Climate Change: 50 Degrees in January

This was my hepatic on April 5, 2011, a very slow start to the growing season. I'll be watching this year.


It's the 31st of January and this is the third or maybe fourth day we have had this month in the fifties. I'm visiting the Olbrich Gardens website for something fun and garden-related and I come across a seminar on growing figs.

Is climate change happening or what! (The Cofrin Arboretum at UWGB tracks and compares our weather this January. If you would like a good guide to tracking your own observations on phenology this is a good place to start.)

Yet last night I heard the weather man talking about a wait-and-see on the forecast and he used the words "polar vector" in the same sentence. So what are we talking about here? Last year our growing season (frost-free days) was a mere 103 face-to-face days. Are we in for the same this year?

Typically certain insects and plants do certain things based on degree days. That's the number of hours above 50 degrees, accumulated. So what happens if we have 100 degree day hours and then 2 months where it barely gets to 40 degrees?

Life is on hold.

This study of what happens and when is phenology and can be very helpful to the organic gardener. It might also be the way around the when to plant dilemmas, regardless of what the calendar says. It is at least as helpful as planting in tune with the phases of the moon, which I use to guess whether that frost watch should really be used as a warning and rather to cover those seedling "'cause baby it's gonna get cold tonight!" train of thought.

Pictures of Clematis in My Garden (from this last summer)

Clematis 'Comtessa du Bouchard'



Clematis heraclefolia ' China Blue'


Clematis 'Josephine'

Clematis from the Olbrich Botanical Gardens

Clematis 'Betty Corning' and a Jackimanii-style clematis, possibly 'The President' or 'Lady Betty Balfour'-- both rich, deep purples known to grow well in the Chicago Botanical Gardens' trials.

Growing clematis in central Wisconsin is a matter of picking the correct cultivars, waiting for the plant to mature, properly siting them, and providing for their other cultural requirements.

To assist in choosing the right cultivars for your area, a good way to go about this might be to see what is growing well for other gardeners in your area. Unfortunately, the period of time between purchase of the clematis and when it starts to show its beauty is just about 3-4 years, long enough that unless careful marking or records are kept most gardeners don't know the name of the clematis now growing in their garden.


Clematis 'Betty Corning' - Clematis viticella or Italian clematis

Another way to go about it might be to research cultivars through your nearest public or botanical gardens. You might visit the garden during peak bloom record your choices. They are more apt to be labeled there. Then, wait until the next planting season and pull out your list.

Another might be to check out clematis trials done at various test gardens around the area.

Clematis texensis 'Princess Diana'

Clematis do not grow well in a northern exposure and I would recommend against siting them there. In the South, clematis are not planted with a southern exposure because of the heat. Here in central Wisconsin this is not a problem. Clematis should be planted so as to receive as much sunlight as possible. They also like a lot of moisture. Clematis should be planted deep as well, with as many as 2-3 leaf nodes below the soil surface. Since clematis like moisture, if you have not planted your clematis nice and deep to start, a nice thick layer of mulch will help both of these cultural requirements.

Clematis are heavy feeders as well and other than roses and hydrangeas may require more nutrients than nearly any other perennials in your garden. Watering the roots rather than overhead watering can be beneficial in controlling fungal diseases.

Sometimes gardeners will ask how to prune their clematis. These is generally followed by me with the question as to which cultivar they might wish to prune.

This is where it gets dicey. They don't know which clematis they have. Sometimes they will know exactly what color their clematis is versus "a lavender-purpley color?" or when it blooms versus a bloom time of "summer?".

At this point, I really have to tell them, "Did you like what it looked like last year?"

"Yes."

"Did you prune it?"

"No."

"Alrighty then, leave it alone."

So often we just want more than we rightfully deserve. If your clematis is thin at the bottom and bushy at the top (this is the way clematis have a tendency to grow, by the way), mulch it heavily, feed it regularly, water the roots.

Be happy.

Clematis can be a bit scary to prune. Here in central Wisconsin, clematis can be a bit slow to begin growing. I wait until I can see buds forming in the leaf axials before I attempt to prune out any dead wood from the previous growing season. Left to its own devices the clematis will use the dead structure from the previous year as scaffolding for this years growth. I typically prune only for shape. If I want to develop a bit bushier plant I will pinch out just the very top growing tip, at a 4' to 5' height. This keeps me out of trouble and my clematis flowering every year. Some of the clematis in my garden will have double blooms early and a later set of single blooms because they flower on old and new wood.

The only clematis in my yard which I cut nearly to the ground are clematis 'Sweet Autumn, which flowers on new wood and the bushy versus vining clematis intregrifolia 'China Blue'.



All pictures were taken at the Olbrich Botanical Gardens.

Tomorrow: Pictures of Clematis Which Grow Well in My 4b/5a Garden(the USDA has updated my zone!).

Here Kitty, Kitty...

I didn't take this picture, but this is what we have been seeing.
I saw it two years ago. My son saw it last fall. My dad saw what he thinks was one three years ago while baling hay.

What? A mountain lion. Yes, here in central Wisconsin. Sort of ups the anty at the top of the food pyramid, doesn't it?

And now, I've seen tracks. Lots of tracks in fresh snow on days where the temperature didn't approach double digits. No melting snow explanations. Tracks I could have followed had I wanted a closer look. Huge tracks, scary huge. No, I don't have a picture. Yes, I should have grabbed my camera and gone right back and taken some pictures. I was running short of time. I didn't have time to go back.

It's a sunny day here in central Wisconsin and I told my son as he left for school, I would go feed his mountain lion for him. It's our new joke.

He was asked and paid to run out and put out food and unfrozen water for a couple stray cats for some snowbirds we know. The cats really are strays, but the woman likes to see them fed. I cautioned her against it, that they would move on and find somewhere else to get a handout. I told her she would just attract raccoons, mice, and rats to the enclosed area by her summer home, maybe even squirrels and a stray bear or coyote.

They like to watch deer in their yard, and I do some gardening for them from time to time, so this is always in the mix. They have had turkey hatch in their hedgerow and file across their yard. They like the wild life their summer home affords them.

I warned them.

When I saw it "in the fur", it was about 15 miles from where these tracks are. It was about dusk on an August night and it ran across the road in front of my truck full tilt. Good thing, because it was so close, it was a race. My boxer weighs 65 pounds, this animal was about twice that. And there is no mistaking that tail, nearly as long as its body flying out behind. I would have guessed it as juvenile, nine months to a year old. I figured it for a temporarilied escaped pet as the road I was driving is near a large campground that can swell to over 5,000 residents on summer weekends.

Last fall, the DNR reported the sightings, confirmed by trailcam, of one in Adams county (about 50 miles from here). They reported they believed it to be a young male "just moving through" and that the general public need get too excited. The DNR also reports mountain lions as extinct east of the Mississippi River. They do report there are as many as 1,000 mountain lions held privately as exotic pets in the eastern United States.


(Okay, the bit about offering small children is a little over the line, but the other advice is supposedly sound.)

The mountain lion my son saw was just casually sitting at the side of the road, like a cat sits. He told me it didn't seem worried about his car at all. He saw his about three miles from where I had seen mine the year before.

So this also leads me to what I didn't see. I didn't see any deer track criss-crossing my friends' yard. I didn't see any raccoon or turkey tracks. I did see a few small bird tracks, some older domesticated cat tracks, and then the mountain lion tracks, about three times the size of my boxer's, and not dog-like in any regard. The tracks came over to the bowls of cat kibble and water, and followed the shape of the house to the other corner of the yard, then they may have sniffed at my son's tracks and walked across the patio and returned the way they came into the pine woods.

The last time my son went out to be sure the cats had water and food he took a flash light, baseball bat, and his jack knife. At 6'3" and 210, at least it would be a fair fight.

So, we've had a fresh snow. And my son has had a brutal schedule of basketball, like 8 games in 11 days. It's a sunny day. So I told my son, I'd run out and feed the cats...

The Lisianthus Fairy

How many times have you studied a seed catalogue dreaming big garden dreams and passed by some flower or another because it is too exotic and surely it is one of those seeds that is much too difficult for the typical home gardener to actually get to germinate?

So you decide you will buy it as a bedding annual only to find it rarely available or insanely priced as a "premium annual"?

The lisianthus is one of those for me. Years ago when I lived in the Chicago metro area and belonged to a garden club of wonderful, vibrant gardeners; the lisianthus was on several of their want lists. Typically, locating it was the big issue, so if I came across a six-pack of these beauties I would pick up a couple and play ding dong ditch with them gardener-style. The lisianthus fairy had struck again. They always hinted they believed they knew who their garden fairy was, but I never confirmed.

Living in central Wisconsin it has been a few years since I have come across any lisianthus. Two years ago, my next door neighbor asked if I would like some bedding plants of which he had more seed germinate than he expected. The gardener, being Dr. Darrel Apps.

I really, really like lisianthus, so I pressed him a bit for culture details. He confided they germinated pretty easily. Surprising him as well.

Okay, for those of you just getting into gardening, my neighbor has a Doctor of Horticulture or Plant Sciences and is known as a daylily hybridizer of the Happily-Ever-Appster Daylilies, and has several, hundreds actually, daylily patents to his name. His easy is probably not your easy. He has a climate-controlled grow room, as much as the space is heated and he runs a fan to deal with humidity. He has some pretty good light racks, not the top end, but close. He uses domed germinating trays, heating pads, and the best seed starting soil science can deliver. And if there is any cultural information on growing lisanthus out there published by no-doubt a horticulturalist with whom he is on a first name basis, he has probably read it, if not talked to the author first-hand.

That's his "easy."

So except for the fan, my grow space is in an attic loft versus a basement, humidity is not as much of an issue for me; I can duplicate all of that: the germinating pad, domed germinating tray, regular florescent lights instead of really, really good lights, and the Internet instead of horta-buddies.

Last year, I did not come across any seed. This year though, I ordered seed from Park Seed, so I'm going to give it a try. I know Darrel ordered his seed from a commercial source. Hopefully, Park Seeds' will do just as well.

So if you see a six-pack of lisianthus on your doorstep this spring...

January Cold

Amaryllis blooming in the sunny window of my neighbor, Dr. Darrel Apps. He has a basement grow room where he is probably preparing to up-pot approximately 2,000 daylily seedlings from his hybridizing efforts of the last summer.


My indoor plant captives are telling me the days are getting longer. It hit a very severe minus 21 on the thermometer the other night, though. Yet, about a week ago we had a balmy 55. If nothing, central Wisconsin is a land of extremes, from politics to weather.

Just the other day, Bing brought me a picture of emperor penguins to my homepage. Who doesn't like penguins? Penguins are happiness that waddles. After my happy feet moment, I noticed the backdrop of those penquins included trees of some sort with grey green leaves.

Well, the picture was taken on South George Island, which lies south of the Antartica Circumference. I think that is fancy talk for Antarctic Circle. The picture made me hunt for more information, particularly on their weather. They are currently having high summer there in the South Sandwich Islands where the record balmy summer day is 74 degrees, but tends to hover around 50 and can get down to just above freezing (36 degrees)for their minimums.

What really grabbed my attention was the trivia regarding winter weather to which I am totally relating in these moments. The typical range of winter weather is about 23 degrees to 36 degrees.

Okay, what's with that? When I check winter hardiness of plants for central Wisconsin, they need to withstand temperatures down to NEGATIVE 30, or maybe worse!

According to what I read about this penguin island, there are no residents there. There are a few British researchers and military types (this being part of the area where Argentina and the UK fought it out in the Falkland Islands War in the 1980s), but that's it.

You don't see too many functioning greenhouses here in central Wisconsin in January. Even with a 10-15 degree bump a greenhouse provides, it is just too cold at night and the days are just too short. Almost any growing space needs supplemental light. Dr. Apps has his basement space. I have two light racks in a spare space in my bedroom loft. While Darrel is pricking out daylily seedlings, I will just now start thinking about planting some petunia or lisianthus seedlings and maybe a flat of microgreens or basil.

That last freeze date is still over three months away.

I will stratify some seeds and pour over vegetable seed catalogues, but that is it. A small pot of 50 germinated petunia seedlings becomes two flats (400 square inches) of growing space or seven percent of my total space for indoor growing.

Until May, I'm here in central Wisconsin counting the waxing minutes of sunlight and thinking about penguins.

Sculpture from the Olbrich Botanical Gardens

Black and white does them justice, don't you think?



I'm not sure this sculpture is still on display at the Olbrich Botanical Gardens. This is one of my favorite pictures of an Olbrich sculpture from a couple years ago.

BASF Will Depart from Europe, Moves Research Facilities, Potatoes

One-time potato farmer and his daughter (age 2), future potato picker. The baby there will be picking potatoes, too, in about six years.

I read this article bemoaning BASF's withdrawal from Europe. It seems they have been busy doing GMO-research on the lowly spud. Europeans (population and their politicians and law makers) want nothing to do with this GMO-potato which BASF would like to see grown for "industrial purposes".

So where are they going? Oh yes, you've probably guessed it. They are moving their research to a country that is open to the use of GMO-crops and research on developing those crops. They are moving all their research to the USA.

I'm not a potato expert, not of the chemistry of them, not of the mapping of the potato genome, not of where what proteins and starches lie on the structure of the recombinant DNA.

I grow them. I eat them. That's about the extent of my knowledge. I have to admit, there is not a time I can remember that I haven't known how to chit potatoes, or knew how they grew in the ground, or what the taste of newly dug potatoes actually tasted like. It is like I was born knowing these things as my dad grew them as a cash crop before everything became so mechanized.

I can remember my dad digging them up using a one row potato digger that laid them out on the ground. Someone would ride the digger to make sure the weeds and the vines didn't snarl up the two-foot wide chain.

My dad would sell them to Frito-Lay for chipping potatoes. The local Frito-Lay manufacturer would chip up a hundred pound burlap bag and the aroma of fresh chips would waft out to the car where my sisters and I waited. If the company was happy and would buy 300 hundred pound bags, we would have our work cut out for us scooping up the potatoes into wire potato baskets after school for the next week. But before then, we would get to partake of the freshly chipped potatoes grown in our own soil.

I was probably about eight.

The local manufacturer is gone. My dad no longer grows ten to twenty acres of potatoes as a cash crop. My mother worked as a potato inspector for over a decade for the State of Wisconsin. I think she might know more about potatoes than my dad.

As an adult, it doesn't surprise me that potatoes are the world's fourth most important food crop behind rice, corn, and wheat. What did set me to thinking though is what were the industrial uses which are behind mapping a potato's genome and developing genetically modified potatoes?

The only answer I could come up with was starches.

Potatoes are all about starches. They are the the leading source of starch per acre world-wide, nearly one-third higher than corn. Bayer is one of the companies that are all over this. Potatoes are a sustainable source of starch, they tout.

So you can probably figure out why BASF feels that if there is a significant amount of push-back from Europe, they'll just pick up and go elsewhere with their research and why some might be bemoaning this decision.

Doing a bit of research into what are considered "industrial uses" of these GMO-potatoes, I surprisingly also came up with the manufacture of seed potato as an industrial use, along with animal feed. This is where it starts to get really sticky for me. Potato starches from these GMO-potatoes could be used in compostable plates, carrier bags, biodegradable plant pots, cutlery, wall paper paste, adhesives, in addition to biosurfactants currently being made from petroleum that appear in soap, detergents, and shampoos. The uses appear nearly limitless.

Potatoes can replace oil.

And, it's hard for me to wrap my mind around the science of it.

It also turns out they have been tinkering around with the potato for awhile. In the 1990s, they released a potato resistant at a genetic level to Colorado potato beetle.

My son wants to major in chemistry at college this fall. Maybe, I'll wait for him to finish his degree and he can explain the sciencey part of whether this is good or bad for us. I have a feeling what some of the jobs for our brightest young people may be. It probably won't be potato inspector nor grower.

Think Pink!

"This one, I think, is called a Yink.
He likes to wink, he likes to drink.
He likes to drink, and drink, and drink.
The thing he likes to drink is ink.
The ink he likes to drink is pink.
He likes to wink and drink pink ink.
SO…
If you have a lot of ink,
you should get a Yink, I think." -- From Dr. Suess


Pink flamingo composed of pink striped bromeliads, from the Chicago botanical Gardens greenhouse

I have a pink house, so pink always has a place in my garden. Enjoy these fun pink plants I saw last year.


Pink Asiatic lily at my house

'Pink Fairy' is a ground cover type of rose. I have been trying to establish it as a blooming hedge along my pink house.

'Invincible Spirit' pink hydrangea related to 'Annabelle', making it a cold hardy to zone 3 colored hydrangea, picture taken at Olbrich Botanical Gardens.

'Invincible Spirit'


A chance mutation so a dark-leaved plant can express the pink tone of this chlorophyll producing gene.

I grow this one in a pot indoors, but take cuttings for pots, 'Lana Angelwing' begonia.

"Little Snow, Big Snow"

This picture of snow is not taken by me. It was taken by a snow researcher with an electron microscope. It is not what we think of as a snow flake. There are snowflakes, typically the larger ones that fall during warmer temperatures, that actually look like what we think of when we think of snow flakes. I'm pretty sure, though that this is what snow looks like when we are getting the "little snow, big snow" sort of snow.


Right now, I am watching the teeny, tiniest snowflakes fall out my dining room window. My ancestors were big journal keepers. Being English, one thing they liked to talk about in their journals was the weather. So a lot of the family stores tend to center around the weather and can be reinforced with these journals. Take the entry made over 150 years by my dad's grandfather, "March 23, ...snow is three feet deep on the flat. It is snowing again today..."

My great grandfather, AO, was worrying about planting early potatoes, many times planted here on Good Friday. I am assuming the March 23rd date to be coming up on that day for him. Here in present day central Wisconsin, it hit 55 degrees Fahrenheit here yesterday, on January 11. I have to wonder what AO would have thought about that!

AO's wife, Sarah, carried a rifle with her everywhere she went. Rumor has it she even took it to the outhouse with her, reportedly to shoot at crows, reading material like a Sear and Roebuck catalogue no doubt being put to a different task. Fact is though, they settled in central Wisconsin just a couple years or so after the land treaty with Chief Oshkosh was signed clearing the last of the Menominee Indians from this area. Most likely they still saw some migrating Indians passing through to summer hunting grounds, as this is an area with lots of these trails, one being what is now State Highway 22 which runs very near their homestead.

For all that, the house in which I now live has a "hidey hole" in the floor under the dining room carpet, where a whole family could hide from these "savages".

My forebears no doubt had opportunities to bore the natives with talk about the weather. However, the natives being connected to the climate more than we are today, could hold up their own in the limited way conversation can happen between non-fluent speakers. In my mind's eye, I can see the Indian standing in the dooryard with a blanket draped across his shoulders grunting out "little snow, big snow; big snow little snow," as the first tiny snowflakes hit his brow.

Everyone would nod and smile, and then maybe AO would respond with something like, "It sure is cold today." And again everyone would nod and smile. Accordingly, no one got shot or there would be family stories about that as well. What does come down is that the Indians said this, "little snow, big snow; big snow little snow."

What we are only now coming to understand is snowfall accumulation tends to be larger when the temperature and humidity are right for it; and those condition favor snowflakes of a smaller size. The natives, keen observers which they were, were passing along important meteorological information in those simple halting words and AO's response that it sure was cold seemed to indicate understanding on his part.

I'm not sure he wasn't just polite and talking about the weather. Since moving back to central Wisconsin, I have been keeping track. When we get "little snow", we get more than four inches. Big flakes? Less.

Right now those flakes are so fine and tiny, I'm thinking six inches. With only 6.3" this winter from an average of around 21" at this point, I have to say, "Let it snow!"

Bakers Creek Seed

As 'Celebrity' took the first place spot (and second), I would be remiss not to grow it as everyone had such good luck with it in the area.


I pretty much know what I'm going to plant this year and what varieties. I have been moving away from the tempting and to those things that grow good for me. To keep things interesting though, I do spend my time with lots of seed catalogs.

Looking for the "new-to-me" veggies is a form of plant hunting of which I have been letting my fingers do the digital hunting.

One of my favorite hunting grounds?

Baker Creek. (Check out this cool melon!)

Baker Creek boasts a huge assortment of seed, including just oodles of heirlooms (1,400) and seed savings types. I want to grow what grows good for me so looking at seed saved by someone's grannie from the Ukraine or which an aunt smuggled out of Russia, completely fills the bill for the growing conditions here in central Wisconsin. I also am perusing my pictures of the vegetables entered in the county fair and hunting down those varieties, too.

Baker Creek hasn't paid me a dime to say any of this, just to get that out of the way; but at $2.00 to $4.00, it'll be fun to mix it up a bit with some of their unusual offerings!

Variety is the spice of life. Hopefully, mine will be populated with this African horned cucumber, beautiful orangey-pink eggplants that like it cool, a short 70-day yellow-rind salmon-fleshed water melon, and a couple others I have been eyeing up.

I'll keep you up to date on my finds and how they do.

Happy hunting all!

Gardening: The Spirit of Water

A Waterhouse goddess of water, from whom all goodness flows. I could see myself in this part-time job, with a lofty-sounding title, like "Goddess of Water, Princess of all things Wet, Duchess of Rain, Deziden of Lands Oft-covered with Ice and Snow."

It's January, and it an incredible 45 degrees here, Even for a January thaw that's an incredibly mild temperature. I saw a small boy tapping a toe tentatively into the water running through a culvert by the driveway as he got off the school bus yesterday and it brought me immediately to thoughts of spring pass and myself as that small child testing the waters with a teasing toe.

As an adult, though, I've been trying to wrap my head around what these wonderful temperatures might have in store for us for the gardening year. Do they signify late snow of the wet and heavy sort with tulips in full flower sugared in snow crystals? Or will we have our snow in a series of 1/2" dustings, gone like morning dew? And will we have enough snow to feed the aquifer that runs clear, and clean deep underground bubbling up in an artesian spring north of town?


The fury of Niagara Falls is all too typical of the power, strength, and might of water.


The reflecting waters of a pool at Olbrich Botanical Gardens.

So instead of ice, sleet, snow, rime, blizzards, freezing drizzle; we have gentle rains, cool running water in gullies half frozen, soggy looking lakes.

Will our weather be the like the water's fury at Niagara Falls or the placid calmness of the reflecting pool?

Comfort Food: Lasagna

Meat Lasagna, ready to eat!

All of you watching your diets in the new year, move along! There is nothing to see here!

The rest of you, lasagna rates up there as one of my favorite comfort foods of all time. This recipe makes use of some of the thick, rich tomato sauce canned in late summer. Opening a jar of the red sauce is like opening a jar of sunshine. Also used in this recipe were some chopped red sweet peppers and frozen whole tomatoes.

For this recipe I used the Barilla lasagna sheets (one box of Barilla lasagna sheets are needed for this recipe) which need no pre-cooking.

Ingredient list for Meat Mixture:

1 pound hamburger
1/2 medium onion, chopped
1 bay leaf
3 small whole tomatoes, chopped
1/2 cup sweet red pepper, chopped
1/2 teaspoon basil
1/4 teaspoon black pepper
dash of salt


Simmer above for 20 minutes, add 1/2 cup of tomato sauce and continue to simmer for 10 minutes.

Additional ingredients used in directions to follow:

1 Tablespoon of Olive Oil
Tomato sauce
3/4 pound Shredded Mozarella Cheese
2 Large Eggs
1 Cup of Ricotta Cheese
Dash Garlic Salt
Dash Black Pepper
Dash Basil


Preheat oven to 350 degrees.

Wipe bottom only of a 13" by 9" pan with 1 Tablespoon of olive oil. Pour in 1 cup of tomato sauce. layer four of the Barilla lasagna sheet in sauce. Spread 1/2 of meat mixture onto lasagna sheets.

In a separate bowl scramble two large eggs. Add one cup of ricotta cheese. Whip with a wire whisk until smooth. Spoon 1/3 of mixture into the pan in globs. Sprinkle 1/4 pound of shredded mozarella cheese into pan. Finish layer with 1/2 cup of tomato sauce.

Start a new layer of lasagna sheets. Follow with meat mixture, 1/2 remaining egg/ricotta mixture. Sprinkle with 1/4 pound of shredded mozarella cheese.

Top with a layer of lasagna sheets. Cover with 1/2 cup tomato sauce. Spoon on remaining egg/ricotta cheese mixture. Sprinkle with remaining shredded mozarella. Sprinkle with a dash of garlic salt, black pepper, and basil.

Cook for 40 minutes. Cheese should be golden brown.