Vacation

Wiese Acres Lilac hedge

The Wiese Acres blog is going to be taking a little bit of a vacation from writing.  With gardening in full swing after nearly 9 inches of rain, weeds running rampant, a garden bridal shower to prepare for on Saturday and a wedding to complete preparations for before July 5, time has become a precious commodity.  I will resume writing twice weekly sometime shortly after July 5.  Between now and then, I may post brief updates as I can.

This has been a strange year and my flowers remain about three to four weeks behind their normal bloom schedule.  The lilacs are in full bloom yet, at nearly mid-June.  This is their most glorious year yet.  The colors were vibrant, the flowers, large, the leaves healthy, and the fragrance was heavenly.  I'll be sad to see the season end for them.

My daughter wanted to use peonies in some of the wedding flowers, since that was one of her grandmother's favorite flowers.  I told her last winter I didn't think that would work because the garden peonies would be done blooming and trying to order peonies in and have them stand up in the July heat would not likely be successful.  She resigned herself to using one or two high quality silk peony flowers in with a mixture of other live flowers for the memorial bouquet.  Last weekend, I was able to tell her with pretty good assurance that she would, in fact, have real peonies from the garden to use for her July 5 wedding.  Who would have thought?  Hmmm.  Now what will we do with those silk peonies we bought?

Well, I'll figure something out for the peonies after I'm done enjoying the beautiful days of summer.  I love this time of year when the days are long.  In fact, on a clear night when the moon is out and the stars are shining, it never really seems to get pitch dark here.  I could spend the entire night out in the quiet of the gardens, listening to the toads buzz and the frogs croak, an occasional owl hoot, and the leaves rustling in the breeze.  Until the mosquitoes drive me inside, that is. 

Sweet Potato Planting Time

My sweet potato slips arrived yesterday.  By tonight, the garden should be dried enough that I can get them planted.  Yes, I grow sweet potatoes in North Dakota.  I even grow celery here, but that's a topic for another blog.  While Mother Nature only allows us a short growing season, we have daylight and warmth for many hours a day during that short season, so we can grow things that it seems shouldn't be possible.   The trick is getting the soil warmed up before planting and choosing the right varieties for northern climates. 

Sweet potato varieties range from 90 to 150 days to maturity.  Obviously, I want varieties that are closer to the 90 day maturity than those that need 150 days.  There are four varieties that seem to do the best with our season length- Beauregard, Centennial, Georgia Jet, and Varaman. 

Beauregard is a 90 day sweet potato with smooth, light red skin and deep orange flesh.  It is a very high yielding variety and while many of the potatoes are finger-sized when dug, I usually find at least two or three on each plant that are five to six inches long and three inches or so around.  Even the small ones are absolutely delicious, though.

Centennial is another 90 day sweet potato that has coppery colored skin and the deep orange flesh we all recognize as a sweet potato.  Centennial doesn't yield quite as much as Beauregard, but the flesh of the Centennial is a litle bit finer-grained, moister, and in my opinion, tastier.

Georgia Jet is known as the most reliable northern producer and I have had good luck with it in my garden.  Georgia Jet has a deep red skin, moist flesh, and excellent flavor.  It produces nearly as well as Beauregard for me.

Vardaman is a 100 day variety.  This is my first year growing this variety so I don't have a lot to review yet.  It is a bush type sweet potato, so it can be grown in smaller spaces than the other varieties.  It is marketed as a high yield potato with excellent flavor.  Vardaman's foliage is a distinctive purple, so it will be an attractive addition to the garden.

Sweet potatoes are started from slips, not seeds.  You can start your own slips by cutting a potato and soaking it in water.  This takes time and patience, neither of which I am able to find most days, so I order my slips from a reliable grower. 

Sweet potatoes like a loose, well organically amended soil and they don't like to be planted in soil that is less than 55 degrees F.  They will grow well in sand but tend to languish in heavy clay.  My planting area has been amended for many years and has a high organic matter content that the sweets seem to like.  Sweet potatoes are heavy potassium (potash) feeders, so I will work a little organic potash into the soil before planting.  The don't like high nitrogen levels - if the N is too high, the sweets will grow lush, beautiful foliage, but no tubers.  And, while sweet potato leaves are edible and seen as a delicacy in some cultures, I prefer the tubers myself.

I will lay a strip of black landscape fabric in the planting area and make sure it is lying tightly on the soil.  Then I'll cut eight inch long slits about every two feet.  Through each slit, I'll make a small depression in the soil, then dig a hole that will allow me to insert the rooted area of the slip.  I'll cover the rooted area of the slip, leaving a small depression in the soil to capture water.  I cover the exposed leaves of the slips with a wind and sun protector for the first few days.  I use the one gallon pots that perennial plants are purchased in from the garden centers.  I simply cut the bottom from those pots and stick the cut edge about two inches into the soil.  It's a cheap, easy, and at my place, readily available source for plant protection.  After a few days, I'll remove the protectors and store them for next year.

I'll keep the weeds down, which is made much easier by the landscape fabric, and keep the soil uniformly moist throughout the summer.  Then I'll wait for the fall and harvest time. 

Oh, I can just about taste those sweet potatoes already!

Old Fashioned Bleeding Heart



Wiese Acres Dicentra spectabilis



 The weather has not been conducive to working in the gardens.  I love the rain, but I am beginning to think I would love it a lot more if it would just go away for about a week.  No longer than that, but no less either.  Well, maybe next week.  In the meantime, I've been occupying my time with cleaning house and sewing, and that just isn't very exciting to write about - and probably even less so to read about.  So, I'll talk about my bleeding heart, a plant of fleeting but oh, so awesome, beauty.  It finally burst into bloom this week - a full three weeks later than usual, but it is blooming.

There are newer cultivars of bleeding heart available, but my favorite is still Dicentra spectabilis, or the old-fashioned bleeding heart.  It is one of the oldest known perennials in cultivation and many of us remember it from our grandmother's and great-grandmother's gardens.  It lives for many years and grow into huge, bushy clumps over time, sometimes reaching as much as 3 feet tall and wide. 

My Mom had an ancient bleeding heart on the north side of her house.  That bleeding heart began its life in the shady yard of the old farm house and moved to the new house with the folks when they retired to a smaller acreage.  Over the years, pieces of that bleeding heart were given away.  Those "starts" still grace many yards, including mine, throughout North Dakota and maybe even a few in Montana and South Dakota.  Bleeding hearts don't need dividing very often, but they tolerate it well and are happy to send their offspring out to beautify other locations. 

The foliage of old-fashioned bleeding heart is a bluish-green with lobed leaves.  The leaves are held on fleshy stems and the flowers form on leafless stems that arch away from the foliage, often creating the illusion that the puffy, heart shaped blossoms are dangling in thin air.  The blossoms of Dicentra spectabilis are a rosy-pink, with a white tip that dangles from the center of the "point" of the heart.  Another variety of old-fashioned bleeding heart, Dicentra alba,  has an all white flower.

Bleeding hearts need part shade and actually do their best in nearly full shade.  They need a consistent supply of moisture, but no standing water.  The more sun they receive, the more water they need.  Bleeding hearts like a fertile, loose, and well-drained soil and benefit from a helping of peat moss and compost mixed into the surrounding soil each year. 

Bleeding hearts bloom spectacularly in early to late spring, adding a bright spot to a garden that is otherwise largely just green yet at this time of year.  Their bloom time is only for a few weeks, but the cooler and wetter the weather is, the longer it will bloom.  The flower stems, also known as "racemes", can be used as cut-flowers, staying nice in a vase for up to two weeks, if given fresh water periodically.

After blooming, and when the weather becomes hotter, the bleeding heart will go into dormancy until the following spring.  This does not mean it died, so gardeners need to resist the temptation to dig it out and throw it away.  It will magically re-appear the following spring and reward us with even more blooms with each year of aging.  I plant my bleeding heart in amongst the hostas, shade-loving cranesbill and Solomon's seal.  Those plants are just getting started when the bleeding heart is blooming its best and by the time the bleeding heart goes into dormancy, those other plants have reached their full stride and cover the bare spot nicely.

Bleeding heart adds great beauty and evokes many special memories for me.  It's definitely a keeper in my garden!