The following post is based on a Moana Nursery news release:

The 15^th annual Great Backyard Bird Count takes place Feb. 17 – 20.  It is the perfect opportunity to enjoy nature and be a citizen-scientist. This study helps scientists better define bird ranges, populations, migration pathways, and habitat needs.

Wild Birds Unlimited is the major sponsor of this joint project between the Cornell Lab of Ornithology, Bird Studies Canada, and the National Audubon Society. Individuals, families, schools, and organizations are encouraged to count birds at bird feeders and in backyards, local parks, or other locations. Those tallies are then reported online through the BirdSource website at www.birdsource.org/gbbc.

The BirdSource website is a revolutionary partnership between citizens and scientists. It gives participants almost instantaneous feedback through graphics, animated maps, and other regularly updated information.

The GBBC is a fun and educational way to get kids excited about birds and nature. Kids are encouraged to participate in the count. To learn more and get additional activities for kids, visit the GBBCWebsite. Additional kids' activities can be found on the Wild Birds Unlimited Pathwaysto Nature for Kids Website.

Results from the 2011 Count

• More than 92,000 checklists were submitted. 2011 was the third year in a row for which checklists have topped 90,000.
• 11,471,951 individual birds were counted. The northern cardinal was reported on the most checklists, followed by the mourning dove.
• The counts for the American crow were up, the first time in eight years. Crows were hit hard by the West Nile virus starting in 1999.

For more information about the Great Backyard Bird Count, call or stop by the Wild Birds Unlimited store located within each Moana Nursery location:  1100 W. Moana Lane (825-0600); 11301 S. Virginia Street (853-1319); or 7655 Pyramid Highway (425-4300); or visit www.reno.wbu.com.

Wild Birds Unlimited, located in Reno and Sparks, is part of the original and largest franchise system of backyard bird feeding and nature specialty stores with more than 275 locations throughout the United States and Canada. Wild Birds Unlimited specializes in bringing people and nature together with bird feeding and nature products, expert advice, and educational events.

I so hoped I'd have a pretty rose garden to show my readers by now, but reality prevailed.

Early this year we moved more than a dozen rose bushes from the front yard to the back because they were all in the wrong places—scratching people coming up our front walk, getting in the way of the faucet, growing where they're hard to water, etc.

We moved them while they were dormant and arranged them in an area of the yard separated by concrete curb and covered with shredded bark. The soil seemed decent, and I added my homemade compost. Like magic, all but one eventually put out leaves and several even bloomed this summer.

I use the word "magic:" because I have never had much luck growing roses with the exception of pioneer roses, miniature roses, and my son's Chrysler Imperial rose. In fact, I never would have been foolish enough to try a rose garden if I hadn't needed a place to put all the bushes that were already here. I hate to discard living plants.

I meant to fertilize them all summer but just never got around to it, which is normal for me. I did manage to keep them watered, even without an irrigation system installed yet.

Results

Only a few of them bloomed. At least one is a miniature rose, so it will be out of place. The worst thing is I suspect many of them are rootstock roses—that is, the hybrid roses of various colors that were grafted onto rootstock have died and the branches coming up from the roots are plain red ones.

Here's one that bloomed and not from the rootstock. Yellow is not my favorite color, but I'll take it!

Excuses

Once I got all the weeds pulled this summer, I spent my gardening time on the rose garden and pond/waterfall area. I have a huge time-sucking project along the fence there: pulling the dirt away from the fence. Attention previous owners: Rickety old fences do not make long-term retaining walls!

I've managed to kill most of the whitetop that was flourishing there. I've thoroughly sprayed the salt grass two and a half times (half the grass the third time in case you're wondering), but it's not giving up yet. When it's dead I'm going to have to pull it out by hand.

Then there's all the weed cloth that (see previous paragraph) doesn't keep weeds from growing. I'm pulling out as much of it as I can and resigning myself to the fact that I'll be finding pieces of it as long as I'm gardening here.

And now that we've had a hard freeze, the roses will be on their own until next April. Maybe, just maybe, I'll manage to get them fertilized then.

I saw these leaf scoops in a magazine this week and instantly knew I had to have them.



OK, in this little picture they look hair combs. However, have you ever raked up a pile of leaves or debris and then looked around for something you could use to pick up as much of it as possible to put in a garbage can or bag? These are the size and shape you need, and they have handy handles and teeth.

Maybe they're in local stores, but I've never seen them.

Another tool I've been meaning to recommend is the Keter Easy Go cart. It's like a lidless plastic garbage can with wheels and a high back with a hole at the top to use as a handle. I can fill it with gravel, rocks, soil, leaves, compost, etc. and drag it around the yard easily. I bought one early in the summer because I was afraid they would all disappear if I waited. I'm glad I did, because I've used it a lot.

I wanted to show you how easy it is to make seasonal decorations with Northern Nevada plants. I'm as far as you can get from a designer, but I like what I've done this fall.

Above, I've tied rabbirbrush and chaste tree blooms to a purchased wreath. I confess that the chaste tree blooms wilted quickly. I originally planned to use lavender on this, but the flowers on that were long gone. I think I'll try Russian sage with rabbitbrush next time because I like the purple-gold combination.

Below is an idea I got from Better Homes and Gardens. I just put showy milkweed seedpods in a vase.



It's been fun for me to look around outside for things I can turn into decorations. If I can come up with these, imagine what you could do!

I've just finished reading Gardening for a Lifetime: How to Garden Wiser as You Grow Older by Sydney Eddison.

As the title implies, it gives advice to aging gardeners who don't want to give up their gardens. It appealed to me because I've realized in the last few years I probably will be alive longer than I'll be able to do the yard work I do now. I even made a conscious effort at our old house to start replacing high maintenance areas with lower maintenance landscaping.

Here are the tips from the author that I'm planning to keep in mind as I plan the new landscape here. I think they are just as valuable for young, busy gardeners as they are for older gardeners:

• English-style perennial borders are very high maintenance. You don't have to plant perennials every year, but you do have to remove dead leaves, deadhead the flowers, divide them every few years, stake some of them, and so on.
• Keep the perennials that need the least work and give you the most pleasure.
• Use shrubs instead of perennials, even though some do require annual pruning. Research them before you buy.
• Work with the existing environment. Eddison wrote at great length about gardening next to and in Connecticut woodland. Here, I let rabbitbrush grow wherever it pops up in the rear part of the back yard.
• Use mulch to control weeds and enrich the soil.
• Plant in containers. Yes! It took me a long time to realize how much easier it is to take care of plants in pots. One of the best things is no weeds. I also like being able to rearrange them.
  
• In a new garden, use lots of bulbs, ground covers, and shrubs and plant fewer perennials.

I'm ignoring some of her advice:

• Hire help or recruit volunteers. The main reason I garden is I enjoy being outdoors when the weather is nice. Having other people do the work defeats the purpose. With that said, I do need and get help for the physically demanding tasks.
• Don't be a perfectionist. Are you kidding? If I were a perfectionist in the garden I'd have given up soon after I started. Again, I just enjoy spending time with my flowers. The only time I realize how imperfect (sloppy) everything looks is when someone visits.
• Turn your lawn into a meadow. Sorry, but meadows sound like a lot of work if you still want to keep weeds out of them.
• Be willing to give up high maintenance mature plants such as overgrown hedges or old trees. I think I'm pretty practical when it comes to these. I'm hoping to get rid of a couple of cottonwood trees and and all the juniper bushes this fall or winter. (Did you know junipers are called "gasoline plants" because they burn so quickly?)

I would add one more piece of advice of my own:

• Embrace tools, especially power tools. When I finally got around to buying a lightweight electric chainsaw, I was amazed at how much time and energy it saved me. I use an electric hedge trimmer to mow last year's ornamental grass and some perennials and weeds. I've tried a couple of different kinds of garden carts that have made yard work easier, too.

I found an ongoing theme of the book pretty amusing. Both the author and I love daylilies. I love them because they have pretty flowers, they bloom for a long time, their foliage looks good most of the time with little work, and they'll tolerate poor soil and irregular watering. She loves them as unique cultivars (and she has a hundred or so unique ones). She says they take all her time for the month of July and she spends 2 hours each evening snapping off all the day's blossoms (while they're still fresh) instead of waiting and deadheading them in the morning.

Whoa. One of the things I've always liked about daylilies is you don't have to deadhead them. I just cut off the stalks after all the flowers have bloomed. Clearly I'm way ahead of the author in the area of giving up perfectionism!

The intent of my Good Garden Award series is to call attention to outstanding gardens that my readers can easily find and see from the street. This one goes to Renown Regional Medical Center for the landscaping around its Mill Street entrance.



It took me a while to catch on, but the Russian sage matches the Renown logo and color. I wish I'd had my camera handy when I saw an employee wearing purple scrubs walk down that sidewalk. The choice of Russian sage must have been intentional, but I don't know. Purple is one of my favorite colors, so I just enjoy it.

We were driving down the street a few weeks ago and saw a landscaper pruning the flowers off some Russian sages. That's right, cutting all the purple sprays off them. Every time I go by them now, I wonder why.



Sure, you need to cut the dead branches off in the spring, but why would anyone want to cut the flowers off now and leave them like this?

Then there's this tree. Every time I drive by it I wonder, What were they thinking????



It's been like this for more than a year; it's not going to grow back. The more I look at it, the more It looks as if the tree is holding up its hands in supplication, asking, Why? Why? Did someone decide it was yard art after they pruned it to death? It just makes me sad.

"Oh! You haven't done anything in the back yet," our visitor exclaimed last weekend as she looked out the window at this:



Ouch. We rushed to defend ourselves.

This year in back I've—

• Planted potatoes.
• Killed the whitetop.
• Hand-pulled all the flixweed.
• Hand-pulled the prickly lettuce and cheat grass in the rear area.
• "Mowed" the weeds in the former lawn several times, using the hedge trimmer when the string on the Weedeater kept jamming.
• Hand-pulled the weeds on the concrete deck.
• Smothered more weeds with carpet pad.
• Sprayed the salt grass in the "rose garden" with Roundup (took a full 2.25-gallon tank).
• Moved plants out of the corner planters on the concrete deck to the garden.
  
• Planted a few more perennials in the garden.
  
• Kept flowers and veggies alive in pots on the patio.
• Started to dig out the dirt and bark piled up against the back fences.
  

Together we've—

• Cut down several dead fruit trees and hauled them to the dump.
• Cut a large, dying branch off this cottonwood tree and cut it into firewood.
• Moved 14 rosebushes from the front yard to the back.
• Pruned the trees.
• Pulled a lot of the rocks out of the pond we're going to get rid of (we'll need a backhoe for the rest).

I shouldn't blame our visitor for not noticing the absence of a 4-foot-high weed jungle. But still—she didn't give us credit for doing anything at all. Ouch.

Some readers may remember we bought the house behind us last fall with plans to rescue it and the yard. Whether I should or not, I feel the pressure of people wondering why I haven't written much about all my gardening accomplishments since then. Big sigh.

We spent all fall working on the inside of the house and moved in the first of the year. It killed me to ignore the weeds going to seed. I did spray the whitetop in front with Roundup and spread some Preen.

I took the picture below the day after escrow closed.



One of the first things I'd done when escrow closed was tear down the Virginia creeper growing across the front of the house, and I was almost finished by the time I thought about taking this picture. I also had to plant some crocus bulbs I bought at WinCo. I wanted to be sure something would come up this spring. (Ironically, the crocuses came up but never bloomed.)

As you know, we had no spring in Northern Nevada this year. Worse than that, an illness in the family hijacked all our time, energy, and money. Besides having little time for gardening until recently, my landscaping budget went from small to none.

Still, nothing can keep me from doing something in the yard!

The roses in the planter shown above were growing out onto the sidewalk and snagged us and anyone who came to visit or work on the house. Early this spring we moved them and a dozen other rosebushes from the front yard to the back, where I decided to try to make a rose garden for the first time ever. I've never had much luck with roses (other than "pioneer" types), but these were all in the wrong places in front and I couldn't just dig them up and throw them away. I'll report on those later.

Phil also dug out the pyracantha bush (far right) for me.

As soon as we had warm weather this year, I started pulling weeds. My first priority was the county right-of-way between our front fence and the street. We have lots of dog walkers, joggers, and bicyclists, and I have pride. Unfortunately, all the cheat grass, etc. went to seed long before I finished. From there I moved to the back yard, where I'm still not finished.

At the same time, I started working on the front planter where the roses had been. First I had to remove all the sparkly white gravel (ugh) and weed blocker. I also pulled out the brick edging;  it seemed like overkill since the sidewalk provided an edge already. (I'll use the bricks somewhere else.) Then I dug in a couple of bags of compost left over from the raised bed planters at our old house.



The Mexican primroses that were already here started blooming early, and it was really encouraging to have some non-weed green and some pretty flowers. A lone chrysanthemum plant growing under a rosebush survived the bush's removal, and I moved it down the row.

For now I've placed a big pot with a Russian sage (from our old yard) where the pyracantha was. I planted baboon flowers around it; I got foliage but no blooms this year. I spent a few bucks in May on some petunias, violas, pansies, and  lobelia. (The pansies and violas died when the summer sun hit them, and the lobelia, which I'd planted around the Russian sage planter, were buried by the muskmelon vine that sprang up from a seed in the homemade compost I used there.)

I checked my Sunset guide for plants that could tolerate both sun and shade and didn't need a lot of water, and I decided to use irises and lilies of the Nile. (Lilies of the Nile are not guaranteed to survive our winters, but this is a sheltered spot. I also considered day lilies, but I'm trying to plant in groups here (rather than the one-of-each plantings I've done before). I've added grape hyacinth bulbs all along the front edge. All of these plants came from our old yard.

I have to explain about the plants in the center, between the stepping stones. That's where I planted the lilies of the Nile, but a bunch of four o'clock seeds came along with them from my old garden. I don't really want four o'clocks there; they're pretty and they're vigorous, two valuable features for someone like me, but they drop millions of seeds. I'm just letting these grow there until I can find another place for them. (They tolerate poor soil but need regular water and a little protection from cold.)

The covered porch is an awesome place for tender houseplants. Right now I have a fuchsia and a heliotrope there, and I'm looking forward to a time when I can sit on the porch surrounded by all kinds of lush, sweet-smelling flowers.

Not really. I'd be bored.

Maybe I'm weird. OK, I admit I'm compulsive. I hate to pull out plants if I don't know what they are. What if they're beautiful flowers? Sometimes they're weeds, but sometimes they're not and I'm glad I've spared them.

How about you? Do you recognize these plants?

Mystery plant 1

This is a plant we found when we bought our house last fall. Not knowing what the flowers looked like made it difficult to find in Weeds of the West, and I tentatively identified as a nasty weed called leafy spurge. Leafy spurge is very difficult to kill, so I put off doing anything about it until this year.

Mystery plant 2

This plant sprouted next to our sidewalk among the Mexican primroses this spring. I wasn't aware of anything like that in that planter last summer and fall when we bought the house, but I didn't want to take the chance of pulling it out if it was a nice flower. (And as it kept growing, I started wondering if it was a shrub.)

Mystery plant 3

This spring I dug compost into the planter along the front sidewalk and planted baboon flower bulbs. These plants with the fat leaves appeared with the narrow, spiky leaves of the baboon flowers. I came very close to pulling them, but they looked familiar and not like any weed I could remember.What would have grown there before or blown in on the wind?

Eventually I realized they looked like melon plants. Again, how the heck would melon seeds have gotten there? Oh, wait—the compost! I gave them more time to see what they turned into.

Mystery plant 4

You might have to look closely, but see those huge leaves among the dame's rocket, flax, and lamb's ears?They're maybe a foot long and 6 inches across, and they have spikes at the tips of the points.

This appeared at our old house this year. We had lived in that house for 25 years, and I had never seen anything like it.


















Ready for the answers?

Plant 1

Ta da! This is no leafy spurge—it's a showy milkweed. Some people consider it a weed—I consider it a wildflower and plan to keep it. I'm glad I never got around to hitting it with the Roundup.

Plant 2

I went through my weed book over and over trying to find this plant. It kept growing but didn't get any buds. It was really out of place in that flowerbed, but I just couldn't bear getting rid of it in case it was a good plant.

Finally I recognized the purple spots on the stems in the weed book. What was it? A common cocklebur. I say "was" because I pulled it out as soon as I knew what it was.

Plant 3

I'm sure this is a cantaloupe vine. It's loaded with yellow flowers, and it's doing a lot better than the melons did in the fancy raised planters we built at our old house! I just hope no one trips over them.

Oh, the baboon flowers? They were supposed to bloom between March and June but never did. Thanks, WinCo, I'll remember that when you put your cheap bulbs out for sale next spring.

Plant 4

I'm sad to report I don't have another picture of this plant.

When I last saw it, a few weeks ago, it was about 6 feet tall and looked menacing with those huge leaves with long thorns all around them and thorns all along the main stem. On top of it were several flower buds—thistle flower buds. They appeared to be yellow. Of course I didn't have my camera with me.

I couldn't find anything like it in my weed book. The closest, with purple flowers, is Scotch thistle, but the leaves on that aren't nearly as large.

I went back 2 days later with my camera. Our sons, who are living in our old house now, informed me they had dug it up. I was stunned.

They reminded me I'd been nagging them about the weeds and had warned them about that one especially. I probably had, but being a realistically cynical mom it had never occurred to me that the plant was in any more danger from them than the prickly lettuce they'd been ignoring.

I probably missed the opportunity of a lifetime. It must be a very rare plant. Heck, maybe I could have had it named after me. Do you think laurel busch thistle would confuse anyone?