Utah Botanical Center

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I love the UBC. I caught on to their vision after working there one summer, and I love to go back and see all the progress they’ve made. I keep blogging about them too. (I just checked and I really haven’t: one post and mentions elsewhere is not constantly blogging about them. So this post is muchly needed.) I love it there. Not saying it’s perfect. There’s around 100 acres, and a lot of it is mowed weeds. Another good portion is under construction, and there are also experiments that didn’t quite work out as planned. (Including a naturalized planting that had me weed whacking for weeks. I’m not kidding. Weeks. Good old internships.)

But here is one thing I love about them, that has not yet received a lot of attention by me. I love there perennial gardens. Anne Spranger is the one behind them, and she does beautiful work. She can also be found in work boots bailing out irrigation leaks, and doing all the dirty jobs as well. Anne was my boss when I was an intern, and she was also my design teacher in school. Here is some of her work:

The UBC has influenced me to focus on regional-specific landscaping. Use the climate, soil, and surroundings to create unique gardens for the area. The UBC creates unique gardens that mirror the needs of the Utah area–lots of water-wise plantings, use of native plants, not a lot of lawn, tons of plant material etc. But it’s a good idea for anywhere: don’t fight your surroundings, embrace them.

Disneyland

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My dad had a conference in Anaheim, so Peter and I tagged along with some of my family and went to the beach and Disneyland. Peter would wake up in the morning and just rock in his stroller, excited to go to back to Disneyland. We were there three days of magical fun, and rode nearly all the rides. Peter did wonderfully the entire trip, and it was fun to have him along. The more cheesy rides made him excited: so they were better for us all. The only thing bad about the trip was Joe had to stay home and go to school and work. Thanks Mom, for letting me come!

Peter’s Birthday

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Peter is now a year old. Wow. We had a rip-roaring birthday party with a whole bunch of family last Sunday. Peter loved all the food and people, but didn’t really get opening presents. Thanks to everyone that came and for all the presents.

Every one year old should have a cake all to themselves. He just dug right in. Horrible manners, unlike his cute little cousins who would very carefully pinch off a piece while Peter was digging in. He’s quite messy, but is eating almost everything we eat. Makes meals a little more simple.

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He is walking a little, but not as a primary mode of transportation. Besides mama and dada he has one little word he uses all the time–up. He’s constantly saying up and pointing. It’s very cute.

Weekend without Peter

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Joe and I had a weekend free from Peter thanks to my Mom. First we went hiking up Dry Canyon in Alpine to Horsetail falls. It was raining soon after we started, and we weren’t wearing rain gear but perservered to the falls, about a mile and a half up. When we reached the outlook to see the falls, it stopped raining and the sun came out. Just perfect timing, and it made for a wonderful hike.

After that, we stopped to do some birthday shopping for Peter, and I started to get chills/feverish. So we went home and I got a nice nap and some ibuprofen and felt much better. Apparently hiking in the rain, although quite romantic and beautiful, was also quite hard on me. Marry Poppins just might know something. I think I had a very mild case of mastitis, but luckily the fever didn’t last. Sleeping while sick is not the best way to spend baby-free time, but we still had fun after I was feeling better. We rented a movie, slept through the night, and I didn’t have to sweep the floor after breakfast and dinner.

A break from Peter was much appreciated–no matter how much I love him, he’s still hard. Sweeping/cleaning/playing/changing diapers isn’t too bad, but it gets a little old. He did great at Grandma’s too.

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Irrigation

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So in college, I learned how to determine how much to irrigate. I learned how in so many places and so many ways I was beginning to get confused. So I wrote up this lovely little article on everything I knew about irrigation. I did leave out the more difficult calculations. (So much fun, but really why waste all that effort when a simple one would do?) Fast forward to now. I was running an irrigation clock and had my doubts on how to run it. In other words, I was doing it badly. Finally the nagging I was giving myself caused me to look at the wonderful article. (I just realized I said it was little. It’s not.) Within five minutes I was throughly refreshed all my knowledge, realized that, yes, I should irrigate more, but no, I wasn’t killing the plants.

I have to admit right now, I have no real information on irrigation systems. But when to irrigate…I learned about that in 4-5 classes: one of which involved the difficult calculations that I so much enjoyed, but forgot quickly due to no reason to actually use them. With all this rambling, I am now going to post my article that noone besides me has had access to before now. Feel free to use, leave feedback, and copy (but don’t plagiarize). I understand it perfectly but not sure everyone will, so if you have questions ASK. And enjoy.

IRRIGATION FOR THE HOME GARDENER (PDF)

IRRIGATION FOR THE HOME GARDENER (DOCX)

I did notice: this is Utah based. So its more useful if you live here, but still applies everywhere else.

Just a thought…

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I was at a church meeting, and I was listening about the creation and then Adam and Eve’s time in the garden of Eden. I had a thought that I was doing the work of God while creating gardens. Because He has certainly made many gardens. And He has encouraged us to so as well:

“And the Lord God took the man and put him into the garden of Eden to dress it and to keep it.” (Gen 2:15)

“Therefore the Lord God sent him forth from the garden of Eden, to till the ground from whence he was taken” (Gen 3:23)

I felt glad of all the time, money and effort I spend out in the garden.

Eating Cucurbit Leaves

My parents vegetable garden did not look so hot this year. Cucumber beetles and squash bugs ate the cucurbit crops. A recurring pest of pocket gophers decided to eat the tomatoes close to the ground. The squash was attacked by powdery mildew. One zucchini and tomato ended up dying before the season was over. There were wilt diseases present.

I gave my parents some recommendations on how to overcome the pests. But nothing was sprayed or done to control the pests even at its worst. And you know what? The garden came through. There was still good harvests, including the largest cantaloupe I’ve ever seen. Maybe the harvest wasn’t as plentiful as it could of been. But it was good enough. Plants and nature can often take care of themselves, even against seemingly impossible enemies. I don’t think we need to worry about pests as much as we do.

The garden has been in the same small plot for 16 years. It is moving next year. That should help the vegetables continue to have good harvests.

Quackgrass

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I hope you never come across this plant. I’ve been helping my grandma out with her garden. In her berry patch was lots of grass. Grass that you couldn’t pull up and it chocked out all the berries. At first I thought it was the lawn grass spreading over its bounds. That would have been a lot nicer. Instead it was a mean stand of quackgrass.

Quackgrass grows in irrigated soil. It has tons and tons of undergroudn rhizomes. If you come across this grass, the worst control measure is to till. Tilling cuts up all the rhizomes into smaller pieces and does a wonderful job of propagating the plant. That’s opposite of killing the plant.

So after I figured out it was quackgrass, I started to think of control measures. Here is what I ended up doing:

I fertilized the plant and made it really happy. Sounds strange. The philosophy behind that is that quackgrass’s rhizomes have a lot of dormant buds. They will just come back even if you spray or pull it up. By making it happy, I hopefully made those dormant buds send up shoots. I waited about a month, then I sprayed it with glyphosate. I did it again in two weeks. That actually did a fairly good job of killing off the plant, but I really don’t want it to make a comeback.

The next step was hand-digging out all the rhizomes. This took a long time. I’m not done with the large patch I’m working on yet. But…to see soil that you could work with and rake through after I was done was worth it.  We could plant in it now…but I think we will wait. The next few months I will be watching the bed, looking for quackgrass to make a comeback. And I plan to nip out all the attempts.

This is the soil full of rhizomes. The grass isn't deserving enough of a picture.

We dug out two huge garbage bags full of rhizomes for a 8'x15' area. Wow.

The moral of this story is–learn to recognize your weeds. This weed wouldn’t have been such a problem if it was controlled when it started to invade, not years after. Also, by knowing what it was, I was able to choose good control measures and avoid ones (like tilling) that are ineffective. If you live in the west, Weeds of the West is an invaluable book. It has the id info for nearly all the weeds you come across.

Wadsworth Creek

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Have you noticed the fall leaves? I started to see red on the mountains and started itching for a hike. This Saturday, my little family took a long hike up hobble creek canyon. We went on the Wadsworth Creek trail, which was pretty empty, not too steep, and gorgeous. So beautiful. We ended up hiking anywhere from 8-10 miles. I hardly noticed we went that long–there was something new and colorful and interesting around every corner. We reached a grove of cottonwoods and bluegrass. (I’m a little wondering how they got there–neither are native.) Peter had fallen asleep by then, and we placed him in the hammock where he was rocked so deeply into sleep he didn’t noticed when we took him out and put him back in the hiking backpack. Joe and I had lunch, and then he suggested we lay down and take a nap. I actually slept a little too, with my head on my husbands shoulder. I thought that heaven must be like this.

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