Bullies in the Hood

Weather: The solstice was the first day with low humidity in Los Alamos and Santa Fé. That it coincided with that solar marker may be chance.

Last useful rain: 6/17. Week’s low: 43 degrees F. Week’s high: 92 degrees F in the shade. Smoke from Mexican fires continues to enter area; sometimes it was replaced with smoke from Arizona.

What’s blooming in the area: Dr. Huey rootstock and hybrid roses, yellow potentilla, catalpa, desert willow, silver lace vine, Japanese honeysuckle, red-tipped yucca, lilies, daylily, red hot poker, Spanish broom, sweet peas, purple salvia, blue flax, larkspur, snow-in-summer, hollyhocks, golden spur columbine, datura, yellow yarrow, coreopsis, blanket flowers

What’s blooming beyond the walls and fences: Tamarix, cholla cactus, showy milkweed, white tufted evening primrose, tumble mustard, buffalo gourd, bindweed, green leaf five eyes, alfalfa, wild licorice, nits and lice, plains paper flowers, goat’s beard, Hopi tea, strap leaf and golden hairy asters, native and common dandelions

What’s blooming in my yard: Betty Prior, Dorothy Perkins, rugosa and miniature roses, catmints, Johnson’s blue geranium, winecup mallow, smooth, foxglove, coral and purple beard tongues, bouncing Bess, Maltese cross, California poppy, Dutch clover, coral bells, pink evening primroses, Queen Anne’s lace, Mexican hats, white yarrow, chocolate flower, plains coreopsis, black-eyed Susan, anthemis; pansies that wintered over

Bedding Plants: Wax begonia, nicotiana, sweet alyssum, snap dragons, pansies

What’s reviving/coming up: Friday I put in more seeds, because so few had come up. Ant hills have been multiplying, and the sidewalk ones were patrolling the beds. I tried sprinkling an insecticide over the beds when I was done to slow the depredations.

Tasks: One man finally planted his vegetable plot this week. Another, waited to last week to put out plants he protected with plastic cylinders. He probably has a problem with rabbits.

Two people erected small canopies to sell produce on roads in town. One listed cherries, onions, and sugar peas.

I continued to pick peaches from low limbs, either to protect the branch or my forehead. So far the unripe fruit hasn’t started to smell or attract insects to their trash bags. Apparently, the chemicals that cause rotting haven’t developed yet.

Animal sightings: Chickadees, gecko, monarch and cabbage butterflies, bumble and small bees, red and brown dragonflies, heard crickets, hornets, mosquitoes, small ants

Now that the sweet cherries are gone, so too are the birds. I managed to get four sour cherries this week, my entire harvest for the year.

Weekly update: We all know the bullies, the plants that naturalize and crowd out their neighbors. Most are prolific seed producers, and many have deep roots that penetrate under the plants with radiation fibrous ones.

Golden spur columbine has been one of my problems. The two I planted in 1997 have taken over a fifty-foot bed. Every time I clear a space to plants seeds for some other perennial, the seeds it already deposited wake up and take over.

A couple years ago I noticed the red hot pokers that had self-seeded from another area were able to hold their own. Even when the Aquilegia chrysantha seeds came up directly under their leaves, the Kniphofia uvaria cultivars managed to survive.

That led me to think maybe plants with bulbous roots would be able to withstand the siege on their space. I bought a variety of hybrid daylilies in colors that contrasted with the columbine’s butter yellow. The Hemerocallis cultivars survived, and bloomed, but every year the columbine grow so close the daylily leaves are lost to view. And, of course, the flower colors weren’t exactly what was described.

Last fall I ordered some bearded iris to see if they could work. Unlike the daylilies, which send up several shoots from the crown the iris leaves are closely united near the ground. That makes it hard for the columbine seedlings to germinate within the plant’s domain. The Iris germamica bloomed in spring, and so far are holding their own.

I also got enticed by a catalog that offered Asiatic lilies for naturalizing. The price was much lower than the specimens sold by the local big boxes. They too made it through the winter, no small achievement for bulbs. Many fail that first test.

Now the Lilium are blooming. It will take another year to know if they will succeed. Bulbs usually bloom the first year, because they spent the summer in ideal conditions. It’s the second year that matters.

Notes on photographs:
1. Unidentified daylily cultivar and golden spur columbine, 1 June 2019.
2. Golden spur columbine seedlings, 22 June 2019.
3. Red hot pokers and golden spur columbine, 22 June 2019.
4. Daylily cultivar surrounded by golden spur columbine foliage, 22 June 2019.
5. Asiatic lilies, so far free of golden spur columbine plants, 22 June 2019.