Jenmenke

Road Warrior

miscanthus

We’re Not in Kansas Anymore

This is Minnesota, folks.

…Despite those 70 degree October temperatures that somehow, unbelievably, made it in to early November.

We reveled in it. We wore flip-flops in November! The decadence. The sheer thrill!

It’s basically what every other state in the nation gets to do on a regular basis, except us. I bet they wear flip-flops (which I call thongs, but get harassed by the younger set for calling footwear by the now ubiquitous term for a g-string) in Kansas.

Well, no more. We got about 10″ of heavy wet snow on Saturday that is still sticking around on Monday. […and Tuesday, and now Wednesday]

So this post is an ode to Fall. I never got around to posting some of my favorite pictures of late fall. And now the snow went and wrecked it all. It smashed my beautiful Miscanthus grass and the pretty asparagus fronds. It covered up all my shovels in the garden that I was lulled into thinking I would use again. It dashed my hopes for a Christmas photo (no, I still don’t have one yet) in the golden light of a daylight savings savings sunset (at about 3 pm).

If I could embed music, I would choose something sad from The Mission.

None of these have been edited in Photoshop. They are straight out of the camera. Not a credit to me as a photographer, but to God’s majesty and the beautiful colors of fall!

I suppose that could be in focus better, but isn’t it pretty? The color?

I’m a spaz with the focus. It’s true. But this one is better.

This is the perfect picture to show the season: Peegee Hydrangeas caught between Fall and Winter.

Another lesson on how not to focus, but pretty none-the-less. This is the asparagus fronds in the dewy rain of late October.

And then I looked up from my tendency to go “macro” all the time and saw this one lone birch tree.

So pretty.

And now it’s all gone. Including — again! — my sweet meat squash that got froze-to-death and turned to mush. I’ll probably never get to taste one of them.

I do love snow. But I hate the mess. The mud before it really freezes. The cold. The heating bills. The grey skies.

Snow is the only bonus prize of winter.

The Trouble with Blue Fescue

I Hate To Say “I Told You So,”

So I’ll say “I told him so.”

(Yes, I mean Dave.)

Two summers ago, when we did some new plantings around the house (after 13 years of living here), Dave was set on Blue Fescue in a large area back by the pool. Having dabbled in ornamental grasses for several years, I was dead set against it.

“No Blue Fescue.”

He (and the landscaper) wanted to know what my grudge was against the cute little grass, all spikey and feathery, depending on the time of year.

“Because it isn’t hardy here.”

Au contrair, said they.

“OK, well, even if it says ‘hardy to zone 4,’ I’ve grown it and it doesn’t thrive here. Even if it makes it through winter, it looks like shit.”

“Jennie, don’t swear.”

“Sorry. I just don’t like Blue Fescue, OK? Pick another plant.”

…back and forth and back and forth it went. Dave won. I lost. And we planted about 50 of the suckers.

Then we had a particularly rough winter. The nursery guaranteed the plants and we replaced over half of them. The … (I want you to know that Dave just walked by, looked over my shoulder, read the only sentence that he could see and said, “they don’t look like shit.” and we started the Blue Fescue argument all over again! He’s gone now, so I resume my diatribe.)

The following winter (this past winter) was one of the most gentle that we have ever had, due to the early, insulating layer of snow we had that lasted for the entire season. I had plants alive after the snow melted this year. That has never happened! And yet… this is how the Blue Fescue fared:

It is what I look out at everyday when I’m sitting on the can and it drives me absolutely batty. I’m sure that if it weren’t the view I contemplated for minutes at a time everyday, it would not bug me nearly as much, but there you have it.

It’s a beautiful plant when it thrives. This is it before it flowers

All spikey and blue-grey. Then it sends up its feathery seed heads and it takes on a completely different look of chartreuse green.

Which is of course much different than it’s normal, more subdued state in our yard:

Charming, no?

No.

It’s frustrating because Blue Fescue — this is Elijah Blue blue fescue — is supposed to be hardy to zone 4a. And maybe it is, who knows. I’ve always considered my garden to straddle the line between zones 3 and 4. But everything should have made it through last winter. I’d love to hear from others familiar with this plant. Maybe ‘Elijah Blue’ just hates ‘Jennie With The Pool.’

I’ll be having the Blue Fescue argument for many years to come, I suspect, because there isn’t another low-growing, petite ornamental grass that is hardy here. If it were up to me, I’d put the whole area into a five-foot high wave of miscanthus. (That’s the deeper green grass planted behind the fescue in one of the pictures above.) I love that grass, not just because it is beautiful when in bloom:

But because it is bulletproof.

And I love bulletproof plants. I’ll keep working on Dave. He may have won the round, but not the fight. And I never give up.