Spuds and Naturalizing

It is just spring and not quite April. The Saturday before Palm Sunday and we are in a brief cold snap with the weatherman promising a week of sunny skies and warm temperatures a couple days into Passion Week. Time to plant potatoes. I have halved and quartered five pounds of Red Pontiac seed potatoes and the wounds are curing on a tray on the chest freezer top; they should be ready to plant in a couple days when the weather and soil warm. I will probably plant some straw-mulched late potatoes in early June for fall harvest.

Speaking of potatoes, we just cooked up the last of last year’s sweet potatoes and have a large pot of yams in the fridge to micro wave and eat during this coming week. I was pleasantly surprised by how well the sweet potatoes kept in a basket in our rear utility room. I didn’t follow the best curing methods at harvest but instead just let the tubers dry a few hours in the sun after I dug them. The last of the yams still showed no damage and were as good as the first. For people who don’t have the time, space or inclination for a vegetable garden, sweet potato vines can still be a decorative ground cover in a sunny flower garden for annuals like red cockscomb to grow through. This works especially well if you choose a couple different yam varieties with different shaped leaves and leaf coloration, e.g. forest green and yellow green. As a bonus you still get the root crop in October.

Yellow is the predominant color in the yard now. Daffodils have been blooming now for a couple weeks, and we have gobs of them all around our property. They are naturalized, semi-wild and spread on their own to surprise us in the first warm spell each year. Absolutely zero maintenance. The Forsythia bushes are also blooming now, so still more yellow. My wife cuts daffodils for the table and house and puts them in a dark blue vase. Dark blue seems the perfect contrast hue for all the yellow and we have a few purplish-blue hyacinths up now which give this same color contrast outdoors. The Spirea bushes are sprouting orangeish-red leaves. The scarlet red quince buds are full and will open any day. Quinces are tough as nails and are one of my favorite bushes. I think of them as early-spring roses.

But naturalization is not all about color; it is very much about tough plants, very low maintenance, ground covers, and just plain being too darn lazy to mow an area. During the first warm snap in early March, I lopped off and hacked down the scrub growth on our road bank. It is a fair-sized area that is too steep and too much trouble to mow, even with a riding mower. I scattered some chopped off aster bushes up around the fence and then planted clumps of Hoosier “ditch lilies” spaced every three feet down to the gravel road. These clumps should take over the bank within a year, a sea of leaf foliage and spreading rhizome roots. I like to plant plants together which have similar leaves but different flowering dates. I intend to add some surprise lilies and yuccas to the orange June-blooming ditch lilies to get some white and purple July blossoms in the same bed.

Yuccas are a desert plant and are unbelievably tough. When we wanted to put in the driveway to our garage there was a yucca in the way. Not wanting to waste a good plant, I dug it up and planted it elsewhere, but it had a deep taproot that I cut off. From that taproot it grew back through five inches of hard packed white rock driveway—twice. I had to use Round Up® it to kill it.

Our sandy, desert-like acreage is full of these tough, yet beautiful flowering plants: trumpet vine, prickly pear cacti, morning glory, and honey suckle etc. which I concentrate in patches to naturalize areas that I can enjoy without any mowing at all. Time to get off the keyboard and get outside. Got to walk-the-walk a little too.