The longer I garden the less anxious I am to make plants grow. Instead, I let them achieve their own happy effect of busy, jostling life.
Each year my compost pile increases in length and width and enriches my hillside of gravel. Each year it becomes harder to find room for this or that untried plant or for replacement of lost treasure. The job now is mostly thinning out rather than planting. I’ll probably never cease experimenting, but it seems to me that this naturalistic gardening may well be the aim of the person who hopes to achieve, at moderate expense and not too much effort, intense enjoyment from his garden plantings.
Southern California – Cutting Time
This is the time (May) to take chrysanthemum cuttings if you haven’t already done so, or to keep pinching back the growing tips of those already started; to sow seed of annuals which require heat – cosmos, marigold, tithonia, zinnia and such; to keep on planting gladiolus corms. Cut back poinsettias and prune the new shoots of wistaria to six or seven eyes from the main stalk.
When traveling country roads in hot dry sections, notice how effectively prickly phlox, Gilia californica, is in rock cracks of sunny cliffs, how the gleaming silver-washed flowers of bright pink smother the low wide bush. Such summer-hot places as the Ojai valley, Santa Paula, the interiors of San Diego and San Luis Obispo counties are just the spots for this handsome native. It is a good companion for the herbaceous monkeyflowers, mimulus, especially those in pale yellow or cream. Put seeds in pellets of earth and tuck them into soil-filled cracks in rocks, or into gravelly banks. Or, the next time you follow a salesman around a nursery, ask him to lead you to a small plant of prickly phlox; large potbound plants are not always a success to transplant.
This month: sow perennials for next year, put in the Last of the dahlias and tigridias; you can keep on planting glads for another month. Keep tuberous begonias damp; scatter a little fish meal between the plants and work it in very lightly.
Since summer fog pleases summer transplants, there is no hurry about making room for them now by yanking out such perfectly respectable winter material as butterfly flower (schizanthus), winter stock, nemesia and Iceland poppy
(Papaver nudicaule). Notice how lovely the late blue cineraria below the graceful boughs of the Australian tea tree, Leptospermum Iaevigat um, with white starlike flowers.
May is a splendid month on my hillside and the busiest month of my gardening year. It is now that the grazing weed and grass seed, which blew onto the hill from surrounding uncultivated areas and flourished during the spring, ripens its seed. Since first things were put first, the seedlings weren’t pulled up. Now it is a race to get the mature plants out before they spill their seed and make a second crop of weeds.
Roses In the Big Valley – Sacramento and San Joaquin
Keep in mind that roses need lots of food and water. In the Big Valley they go through the summer better with a heavy mulch. Put cow manure around the bushes and cover this with mulch or chopped straw. Leave this on all summer and when you water make a thorough job of it – it is essential that water penetrate to below the roots. A mulch of peat is not likely to let moisture through. Well ripened compost makes a perfect mulch for roses, mixing in some fish meal is also good. Bat guano is often recommended, but needs careful handling as it is strong stuff.
Beware Of Cut Worms
The cutworm—short, plump, brown and curled into a single curve—which you come across so frequently near the surface of warm May earth, is easier to combat when you know something about his behavior. At night he emerges from the soil, where he has spent the day, to stroll among tender plants and nip them off close to the ground. Unless you get him he will become full grown by July and enter the pupal stage. By late summer he is a moth. His eggs are laid on suitable vegetation and soon hatch into tiny cutworms which enter the ground and while away the time until next May.
Each time I am in the Northwest in spring and see sheets of camassia species in flower I wonder that more hybridizing has not been done with this plant. Camassia is a large bulb which bears erect stems, dense with starlike flowers. The four Oregon species range in color from purple through the blues to white. I have noticed that the flower color of the same species varies with the location. Camassia leichtlini, the tallest and best known, will grow in drier places than supposed. It often prefers raised fence rows or the edges of ditches to lower areas where the bulbs get submerged. The color of this giant often deepens as one goes north, where there are stands of dark hyacinth-blue.
by R Lester
