Wow. A ton of mail came in this week – seems like the email server dam finally let loose and I’m flooded. :-)

There are some really GREAT questions in the inbox – good ones that need sharing and writing about on my web pages. Those kind of questions demand long answers (more than “yes” or “no”) in some detail so they are slated for web pages or modifying web pages.

As I said, I never delete a question until it is answered but I can no longer guarantee when that will happen as the numbers are pretty staggering at the moment.

We’re now into the “what’s wrong” stage of the garden where the problems are occurring and you are asking great (and complicated) questions.

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OK – now you have to imagine that I’m sitting in front of a computer monitor – I get a letter that says, “Something’s eating my plant. What is it?” (that’s the entire letter by the way.)

LOL!

I have absolutely no idea what’s chewing on your plants nor do I have any idea what plant it is. :-) Could be anything from squirrels to slugs but if *you* don’t see ‘em ...

Half the time I have no idea what’s making holes in mine.

I spray my plants every few days with a mix composed of several tablespoons of Tabasco sauce, a dash of soap and the rest of the household spray bottle filled with water. That seems to keep whatever is chewing on mine down to the dull roar. I can tell you that this 1) stinks 2) is really tough on the eyes if I spray upwind (yes, I learned the hard way) 3) works. That is it works until whatever I’m repelling decides it likes hot spice with its greens. :-)

I love gardening.

For the record, I bet on slugs more often than not when you can’t see anything) Get out the hot sauce or get some Sluggo (iron phosphate – a natural and effective slug bait that knocks them dead.)

But you gotta tell me more if you need a good answer.

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I am also relieved to be able to report that my gardener Aunt Vi does not like mice and depends on good old Misty to handle that problem for her. So she feeds the squirrels and chipmunks to keep them off her flowers but mice are cat toys. Another family communication issue resolved. :-) (thanks Aunt Vi for clearing *that* up.)

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Your Questions Answered

We have just installed a series of waterfalls cascading down into a larger pond. I'm very new to this area and have done very little research on plants. We've planted about 5 or 6 water lily plants which are blooming pretty well. I think I read somewhere on your site that lilies don't like moving water. Does this mean my lilies will probably die? If so, what plants do you recommend for planting? Being in zone 8, algae, or green water, is getting to be a problem. Will chemical algaecides hurt the plants?

A: OK – lilies don’t like to be in the water stream where they get bobbled around too much. A *little* bobbling is natural but being in the middle of a river is not where you’ll find them in nature.

As in many things in the water garden, a little bit is fine but a little bit more is disastrous and you’ll have to be the judge from practical experience. The single best advice I can give about water gardening is to follow nature. But we tend not to do that in our water gardens because we design for huge waterfalls relative to the size of the ponds we let them fall into. LOL!

So just because you have waterfalls doesn’t mean you can’t have lilies, you just can’t reasonably expect a lily to live in rapidly moving water – put them in the slow sections of your pond.

Re algae. Oh Oh! I’m going to be very politically incorrect here and tell all my readers that algae is the thatch of the pond world.

Algae and lawn thatch both occur as a result of garden mismanagement.

If you have algae, you have an unbalanced pond. Period. That unbalance is either in the construction/build process that includes the filtering and pump management or in the ecological end of the pond (pond, fish rates etc). But your pond is ecologically unbalanced and it is the gardener’s or construction system fault.

Algae chemicals are simply bandaids to “cure” a garden mismanagement problem. If you read the label, it is often a chemical called atrazine. This is a very common chemical used to kill weeds in corn fields and of course it will kill lilies if you add too much of it. That’s what it does – kill plants. A little bit will kill off the algae (all the algae by the way including all the good stuff that is helping keep your pond clear) and leave the plants alone in a sterile water.

My recommendation is for you to read the entire section on pond construction and the pages on algae control (you might find it easier to use barley straw to kill off the floating algae as it won’t kill your plants) to get a handle on pond management.

Then read the section on oxygenating plants – get a ton of these.

Follow the recommendations for oxygenators, pond coverage and go from there.

And good luck! :-)

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my question THIS TIME IS ;-) why thin the plants? Practically all of them came up and they're gorgeous, healthy plants .. can i merely separate them and plant them somewhere else appropriate? I make all kinds of breads with them, etc. and despite my lack of knowledge with them, I'm not tired of them yet :-) and for that matter, why thin plants at all if the healthy plants can be grown elsewhere on the property? guess I've turned into a recycling nut

A: Why thin vegetable seedlings? Or thin any seedlings for that matter? We grow the garden and set spacing for *mature* plants. Your small plants look good right now but they’ll grow (we hope) :-) Once they get larger they’ll take up more space (we hope!) :-) Crowded plants have reduced air circulation and diseases increase. Crowded plants make it easier for pests to hop from one to the other spreading their eggs and increasing pest problems. Crowded plants make it harder for you to weed around them and work around them without damaging the plants. And crowded plants make it harder to find the fruit when it is at optimum size. That’s why we thin.

Can you move seedlings? Absolutely. Thinning means to set the spacing for mature plants. What you do with those smaller plants you remove (always remove the smallest) is up to you. Transplant ‘em, eat them or toss them into the compost pile, whatever you decide.

You’ll find that some seedlings (like a lot of cucurbit crops – melons/cucumbers etc.) will be set back and growth will be retarded by transplanting. It is far easier to plant a few extra seeds and then simply chuck away the weak ones or ones that are not in the correct spacing.

I can’t speak to the beginning gardeners desire not to lose a single seedling. That is an amazing feeling – of watching a seed start and grow. Even after 30 years in the nursery industry I still enjoy watching seeds grow and develop. But after 30 years and literally hundreds of thousands of plants, I no longer mind tossing the extras away. LOL! The first hundred thousand are the toughest! LOL.

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i have a purple coneflower that looks like dead twigs. i was afraid to dig it up and throw it away. can you tell me how to check for any signs of life to it.. Dora

A: How to tell if my perennial plant is alive. Is my perennial plant alive? Darn good questions and ones that I’m looking at in my own garden right now. There’s always those plants that make a fetish of starting late (hibiscus, coreopsis, buddleia) that frustrate the heck out of me. Then there’s the plants that are trying to decide *if* they will start or not. I too have some Echinacea or coneflower that are making that decision.

If there’s green leaves above the surface, they’re alive.
If there’s no green leaves above the surface, there’s hope.
If you get to July – there’s little hope.

You can gently scrape away the mulch from the surface of the plant to see if there’s any life showing.

Life showing includes a hard centre point or growth area (for almost all plants). If the growth points *around* where the stalks were are soft, then you likely have a problem. I tend to gently poke around to see if there’s any “hardness” to the surface where the old stalks are. If there’s no hardness – no firm plant tissue, I can gently excavate to see if I can find some hardness or if there are any roots there.

If roots are brown – they’re dead. If roots are white, they’re alive and I cover them over – say a small prayer to the garden goddess and walk away.

But *DO NOT* go excavating around the roots as a first step. If the plant is trying to decide to grow or not, your digging around and messing about with the roots might be the tipping point. Gentle patience and a light finger touch is the order of the day.

Patience my dear Dora – patience. :-)

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I have had my lungwort for several years, planted in shade and it has never bloomed (had a sole white flower once). Would you know why? Thank you.

A: On the surface, this question doesn’t have enough information for any of us to make a helpful suggestion. But – there’s an important point I want to pass along now that bloom season is upon us.

As a general rule of thumb in the garden, plants bloom when they are free from stess. Stress a plant and its very first reaction is to reduce the number and the size of the blossom. Or to shorten the duration of the bloom.

The trick then for all gardeners is to reduce the amount of stress our plants are under if we want them to bloom and to bloom for extended periods of time.

Why this plant isn’t blooming is beyond me as I don’t have enough information but if I had to guess, I’d go with a lack of water.

Lack of water is the number one problem in flower blooming. To that you can add all the other problems, lack of food, lack of sunlight, lack of good soil, etc etc.

So, I have no idea why this one isn’t blooming but I will tell you it is under stress and as soon as you figure out what what the plant wants and give it to it – it will start blooming again.

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will coompost tea with just rabbit manure in a stocking soaked in a bucket of rain water be to strong for veggies and flowers? soak for a week before i use it. thanks bob

OK – first of all, rabbit manure doesn’t produce compost tea. Compost produces compost tea. Rabbit manure produces manure tea.

The objective in using good compost to make compost tea is to incorporate an entire range of beneficial organisms to our soils. Compost, by its very nature, has eliminated all the negative problems such as e-coli. The active brewing also encourages beneficials to grow and eliminates the microorganisms we do not want to grow. We call this aerobic tea making (with oxygen)

Letting manure sit in water for a week is an example of anaerobic tea making (without oxygen) and it produces an entirely different set of microorganisms than good compost. Some of these are useful to the garden and some are not.

If this garden were mine and I had rabbits, I’d compost the rabbit manure properly, letting it heat up and mixing it with straw or other organic matter to create a dynamite compost. Then I’d add that to the garden and make tea with that product. But I wouldn’t use the rabbit manure directly or make tea with it.

Fresh manure of any kind is not a good additive to a vegetable garden.

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We're moving to Viola, DE and will live in a home with an elevated sand mound for a septic system. Any ideas for a gardening project? It will be 60 feet x 40 feet & will mound to 4' high. We cannot plant anything with deep roots. We can use a small tractor to mow grass. We'd like it to look like a wonderful perennial garden. Any ideas please? Thank you.

A: OK – first things. Yes, for anybody wondering you can garden on top of septic systems. All the fermentation takes place in a double chamber in the tank. Deep roots are a good idea to avoid as they’ll go into those drainage pipes at the very first opportunity.

Grass is traditional but “we’d like it to look like a wonderful perennial garden” Gee – let me suggest you buy my perennial garden design book and plant a perennial garden there. LOL!!!

I had a perennial garden over a septic bed for a few years. Grew like mad with the available water.

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Do you advise mulching with 3/4" stone? We have had an artillery fungus problem in the past and don't want it again. We thought stone would solve the problem. We are told that mulching with 2" of stone is best. What do you think? Thanks. Pat

A: OK – artillery fungus is a fungus that attaches itself to siding and is really quite ugly. Wood mulch is being blamed for it but...

Let’s assume this is correct and we don’t want to use a wood mulch.

I’m not a fan of stones for mulch except on rock gardens where it fits the design. You can’t garden with a stone mulch. You can’t dig in it because you’ll be constantly burying the stone and once that stuff is slightly buried, you’ll never be able to get rid of it without a LOT of work. From a gardening point of view, it is a terrible mulch. It doesn’t degrade, it doesn’t add anything to the soil, you can’t add compost or any organic matter to your soil over top of it, it encourages weeds to grow. Yes, weeds will germinate very, very well in a stone mulch. It is a gardening disaster.

From a design point of view. Depends on your design I suppose. Japanese gardens use a lot of stone. Alpine gardens look good with stone mulch and it also works for their culture/cultivation. My .02 is that general gardens look silly with stone mulch as it is totally out of place. But that’s my .02

From a gardening standpoint – no. From your design standpoint – it’s your property.

Just don’t expect to garden in that section once you mulch with stone.

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I've heard coffee grounds are good for acid loving plants. How much should I put around blueberry bushes, raspberries, etc.? What about old, stale grounds that have not been used

A: Coffee grounds are great for keeping plants up and awake at night. Night blooming plants particularly like coffee and coffee grounds.

But seriously folks…

Coffee is a slightly acidic organic material that can be added to compost bins with no problem. Worms like the stuff. It will not bother the pH of soil at all because by the time it decomposes, the basic existing pH will have changed it to the pH of the surrounding soil. Unless you have commercial quantities of the stuff, feel free to dump the household coffee grounds wherever you like on whatever plant you like. You likely don’t have enough to worry about changing the pH of the soil. Nor do you likely have to worry about how much you dump down. Spread it around evenly would be my recommendation. It will disappear as the worms (you’ll have awake worms too) take their evening coffee breaks.

It will also make you feel better.

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From My Garden To Yours

There are very few plants that I don’t try to grow at some point or other and this is particularly true of plants I appreciate. If I like the look of a plant, I’ll grow it for the heck of it. One of the plants that I have not spent a lot of time with is the North American native Liatris. Looking at some pictures the other day in my office, I couldn’t for the life of me figure out why I hadn’t put a section of these into my garden at one time or other. This plant makes an excellent cut flower, it makes a long blooming perennial starting in early to mid summer and blooming well into fall, is hardy as nails, lives in full sun and is excellent for beginners as well as experienced gardeners.

Liatris is a member of the aster family and although it has flower spikes sticking straight up, each spike is composed of hundreds of tiny flowers. The interesting thing about Liatris is that it opens from the top down. Most flowers with long spikes open from the bottom up. This means that if the liatris bloom starts to get a little ugly at the top, you simply prune off the ugly bits and the bottom of the flower spike will continue to open and will look much fresher.

Liatris are plants of full hot sunshine and the tuberous roots appreciate a well-drained soil and will rot in soils that hold too much water. This is particularly true of clay soils that stay wet in the winter. Clay soils are death to this plant. If you have a very hot dry garden, this is one plant you definitely want to grow. Water regularly for the first month or two to assist the plant in getting established and then leave it on its own.

While the plants can be started by seed, most gardeners propagate them by division. Dig up every four years and cut up with a sharp knife leaving one eye on each division to produce new growth and flowers. If you’re really quick in the spring, you can take tip cuttings from young tender growth and these will root quickly and yes, the plant will produce other shoots. Or, you can start a ton of them from a few seed packages if you remember they need some cool weather before they’ll germinate (I have articles on my website about germinating perennial seeds) You’ll have quite a colony in a few years. Plant the base of the tuber one to two inches deep. This plant is similar to a peony in that you do not want to bury the eye more than an inch below the surface of the soil. Plant the individual chunks of root approximately 8 inches apart for the best show.

Just about every garden centre will stock L spicata and a few of its better known varieties such as Kobold, ‘Blue Bird’ that has a bluish-purple flower head and ‘Snow Queen’ that is a white (dirty white but white nevertheless). These make excellent garden plants at about the three foot tall size.

I have seen the following plants in specialty garden catalogues and nurseries and for the life of me, I don’t know why I haven’t grown them. These are gorgeous plants. Liatris aspera or rough gayfeather grows approximately five feet tall if its happy and it has lavender flowers. The only thing it can do is be a little floppy, particularly if you place it in a good garden soil where it will tend to grow enthusiastically. Stake it or grow it next to a rose or shrub that will support it in its old age.

Liatris elegans or pinkscale blazing star is shorter and more tender. I did try this one once in my garden but seeing as it is rated a tender zone 7, it was not very impressed with a zone 4 garden winter. It has a very large, showy lilac purple flower spike. And another tender liatris although one worth trying as it is a zone 5 or 6 hardiness rating is L. graninifolia or grass leafed blazing star. This is a dwarf species only growing to two foot tall but it produces a ton of soft lavender flowers (some are almost white) in early fall. This is an excellent plant for the fall garden.

I do not for the life of me know why L. ligulistylis or meadow blazing star is not more readily available. A mature plant can produce a boatload of flower stems (I think the record is up around 70 stems on one plant.) The nice thing about this plant is that it will tolerate a slightly more damp soil and a slightly more rich one than its cousins. It is hardy into zone 4 but it will be hard to find. Go figure. A good dwarf (I’ve actually grown this plant for two years) is L. microcephala or dwarf gayfeather. It too has a grass-like foliage and throws up several rose-purple flower spikes each year. Use this one in a rock garden. You’ll likely find seed in specialist catalogues or on the Net before you’ll find plants in a garden centre. Mind you, I think somebody weeded it out one year but I can’t recall who to blame for not having it now. But no matter, I haven’t grown this plant enough and I should probably think about fixing that situation.