Dog Show

The Scottish Deerhound just won best in show at Westminster. Helene and Eileen obsessively watch the dog show every winter, insisting on stopping work on these two days to oo and ahh over canines. In fact, they even fled the office today for the quiet of Eileen's house to escape the constant barrage of phone calls and visitors we always seem to get. It's certainly a bizarre subculture, but when it's freezing cold outside it's a welcome change of pace to sit in front of the television and listen to that strange narrator inform you that certain dogs "champion fair play", whatever that means. This year it was almost a home-shopping type experience, as Eileen is in the market for a new dog.

Also, it was a year in which the poodle did not make it into the final group. Blackrock Farm is home to two standard poodles, Leo and Magdalena, and one miniature, Sebastien. However, these farm poodles are quite a bit different from the traditional show dogs of Westminster. Here's one now:

Anyway, in honor of the Scottish Deerhound Anne decided to create a greenhouse rendition of the breed. Due to space constraints and fog building on the camera lens in the ultra-humid greenhouse we were only able to provide you with a head on shot:

It's kinda hard to make out, but the magnifying glass is the snout, the rocks the eyes, and the fuzzy potted plant (Upright Club Moss) standing in for the Deerhound's scruffy face. The thin body is made from a wicker chair, and the fuzzy tail and hind legs by one of our many beautiful Upright Black Elephant Ear plants.

Yeah, it's a stretch, but winter at a nursery sometimes leaves us with a bit of free time.

A Poem

This will be my first time posting under my own name on this blog, and despite our relative obscurity it is still intimidating to be posting my writing to the public. With this in mind, I suppose the best way to go would be to get the most embarrassing notion out of the way first. I am going to post a short poem i wrote several years ago; one that was inspired by this beautiful place and the times i spent here simply growing up and not working. Over time, and as my maturity level has grown, this place has become as much my job as my home, but I wanted to start off my writing on this site with a more pure, idealized, unclouded memory. I'm a poor excuse for a poet, but I hope everyone will hang with me, and that as I write more you will perhaps find a few words of mine to your liking.

A Walk to the Back Field's Bench

Fifty-five steps

In the misty morning,

Over the damp grass,

Barefooted through puddles

Whose mud seeps between my toes.

Across the piled rocks

Slippery from the dew,

Which is our bridge over

The small, slow moving stream.

The trees drip with water

As rain begins falling faster.

In huge drops it falls

The first few making

Their tapping sounds before

It becomes a constant hum

The last ten steps are on a path

Mowed in the fire-weed.

The cut stems stab my feet.

When I reach the bench I sit;

In the downpour, I check

To see if I am bleeding.

Time

Time.
As you know time is a fleeting thing. I get so busy that I can't seem to find the time to do all the things that I know I should.
I am determined now to keep up our blog and I hope that you will have some renewed faith that I will and share it with some of you friends and please make comments or suggestions about what you want me to write about.
But time is essential when we are talking about starting seeds. They need to be started at the correct time. If we start them too late they won't make it here with our short growing season, start them too early and they get leggy and weak.
Now is the time to start quite a few and if you are doing that yourself we can help with a few ideas.

Japanese Beetle Parasite

We really don't like Japanese beetles.
That is an understatement.
But there are a few that we should allow to live.
There is a fly called Tachinid fly. Each female fly can deposit up to 100 eggs over a fourteen day period. They deposit them on Japanese beetles. When the eggs hatch they cause the beetle to fall to the ground and borrow into it. The eggs eat the beetle and then the life cycle begins again as they hatch into flies and find new beetles.
Pesticide use stops this from happening. Killing ALL beetles stops this from happening. In Japan, where the beetle is from, they do not have the same problems as we do because they have a natural balance of the fly and the beetle.
And so my friends what to do?
Look carefully at your beetles and any that you see with white dots on them, ( usually on their backs) leave them alone. Let the flies do their thing and multiply.
Use nematodes on your lawn in the spring to help with grub control. Those grubs are baby beetles. The nematodes love to eat them.
Watch for those little white dots.

Planting time

I have been remiss.
Planting time here at the farm is a wild time. 7 days a week and no let up. Everybody here, almost anyway, is putting in extra hours and working really hard to get everything done.
We do plant a lot of boxes and pots and containers and we like them all done by the Forth of July. We are almost finished.
This year seems different.
We have no excuse about rain days and lost work days. Still, we are not caught up. Not because of tons of huge jobs but because I think the weather and early spring has made it July in June and June in May. The weeds are spectacular! The gardens are requiring more maintainence, the trees more pruning and the plants more watering. We go to a garden and within a few days it really needs us again.
Even here at the farm, lettuce is going by faster, the weeds are already up in the potted plants that we sell, the perennials and shrubs. We are watering every day even if it rains. The heat just makes it harder to manage.
My crew is awesome. We have some new people and they are doing such a good job of learning and asking all the RIGHT questions. They are careful and personable and things get done because of the team work that goes on at Blackrock.
People keep asking if there will be anything left in bloom in August and I keep telling them to cut back everything and we will probably have a wonderful August filled with second blooms on perennials. Keep dead heading the annuals. They will continue to bloom so long as they never get to go to seed.

Guest blogger....Penny Marshall

I asked Penny if she would write some things for the blog. Penny is a wonderful gardener, writer and friend.
She and I share many of the same interests. Add to my list an ever growing body of books on horses. There is never a need to 'find' something to do. We are busy.....busy. Even if we are sitting down our minds are sorting out garden matters or a host of other interests.
I loved reading her piece on Garden Passions and I think that you will too. Penny gardens in Biddeford Pool, Maine. She has a beautiful piece of property with views of a fresh water pond, loaded with waterlilies and then of the ocean beyond. Can you even imagine that? I will take some photos soon of her place to share with you.
Enjoy.

Periods of Garden Passions by Penny Marshall

Picasso had a blue period but, not being too up on affaires d’art, I don’t know if he had other ones. As an extremely multifaceted and old individual (meaning lots of consuming interests but no single all-encompassing passion or talent over four score years) I have had many periods in many fields, often being deeply immersed in two at once, or, occasionally in productive, or just as likely, spread thin spells, in even three. With me, just because I’m not still deeply embedded in my “rhodie” period for instance, doesn’t mean I don’t have a good dirty-sneaker-clad foot in it, signifying ongoing curiosity and interest, and an ever-present book buying urge toward it. As someone said to me (somewhat scathingly I thought, c. thirty years ago) “My God, Penny, must you try to specialize in everything AT ONCE?” to which the answer appears to be, yes.



So at the moment I’m deep in an Amelia Peabody mystery period, a health conscious less-meat-is-more one, and I may be moving out of my big-time Trees period into a mixed Trees and stones-in-the-garden one. At the moment, my garden bears the traces of (I think) every one of my garden periods except the first - Sweet peas – one, and now that I think of it, that’s no good at all and must be remedied. Let’s hope Blackrock can help and if they can’t why, I ask you, NOT!/?



My sweet pea period began at c. age 5 when my mother, at my importunate, probably loud, begging, bought me a bunch of those intoxicatingly scented, deliciously colored glories at a Saturday morning Mennonite Farm Market in Hagerstown, MD, c. 1932. It wasn’t until 1937 when I was ten that I was able to plant my own bed of sweet peas, a thoroughly wasted endeavor as the garden plot assigned me by my hogging-the-best-places-for-gardens mother was in the very shady, three dog populated, fenced in dog yard in Fairmont, WV. Nothing even tried to grow or maybe the dogs “watered” them for me.



For my own and possibly Helene’s amusement (and maybe even yours) I’m going to list my garden periods in as close as I can come to the order in which they dawned. I enjoy looking back at my life almost as well as getting on with it, and garden periods (during a definable “period” the main garden budget, book buying/reading, curiosity, plant buying, seeking, learning and planting is focused on the named species) serve as handy pegs for happy memories as well as frustrating ones.



So, sweet peas. (Big skip while I grew up, passed through my sweetheart roses on the bosom and orchids on the wrist social life, and got a garden where I called the shots.) Then roses, peonies, iris, azaleas (hybrid and species), bulbs, woodland wildflowers, groundcovers, rhododendrons, ilex, magnolias, epimedium. Side skip to increasing emphasis on Maine garden as I moved from suburban NY. Then onward with rock gardening, hosta, old roses, coral bells, columbine and geranium (bundled together), lilacs, magnolias – again ( different garden), hydrangeas, variegated/colored foliage, alpines/troughs, shade plants, trees (especially Japanese maples), and (all blended in one and slowly coming up on the outside) stones, ferns, mosses.



Comment. Having a tree period after years of planting things and while enjoying soul satisfying ocean and (separate) pond views you wish to retain is Very Difficult. Think about it!



There is also a part of me that wonders if maturity, both of self and gardening talents, is necessary before moving “up” to trees or do some people come to trees earlier, possibly even start there? A suspicious but canny inner self wonders if it took a larger budget or more assurance that after all those years of growing smaller things I could succeed even with these important and expensive “biggies” that allowed me to move on to trees. Who knows? And, it turns out I don’t really care – I just enjoy speculating about things. Today’s biggest wonder - could I make a success of moss gardening? I’ve suddenly huge healthy patches all over the place, none planted, none planned, all unknown. But beautiful, velvety and (courtesy of changes in climate) thriving and, yes, even invading. Guess who needs a book on mosses to study!





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