Scanner art by Craig Cramer, gardening & more
Wet and stormy week. Those lovely volunteer grass patches I posted about a week ago went down. So did my Scotch thisltes, which has never happened before. (But that happenstance has me working on a Plan B pruning plan that could transform Scotch thistles from an architectural skyscraper of a plant to a prostate groundcover. More on that later.)
A week ago:
Gotta go weed…
Late blight — a very destructive disease of tomatoes and potatoes (yeah, the same disease that caused the Irish potato famine) — has appeared here in New York earlier and more widespread than ever before.
Go check your tomatoes and potatoes for signs of the disease. If you’ve got it, there’s nothing you can do about it. But it’s important that you seal up the infected plants in a plastic bag to prevent its spread to other gardens or commercial farms, and report it to your local Cooperative Extension office.
You can find details on the Cornell University Department of Horticulture blog. Meg McGrath, Cornell plant pathologist has excellent images of the disease in her photo gallery, and Amy Ivy, horticulturist in Clinton and Essex Counties has a podcast on the subject.
The twist on this one: Late blight doesn’t overwinter up here. Its spores are usually carried up from the South on storm fronts. This year, it appears that one source of spores are from infected plants shipped in from production facilities in the South.
Sometimes it’s what you don’t do that counts.
The west edge of my water garden has subsided. That nice patch of lawn you see Jade standing on in my banner image has, for the past couple of years, been soggy right straight through the summer. So this summer, I decided not to fight it so hard and let a couple of patches go unmowed. Now I have a couple of nice drifts of not-too-shabby but unidentified grass growing there. One friend commented about how it enhanced the water garden from a distance by partly obscuring its rectilinear outline.
Shot a bunch of close-ups of the grass. (Can anyone ID it?) But I’m too lazy tonight to decide which I like best.
One of my favorite eye-candy sites (non-gardening) is EnglishRussia (‘Because something cool happens daily on 1/6 of the Earth’s surface”). I have a creepy affinity for all things former-Soviet and Eastern European. And this photo gallery, Art on the Plant, really struck a chord.
And I love the broken-English (much better than my Russian, for sure) descriptions:
This is the biggest Ural plant “URALMASHâ€, in order to build it they destroyed thousand of square miles of virgin thousand years old aged forests 60 years ago. It was working thru all the Soviet era and then during the capitalistic phase of modern Russian economy too, but now because of the world’s crisis it has been stopped. Now the rooms of the plant stand still and some artist has completed the nature paintings on the lockers around the plant so that it looks even more creepy now.
But this is still my favorite piece of Soviet arcana …
Over the weekend, I passed along a link to this picture from the streets of Iran to my buddy Julie over at The Human Flower Project, hoping that she’d write something about it. It reminded me of other iconic images from the ’60s and this work by London graffitti artist Banksy.
Instead, Julie asked me to write a little something. You can read it here.
Thanks for the nudge Julie.
