And what might this be? One of those clever compostable pots, in a new and improved size? No. This is a rootbound plant. Let me be more clear: It is the mother of all rootbound plants. I’ve never seen its equal. It only looks like it’s encased in a beige box; that perfectly smooth surface is actually a tightly packed network of roots.

The first sign of trouble was when I tipped the pot over to poke through the drainage holes to loosen the plant. I couldn’t even see the drainage holes. The roots had not only come through them but formed a dense mat covering the bottom of the pot. If you’d been looking only at the base of the pot, you’d never have even known its actual color was black.

No amount of pushing, prodding or coaxing would get the plant out; I had to cut the pot away (another first). The whole thing came out with this beige-box base. Weird. I didn’t lose as much as a speck of potting soil; honestly, I could barely even see the potting soil.

With a plant that’s not root-bound—or at least still has some soil around the root that can be manipulated—you should massage the roots to loosen them up, which helps them take up water and nutrients after planting. I gave this guy an experimental squeeze; the roots didn’t even budge. Massaging was impossible. So I sliced into the roots with my trusty garden knife.

Actually, this technique is useful for any rootbound plant; it just takes some getting used to. Slicing through roots feels not only counterintuitive but downright foolhardy. But it really is a good thing. And for a plant like this, it’s essential. Otherwise the roots would have to force their way past a fibrous wall, which just adds to the shock the plant is already feeling from the transplant process itself. So slice away. The idea is not to hack anything off, just to make enough cuts to aerate the roots and open things up a bit.

So far, this patient is doing quite nicely. In fact, it looks a lot better than the coneflowers I planted at the same time, and they weren’t rootbound at all. Go figure.

…shown here.

Went to my favorite greenhouse the other day over my lunch hour, intending to spend, oh, twenty bucks or so on a few perennials. Sixty-some dollars later, I was walking to my car with this flat. I should’ve snapped it while it had the phlox and echinacea in there, too.

Phlox seemed like a good choice for the rock garden that isn’t supposed to be a rock garden. Five minutes into digging, though, I was cursing yet again the landscapers who failed to remove the volcanic rock when they took out all the old shrubs in this spot. Digging three holes for plants in 4-inch pots took me—my hand to God—half an hour.

Let me know if you need some volcanic rock.

Planting the echinacea was a happier event, although it involved no less digging. I had one good-sized plant, for which I paid six bucks. But upon closer inspection, it looked emininently dividable. Bonus! I eased it out of its pot, then carefully sliced down through the woody roots with one of my favorite gardening tools, an old kitchen knife, and got three plants for the price of one.

This knife is nothing special. In fact, it’s a crapppy one with a plastic handle, probably purchased when I was stocking my first kitchen at Goodwill and the Salvation Army. It had been been useless as a kitchen knife for years, but repurposing it as a garden tool was a brilliant idea, if I do say so myself. I use it for weeding, cleaning out sidewalk and driveway cracks, slicing through woody weed roots, dividing plants, and myriad other tasks. Dig through your kitchen drawers for knives you don’t use anymore. Once you have one in your arsenal, you’ll wonder how you ever gardened without it.

So today, on with the rest of it: coreopsis, forget-me-nots, soapwort, campanula, parsley and a beeyootiful yellow coneflower I can’t wait to see in bloom.

I would’ve called this the project du jour, but no project at my house gets done in a day unless we’re paying somebody else to do it.

I really admire gardeners who have a landscaping to-do list and breeze through it in businesslike fashion; me, I just can’t. It’s not that I don’t have a list. I just don’t pay much attention to it. A lot of what happens in my yard is ruled by whim and caprice, and what I happen to be in the mood to tackle—an organic approach, if you will. When the project is ready, the gardener will appear. Any time I walk outside with my disposable gloves, a muck bucket and a trowel, it’s anything-can-happen day.

So this project started like most of mine do, on the spur of the moment. This bed of sweet woodruff is determined to make its way into the grass, and I’ve given it a wide berth; it’s probably expanded by a foot or so since we moved here. But enough already. A border will help me stick to my guns about limiting its spread, and it’ll help our sons figure out exactly where the bed ends and the grass starts when they’re out there with the mower.

I decided on a rock border after puzzling for the millionth time over the abundance of rocks on our property. They aren’t artfully arranged or anything—they’re just there. Some are in strategic spots around the foundation, so their placement makes some sense from a water-diversion standpoint. It’s the random scatterings in the gardens that baffle me. (The previous owners were not random sorts. Before we bought the place, we did a walk-through with our inspector, then sat at the dining table to go over the results of his inspection. The next day, Mrs. Homeowner called her Realtor and had a hissy fit because we didn’t leave the dining room chairs exactly where we’d found them. So.)

I decided to just experiment a bit and pick up each and every random rock I spotted in the course of an hour or so of gardening, and this is the result: an hour’s worth of rocks, and I was hardly even trying. So there should be plenty of rocks to finish this project. I’m shooting for the end of May. No sense in rushing things.

Judybusy and I were chatting in the comments section last week about good neighbors. Judybusy has That Damn Nancy (so named because her garden always looks “pristine”). Neighbors like that really help you raise the level of your own game. And if they’re nice in the bargain, it’s a bonus.

At our previous place, we were blessed with two such neighbors. Alice and Joan were extraordinary gardeners, generous with their advice, quick to praise my triumphs and gentle with their criticisms. Alice educated me about the horrors of buckthorn and introduced me to the joy of bleeding hearts. The three of us swapped plants and stories over the fence.

Their husbands were equally wonderful. When we fond a ceiling leak in our basement bathroom, Alice’s husband, then well into his 70s, came right over and helped my husband pull the upstairs toilet and replace the seal—a task my spouse would never, ever have undertaken on his own. (I don’t even let him handle a power drill.) Joan’s husband brought us the surplus from their strawberry-picking expeditions every July and delivered her exquisitely crafted Christmas cookies every December.

Both couples were generous with our children, too, always chatting them up, telling us what great kids they were, slipping them small gifts here and there, giving them a few bucks for their graduations. We would’ve been lucky just to get to know them. Having them as neighbors was a gift.

The neighbor whose back yard bordered ours was a little more prickly, complaining when one of my daylilies sent up a sprout in her yard on the other side of the chain-link fence. She once called the local constabulary to complain that our cats were pooping in her flowerbeds. A village cop came to our door, sheepishly informed me about the complaint, and pointed out that if he got another one, they’d have to come and corral our wayward felines. (He seemed embarrassed by the whole thing; I don’t think he made eye contact at all beyond his initial “Hello, ma’am.”) After that, we made a valiant effort to keep our cats from fleeing the house. Alice and Joan were horrified by this story; they were convinced our cats were keeping the neighborhood rodents out of our houses, because they’d had this problem before we moved in, and never since. As soon as we corralled the cats, both their houses were plagued with chipmunks in the basements. (If Backyard Neighbor had this problem, she never let on.)

In our new place, we’ve had no problem whatsoever with our neighbors…except the ones whose backyard abuts ours. It started when the man of the house pulled up in our driveway and marched up to the door to announce that our son’s drumming was hampering their ability to watch TV. Yes, you can hear the drums from outside, but are you kidding me? He apparently got up from his spot in front of the TV, drove around the block (which took him twice as long as it would have to just walk across the back yard), parked in my driveway and rang the doorbell to impart this news. Oddly, he had a bluetooth headset firmly planted in one ear—to better allow his spouse to hear our conversation, I suspect. I was furious, but kept my calm and told him I’d tell the kid to keep it down.

(A bit of explanation: The kid does have a drum kit. It is in the back of the house, although it’s below ground level. Yes, a certain amount of sound drifts outdoors. But we keep all the windows and doors closed when he plays, and he never plays after 6 p.m., and never for more than 30 minutes. Folks, get a grip.)

Fast-forward to last weekend. A tornado watch was in effect, and the wind gusts were so fierce I didn’t feel entirely safe working in the back yard, where we have more than a dozen trees, many of them prone to dropping limbs when the wind is howling. I look out across the patio, and there is Backyard Neighbor, spraying weed killer on the slope behind his own patio. I don’t know what he was using, but it was a serious device—a long cylindrical tank with an attached hose and sprayer. The winds had to have been gusting to 30 mph or more. I could not believe my eyes. Has this man never heard of chemical drift? (He wasn’t wearing a mask or gloves, either.)

I was still watching in amazement when a profound chemical stench came drifting through the patio doors and into the dining room, where I was minding my own business with a bowl of soup. I could only grimace and hope he wasn’t killing anything in my yard, but who knows where that stuff ended up?

Now I think I know. My largest bed of sweet woodruff, which sits haplessly downwind of his spraying zone, has gone from vibrant green to sickly yellow, and some of the leaves are blackened and scorched around the edges.

As soon as I closed the patio door on Saturday and explained the situation to my son, he said, “That jerk. I’m going downstairs to play drums.”

I can’t say that I’m sorry.

Readers, let me introduce you to Will Allen. If this man’s story doesn’t inspire you, as gardeners and as human beings, nothing will.

Will Allen is the founder of Growing Power, a nonprofit based in Milwaukee and devoted to promoting sustainable urban agriculture. He won a MacArthur genius grant two years ago, is on Time magazine’s list of the most 100 influential people in the world, and has an astounding dream: to build a $10 million vertical farm on the two urban Milwaukee acres that are home to Growing Power’s greenhouses and thriving fishery. The plans for the five-story farm are a thing of beauty, complete with solar panels and a system for capturing runoff to water the plants.

Growing Power started in 1993 to provide urban teenagers a place to work, and to provide themselves and their neighbors with affordable food that wasn’t crap. It’s turned into something much more, with eco-friendly farms in both rural and urban areas, including one adjacent to Chicago’s Cabrini-Green neighborhood. Participants range from urban youth to urban planners. And these kids (and adults) aren’t just doing busy work—they’re providing food for their neighborhoods and learning valuable skills in the bargain, from the science of vermiculture to marketing strategy to aquaponics to apiculture. They raise poultry and livestock, too.

Restaurants committed to serving locally grown food, including Madison’s renowned L’Etoile, buy produce from Growing Power. If you live in Milwaukee, you can buy a market basket of 20 to 25 pounds of seasonal produce—enough to feed four people for a week—for sixteen bucks. Sign me up.

Will is busily spreading his gospel to other urban areas—Seattle, New York, the Twin Cities. Last year, the National Governors Association honored him for distinguished service to state government. He’s a man on a mission. This 2009 excerpt from his blog explains:

For years I have argued that our food system is broken, and I have tried to teach what I believe must be done to fix it. This year, and last, we have begun seeing the unfortunate results of systemic breakdown. We have seen it in higher prices for those who can less afford to pay, in lines at local food pantries, churches and missions, and in the anxious eyes of people who have suddenly become unemployed. We have seen it, too, in nationwide outbreaks of food-borne illness in products as unlikely as spinach and peanuts.

Severe economic recession certainly has not helped matters, but the current economy is not alone to blame. This situation has been spinning toward this day for decades. And while many of my acquaintances tend to point the finger at the big agro-chemical conglomerates as villains, the fault really is with all of us who casually, willingly, even happily surrendered our rights to safe, wholesome, affordable and plentiful food in exchange for over-processed and pre-packaged convenience. …

We have to start subsidizing health and well-being by rewarding sustainable practices in agriculture and assuring a safe, adequate and wholesome food supply to all our citizens. And we need to start this reform process now, as part of the national stimulus toward economic recovery.

He’s accomplished more in seven years than most of us will in a lifetime, and he’s just getting started. And that $10 million vertical farm? I wouldn’t bet against it.

In the South, they have kudzu. Here in the Midwest, we have garlic mustard.

Actually, it’s spreading beyond the Midwest. Introduced for its herbal properties from Europe in the 1800s, it’s now wreaking havoc from Maine to Alaska. To call it invasive is an understatment, like calling the Hoover Dam a fair-to-middlin’ piece of architecture. Garlic mustard is such a scourge that it poses a genuine threat to woodlands, where it rapidly takes over, crowding out native plants. In Washington, it’s putting entire forests at risk. You can read about that here.

This part kills me:

Sasha Shaw, a noxious weed specialist with King County, said it’s possible the plant could have been introduced to the area in gravel dropped recently by a visitor from the Midwest.

Oh, sure, blame some hapless Midwesterner, tromping through the pristine Pacific Northwest with gravel on his shoes. Or maybe the visitor was just walking around, aimlessly dropping rocks here and there. You can blame the Midwest for many things—Jerry Springer, Woody Hayes, Bobby Knight, fires on Lake Erie, Big Butter Jesus—but don’t try to pin the spread of garlic mustard on us, too.

The village I call home is doing its part, or trying to. We’re blessed with many, many acres of woodlands, and every spring we have a garlic mustard weed-out day, during which an army of volunteers takes to the woods with heaps of plastic bags, yanking up this stuff by the armload.

Despite these weed-out efforts, lots of property owners seem to remain blissfully unaware. My heart sinks every spring when I see roadside rights-of-way teeming with this stuff. It takes tremendous restraint to not stop in the middle of the street and start pulling it up. Don’t the neighbors see it? But then they don’t seem to notice the buckthorn, either. And that has thorns.

The good news is, garlic mustard is pretty easy to pull up, especially if it’s in moist soil, which is where I usually spot it. Small plants have fairly shallow roots, which also helps in the yanking department. Once it’s the size of this sucker in my yard, though, it’ll have a taproot. (Dear reader, I allowed it to flower just to have a specimen for you to see; you’re welcome.) And just like that other taprooted nuisance, the dandelion, it needs to be eradicated down to the tip of its life source, or you’ll just have to yank it all over again next spring. (Or maybe sooner; I’m not sure because I’ve never left a taproot behind. When it comes to garlic mustard, I don’t mess around.)

If you remove garlic mustard before it flowers, you can throw it on the compost heap. If it’s already flowered, though, dispose of it in the trash; otherwise the seeds will contaminate your compost. The same rule applies if you’re lucky enough to live in a community that recycles residents’ yard waste as mulch. Repeat after me: no flowering garlic mustard in the communal collection bins. You’ll only be spreading the misery.

Last night’s torrential rainfall made for a white-knuckle drive home from work for my husband, but the yard and garden loved it. The hostas seemed to spring up another 2 inches overnight, and the sweet woodruff is justthisclose to bursting into bloom.

I’m lucky to live in a climate that gets plenty of rainfall during the growing season—well, usually. We can almost always count on a spell of drought conditions sometime during July. But I never, ever water anything in my yard (except the potted plants, which rarely survive on only the moisture that Mother Nature provides). There’s no great secret involved here. It’s just a matter of planting things that will thrive on existing rainfall (or lack thereof) without a fuss.

In my experience, virtually any native plant will take whatever nature dishes out, whether it’s in sun or shade. I’ve grown daylilies, Shasta daisies, coneflowers, coreopsis, rose mallows, yarrow and gaillardias with no effort whatsoever beyond the initial planting. And if you’re a lazy gardener like me, this is the only way to fly. You dig a hole. You put the plant in the hole. You add water, re-fill the hole, water a little more, and walk away. If you’re really, really conscientious, you mulch. And that’s about it. You do need to weed, of course, but if you’re a serious mulcher, you won’t even have to do much of that.

This water-saving approach is known as xeriscaping—a fancy word for planting stuff that doesn’t need supplemental watering. Saving water is no small benefit if you’re occasionally subject to watering restrictions, and of course it’s good for the planet. It’s also a godsend if you have large garden spaces and limited time to tend them. I’d rather be on the patio reading a book. Or scouring my favorite greenhouse for a new native to try. If you have any suggestions, I’m all ears.

We’ve added some new content here on the right rail that I hope you’ll find useful. First, there’s the blogroll (and if anyone has a better term for this, please let me know; I couldn’t think of one). You’ll find a few garden-related sites, along with links to some of my friends’ blogs, wherein you’ll find a little bit of everything—commentary on pop culture and political issues, the business of TV, the occasional recipe, and even archaeology. Explore, why don’t you?

The newest addition—What IS this thing?—is a guide to some of the plants you might see in your garden and need help identifying. You’ll find a photo of each plant, with a brief description of my own experiences with it. Please poke around, and feel free to post comments, suggestions, kind words of moral support and so forth. The list is somewhat limited right now, but keep checking back—I plan to update it. A lot.

Let me count the ways.

If hostas were dudes, they’d be burly manly men, guys who know how to reshingle the roof and put up drywall. These plants are garden workhorses, and this homely little photo illustrates why.

Last fall, I dug and divided one hosta after another, replanting them in bare spots, particularly those areas where I’d eliminated some useless and unidentifiable shrubs. I could not for the life of me figure out why the previous gardener who lived here had planted these bushes. I gave them a full two years to redeem themselves, but they were disappointments—no blossoms, no fruit, no pretty skeletons to provide winter interest. Even the foliage was uninspired. So, out they went. And in went the divided hostas.

About a month ago, I figured out the true purpose of those shrubs: erosion control. They were in a shady border that stays moist virtually all summer, on a slight grade that ends in a swale where our backyard abuts the neighbors’. Snowmelt and spring rain washed a considerable amount of topsoil down into the swale, leaving more than a dozen transplanted hostas sitting there helplessly with their roots hanging out. The soil was too wet for me to wade in and replant them. Reader, I was the very picture of despair. All that work, swept away. I figured my only recourse would be to plant them all over again and hope they survived.

Lo and behold, the garden is now about as dry as it ever gets—and check it out. The transplants are sprouting new leaves in spite of me. I’m reluctant to disturb them by digging in and replanting them more deeply now—what the heck, they seem to be doing fine. But I’ll give them a nice warm blanket of mulch, just in case.

I’ve been remiss in my blogmistress duties lately, but there’s an excellent reason. I’m working on some new content and it’s taking longer than I expected. But a brand-spanking-new right rail will be coming your way soon.

It occurs to me that writing a gardening blog is a bit of a fool’s errand. Spring is prime time for writing this stuff, but it’s also the time when I have so little time…because I’m in the garden. Many years ago, the Baltimore Sun columnist Susan Reimer wrote about the toll gardening takes on the rest of your normal responsibilities. At the time, she was contemplating a load of mulch sitting on her driveway, awaiting her ministrations, and gave her family notice that for the next three months, they shouldn’t expect her to prepare anything that looked like dinner. Word.

(Sidebar: I met Susan once, at a reunion of our college newspaper. I’m quite sure she wouldn’t remember me, but Susan—if you’re Googling yourself and stumble across this post—it was lovely meeting you, and I enjoy your column. Go Bobcats!)

Spring seems to have finally arrived, and we’re all pinching ourselves while we wait for the other shoe to drop. My husband had the lawnmower tuned up and the snowblower taken away on Monday; he is freaking asking for it. We’ve been known to get snow as late as May around here. Why tempt the gods?

I’m resisting the urge to buy flats of annuals and plant all the things I’m envisioning for this year’s garden—several varieties of coneflowers, native grasses, red and yellow coreopsis—and trying to content myself with pulling weeds. I saw the first dandelion bloom this afternoon. And there’s buckthorn. There’s always buckthorn.

If you are unfamiliar with this garden scourge, I envy you. This is a plant that, when small, mimics a perfectly useful shrubbery, something that might grow full and leafy, maybe even with spring blossoms. It is none of those things. It will grow full and leafy, but it will also produce three-inch thorns, woody stems that succumb only to a handsaw, and roots that succumb to nothing I’ve yet discovered.

At our old house, I discovered the one flowering shrub in the yard was a form of honeysuckle that’s banned in our village because it’s invasive. I gamely set about toppling it, only to find my progress thwarted by thorns. Buckthorn was hopelessly entangled with the honeysuckle.

My retired neighbor watched me hack away at this mess for about an hour before he took pity and finished the job with a chainsaw. Even THAT took a while. (And he wielded a mean, very efficient chainsaw.) We didn’t bother trying to eradicate the stump; it was the size of a basketball.

Buckthorn was rampant elsewhere in the garden, too, mostly in spots where it had twined itself around the chain-link fence. Once this stuff gets a toehold, with serious roots, there’s nothing for it but to keep hacking it down and cutting back the leaves and shoots. For heaven’s sake, it’s impervious to Roundup! Truly, this stuff comes from Satan.

Our new yard has buckthorn, too. It comes up amid the shrubs, in the garden beds, in the raspberries, in the lawn. Our first summer here, I was walking one of the beds, trying to identify everything. One plant in particular had me puzzled. It was a 5-foot tree growing from three separate trunks, the foliage trimmed and trained into a perfect globe. Then I took a closer look at the leaves. You guessed it—we were the proud owners of a buckthorn topiary. It was toast by nightfall.