This guest post was written by David Deardorff and Kathryn Wadsworth, authors of What’s Wrong with My Plant?, and originally appeared on their blog.

Today, the last of November, beginning of December, snow is flying in many parts of the USA. Many die-hard gardeners in colder areas turn to houseplants to satisfy that perennial itch to commune with the green world. These days it seems you find lots of houseplants for sale wherever you go. Many grocery stores, even big box stores, now boast a tantalizing display of gorgeous exotic orchids in full bloom along with other houseplants. The flamboyant color and opulent form of orchid flowers are seductive. Like sultry temptresses they lure us into their embrace and many of us succumb to their charms.

For many people, orchids have the reputation (undeserved!) that they are demanding and difficult to grow. Poppycock! Orchids are tough customers that hang on under the most trying of circumstances so long as minimal needs are met. The only finicky aspect of orchid culture is the potting medium because they cannot grow in soil.

Many orchids make excellent flowering houseplants. Take a word from the wise and be careful though, because once you start growing orchids you may never stop! At one time in our lives Kathryn and I owned an orchid nursery and tissue culture lab in Hawaii with several thousand orchids. We were also judges with the American Orchid Society and we literally lived and breathed orchids for years.

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This guest post was written by David Deardorff and Kathryn Wadsworth, authors of What’s Wrong with My Plant?, and originally appeared on their blog.

At this time of year David and I put the garden to bed. He writes about keeping it healthy for next season, and concentrates on sanitizing — cleaning out unhealthy plant tissue where disease may lurk until spring. For me the garden season is over. In our cold climate, I find myself more and more reluctant to go outdoors, much less garden. It’s time to concentrate on indoor activities.

The other day David and I watched the local news that carried a story about the dangers of falling leaves in the coming storm. Trees had just begun to turn colors, and had not yet had an opportunity to drop their autumn leaves. The newscaster warned that these leaves posed a terrible threat. OMG — the wind could bring them down all at once! They could cause flooding!! We could almost hear the sound track to Hitchcock’s Psycho in the background, as the menacing leaves crawled toward us. What fierce creatures deciduous trees are. “Be afraid. Be very afraid.”

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Spending lots of time on garden blogs really gives one a sense of what needs to happen when. Time to plant bulbs? Friendly reminders come in every day for a month, complete with last spring’s crocus, tulip, and daffodil pictures. Does your tree need a bit of a prune?  Do you need to divide your perennials? The experience and recommendations of dozens of gardeners are a Google (or a Bing, or a Yahoo, or a Lycos) away. Time to clean up the garden for the winter?

Well … surely that can wait several months, right?

I finally did a little bit of garden cleanup over the weekend. I pulled up shriveled cucumber vines and my shivering tomato plants, which have done a spot-on impression of not growing an inch since September. The green tomatoes still on the bush have pouted and split open in the rain, and the slugs have rejoiced. Or maybe something else has rejoiced. I haven’t actually caught slugs on my tomatoes, but they do have nibble marks on them.

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This guest post was written by David Deardorff and Kathryn Wadsworth, authors of What’s Wrong with My Plant?, and originally appeared on their blog.

It’s late November and garden ghosts from last summer’s bounty may still linger in standing dead stalks of flowers long gone. Unfortunately, some of this left-over plant material may be infected with fungal or bacterial diseases. Roses may keep their foliage until well into winter, even if it’s infected with black spot or powdery mildew. Pear leaves infested with blister mites will come back to haunt you if you don’t rake them up. And all those tomato vines that succumbed to late blight last summer will cause you problems next year unless you get rid of them.

Getting infected plant material out of your garden is called sanitizing and it’s one of the basic tools for managing plant disease or infestations by insects or mites. Sanitizing disrupts the life cycle of these organisms. The bacteria and fungi inside dead infected plant material are still alive and waiting for the opportunity to reproduce. Insects, mites, and eggs are also not dead but merely dormant, waiting for winter to be over. The bacteria, fungi, insects, and mites will all begin to reproduce and create a new generation to infect your garden again next spring as soon as the weather permits. When you seek and destroy these critters while they are dormant you have drastically decreased the numbers that will survive to give you headaches next year. If you can gather all the infected and/or infested material up and get it out of your garden you have reduced the inoculum load significantly. The result is less disease and fewer pests. Sanitizing won’t eradicate these problems but it will give you a fighting chance to manage your garden more effectively.

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We did our “design launch” yesterday for a somewhat technical but always delightfully written (and sometimes even funny) book on those underappreciated garden insects: Bees, Wasps, and Ants: The Indispensable Role of Hymenoptera in Gardens. Believe me, you can’t really understand what’s going on in your garden without this book.

The most interesting thing I learned today is the existence of the “Justin O. Schmidt Pain Index” for bee/wasp/etc. stings.  It’s rather entertaining reading, and a not-so-gentle remembrance of stings past. This may not be news to everyone—there is a lengthy Wikpedia article here, but I love the idea that you can now put a number to your level of agony. Kind of like the Sleep Number bed.

The Justin O. Schmidt Pain Index (Schmidt 1990)

1.0, Sweat bee: Light, ephemeral, almost fruity. A tiny spark has singed a single hair on your arm.

1.2, Fire ant: Sharp, sudden, mildly alarming. Like walking across a shag carpet and reaching for the light switch.

1.8, Bullhorn acacia ant: A rare, piercing, elevated sort of pain. Someone has fired a staple into your cheek.

2.0, Bald-faced hornet: Rich, hearty, slightly crunchy. Similar to getting your hand mashed in a revolving door.

2.0, Yellow jacket: Hot and smoky, almost irreverent. Imagine W. C. Fields extinguishing a cigar on your tongue.

2.0, Honey bee and European hornet: Like a match-head that flips off and burns on your skin.

3.0, Red harvester ant: Bold and unrelenting. Somebody is using a drill to excavate your ingrown toenail.

3.0, Paper wasp: Caustic and burning, distinctly bitter aftertaste. Like spilling a beaker of hydrochloric acid on a paper cut.

4.0, Pepsis wasp (spider wasp): Blinding, fierce, shockingly electric. A running hair drier has been dropped into your bubble bath (if you get stung by one you might as well lie down and scream).

4.0+, Bullet ant: Pure, intense, brilliant pain. Like fire-walking over flaming charcoal with a 3-inch rusty nail in your heel.

This guest post was written by David Deardorff and Kathryn Wadsworth, authors of What’s Wrong with My Plant?, and originally appeared on their blog.

It’s late autumn and Halloween jack-o-lanterns sag and melt away in forgotten corners of the yard along with left-over dead cornstalks. The ghosts of last summer’s bounty linger in flower beds and vegetable gardens. The bright leaves of maple and oak that covered the ground earlier in the season are brown and soggy.

As every gardener knows, a garden generates waste. The outer leaves of cabbage, corn husks, pea vines, fruit tree prunings, and so forth are produced in abundance every growing season. Many people have a lawn to deal with also, and a lawn results in grass clippings. And of course there are always weeds!

You can transform all this material from valueless waste to precious black gold by composting it. And it’s relatively easy to do because most of the work is done for you (for free!) by beneficial micro-organisms like fungi and bacteria. There are a couple of secrets that you should know before you start, however.

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As I was walking across the Burnside bridge yesterday, I happened to glance down at the traffic on I-5, and noticed the traffic median.

I’m guessing that traffic medians are tough to dress up. It’s a harsh environment – hot air, gas fumes, wind from passing cars. Trash gathers there. Roadkill gathers there. Regardless, I happen to think that this particular median could use some serious help. The line of shrubs pruned in box shapes is really not doing it for me.

What could be planted there instead? Succulents? Down near Santa Cruz the medians were planted with swaths of ice plant, invasive but gorgeous.  Grasses? The meadow and grass plantings in a few of our books are stunning, and I’d love to look down on waving grasses as I cross the bridge.

Should we expect traffic medians to be attractive, or should we just be grateful when there is anything at planted in that space?

This guest post was written by David Deardorff and Kathryn Wadsworth, authors of What’s Wrong with My Plant?, and originally appeared on their blog.

David has been talking about storing summer bulbs, and it got me thinking about all the things we who live in cold climates do to prepare for winter.

As gardeners we store bulbs, corms, tubers, and tuberous roots. These plant structures store the net photosynthate that the plant produced during the growing season. Which means: plants store food to survive the winter and grow again in spring.

Somewhere in our pre-history we learned a lesson from plants and started storing these same plant parts for our own food. We “lift” tubers like potatoes (Solanum tuberosum) from the ground, shake dirt free and, in former times, placed them in root cellars. Today we might store them in cardboard boxes or burlap sacks in our garages. We also gather tuberous roots like sweet potatoes (Ipomoea batatas) and bulbs like onions and garlic, and store them through the long months of cold when we cannot grow food outside.
As November proceeds in the northern hemisphere, we prepare for festivals at which we gather and share our stored bounty from the garden. Storing food is all about coziness, feelings of safety, belonging, and abundance. Despite the hardships of the season – driving rain, cold, and, snow – we enjoy our winter feasts.
David’s family cherishes traditional winter feasts. Mashed potatoes are a must. Close relatives of tomatoes, eggplants, chili, and bell peppers, potatoes come from high in the Andes of Peru, and have been grown for over 6,000 years. Breeders have mixed the gene pool to create the multitude of varieties we have now.

We all have favorite potatoes, but I particularly love the ones with tender skins and flavorful flesh, such as Yukon golds. I also like to mix it up with the newest – or oldest, depending on how you look at it – Peruvian blue and purple potatoes. But tradition often dictates the good old russet. No matter which potato we choose, I use a recipe I learned long ago:

Simple Mashed Potatoes (serves 4)
Potatoes: 2 lbs
Milk: enough to barely cover potatoes
Salt, pepper, butter to taste
Scrub the potatoes and leave skins on. Cut them in half inch cubes.  Boil them in milk until tender. As you mash, add butter, salt and pepper to taste.

Sweet potatoes come from lowlands throughout the Caribbean and South America, and people have been mixing genes from these gems of the earth for a long time to create many tasty cultivars. Some of these cultivars are also called yams by grocers in many areas of the U.S.

Still, our favorite bounty from the root cellar through the winter is:

Root Cellar Bounty:
Bulbs: Onions, Garlic
Tubers:  Potatoes
Roots: Sweet potatoes, Beets, Carrots, Parsnips
Olive oil: enough to drizzle the vegetables in a thin coating
Favorite herbs:  such as thyme, rosemary, and sage.
Cut all the vegetables into bite-sized pieces. Lay them in a single layer in a 9 x 13 baking dish. Drizzle them with the olive oil until thinly coated. Roast them in a 350 degree (F) oven until fork tender.
Yum. Oh, you should probably let them cool for a bit before you bite them.

This guest post was written by David Deardorff and Kathryn Wadsworth, authors of What’s Wrong with My Plant?, and originally appeared on their blog.

Glorious flowering bulbs of summer can light up your garden all through the warm summer months. Some, like tuberous begonias and dahlias, bloom all summer long. Others, like gladiolus, cannas, and crocosmia, have a more definite and shorter season of bloom. All are among the most flamboyant of summer flowers. They come in a brilliant rainbow of colors, many provide much needed height, and all add interesting texture and form to your garden. Oddly, though all those mentioned above are called bulbs, none has a true bulb. Instead of real bulbs they have a variety of underground storage structures like corms, tubers, or tuberous roots.

If you live in a cold winter climate, you need to dig up most of your summer flowering bulbs in autumn before hard freezes occur. Unlike spring blooming bulbs such as tulips, daffodils and crocus, these summer blooming bulbs are tender and will be killed by winter cold. You should dig up tender summer flowering bulbs in the autumn before hard freezes occur. Then you divide them, store them through the winter somewhere where they won’t freeze, and re-plant them in the spring. Garden jargon calls this process “lifting” the bulbs.

Dig them up, shake off as much of the soil as you can, and set them on newspaper in cardboard boxes to dry for a time. When the little bit of soil clinging to them has dried out, brush away the soil and store them in labeled paper bags until time to plant again next spring.

A couple of tips for success:

First, never store bulbs in plastic bags. Plastic bags don’t breathe, and they trap humidity. Both conditions promote bulb diseases. Put them in paper bags.

Second, dust them with sulfur after you’ve cleaned them up and before storing them. A good way to get them dusted is to put them in a zip-top plastic bag (only temporarily!), add a tablespoon of dusting sulfur, close the bag tightly, and shake. You should wear a face mask to avoid breathing the sulfur dust into your lungs and you should wear gloves to avoid getting it on your skin. Sulfur is a mineral element, mined from the earth, and is routinely used in organic gardening practices to control fungus disease. It is a relatively safe product but some people can have allergic reactions.

When your bulbs are well coated with sulfur, put them into a paper bag, label the bag with the kind of bulb, the name of the cultivar, and the date, and store your summer flowering bulbs in a cool, dark place through the winter until you can plant again in the spring. Dusting with sulfur prevents fungus spores from germinating as bulbs in storage can easily become infected with blue bulb mold, a fungus disease.

If, in spite of your best efforts, some of your bulbs become moldy while in storage, throw them away. Don’t plant them. And don’t keep them near your other bulbs. You’ve heard how one rotten apple can spoil the whole barrel. Same goes for bulbs. You don’t want one rotten bulb to spoil all the rest.

I’ve been reading parts of Fearless Color Gardens by Keeyla Meadows today, deciding how to capture the essence of it in a one-page letter. It really isn’t going to be easy; there is a lot of fun, friendly information packed into this 180-page book.

The parts I like best are the TRY THIS sections. These are step-by-step plans that help gardeners connect with color. Most of them are simple, and they’re all fun. Here’s an example  from chapter one.

TRY THIS: Keep a Color Adventure Journal

Keep a color notebook to record your discoveries on your color journey. I use sketch notebooks from the art store. Select several colored crayons, pens, chalks, or pencils that you are attracted to. One of the wonders of color is how personal it is. What attracts you is repulsive to someone else. We are not all the same. Now select a few colors that are repellent to you. All explorations are of interest regarding color.

Here are some explorations to try:

#1. Find a flower with petals of a color that is very attractive to you. Copy the color into your notebook. Write about the color. Do this for a few colors. What are some of the most attracting colors for you?

#2. Select one or two colored pens, pencils, or crayons of colors that are familiar from your childhood. Choose at least one color that you love or used to love and one color that you dislike. Make dots, squiggles, giggles of each color on a page, leaving room to write. Write about your color roots.

#3. Perhaps draw a stepping-stone, “follow the yellow brick road” path with one of your colors. Trace your relationship with the color you love through the years. then trace your relationship with a color you dislike or are repelled by.

From Fearless Color Gardens, available in December