Agastache: A Tongue-twisting Indestructible and Deer Resistant Plant

The plant is a tongue twister, but your friends will be impressed if you can say “agastache” or “anise hyssop.” But even if you can’t, the plant is a nice addition to your garden, particularly if you live in deer country.
Much has been said about “deer resistant” plants. To my way of reckoning, the only deer resistant plants are the ones planted where there are no deer at all. Deer are the ultimate survivalists and will eat “deer resistant” plants with relish when they are hungry enough. That usually means the period toward the end of winter, or during periods of mid-winter deep snowfall.

Given a choice, deer are very much like the rest of us. They prefer one type of salad greens to another. Agastache is one plant they will avoid when there are better things to eat. Agastache is also called “anise hyssop” and, as the name would imply, has a strong odor which is unpleasant to deer.

Agastache blooms on 4-inch-long spikes that are covered with small lavender-blue flowers. The blooms attract butterflies and bees. Planting agastache will help insure that bee colonies survive. Agastache is durable and can be grown in sun or partial shade. It tolerates dry conditions and requires little maintenance. Once in a while, the deer will help the plant by nipping the ends of its 2 to 3 foot stalks before moving on to greener pastures.

Life in the Bamboo Jungle

How to Trick Forsythia Bushes into Early Bloom

Things You’ll Need: pruning shears, a bucket of warm water, a sunny area...



In the cold climates, the ideal months to pick Forsythia stems for "forcing" is February or March. Any later than that, and they'll bloom some warm day without your help...

Make some cuttings from the Forsythia bush with a sharp pruning tool. It is important that you select a warm day to do this as the stems will be less brittle. Brittle bushes snap are easily damaged. Try to pick the stems with the most buds. The length is up to you but it's much easier to handle shorter lengths. Let the size of your vase(s) be your guide.

Take the cuttings inside where you've filled a bucket with warm water. Place the cuttings in the bucket of warm water. Some experts recommend that you re-cut the bottoms of the stems while they are submersed under water in order to protect the fragile "wounds.

Saving the Planet Through Inertia, Laziness, and TV

Well right now’s the time of year when you’re supposed to be looking through seed catalogs and planning your garden. While I don’t disdain such activity, I can’t say it gives me a great deal of satisfaction either. After a time, you know what works and what doesn’t. You also know what part of your property gets the sunshine and what part the dark. Remember that spot along the treeline where the sun rises? That’s the East. From there, the sun heads South. Eventually, it ends up in the West. Once in a while, it evaporates into the ether. That generally means it’s a cloudy day. The wet stuff is rain, sleet, or snow. If it’s snow, you can plan your garden by drawing lines in it with your boots as you long for spring, but I prefer to shovel it.

About the only thing I like to do this time of year is prune the trees and grapevine. I only do that on a warm winter day. You run the risk of hurting the plant if the branches or vines are brittle from cold.

The other think I think about is those plants you buy in containers from K-Mart or Wal-Mart. The discount stores have the least expensive selections but not always the finest plants. People who work in the discount stores seem not to like their plants too much. It’s as if the plants are undergoing basic military training in preparation for the Big One. The Big One is the war where the urban homeowner recently located to suburbia drives to the store to load up a bunch of plants they will torture until dead. Really, I don’t think that such gardeners as these are so much sadistic as they are inclined to be distracted. Many homeless plants bought from K-Mart or Wal-Mart become the victims of adult attention deficit disorder. Some are half-buried because the people who adopt them find the soil too hard to dig with those cute little garden tools they found in Home Depot or Lowe’s. A common mistake made by urban gardeners is to believe that all plant life originated in the Sahara Desert. This type of gardener does not believe in spoiling the plant with an excess amount of water. That notion ties in neatly with other ideas of environmental conservation. Laziness, slothfulness, inertia, watching television—these are the things which will save the planet, so long as they are combined with the fasting which will be inevitable when the food supply fails to appear in the summer months.

Gus: In Memoriam

I’ve heard it said that if you die and go to heaven, you will meet there with all of the pets you ever had. I’ve just buried my beloved dog, Gus, and it comforts me a great deal to know this is so. It’s probably the only reason one would ever want to go to heaven anyway. Seeing the pets you lost during your lifetime is certainly an inducement to the “good life.”

Gus was always very good to us and I learned a great deal about life that I didn’t know before we joined up with him. To some people, it may seem a bit lunatic to say that a dog helped you find your way in life, especially a mongrel dog like Gus, but the fact is that Gus was unmatched in nobility and courage and determination and that opinion applies to all the animal world which includes humans, whether aristocracy or low-born.

The Vanishing: A Horror Story about America's Farms

 

 

 

 

So as I was looking around yesterday at the vanishing farm landscape, and watching the mechanized horsepower burning up the roads, I had some dark thoughts. Those people on the roads, driving so fast, as if the animals didn't exist, as if people no longer walked along the roads, as if nature was something that had lost all meaning except as a political idea....weren't some of them environmentalists? I certain they were because I saw the bumper stickers as they passed....save the world, save the planet, drive fast, horsepower!...

Christmas Comes to Billy

 

The Dim Winter Light

 

Owls screech over ice as weather takes its toll on Poconos creatures - poconorecord.com - The Pocono Record

Owls screech over ice as weather takes its toll on Poconos creatures - poconorecord.com - The Pocono Record

Three Common Household Landscaping Mistakes I've Made - Associated Content

Three Common Household Landscaping Mistakes I've Made - Associated Content

Winter Storm Hits the Pocono Mountains - Associated Content

Winter Storm Hits the Pocono Mountains - Associated Content

Winter Walk

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You need a dog to get you to go out when the weather's rough. I went out this a.m. for a little hike with our dog pulling me along. He's pretty good for a dog, but headstrong, and we have different tastes. I like to look at things like Winterberry and Bittersweet. The dog likes to sniff out whatever invisible things passed through there before.

I once tried transplanting some winterberry that I'd extracted from a swamp. It didn't work. Bittersweet's much easier but it becomes a pest and can strangle a tree....or a person if you stand there long enough. You've got to keep cutting them back.

The Road was clear when I started out but it started snowing about an hour later, and kept knowing, and kept snowing. It turned to sleet later on. a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg0jQ5VB7IiKI3b_OUwrF6yGqceR9hZQE9OO_-aA8WltmFPKOq2F0hTstv-jRqCJxbdWAim7EpVBOqfLgk-EbROli6j5-XmX5q94HzB52YTbOVphsCN5Ae8uBgoKxcoco1t1at2L8xAnAI/s1600-h/Photo0061.jpg">a>

The snow was blasting for quite awhile. Everything was still and quiet. I didn't pass one car when I hit the highway. I cut back into the woods; unfortunately, I didn't have my boots and kept sliding around when I had to do some climbing. By the time the snow started to pile up I was only a mile from home. I laughed to myself, thinking about those old Jack London novels.

But there up ahead, I saw our mailbox. Or somebody else's.

*****

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How to Keep Squirrels from Raiding the Bird Feeder

We tried every type of bird feeder to no avail. The squirrels defeated every method we used to prevent them from cleaning out the bird feeder. We were tired of throwing away money. Then we had a burst of inspiration: a one foot square of stiff plastic sheeting did the trick.

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Hunting and the Culture Wars

Hunting season is a huge event in rural Pennsylvania but the area where I reside is rapidly changing as new housing tracts are developed and an influx of new residents changes the human mix.

There are people who believe that Remington is a typewriter and that Weatherby is a thermometer or device for predicting climate change. Meanwhile, an older and long established population sees their forests being cut down and replaced with shopping centers and houses filled with kids who can make no connection between barnyard cows with milk nor free-ranging chickens with eggs. The poor local newspaper tries unsuccessfully to serve both populations but the online forums they provide to air public sentiment become fields of fire where participants hurl insults at one another.

Responding to a complaint from one disgruntled forum reader that “…not everyone wants to see photos of the murdered corpses of beautiful animals on the front page of their newspaper…” a forum reader sums it up this way for the pro-hunting crowd:

“You live in the wrong area then. Your beliefs and view on life are different than many people's here. Please go away. In as little as a few generations ago, this would help feed a family plus. None of you care. Nor do you care about the beef cattle or chickens. Technology makes 1/2 of modern day man unfit for nature. I will hail the day when electricity goes down.”

That was one of the more polite exchanges. Instead of acquiring a better understanding of other points of view, the expressions of opinion are oftentimes uncomfortable, occasionally menacing:

“Relax Ronnie(not his real name), be careful next week and please do not walk into the woods without wearing orange, we don't want to lose you.”

So it goes in the culture wars. What's your opinion? There's a comments section at the end...just click on it and speak your mind.

Looking North to the woods....

The fall colors are brilliant and cannot be described with few words or many. Looking North to the woods beyond Walter's farm...

How To Set Fence Posts

There are a lot of things you can do around the home with fence posts. The most obvious thing you can do, of course, is to stretch prefab fencing sections between the posts. Other reasons setting fence posts: making a grape arbor, a rose arbor, or even as posts to string an outdoor clothesline. If you live in the country and are trying to make a vegetable garden, it's a good idea to fence it in around a frame made of fence posts set in a rectangular pattern. That will save your vegetables and flowers from the deer. These are simple but common reasons you'll have to set fence posts.

Things you’ll need:

Ready-mixed bags of concrete. The least expensive is the one with aggregate, a combination of cement and gravel. Quik-Crete is a well-known brand. It comes in 40, 60, and 80 pound bags. Get the lighter one—that’s all you’ll need for a single fencepost. If you can handle the heavier bags, you can set two posts with a single bag.

Four by fours are the most economical for setting posts. They're strong enough and they come in convenient eight foot lengths. You can use thicker posts and longer posts (those used in upper level decks, for example, may be sixteen feet), but they are much more expensive.

You’ll need a post-hole digger. You can rent a motorized digger from a rental company if you’ve got a long run of fence posts to set. For a smaller job, you can use a manual digger though, in hard soils, this requires some man-handling. For an eight-foot post, you’ll have to dig down at least two feet. That’ll leave six feet sticking out of the ground, high enough for a privacy fence but not so high that the city building inspector will pay a visit. Six feet above ground elevation is a standard set by many town building codes for fences in suburban areas.



Dig a hole two feet deep and set the post into it. Get a long mason's level and level the post vertically in the hole. Support it in position with rocks and outside with bracing. Check the level continuously as bumps are likely to put it out of kilter. When you're sure the post is perfectly plumb (vertically leveled), and stable, you can begin putting the dry concrete in the hole. Check the level again. You can wet and stir concrete in a wheelbarrow and pour it into the hole already wet, but you don't have to. It's much easier to put it in dry and begin to tamp it down until it's hard. As you're tamping, continue to check vertical level to insure the posts are straight up vertical.

If you're having a problem with leveling, you can nail support sticks made of 2 x 2 or 2 x 4 for bracing. The bracing will be removed when the concrete hardens. Hardening of the concrete will begin when you pour water into the hole filled with dry concrete. Do it slowly so that its seeps in. Be sure the concrete is soaked. Make a last level check before the concrete begins to harden. Let the concrete cure for several days before removing the braces.

Whether you're setting a single fence post for a bird feeder or one hundred fence posts for a long fence, the procedure is the same. Buy the materials. Get the right tools. Dig the holes at least two feet deep. Stabilize and level the posts. Pour in the concrete and wait for it to cure.

First Frost and a Story About Parsely

I've been MIA. The fall is a hurried time with everything threatening to collapse all at once. We needed a new front door. Heating oil prices jumped to $2.59 a gallon from $2.39 just last week.

The deer are hungry and on the move, the coyotes are howling because they enjoy the evening chill, and the remaining garden food and herb plants look as if they've been singed by a flamethrower.
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I've got to tell you something. The deer have been eating the parsely. That tells you two things:

1) Horticulturalists who tell you that the deer do not eat herbs because of the strong taste are not infallible.

2) The deer have been watching cooking programs on TV and have developed a more sophisticated palate.

I wonder if I should call Martha Stewart. She'll know. Anyway, for those of you who don't believe me, here's Exhibit A:




Also, there's eyewitness testimony....

Walking Sticks in the Throes of Love

Among Walking Sticks, the male is the smaller of the species. The females lay hundreds of eggs and drop them to the ground. If there is no male in the vicinity, every one of those eggs will become female Walking Sticks. They feed on leaves, obviously.