The Fight Against Fungus Gnats

I have tried EVERYTHING. I've scoured the internet looking for solutions. I'm a relatively intelligent human being. I'm losing to tiny fungus gnats. It's so unfair!!!!!!

Back in early spring I bought some potting soil and "refreshed" the soil in my houseplants while repotting them. It wasn't long before the house was invaded with clouds of little gray bugs, barely visible unless they were found floating in a cup of water or in our food. They were everywhere!

I tried yellow glue traps, vinegar traps, soaking the soil with NEEM oil, soaking the soil with a systemic insecticide, and finally, in desparation, bagging every single one of my house plants for two months. The glue traps caught thousands, the NEEM oil killed hundreds of larvae, and bagging my plants gave us two months of gnat-free food and drink.

Yet, still gnats have survived. I just opened the bags on a couple of plants to see if the bagging worked and now gnats are zipping around. Yes, there aren't many but there will be. There will be. If someone has a technique that works, I'm all ears.

The sweet smell of summer

           A sample of self-seeded phlox' variety

Tall Garden Phlox has taken over the front beds of my house and are starting to make inroads into the other areas of my yard as well.  For years I neglected deadheading the phlox I inherited from the previous owners, and since they aren't very fussy about where they will grow, they now outnumber any of the other perennials in my yard (not including the weeds, of course!)

Now I religiously deadhead them but I do it with regret because phlox are really into "loving thy neighbor" and over the years my palette of phlox blooms went from a medium purple to a wild mix of lavender blue, white, white/pink, pink, bright pink, a range of heights, and slightly different flower shapes and sizes.  All because I added a 'David,' 'Red Riding Hood', and several 'Laura' phlox after I found out how fragrant phlox are.  Now I look forward to seeing what any new phlox plant will look like when it blooms.

And the fragrance once they do bloom is lovely!  I really love walking out my front door and having that vanilla wall of smell envelope me.  Nice!

The other thing I love about phlox is that the butterflies, sphinx moths and hummingbirds love them too.  I can sit and watch all the pretty fluttery critters out there working over the flowers right outside my picture window.

What I don't love is the powdery mildew that goes along with phlox, but we had pretty consistent rain here this summer so the plants didn't really get water-stressed thus I didn't see much mildew. 'David' is my latest blooming phlox so I will get to enjoy the show well into mid-September. Yay!

All of these white phlox are self-seeded 

Red Riding Hood is one of 3 cultivars I actually planted-it got bad reviews in the Chicago Botanic Garden trials for poor mildew resistance but I've never had a problem in my yard with this one. (Knock on wood)

Blue Bloomers

Double Daff Surprise!

Creeping Jacobs Ladder is a good companion for hostas and pollinators love them, but gotta warn you they reseed like crazy

We are finally getting the rain we need so badly!  This Spring has started off pretty dry so even though I'm stuck inside today, I'm super happy that it's because of several good downpours.

 "Sound" daffodils are back from the brink

Found a couple of surprises in my yard the last couple of weeks.  First, there's a maple growing in the back yard that I didn't plant and never noticed before. I was just looking out my window and noticed a tree with reddish leaves I had never seen.  I was so surprised!  It's not small (probably about 10' tall now) so its been several years of me not noticing it.  (That's how you know you've got a crap ton of trees in your yard...when a 10' tree just shows up out of the blue.)

Second, I found two types of daffs blooming this spring that I thought had disappeared from the yard years ago. A very pleasant surprise indeed!

It wasn't all happy surprises though.  One unpleasant discovery I made is that the garlic mustard situation in my backyard has seriously deteriorated. I really need to kick butt this season and regularly patrol and remove those horrible, horrible plants.

So, on to the subject of today's post. Despite the stingy amount of rain we've gotten the last couple of months, some of my spring bloomers are looking fabulous...Virginia Bluebells and Creeping Jacobs Ladder, both Wisconsin natives, have blue blooms and don't seem to be struggling as much as some others.  Throw in some pulmonaria and there's just a lot of blue happening right now in my garden.

There's a lot of pollinator action happening too.  It turns out that I'm not the only one who likes blue.

Although I only see hummingbirds and the big kind of bumblebee visiting my pulmonaria, EVERYONE loves creeping Jacob's Ladder!  Big bees, little bees, big and small flying insects that I don't recognize, and even ants.  I sat down for a bit to watch the show and the bumblebees were so covered in pollen you could hardly see their legs. There was just a swarm of flying critters working over the plants.  I don't see that kind of pollinator activity except in the late fall when the sedums and native goldenrods are blooming.

Deer leave these ephemeral Wisconsin natives alone (at least in my yard)

Unknown Lungwort (maybe a cross between "Diane Claire" and "Mrs. Moon") just decided to show up one day with its moody dark blue flowers.  Bumblebees seem to like Pulmonaria (aka Lungwort) even though its not native to Wisconsin. Maybe because the flower stems are stiff enough to hold them?

Thinking About My Favorite Hostas Today

There's sunshine this morning!  Hope your day is starting out as promising as mine is!  The sky is blue and the snow is fresh and sparkling.  There's a flock of cardinals zipping around the yard and it is even supposed to warm up a bit today.  I can also hear a couple of songbirds (and I don't mean the crows) singing away. 

I love how the yard and trees look when they are covered in snow but I'm also getting pumped about spring.  February is zooming by so quickly!  It seems like spring will be here any second.  Yes, yes, I know. This is Wisconsin and we won't be seeing spring anytime soon...but it feels like it's going to be here soon. I'm running with that.

Thinking about spring has me thinking about my garden and the plants that grow there.  My favorite garden plant is hosta.  A pedestrian choice, sure, but I don't care.  They make me happy.  

Although I don't have a single favorite hosta cultivar, I grow several that I think are just so lovely that I want to single them out for praise.  Unsurprisingly, most are tried-and-true varieties that have been around for a long time and can be found in many gardens.  One, Dream Queen, is a newer variety and it's taken a while for me to see its charms.

Gold Heart Bleeding Heart,
Olive Bailey Langdon Hosta,  Sagae Hostas,
and Epimedium

Sagae is not only pretty but it has room under it for other plants.  I tuck epimediums under mine and they seem happy together.  Slugs and earwigs are the main menace to hostas in my garden but they tend to leave Sagae mostly alone, which means they still look decent later in the season when the rest of my hostas are hole-y terrors.

Sagae just starting to leave out

Olive Bailey Langdon  is my favorite hosta color combo: blue and green.  It doesn't leave any room at its base for other plants but I love how pretty and happy it always is.  

Sum and Substance in late summer in a bed that badly needs some maintenance

Sum and Substance is the star in my front yard's street-side border.  It's huge size and chartreuse leaves stand out against the dark of the spruce trees that flank it.  It's the only large hosta I grow at the moment.  Trying to divide a mature S&S is a fool's errand but last year I managed to chip a bit off of a couple of plants to expand my S&S family.  We will have to see this spring if they survived both the winter and competition from those thirsty and aggressive spruces.

Krossa Regal is a tough plant that survived where my beloved japanese maple tragically could not

Krossa Regal has a rough gig in my garden.  I have several planted in a steep bed that is completely shaded most of the day with the exception of  a couple blazingly hot hours of full sun in the middle of the day.  My japanese maple couldn't handle it but KR is doing fine.  I just have to keep it sprayed so the deer don't get it and keep on eye on the watering.  (The neighborhood deer just really seem to like KR even though it's planted by the house and not exactly easy to get to.  They will bypass other types of hostas to get to the KR)  Mine is tucked in with Hakone grass but its vase-like shape lets it grow well above the grass.

Dream Queen took a while to find its place in my garden.  It just struggled and struggled and I had read some bad reviews about it online so I was close to giving up on it but then I found it a home it liked and now I've come to appreciate its slug-free leaves and pretty leaf shape and colors.  

Dream Queen is another hosta I really like but it's a very slow growing diva.

Guess which one is Gold Standard?

Finally, there's Gold Standard.  I never expected to like Gold Standard.  There's nothing particularly unique about its shape or size. It's not even a color I like in hostas. But it shines so brightly in my dark and shady patio garden, I find myself drawn to it when I gaze down from the deck to look at the hostas.  The only problem with GS is that the earwigs love it too.

I love all the different cultivars I grow, even the bland ones like lanceleaf hosta.  I love how their shapes and colors change as the growing season progresses.  I love the flowers, especially the fragrant white ones, like Fragrant Bouquet has.  The tree frogs and bees and hummingbirds like them too.  Which makes me like hostas even more.  I guess I'm just a sucker for hostas.

Dream Queen paired with Wolverine Hosta and Jacobs ladder

Dream Queen and Wolverine's variegation looks pretty different once summer's in full swing

Small Project, Big Change

Happy February! 

I've been spending some time this winter thinking about what to tackle in my yard this coming growing season.  One item on my list is further refining my front foundation beds.  I have really struggled to figure out what I want from the plantings in front of our house and that lack of an overall vision for the space has definitely slowed my progress. 

Yet, over the years, I've done some stuff that didn't require much thought: chopping down the overgrown, straggly yews, pulling out the diseased European viburnums that always looked like they were on the verge of death but never actually died, killing off all the aggressive spreaders that choked out everything in their path, and replacing them with less weedy-looking plants.  I've also been working to improve the soil so the plants are healthier and happier. 

In other words, I'm making progress.  Slowly.  The beds aren't "right" yet and I still don't have a  master plan, but each year my tweaks make my front foundation a little better. 

One small change that has really made a big improvement in using the space has been putting in pavers and gravel along the house foundation where before it was just dirt, mud and plants/weeds growing right up to the house.  Now I can easily walk the length of the beds to get to the side of the house or access the faucet, even if it's muddy.  Weeding and watering my too-deep beds is super stress-free.  It even makes putting up holiday lights and washing windows easier too!  And, I can't prove it, but I think it also cut down on the number of centipedes in our basement.  Yay!  It all makes me so happy!

Since I've put in that paver path at the back of my foundation beds, I've realized that turning that space into something pleasing is not impossible and I'm looking forward to the next steps in that process.

I love the UW Extension Office!

So, I bought some tropical houseplants for my planters this past spring 'cuz I wanted some bold tropical foliage.  The plants didn't have tags so when I brought them inside before it got cold, I realized that I didn't know what care they required indoors.

The crotons were easy enough to identify but I wasn't sure what a couple of my other plants were.  Enter my heroes, the volunteers manning the UW Extension horticultural helpline.

Give these fine folks a call with all your gardening drama and they will have all kinds of helpful suggestions.  You can even send them an email with your plant photos and they can help identify what you have.  Their knowledge is amazing!

 How do I overwinter my coleus?  They can help!  What is causing the holes on my leaves?  They can help!  Is my plant a dumbcane or dieffenbachia?  They can help!  Each county in Wisconsin has an extension office.  It's free to contact yours.  I sent my extension office an email and got the answers needed to keep these guys happy.

The verdict: Dieffenbachia

I neglected to consider where I would put my outside plants once winter came.  Oops!

Happy New Year 2020!

After a weekend of temps in the 50s, we start off 2020 with a lovely blanket of new snow.  Wishing you all a wonderful year!