Build a pondless water feature

Burbling Water in the Garden

Six simple steps to a pondless water feature

for less than $50

By Amy McDowell

Water features add motion and sound to the garden, drawing both people and wildlife. The garden pond’s wave of popularity in the past decade makes the old standby water feature—the birdbath—unexciting and stale. Birdbaths add an architectural element to the garden, but the stagnant water evaporates so quickly that it’s hard to think of them as a true water feature.

With little more effort and expanse than a birdbath, you can add a water feature with moving water and a large reservoir that won’t run dry quickly. It is a ground-level feature with water burbling over a pile of rocks. The materials cost less than $50, assembly takes just a couple of hours, and birds will love it.

Materials:

   18-inch round plastic tub

   21-inch round metal grill

   Small submersible pond or fountain pump

   2-foot rubber tubing or PVC pipe

   Safe outdoor electrical source

   2-3 dozen rocks, fist-size and smaller

Six simple steps:

1-      Dig a hole large enough to bury the plastic tub up to its rim. Set the tub inside and backfill with soil around the outside.

2-      Set the pump in the center of the tub, using rocks to keep it upright if necessary. Run the cord to a safe electrical source, but don’t plug it in yet.

3-      Connect the tubing or pipe to the pump’s discharge so it rises straight up in the center of the tub to a point several inches above the rim.

4-      Place the metal grill on top of the tub with the tubing running up through the center of the grill. Bend the bars in the center of the grill if necessary.

5-      Stack rocks on top of the grill, concealing the empty tub below, the tubing and the grill. The rocks will be higher in the center and taper off to ground level at the edges.

6-      Fill the tub with water and plug in the pump. Rearrange the rocks so the water burbles over them.

Keeping a Garden Journal

The invaluable garden journal

By Amy McDowell

My garden adventures—all of them—are documented.  Even the time I accidentally splattered myself with the slimy guts of two dozen plump four-inch tomato hornworms. Eew. Yes, it was gross.  Gardening is messy, but I learn things all the time.

I record everything in my garden journal. I now have about fifteen years’ worth of helpful and humorous lessons documented. I wrote about waiting three years for the first bloom on my fragrant bourbon rose, finding a baby deer in the woods behind my home, and the thrill of seeing a dog-tooth violet bloom for the first time. There are crazy and delightful stories like the time masses of praying mantis hatched in my car when I left two egg casings on the warm dashboard. I have a record of the time a ground squirrel nearly drowned in the whisky barrel and the time a raccoon was trapped under the heavy bowl of the large antique bird bath after he accidentally tipped it over on himself. I documented every deer sighting, hawk sighting, and screech owl.

My journals include recipes for homemade hummingbird nectar, deer repellent, insect spray, and even rooting hormone. I sketch and chronicle ideas I have tried, such as the homemade scent dispensers for fox urine to repel rabbits, and I jot down ideas that I have seen in other gardens, such as using cardboard boxes for rose cones.

The practical side of a garden journal is to record the botanical and common names of new plants I put in. I sketch where I planted them, and sometimes even document where I bought them and how much I paid. Sometimes they grow beautifully, and other times they die off. It is helpful to read through old garden journals and remember the successes and failures.

My journals are an invaluable archive of my joys and blunders in the garden. My lesson about hornworms is that when you go about ferociously plucking them from a datura and stomping them to goo with your right foot, the guts will spurt far and wide—all over your left leg. Later you will look down and wonder, “What is this green crusty stuff all over my pants? – Oh, sick!”

Hydrangeas, pink and blue

Our blushing Hydrangeas

By Amy McDowell

A Hydrangea’s color is as changeable as a chameleon. You may buy a Hydrangea with sky-blue blooms at the garden center that turns to pink in your garden. It’s a frustrating trait for gardeners intent on designing with a particular color. The Hydrangeas, though, are simply responding to their environment. A low soil pH (acidic) will turn Hydrangeas blue and a high soil pH (alkaline) will turn them pink.

Virtually all of the soils in central Iowa are alkaline. Areas where fallen oak leaves or evergreen needles collect and decay may be more neutral, but it’s unlikely that you’ll find any acidic soils with a pH lower than six in this area. And that means no blue Hydrangeas for our gardens. Plant a blue and it will convert to pink. (The whites stay white regardless of pH.)

Even if you go crazy mulching with pine needles or pouring on Miracid or Aluminum Sulfate, the plant’s response will be both mild and temporary. Not only are our soils alkaline, but our tap water is, too. A blue Hydrangea grown in a controlled environment like a pot is likely to turn pink eventually just because of the water.

So pink or white it is. At least we’ve got choices of bush, tree or climbing Hydrangeas. We can decorate our gardens with mopheads like Annabelle, lacecaps like Radiata, repeat bloomers like Endless Summer and White Moth and ornamental trees like Pee Gee and Pink Diamond. We’ve also got the white lacecap climbing Hydrangea and the deep burgundy fall color of the oakleaf Hydrangea.

Variations in bloom and foliage are ever expanding. Although its not hardy here, the new “Lady in Red” Hydrangea (zones 6-9) is red stemmed and red veined. It’s just a matter of time before hybridizers create something like that for our colder winters.

Don’t be blue when your Hydrangea blushes pink. We all must adapt to our environment.

Crabapples Add Curb Appeal

Crabapples add curb appeal to salt-box homes

By Amy McDowell

Two-story homes are immensely popular around the Des Moines metro area for one simple reason; homebuyers can get a bigger home for less money. They are much cheaper per square foot than ranch-style homes. After moving in, new homeowners struggle to landscape those boxy facades, and it’s common to see a ring of short shrubs (nearly always Spirea) around the home’s foundation. Unfortunately, that kind of landscape is out of scale with the size of the home and ends up looking chintzy. Some designers call that look “garnish around the turkey”.

A single tree in the front yard will aesthetically break up the tremendous bulk of the home and make it appear grounded. The tree’s canopy shouldn’t conceal the home in a dark leafy mass; it should be planted off center so it will not directly block the front door or any windows from the street.

Although a towering oak with rugged branches arching to shelter the roofline is the ideal tree for many reasons, oaks are slow growing and planted for future generations to enjoy. Go ahead and plant one, but you’ll also want to plant something that will grow faster. Plant an ornamental tree that will give your home curb appeal and help it blend with the landscape within a handful of years.

Crabapple trees are the best ornamental trees in Iowa. They are amazingly well adapted to our heavy clay soils and bitter cold winters. Tour the Arie den Boer Crabapple Arboretum at Water Works Park and you’ll see specimens that have survived many a flood. Trees that can survive floods are tough-tough-tough when it comes to living in clay soil. Crabapples bloom faithfully each spring in pink, white or red.

For 15 years, “Spring Snow” Crabapple was all the rage because it is fruitless. But being fruit-free isn’t all that important for the crabapple hybrids of today—they nearly all have tiny fruits that are retained long into the winter months. Mushy golf-ball-sized crabapples rotting in the grass are a thing of the past, thank goodness. New crabapple varieties are bred for rust resistance, too, so there no problems with ratty-looking foliage and late-summer leaf drop.

If your two-story home sticks awkwardly out of the landscape, plant a crabapple. They are hardy as heck, fast growing and beautiful bloomers.