Perennial Favorites

Sometime in late winter I plant annual seeds outside in the garden. I use the arbitrary dates of Valentine’s Day and St. Patrick’s Day to bookmark the prime time for planting my hardy annuals, but it’s really pretty flexible.  I like to do it just before a snow is predicted, but that isn’t completely necessary either.

Some of my favorite flowers to plant this time of year include the California poppy shown above. These incredibly drought tolerant little plants can be perennial in Colorado, but at 6500′ elevation they act more like annuals for me, reseeding where happy. Some years I have a big patch in the no-water garden, other years only a few come back. Don’t plant them in an area that has rich soil and lots of irrigation–they don’t need that! They love gravel mulch, and will reseed there better than in open ground.

Lots of hardy annuals can be planted this time of year. Bachelor’s buttons, shown above, are another that will respond well to this  schedule.  Any plant that has seeded itself in your garden should be able to adapt to late winter sowing. The advantage to planting now is that the seeds will be in the garden when the time is right for them to germinate, and you will get much earlier blooms than if you wait to plant them in May when you’re planting bedding plants.

Here’s a partial list of ones you might like to try:  Larkspur; Coreopsis tinctoria (Calliopsis); Berlanderia lyrata (Chocolate Flower); Lallemantia canescens (Dragonshead); California Poppy; Nigella (Love-in-a-Mist); and Calendula.  Those are all plants that like to germinate in cooler temperatures.  You don’t need to dig in your garden, just broadcast the seeds on the surface. If the ground isn’t frozen, you could use a rake to scratch a bit in the soil. This is one reason I like to plant when I expect snow: the seeds will be settled into the ground by the snow as it falls. Another reason is that the seeds are protected from creatures who might like them for a snack.

If you want a lot of color for just the cost of a packet of seeds, plant some hardy annuals this year for countless blooms outside and enough flowers to cut for bouquets to bring inside.

(A tiny digression: petunias are hardy annuals, too, meaning that they can take temperatures down into the 20s without damage. My grandma used to have a patch of petunias that reseeded in her garden every year, old-fashioned ones that were much taller and more fragrant than the varieties you see today. I’m looking for seeds for those heirloom petunias–I’ll let you know when and where I find them.)

Blue elderberry grows just down the road from Perennial Favorites.  If you’re looking for a native fruit tree to add to your garden, look no further!

This picture from William & Wilma Follette @ USDA-NRCS PLANTS Database / USDA NRCS. 1992. Western wetland flora: Field office guide to plant species. West Region, Sacramento

The flowers are gorgeous in June and July. The berries, a deep blue, are used to make wine, jelly, pancake syrup, and even as a component in herbal cough syrups!

Blue elderberry (Sambucus nigra ssp. caerulea) usually occurs in moist areas within drier, more open habitats.  It is frequently associated with quaking aspen (Populus tremuloides) communities.  The tree that grows near us is in a bit of a grassy swale–most of the plants around it are drylanders, but I think somehow there must have been enough moisture in this low spot for it to germinate and flourish.  Once established it can take dry conditions as was evidenced by its ability to bloom profusely this past summer despite the months of extreme drought our region experienced during 2010-2011.

Even though the leaves and twigs (and even the raw berries) are toxic, the cooked berries have been used for centuries as food and medicine.  The raw berries are not toxic to birds, however; it is loved by bluebirds, vireo, western tanager, house finch, towhee, magpies, woodpeckers, grosbeaks, Townsend solitaire, quail, pheasant, and hummingbirds who visit flowers for nectar.

Last summer I saw a lovely purple flower in Reta Zane’s garden. The flowers were globe-shaped and about five or six inches across. I knew it was some sort of onion, but I didn’t know which one. There are many ornamental onions that you can plant as bulbs in the fall, just like tulips and daffodils. When they’re planted for their flowers, they’re usually called alliums, the scientific name for the onion genus.  Some, like Allium ‘Globemaster,’ are three feet tall with huge eight inch purple blooms. The bulbs are sort of pricey.  When I saw the huge number of these beautiful purple alliums blooming here and there in her herb garden and rose garden, and some in the perennial border, I had to ask her what variety they were. She said, “Oh those are leeks. I planted them years ago and when I saw how pretty the flowers were I decided to let some go to seed every year.” They reseed in her garden with abandon.

Leeks are expensive in the store–often $3.00 a pound or more–and yet Reta was growing them with no effort at all. All she had to do was let a few of them go to seed, and every year she had more than the year before.  Each leek produces hundreds of seed, so you can  have your leeks and eat them, too.

Too many of our customers are afraid of seed, and I hope that this year I can convince more of you to experiment with growing plants from seed. Annuals are easy, so are some perennials. Most plants want to germinate, it’s their means of survival, after all.  Here’s a picture of leeks germinating in a flat in the greenhouse.

As the snow melts in our valley, I’ve been checking out ornamental grasses.  We’ve had a total of over seven feet of snow here since late October, and you’d think most of the grasses would be smashed flat. Not so. For example, check out Hardy Pampas Grass (Erianthus ravennae.) The first picture was taken in  late September, and the second was taken a few days ago in the same garden. This garden belongs to Marilyn Fillmore, a neighbor who lives about two miles east of Perennial Favorites. Its aspect is west-southwest, on a slight slope, covered with gravel mulch, and the snow melted here weeks sooner than in my mostly north-facing garden. Location, location, location– it’s everything in gardening.

Hardy Pampas Grass seems capable of withstanding minus 25 F. and still coming back strong, but it does like a long season to produce its blooms. I’m not sure it would do well much above our 6500′ elevation. I’d like to be proven wrong, though, and if anyone is growing it in Westcliffe or Evergreen or Cuchara, let me know.

I tried to find some native grasses to include in this article, but most of the native grasses in my gardens are still covered with snow. There are two in particular that I wish I had pictures of. One, a High Country Gardens introduction, is called Bouteloua ‘Blonde Ambition;’ it was chosen by Plant Select for their 2011 collection and it deserves all the praise it gets, in my opinion.

The second native grass that I planted two years ago (and again last year) is Muhlenbergia reverchonii ‘Autumn Embers.’  Lauren Springer Ogden has a great picture of it in her second edition of The Undaunted Garden.  She and her husband Scott Ogden introduced this plant and it is one of my favorite ornamental grasses.  If you haven’t read the second edition of The Undaunted Garden you might miss hearing about all the plants that she is trialing in her garden, and that would be a shame. I’m going to spend the next couple of years trying to grow everything new she mentioned. I haven’t seen her current garden in Ft. Collins, but I’ve heard that it is incredible–and much that makes it such a beautiful creation is her use of grasses.  She echoes the prairie by weaving grasses through her rock garden,  her perennial border, the cactus garden and near native shrubs. The pictures in her book are outstanding.  Go now and get a copy and be inspired!

If you’ve been to the nursery in the last couple of years, you know I have an apple tree obsession. I don’t know how to trace the beginnings of the obsession–it began in part when I read The Botany of Desire by Michael Pollan, about ten years ago. The section on apples was my favorite part of that book. He traced the origin of the apple back to Kazakhstan, and The Valley of the Apples.  Scientists believe that is where the apple originated.

Dr. Phillip Forsline was mentioned in The Botany of Desire because he had been going to Kazakstan for apple seeds since the 90s. He was worried about the lack of diversity in apple trees in the U.S. and wanted to introduce some genetic variability by bringing seeds from The Valley of the Apples, planting them, and hopefully finding apples with more disease resistance, drought tolerance, and other desirable traits.  I wrote to Dr. Forsline and he sent me seeds that he said came from some of the coldest, driest regions in Kazakhstan–seeds that would perhaps flourish in Colorado’s extremes of temperatures and our semi-arid climate.

I planted those seeds and they germinated! Apple seeds need to experience a period of cold stratification before they will germinate. They receive that naturally if it’s left up to nature, but I accomplished it by moistening the seeds and then storing them in the refrigerator in a baggie for two months.  From seed to fruit takes about 7-10 years, so it’s possible we’ll start to get fruit from some of those trees this year.

A few years ago a friend of mine was visiting from Nevada;  when we had apples for a snack, she found apple seeds sprouting in the core of her apple!  The apples, stored in the frig, had provided the same moist, cold conditions that the seeds need to germinate. Still, I’d never seen that happen before. The apples we were eating were Pink Lady (second only to Honeycrisp for flavor, imo!) and I planted the seeds that day.

One of my neighbors called last week to ask if she could plant Honeycrisp apple seeds and grow a Honecrisp apple tree. The answer to that is, sadly, no. Apple trees do not come true from seed, as a matter of fact, each seed in every apple is different from the other. Those seedlings shown above will not produce the same Pink Lady apple that I love. That means the only way for my neighbor to have a Honeycrisp apple is to graft a scion from a Honeycrisp tree to a root stock.  I hope to someday try that. I know how to do it…in theory….but I’ve never actually done it.  Meanwhile I’m having a great time growing apple trees that might someday produce tiny purple apples or big orange-colored apples or even a red and yellow, sweet and crisp apple to rival Honeycrisp.

I think growing apple trees also appealed to me because they are the most reliable fruit tree to grow in much of Colorado. All around Rye, from 6000′ elevation to over 8000,’ there are wild apple trees. Some are remnants from homesteads, planted ages ago, but some are trees that grew from seeds scattered by birds or mammals or humans. Within a mile of Perennial Favorites, I can walk to ten apple trees that grow by the roadside, or near Graneros Creek, or even on a south facing slope. They aren’t tended by anyone yet they produce fruit three or four years out of five.  Two years ago, in 2010, we had a great year for apple trees in our area.  The picture you see at the top of our page was taken then, of a wild apple tree that grows on the ridge behind the nursery.

Here’s another picture of that same tree with Merrilee ready to harvest the apples.  

That picture was taken in October and the leaves and grasses had already changed color. This particular wild apple has not been very productive…but it is very drought tolerant! It’s growing with mountain mahogany and sumac on a south-facing slope, and the only water it gets is from the sky.  I’ve noticed that all the apple trees around here can survive severe drought, although few grow in such an inhospitable location.

Looking back at my resolutions from years past, I found this paragraph that I wrote for the The Greenhorn Valley View, the local weekly, a couple of years ago:

My resolution for 2010 is to plant cucumbers in the garden and make bread & butter pickles like my grandmother’s.  Every year she and my aunt would put up 40 jars of pickles, often on the hottest day of the summer, with no air-conditioning, in Missouri, where the high temperature matched the humidity: 95.  They were the best pickles on the planet, so crisp and sweet and tart and spicy.  My grandma aways wore a cotton dress and pulled her silvery hair back, and when they were done she stood in front of the fan smiling. The jars were lined up on the counter, waiting to be given to neighbors and family and friends, and enjoyed all winter when the summer was just a memory.

I’m sad to report that that resolution went the way of so many, and I did not make bread and butter pickles in 2010.  I did, however, have a cucumber volunteer in the flower garden last summer. I didn’t notice it growing until July and by that time it already had flowers on it. It was a happy surprise, and did better than all the cucumber plants I had started earlier in the greenhouse. That one plant supplied all the cucumber we needed for fresh salads. This year I think I’ll plant two of them in the flower garden, and add on to my resolutions for 2012: #7 Make bread and butter pickles!

Here’s the picture of the cucumber plant in the flower garden. 

I like making New Year’s resolutions. There’s something about the process that lifts my spirits.  Here’s what I’ve got so far.

1.  Make more dinosaur gardens.  I like to think of them as terrariums without the glass cover.  Come to think of it, make a terrarium! Explore all kinds of indoor gardening while snow covers the earth.

2. Build a sustainable dog house. Katherine posted about Craftzine’s 100 Best Crafts of All Time on Facebook, and that led me to sustainablepet.com and these cool little houses. 

 3. Update catalog on the website. This is way overdue. We have so many new plants for 2012, and no one knows about them but me.

4. Eat less, walk more.

5. Read more, watch less.

6. Know when to quit. Who says you need 10 resolutions? I think six is a fine number.

I took this picture yesterday, after the snow stopped. This tree is 20 years old and still less than 5′ tall.  Every December I see Dwarf Alberta Spruce on sale everywhere–most of the tabletop evergreens, sold already decorated for Christmas, are Dwarf Alberta Spruce.  It only grows one inch a year, and if you have a small yard, or a spot near the house where you want an evergreen, it’s perfect.

Not only does it stay small, it is incredibly winter hardy. This little tree can survive 40 below zero! I have read warnings about protecting it from the wind, but mine is in a fairly open spot and has never shown any winter burn on its branches. 

One problem with buying a living Christmas tree is that it is often difficult to plant it in the landscape in January.  If your yard is snow covered, as mine is, you can still enjoy a tree indoors now, but after the holidays you must keep it in the coolest room you can find. Even an unheated garage would work as long as you don’t forget it. Keep the roots moist and plant in your garden at the first opportunity.