted yesterday, before I hid them from the prying eyes of my gardening friends, 21 small pots (4 inchers) of plants that need to go in the ground pronto. Let me put it this way, if they don’t get planted this week, I might as well kiss them goodbye. I am not going to do the math on this, but suffice it to say, if I blow it, I might as well light a match to a C note. Will I ever learn not to buy a plant if I don’t have a place for it?. Arrrrrgggggh. Its definitely akin to my fabric habit. I hoard fabric. There. Out in the open. Is there a 12 step program for plantaholics?

I am planning to spend the next few mornings in the garden taking advantage of the cooler temps. The afternoons will be for catching up on my writing about Idaho Gardens. Next weekend, a big treat for me: the Sawtooth Botanical Garden tour in central Idaho. My chance to be a tourist in OPGs. Other Peoples’ Gardens. I am so looking forward to it. I’ve also been on the prowl for gardens for the 2010 garden tour in Boise. Man, you get some strange looks when you start cruising the alleys, the same ones, again and again and again, trying to get a look inside the back fence.

Until next week, be cool.

Your pal,
MA

ps, I forgot to tell you, my Cueball squash bit the dust. Actually, the little darling was yanked out of the bed by its head and left to wither and die in the heat. We are not even gonna talk about who committed such an offense, just know it wasn’t me.

To all my fellow Idaho gardeners/garden bloggers, I hope you are doing the Garden Bloggers’ Bloom Day. Its not too late to run out side, snap some picks and link over to May Dreams Gardens. Come on!

Here’s my offering for June:

[caption id="attachment_8526" align="aligncenter" width="225" caption="Good ol\' fashioned tiger lilies"][/caption][caption id="attachment_8527" align="aligncenter" width="225" caption="callicarpa \'Profusion\' aka Beautyberry"][/caption]

Yes, there’s more: penstemon barbatus, penstemon psueudospectabilis, veronica Royal Candles, rosa chinensis mutabilis, calendula, and verbena bonariensis.

And it’s stopped raining for a few minutes~!

Dear Dee and Carol,

Whoooaaaaa Nelly! Week 14? What’s with that? It means we have been in the garden for more than 3 months. OK, its the first of June, back it up: first of May, first of April, first of March. I guess we have been gardening for a couple of weeks. Time flies when you are having fun. Speaking of which -

It was so good to see you and spend time with you in Chicago last week. Four whole days of running crazy busy in Chicago trying to see as many gardens as we possibly could in such a short amount of time and over such a huge city area. (Long exhausting sentence and weekend to match). Let’s see: we were in the Chicago Botanical Garden(s), the magnificent Lurie at Millenium Park, the Lincoln Park Conservatory and the Lily Pools,Carolyn Gail’s lovely home and garden, the private-yet-restaurant-related garden of Rick Bayless (Mexico One Plate at a Time/Frontera Grill/Topolambampo), Grandmother’s Garden near the conservatory, and I know I missed some along the way. Whew. I have yet to recover from Chicago but already looking forward to doing Buffalo big time in 2010.

Home again home again. While I was gone, we had a little rain and a lot of sun. This late spring season has been especially kind this year. The garden is lush and green and bursting at the seams. The first crop of greens have all bolted and been pulled to make way for hot summer annuals. I have a long galvanized planter which, in a previous life, was part of a room divider/half wall in my 1959 rancho deluxo house. Flyboy is going to put some holes in the bottom of this funky planter. It measures about 12 inches deep x five feet long x 9 inches wide. The plan is to fill it with potting mix and place it on the side of the house where it will get shade in the hottest part of the day, yet get plenty of morning sun. I am going to plant it with a mix of various salad greens/arugula/basils.

I have to get in an make some room for the Cue Ball, Eight Ball and One Ball zukes. Thanks, Indy, for the seeds. I have just the place for them. I am ripping out a big 4 foot x 4 foot area of orange oriental poppies. They do not belong in this bed and I don’t have to leave them there. The plant was supposed to have been Patty’s Plum and it is so NOT plum. In the same bed, I have another goof up, a huge stand of dirty yellow iris with a brownish purple edge. Now, I love love love tall bearded iris, but this is not a color to behold, so out they come. And don’t even ask me how they got there. It is not a color I would have chosen in a million years. I think they were mislabeled. Off with their heads!

The raspberry patch is on a roll, in a couple of weeks I should be able to start eating them. With any luck at all, they will produce through October. I planted both summer bearing and everbearing in an effort to get a very long fruiting season.

I could hardly find the peas. I knew I planted them, but they have been overcome by the rest of the stuff in that border. YIKES! With almost two inches of rain, just last night,it’s looking green and jungle-y out there. Hell, the Lily pond/reflecting pool was overflowing last night during one especially heavy rainstorm. Things are so wet they are tipping over. And weeds. WEEDS have run amok.

One more thing before I close. You all know my lust for espaliered fruit trees? I have managed to find some more 6 branched/ 6 variety pear espaliers. I have two of the trees tagged at the nursery and hope to pick them up tomorrow or Tuesday. Three of the six pears are: Comice, Anjou, and Bartlett. I am so excited to get them and get them in the ground. For once in my gardening life, I actually know just exactly where they are going to be planted: I have a nice space along my property line/fence where they will be supported yet have great airflow and perfect sun.

So, tah tah for now from the infamous Ranch du Bois. I can’t wait to hear how you are faring in your gardens.

MA

Finally! Here’s my Bloom Day post, for Carol over at May Dreams Gardens.

Since everyone was getting fancy w/you tube videos and background music, I put mine in a collage. So there.

left to right: top row: wisteria & Boise; wisteria; ad euphorbia
2nd row: snowball viburnum with purple and white lilacs in the background; snow in summer + geum; and rosemary w/bees
3rd row: allium Purple Sensation in front of Baileyii redtwig dogwood (shrub); unknown tulip variety, ajuga Black Scallop w/Ivory Prince hellebore in the back.

In honor of Earth Day, the true Mother’s Day (Mother Nature, silly!), I recommend taking in as many plant sales as possible. Here’s the short list:

Friday and Saturday, April 24th & 25th, Annual Plant Sale at the Idaho Botanical Garden. Friday night is member’s only, you get first dibbs on all the good stuff. Gates open at 4 pm. and you will want to be there early. Wine, cheese, and crackers are served free of charge. The Friday MEMBERS ONLY sale has become a harbinger of Spring for Boise gardeners. Get caught up with your fellow Felco-wielding pals, load up your cart, and get ready to garden.

Psst: A little bird told me there is a shipment of really nice stuff coming in from Mountain States Wholesale + look for heirloom tomatoes from the Boise State University horticulture program.

Idaho Native Plant Society sale, held at the MK Nature Center, 10-2 on Saturday, April 25th. 600 South Walnut Street, adjacent to Municipal Park, just off Warm Springs Avenue.

Idaho Earth Institute plant sale at Lucy’s Coffee and Espresso, 1079 Broadway Avenue, click here for a map.
The sale is from 10-2.

I’ll be working Friday night at the Member’s Only sale at the Garden. Stop by and say hi.

You can hear my latest podcast/visit to the 94.9, The River, by clicking here: River Interactive, Morning Features.