Suza's garden tips...

Catch rain off your roof... save $$ Aim your downspouts off the roof into tanks and large cans and buckets to collect rain water. Save $$ on your water and sewer bill. In a good rain I can collect over 300 gallons off the roofs. Each container has its own dipper can for giving personal drinks to the nearby plants.	The East Coast has a new killer, West Nile Virus, that is spread by mosquitoes. Toss in Bt (Bacillus thuringiensis) donuts, available at the local garden center, to kill mosquito larvae before they can bite you. It won't hurt your birds, pets, fish, plants. See the chunk of Bt in this tank? You'll need: water tanks, tubs, buckets, large trash cans, cisterns, bungie cords, PVC pipes, downspouts, gutters, hoses, Bt donuts, creativity, gravity, rain.
	These are 300-gallon water holding tanks, installed under my sister's deck. She takes the drought seriously. You can, too, by setting up your own water collecting and saving system.
Keep searching till you find what you want. It took me two years on the Internet to finally locate Clematis 'Roguchi,' seen here in front of the mystery pink rose.	Try growing something unusual. This is the amazing flower of Stapelia gigantea. It's a succulent. The flower attracts flies...
Praying mantis are fun to find in the garden. They eat lots of other insects. When they turn to look at you, well, you will think they know all your secrets! The egg case looks like an old cork, and will sit all winter stuck to a twig.   Keep your eyes open for their egg cases attached to twigs and stems while you clean up the garden in the fall. Don't toss them.	And, here's the result in the spring, more mantis babies than you can count, streaming out of the egg case on the first warm day. The Garden Nanny often separates them as they are born. One over here, a couple over there. Otherwise, they will eat each other! Each baby mantis is around 1/4 inch long. Can you see them?
Give your vines something to climb. Mina lobata vine decided to eat this chair. Some vines will twine -- on strings or an open trellis, some will use little suckers on their stems, some need help going up -- climbing roses, for example -- figure out what your vine needs.		It helps to have a truck. This is my sister's '55 Chevy. It has hauled 180,000 plants, seventy million pounds of mulch, and made 400,000 trips to the dump. In the Fall, plant lots of bulbs so you will know that Spring is on the way! These are species tulips, low to the ground, huge flowers, and they will colonize.
Find out about plants that the butterflies need. Learn which caterpillars become butterflies and don't be in a hurry to get out the insect sprays. For example, Asclepias tuberosa (butterfly weed) is needed as a food source for the Monarch butterfly caterpillar. We can teach our kids about nature and insects, and how nature has its own balance. We can look up IPM (Integrated Pest Management) and practice it. Flowers with flat tops are great for butterflies. They use them as landing pads when stopping for a snack. They also enjoy flowers that are clustered with short flower tubes, such as the buddleia in this picture. Butterflies need a place to lay their eggs, food sources for the caterpillar stage, a plant for its chrysalis, and nectar sources. Some more good plants to grow for butterflies are eupatorium (joe-pye weed), solidago (goldenrod), echinacea (purple coneflower), liatris (gayfeather), thyme, parsley, calendula, aster, monarda, achillea (yarrow). Give the butterflies plenty of mud puddles, too. (Tuck your bird bath basins into the beds, right on the ground.) A butterfly caterpillar may increase its body size 30,000 times in the time from hatching to chrysalis form. When's the last time you saw thousands of butterflies in the tree tops on their migration? Actually, did it seem there were a fewer butterflies last summer? I think so. Perhaps we all need to stop cleaning up our yards and gardens so meticulously in the fall. Also, if you leave some of your perennials alone in the Fall, leaving the seed heads from the flowers to weather the winter, the birds will have better luck finding seeds to eat as cold days approach, as well as protective cover and nest building material. And every leaf that falls in the Fall is a gift. Leave some where they fall. Rake some up and shred them in a shredder or use the mower, and use them in the compost heap and for MULCH. It's a good idea to keep your leaves on your property. Keep your eyes open for this book: Principles of Gardening--The Practice of the Gardener's Art by Hugh Johnson. It's the revised edition, 1996, Simon & Schuster. Your library might have it. I got this fine book at Half.com: The American Horticulture Society A-Z Encyclopedia of Garden Plants by Christopher Brickell and Judith Zuk. It covers 15,000 plants and has 6,000 photos. Fabulous reference book, a must-have! Another great book that has helped me with the perennials: The Well-Tended Perennial Garden, by Tracy DiSabato-Aust. Following her instructions, I have been singing "This is the way we pinch our plants, pinch our plants, pinch our plants" and already I can see that the echinops is going to be amazing, the montauk daisy will knock your socks off, salvia 'Argentine Skies' may not need staking, the white Italian sunflower will be sturdy and floriferous, all the garden phlox and asters will be loaded with flowers, shorter, and less vulnerable to winds, and of course chrysanthemum 'Sheffield Pink' and 'Clara Curtis' will be loaded with even more flowers, less leggy and later.
Green is a color, too.		Regarding tools: I have found it pays to get the best tools. They last a long time if you don't lose them, and are easier to sharpen and maintain. I have many Felco pruners, several replacement blades for my Felco saw, a couple solid garden spades, and a fabulously designed garden fork. I use only by-pass pruners. I regularly clean the soil off the spades and forks and oil up my pruners on a regular basis. Good gloves are essential. And remember that gloves are a consumable. You can easily end up with more left hands than right! Or vice versa if you are left-handed! I have finally reconciled myself to the fact that even expensive gloves will eventually wear through at the finger tips. I have tried them all. My sister and I now buy gloves by the case and split them between us. Back to top Home Page | Composting | Worms | Cats | Roses | Amorphophallus | Suza's Plants | Ponds and Aquatics | TradeWorms...world travelers | Related Links suzaplants@earthlink.net All photos © suza. All rights reserved.