Squee!

I love plant sale weekends.

Air quality

I've always had a houseplant addiction. I figure it's healthier to have lots of living things around you, whether those things are people or animals or plants. NASA did a pretty rad study that compared different houseplants and their abilities to remove chemicals from the home. Because homes are increasingly becoming energy efficient and better sealed, indoor air quality can be quite poor. The cleaning products we use and even our furniture off-gas chemicals like benzene and formaldehyde.Things like carpet, draperies, or even kleenex and grocery bags release these chemicals.

The best of the best were published in the book How to Grow Fresh Air by B.C. Wolverton. The full 50 plants, if you're curious, are listed here.

He evaluated plants based on the amount of chemicals they remove, their ease of growth, their resistance to insects and disease, and their transpiration rates. The transpiration rate measures how much water the plants release through their leaves, which in turn pulls air down around the plant roots. This is a good thing because it creates air flow where there otherwise might not be any. Better airflow means better removal of chemicals from the air.

Areca palm (Dypsis lutescens)

The number one plant for removing chemicals, transpiration rate, and ease of growth is the Areca Palm, followed by the lady palm (Rhapis excelsa) and the bamboo palm (Chamaedorea seifrizii), one of which I plan on acquiring soon. The author includes a lot of interesting facts about the plants, such as when they consume carbon dioxide and give off oxygen. Snake plants (Sansevieria), Christmas Cacti, and Aloe Vera all give off oxygen at night, so they are great plants for the bedroom. I moved the boy's humongous snake plant into the bedroom recently, and while he hasn't stopped snoring, we're sleeping well. Because of all the oxygen, I'm sure.

I already had a fair number of plants listed in the book, which makes me think most houseplants are probably pretty good for you. This is a Dumb Cane (Dieffenbachia "Exotica Compacta").

These are Dragon Trees (Dracaena marginata). The dragon tree is among the best plants for removal of xylene and trichloroethylene.

I won't even show you a picture of my peace lily (Spathiphyllum sp.). It's a beautiful plant when you don't ignore it the way I do. I'm not crazy about it, truth be told, but it ranks really high in the list.

This is a rubber plant (Ficus robusta) that I also try to kill regularly. It ranks high and is especially adept at removing formaldehyde.

The "knows how to become a librarian" flag just looks cool.

This is heart-leaf philodendron (Phildendron oxycardium), which most people probably have at home. They don't need much light and they are super cheerful looking, no?

So, yeah . . . if you hate house plants but love good air quality, get an areca palm. And sleep with some aloe vera.

Garden fever, part deux

It was almost a year ago that I posted I was suffering from garden fever.

It's back, the garden fever. All day at work I'm thinking in the back of my head about what I could plant along the back side of the house. Do I have a place for another viburnum? What's a good low-growing evergreen for the area with the weird willow? Could I turn that suckering stump into a birdbath? Is 28 ferns enough? (No.)

It honestly makes me feel very manic. Fall and spring are really creative times for me, when I get very excited about EVERYTHING. I have a stack of interior design books, a pile of yardscaping guides, new music on the iPod, crude sketches everywhere . . . I catch myself bouncing in my seat when I catch wind of another plant sale. Everything feels full of possibility.

I was flipping through a plant encyclopedia at lunch one day and I felt like I would just die if I didn't get a goatsbeard (Aruncus) under the conifer in the backyard. I called Marbott's after work and found out that they don't carry it and I was so sad. I didn't want to drive all the way out to Portland Nursery during rush hour, either.

I saw this picture in this yardscape book of gas water heater flue baffles used in the garden and I. had. to. have. some.

Yanked from The Revolutionary Yardscape, p. 160

Do you know how freakishly hard it is to find those? Nary a hardware store in Portland (not even Wink's!) carries them, there weren't any at The Rebuilding Center, and the online stores that carry them (Sears, mainly) don't include the dimensions or a picture. Stymied again!

That's why it makes me feel so much better when I hear from friends who are just as antsy to get out in the mud to start planting. And then I saw this, from A Way to Garden.

"I garden because I can't help myself."


On Being a Gardener: From "And I Shall Have Some Peace There" from Margaret Roach on Vimeo.

That's exactly how I feel. I can't help myself--what am I going to do, just not garden? That's not an option. I honestly don't understand how people DON'T get excited by gardening.

In other news, I think this mystery bush might be a dwarf Canadian hemlock. Maybe? Either way, I want to move it somewhere else. That's the bedroom off the deck there and I want something that smells good so the scent will waft in through the screen door that I'll have someday. Can someone drop a hint to the boy that a screen door would be an excellent birthday present?

And one of these. WANT. 

'Fireworks' fountain grass

Quick updates

I planted swiss chard.

The beans are flowering and growing . . .

Cranberry bush beans are almost ready to be picked . . .

If the weather behaves (come on, indian summer!) there will be tomatoes . . .

This crazy feral monstrosity is a tomatillo plant.  Mmmm, tomatillos . . .

I planted what said radicchio, though it looks like leaf lettuce to me.  Leaf lettuce that wilted in the 92 degree heat . . .

Bleeding hearts will self-seed prodigiously, if given enough water . . .

Since my clematis never took off on The Weird Fence . . . 

Me and my boy planted hop plants that he can use in his homebrewing.

Brussels sprouts are chugging right along . . .

What a difference a couple of months make!

One plant mystery solved

I was at the Home Depot on Saturday and I saw one of my mystery plants!  Remember this guy?

Turns out it's a Fatsia Japonica.

This plant is also known as Japanese Aralia or false castor oil plant (sexy!) and it can get to eight feet tall.  That sort of makes me want to remove it, but then I read this:

"In Japan, the shrub was traditionally planted on the north side of a home to help ward off bad spirits." (Source: rainyside.com)   

So now I really can't remove it.  What if bad spirits take up in my house?  My roommate is already convinced we have a basement ghost, so who knows what could happen next!  Well played, mystery plant.  You can stay.

On the plus side I get to make me cookies!

Mystery plants

I have a number of plants in the yard that perplex me.  This tree was chopped down once and a number of suckers came up.  Nobody has any idea what it is.

Beneath it are hordes of very tenacious suckers.  I suspect they are related.

 

This looks like some sort of dwarf willow.  I thought it was dead but it's actually beginning to leaf out.

I just discovered this one between a clump of bamboo and a rhododendron in the backyard.

I got excited, thinking it was a flowering currant, but the leaves don't match.  Spiraea, maybe?

And then there's this one.  It's cheery looking enough, but I wish it was something else.

These guys are on the back of the house. No clue about them either.

Then there are the mystery bushes in the northwest corner.

And then there are the plants that are just unwanted.  I was so excited that my peonies survived their ungraceful transplant from Z's house!

Then I noticed more blackberry popped up.  Grrrr.

Anybody who can identify any of these plants gets cookies!

Garden fever!

I officially have garden fever.

I've checked out pretty much every book on gardening in the library where I work.  At night I pile into my bed with my books and my sketches and plot.  This is exactly what I needed to jolt me out of my homeowner ennui.

Last weekend I planted four more peonies and put a columbine in the shade garden.

I planted an Ocean Spray in the back right corner.  Ocean Spray is a native plant which means it's low-maintenance.  No mulching, no pruning, no soil amendments, just plant them somewhere they can go nuts.  Ocean Spray can get to be 15 feet tall and wide, so it should screen out the neighbors behind me as well. 

God, is my yard a mess or what?  In addition to screening out the neighbors (a new fence should help, too), I want to put in raised vegetable beds.  I have a completely annoying brick heap in my yard, presumably left over from a bricked barbecue.

I started grabbing bricks and laying out where I want to put the bed.  But I kept wanting to change the shape and that got really tiring, moving bricks over and over, so I finally got smart and pulled out the hose.

Once I had a shape I liked I moved the bricks.  I ended up with a modified bone shape.  My sister said it looks more like a shark or a boot.

I was encouraged by my friend T to do sheet mulching.  Some people call it "lasagna mulching."  You lay down newspaper or cardboard to choke out the grass, then pile on mulch and organic material.  You kill off the grass but maintain all the bugs and bacteria and established naturey goodness in the soil.  And you keep piling and piling until you have nice soil to plant your veggies in.  I asked one of coworkers to save the newspapers the next time she cleared out the library periodicals room.  That very same day I had two huge boxes of newspapers!

I did this on a rainy day, which worked to my advantage (wet newspaper doesn't fly away).  You just spread out a thick layer of newspaper (between 5-20 pages said one website) and grab some bricks so they don't fly away . . .

Then I grabbed some of the soil from the various pots I had all over the patio and spread it on top.

The next time I mow the lawn I'll use the bag (I usually don't) and spread the collected clippings on top.  I'll start collecting compostable materials like kitchen scraps and throw those on too.  Then hopefully I'll figure out what material I want to use to raise the beds and I can start getting my veggies going before we get too long into spring.

I also planted ranunculus bulbs and sowed sweet alyssum beneath the rose bushes out front.  The maples in the front are leafing out and the color is gorgeous.

I'm planning on planting creeping thyme beneath them.  It should provide a nice ground cover that has the bonus of releasing a wonderful smell when it's stepped on.  So as my roommate gets in and out of her car she should be greeted with a lovely scent.

This is the carrot I had on the stick last summer when I was working so hard on my house.  "Get all this interior stuff done and you can play all next summer in the yard," I kept telling myself.  Hopefully my house will behave and I really can spend my summer toiling in the backyard.  Fingers crossed!