stereoman's Blog

I can't remember a time when I wasn't equally fascinated by the texture of leaves as I am enamored of the sight and smell of flowers. For the first dozen years of my gardening experience, I was so fixated on growing "crops" and getting "yield", I hardly gave a second thought to ornamentals of any kind, but when I did start thinking about it, the first thing I thought about was foliage.

I started out growing the ordinary kind of caladiums, like you can find in any nursery, garden store, or toy store (Lowe's, Home Depot, etc.). Their handsome appearance, variety of colors, and resistance to overzealous watering made them ideal houseplants for me, but there was something I was longing for that ordinary caladiums didn't offer.

I wanted texture. I wanted a plant I could pet, and that would feel good on my hands when I touched it. That's what led me to Elephant Ears.

I was hooked on them from the first year I grew them. Since they are tropical plants, I began experimenting with ways to preserve them from year to year, learning by bitter experience when is the right time to plant them, what conditions they require, what they like, what they will tolerate, and what they won't tolerate, how to treat them at the end of the season, how they can overwinter outdoors, or when is the right time to bring them in, and how to keep them vigorous through the half year they are not growing outdoors.

At first I thought I could preserve them in the ground over the winter, if I mulched them deeply enough to prevent the ground from freezing. But soon after I began growing them, we had a January so cold that people were ice skating on Beaver Lake, and the ground froze so deep my entire baby collection perished, deep mulch notwithstanding. After that I began learning how and when to dig them up in the Fall, and what to do with them once they were inside.

The summer I sold my house in Oakley, I left my babies behind and started over from scratch at the little cottage I shared with Mary and her White-Eyed Conyer named Hook.

The summer I had a room at the old house on the magnet school campus, I got permission to plant my babies in front of the Administration building. I left those behind too.

When I moved to Candler with Amber in 1999, I brought a whole moving van load of plants with me, including about twenty pots of my babies. When we bought a house together in 2001, I brought a whole moving van load of just Elephant Ears. I left those behind too, when we split up in the Winter of 2003.

In the summer of 2004 I started all over again in a new place, the place where I am now, and intend to stay for the rest of my life. I think I am now fairly expert at care and nurture of Elephant Ears, and as testimony I can boast that my babies are the largest anyone has seen outdoors in this whole town.

I've pretty much filled (or, some might say, choked) all of the shady areas of my yard with them.

They go great with hostas.

And I've even planted them in sunny areas, like next to my pond.

I won't be doing that again though. The fish say it feels too crowded.

To keep them going through the Winter and Spring, I crowd the smaller babies together in four large pots on the windowsill in my office space. They spend six months indoors.

In the past, I've overwintered the larger babies in huge pots, but space being at such a premium, I'm trying a new experiment this Winter. I bought two of those plastic storage thingies that are designed to roll under your bed, filled them with sand (with a little homemade swamp muck thrown in), and put my big babies in them. Eureka! I found I had enough space to plant all the remaining small babies that wouldn't fit on my window sill as well. So now I have a basement jungle as well as a window sill jungle.

I plan for 2008 to be my babies' best year ever. When late May gets here, I'll have over eighty plants to set out, and after four years nurturing the soil on this property -- which was already terrific to begin with -- they're gonna be so happy, they'll reach the sky!

Okay, slight exaggeration. I can dream, can't I?

A few years before I moved into this house, there was a lovely red maple covering much of the front yard. One day, the power company, having determined that the tree was a "hazard" to the electrical wires feeding the house, came in and "trimmed" it. They cut it back so far that it rapidly lost its vigor, and by the time I came here in 2003, it was nearly dead.

I love trees, all kinds of trees, and maple trees are especially beautiful, and useful. But I was not inclined to devote much energy to saving this maple tree, because I was so deeply involved in so many other projects that seemed much more essential, and potentially fruitful, that it was hard to justify diverting my efforts to what would very likely be an exercise in futility.

Instead, my mind began to turn around visions of what could be in that spot if the maple tree wasn't there. I saw a Japanese maple in my mind, elegantly bonsai'd. I saw a bed of perennials. I saw another water feature. I saw a sunny space for my precious Elephant Ears. I waited. With each passing year, the maple tree deteriorated further.

Last Fall, I had a woodworker friend of mine cut it down. It was so far gone, he said all the wood was good for was the stove.

Now I must remove the stump from the ground. 

When I first began digging it up, my neighbors scoffed. "You'll never get it out of there!" they said. "When do you plan to be done with that - next lifetime?!!" they teased.

They may be right. It's one heck of a stump. My brother-in-law, bless his deranged heart, has actually been coming over of his own volition to help me burrow, beat, lacerate, crush, and pummel the rotting wood. My next door neighbor offered to loan me a come-along when the time was right, but seeing how it looks now that I've exposed its gnarly underbelly, has retracted his offer.

Will I ever get it out of the ground? And, then what?

 Stay tuned!

Spring has sprung!

Today was the first gardening day of the season. It felt so good in the bright warm sunshine, getting grit under my fingernails, spraying water in my face, the warm, dark clumps of mulch breaking apart between my fingers. The deep, musty smell of decomposing leaves.

Last week I borrowed a friend's truck, and my brother Rob and I went down to the Riverside Stump Dump and got a couple loads of leaf mulch - one for his garden and one for mine. Big hot moist vaporous mountains of leaf mulch! The giant earth mover shoveled a whole pickup load in one mouthful.

Yesterday I planted twenty radishes in the top bed in the back garden. First planting of the season! In a garden as small as mine, I count every seed.

Exception: carrots. Today I poured a teaspoon of carrot seeds into a small bucket with an inch of topsoil in the bottom, and stirred them together. Then I added an equal amount of leaf mulch and stirred some more. Then I added a pint of water and stirred some more. In a few days I will spread the contents of that bucket over a five foot by two foot section of the upper bed.

I used to have a lot of trouble getting carrots seeds to germinate. Not any more!

Today I cleaned the muck out of the ponds. Nasty anaerobic yuck EEUW! Poor fishies were terribly disturbed by all the commotion. Once I was finished with that, I cleaned out the pump filter and ran the pump for the first time this year. Yay! Waterfall!

Today I cleared away the unwanted plants in the perennial bed. There are no weeds in my garden, only a few unwanted plants here and there. Look at all those Peruvian Lilies peeking up!

The Quince has been in full bloom for more than three weeks now. Last March we had a severe cold snap that killed most of the tender young buds, but this March has been so moderate. Not all lambs, but no lions.

The Holly tree has begun to shed. Good thing I had my shoes on!

There's the whole back garden. Expansive, eh? The two back beds are half covered with Creeping Charlie and Wild Mint, but there's no harm in that. The honeybees love it.

Welcome, nectar sucker, pollinator, traveler!