Re: New Plants for spring

Hello Gene,
Hmmm...my soil problems.  To start with, it's pure sand, and it's extremely
deficient in nitrogen and phosphorous.  That's all I can figure from
standard soil tests; though I also paid a private soil consultant for
specialty tests, nothing special showed up.  Despite soil amendments, the
first three years here many flowers refused to bloom at all--columbine,
tiarellas, iris cristata ( a native in the area), geraniums, epimediums,
heuchera.  Each year I have poured into the gardens a fortune in colloidal
or rock phosphate, dried blood, purchased compost (I could never have made
enough and what I had went to the vegetable garden), and Planters II, a
trace mineral supplement.  Strange wilts and blights killed many plants--for
three years peas withered and died, tomatoes died from what I think was
verticillium, root crops were stunted and bitter, a planting of vinca minor
blighted and almost died.  Colchicums I planted one fall came up the
following spring with small leaves and then just dwindled away, never
blooming again.  Cimicifugas didn't bloom for four years after I got them,
though they were in bloom when I purchased them.
    Even now, I cannot grow Heucheras (except for H. Raspberry Regal),
either for flowers or foliage.  They simply don't thrive, no matter what
garden I  move them to, and the purple foliage ones like 'Velvet Night' have
always been real favorites.  Liatris spicata will not bloom for me, though
Liatris aspera and L. squarrosa do very well.  Corepsis verticillata
'Moonbeam' will not grow at all, though Coreposis tripteris is magnificent.
My asparagus bed has fusarium wilt and I lost two Cotinus last summer to
verticillium wilt.  Roses, fortunately not a favorite of mine, will not grow
at all.
    However, after six full seasons and more money than I ever dreamed I
would spend in soil amendments (as well as hundreds of bags of autumn leaves
scavenged from friends in town and a permanent mulch of hay on the vegetable
garden), I am seeing results.  Since I could not grow many of the plants I
had been growing in all my previous years of gardening, I was forced to
learn a whole new palette of plants that include various agastaches,
phlomises, callirhoes, dracocephalums, pardancandas, penstemons, though I
still haven't been able to get P. strictus, supposed to be easy, to bloom.
I also depend heavily on achilleas, salvias, ornamental grasses, baptisias,
siberian iris, sedums, and my native garden is a mass of huge plants like
Eupatoriums, ironweed, Persicaria polymorpha, patrinia, and asters.
    Because of the deer, I avoid hostas, using Brunneras and Pulmonaria in
their place, and have only a few daylilies, though they do well here.
Fortunately, most of the new plants I grow, are not especially interesting
to deer, and gardening in deer country has become a specialty of mine.  I do
workshops on it locally.  It is indeed, much more than having just a list of
deer resistant plants.
    I could go on and on about the peculiarities of my soil, but by now you
probably have the idea.  Oh, I have forgotten to mention the huge boulders
that dot the gardens, very picturesque, and the huge ones just below the
surface that make nonsense of a plan worked out on paper, not so
picturesque.  And I have lots and lots of moles with whom I live in an
uneasy detente. They don't eat plants or bulbs, but they do push bulbs
around and make them disappear.
    In over 40 years of gardening, for myself and others, in three states
and two zones, I have never encountered soil like this.  I tell people that
the gods of gardening decided they better give this piece of land to a
really good gardener because it would completely discourage anyone else.  I
am grateful for their faith in me, and they have forced me to become an even
better gardener.  I bloom where I'm planted.
Merri Morgan
Zone 5b, WV

----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Gene Bush" <genebush@otherside.com>
To: <perennials@hort.net>
Sent: Thursday, January 08, 2004 8:48 AM
Subject: Re: New Plants for spring


> Hello Merri,
>     Please... we all have "soil problems" since we all want to grow things
> that are not native to your backyards. I am always building raised beds
and
> mucking about with my soil. I would be interested in what you see as a
> problem and what you are doing about altering reality;-)
>     Deer resistant is a deer with a full tummy for the neighbors yard....
>     Gene E. Bush
> Munchkin Nursery & Gardens, llc
> www.munchkinnursery.com
> genebush@munchkinnursery.com
> Zone 6/5  Southern Indiana
> ----- Original Message -----
> > Many thanks, Gene.  I'd forgotten I had asked the question, but I am
very
> > grateful you went to the trouble to find the name tags.  I have such
very
> > difficult soil--I could go on forever describing its problems, but I'll
> > spare you--that I am always looking for plants that will thrive here.
And
> > be deer resistant to boot!
> > Merri Morgan
> > Zone 5b, WV
>
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