The Bulb Maven

August

August is almost over, and although it is a month full of pleasures for me, it is also my most stressful month with work days that can last from 4am until I collapse exhausted in the evening, too tired for a short training session with my dogs.  In addition to packing orders for a part of the day, I must take care of five greenhouses full of bulbs.  I have a little help one day a week, but most of the work is done by me. Watering takes place every day, and it is tedious and time-consuming, and repotting takes place whenever I can.  The computer work I do before it gets light.  I have been in the habit of waking around 4am for many years, sometimes even earlier when work builds up.   I don't mind it, I don't actually know how I would get the work done if I didn't get up well before the crack of dawn.  All is quiet, and I can enter orders and answer e-mails, print out invoices and labels.  I often get complaints that I don't answer e-mails, but if I answered all e-mails I simply wouldn't be able to get anything else done.  I try to provide basic information about planting and growing the bulbs, but I am simply not able to engage in extended correspondence beyond that.

My favorite agility trial is in August also, and it is one I simply cannot miss.  I rarely have an opportunity to do a dog trial locally.  Most of the time I trial in the winter when work is not so pressing and the temperatures are not sizzling (they rarely sizzle here), but the dog trials involve travel, usually a five to seven hour drive and three or four overnight stays.  The one we have here is just 30 minutes away, and I see all my friends from far and wide.  It is so much better for the dogs too, not having to endure hours in their crates in the car or staying in a motel.  My new dog, Arlo, is doing very well at the trials and is already in the Championship level where he is accumulating points and qualifying runs that count towards a championship.  He has just turned three, so I am very proud of him. Here is a winning run at a recent trial:  https://youtu.be/uiE2eYeifxk

My older dog, Hannah, did not get there until she was six, undoubtedly due to my poor training abilities, but I have learned a lot in the past years, and I am currently taking an on-line class from Finland (www.oneminddogs.com) which has taught me so much.  The Internet is amazing, you can take classes in dog agility from the world's best now.  
I still compete with my older dog, Hannah, and she still wins some runs.  She will be eleven years old soon, and won four championship titles before I put her into semi-retirement. 

Little Willie, my male terrier, is fully retired and perfectly happy to be so.  We do a few jumps and tunnels at home so that he isn't left out, and he still enjoys that.  Here he is, hanging out at a trial.

Shipping continues apace in September, but it is the month where I take a short break, going up to Oregon for a dog trial and a few days of hiking in the beautiful mountains around Bend.  I have a little travel trailer now, so no more tent camping or motels for us, and the dogs absolutely love the trailer.

 

 

 

 

Seeds

For a business like Telos, where almost all bulbs are grown from seed, you need a LOT of seed, and sowing and harvesting seed goes on year round.  The summer growing bulbs, like the bulbs from South America, ripen seed anywhere from mid-spring to early winter, and since those seeds are only viable for a fairly short period of time, they are usually sown right away.  Most of the species I grow are simply unavailable commercially, so I depend on my own plants to produce the seed I need and I often swap seed with other collectors of a genus.  Hippeastrum seed can be sown directly in a flat, floated on water to start them, or put in a plastic zip-lock bag with damp vermiculite to get them started, then sown. I use the plastic bag method, since I usually have a lot of seed and I get better results than sowing directly.  I leave the bags at room temperature for these species, then sow them when the radicle appears.

Two days ago I went south to gather some Calochortus amabilis seed.  I have been to the same spot three times, although not for the past two years.  Both times I went in early July and the seed was still a bit green, but this year I was way too late, the pods dry and empty, probably due to our very dry winter. The day was not lost, however.  I stopped on the Eel River coming home with my three dogs and we all had a great time splashing around in the water, which, this year is only about a foot deep.  This is a big river, and it often dwindles in late August, but not usually as much as this. With the weather overcast, there were no other people out.  I was glad, since my dogs are a bit reactive (I don't mean aggressive) to noise and movement, and if there are small children playing it can be a bit overwhelming for them, so we had the place all to ourselves.  Some larger dogs see them as prey and we have had some horrible encounters, so I am always cautious.

Imagine my delight when my few bulbs of Sprekelia howardii sent up two flowers simultaneously.  I have had this rare species in my collection for some time, but I have never got seed from them.  I carefully pollinated both flowers, and now have a fat seed pod ripening.  Why only one made a seed pod I couldn't guess.  Another flower is emerging, so I am hopeful that I will get another pod.

My two helpers spent an entire morning cleaning seeds collected in the nursery. Not an unpleasant job. With little Gwendolyn nearby, they have an opportunity to chat to each other and the day, for a change, was rainy.

 

www.telosrarebulbs.com

Harvesting Bulbs

This is the busiest time of year for Telos.  Orders are coming in at a steady pace and we are still finishing harvesting the dormant bulbs.  Harvesting the bulbs is a dirty, dusty, unpleasant job, so I try to keep it down to about three hours or so a day, then spend the rest of the day packing orders, watering the summer growing bulbs and doing the myriad chores that a nursery requires.  We often move things outside if weather permits since the dust from the dry potting mix blows away with the ocean breezes we have here. Here are my two helpers, with the littlest addition to Telos, little Gwendolyn.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

This morning I finished harvesting the Calochortus bulbs.  It is depressing to go down my list on the web site and see so many 'not available' notations.  I grew all the species listed on the web site, but there are no sources of seed for most of these species.  I bought seed in the past from Ron Ratko of Northwest Native Seed, but when he closed his business, that was that.  Some seed I can gather locally, but that is not always reliable.  Since I gather mostly from roadsides, populations are often wiped out by the county road crews spraying herbicides or mowing them down repeatedly.  Weather plays a big role in whether there will be seed or not, and with our successive dry winters, this year was a very bad year for seed production.  Of course, I pollinate my own plants, but that doesn't always give me the quantities I need, and sooner or later I lose a species to rodents or rot and simply can't replace it.  It is easier to buy seed of South African bulbs than native California bulbs, and I will be expanding my collection of South Africans in the future.

 

www.telosrarebulbs.com

Mouse Wars

When you grow things for a living, Mother Nature will inevitably throw you a curve ball.  Some years it is an unusual freeze, killing your tender plants and bulbs, another year flooding, causing increase fungal disease and rots.  The springs of 2010 and 2011 were unusually wet and cold, and as a result I lost virtually all my native lily relatives, Erythronium, Fritillaria and the lilies themselves.  They just vanished.

This year it has been a plague of mice. My greenhouses are like the Hilton Hotel to mice.  They are large, warm, dry and full of wonderful things to eat.  We are surrounded by fields, and in the winter they migrate in, sort of the equivalent of New Yorkers going to Miami for the winter.  They burrow into the pots making cosy little nests and eat their little hearts out. My two female cats, brought home two years ago for the specific purpose of controlling mice did a fantastic job the first year, and I lost not a single pot to mice.  This year it has been very different.  Perhaps they have becoming accustomed to a soft life, lounging around in my office and eating prepared food, or maybe they are just overwhelmed this year.  I have seen them many times with dead mice, so they are doing something, but when I was gone for a week I came home to serious devastation in the Oxalis benches.  One bench of Oxalis pots was almost completely wiped out.  They have taken to gnawing through the pots from the side, then hollowing out the mass of bulbs, in some cases leaving not a single bulb remaining.

Something had to be done.  I tried every sort of mouse trap on the market, and caught precisely zero mice, while more pots fell to the mouse hordes.  Poison was out of the question, since I don't want to poison my cats.  I finally decided to try to prevent the little devils from getting up on the benches by sheathing the legs of the benches in metal.  It was not a small job, but it seems to have worked, although I have to be vigilant to not allow anything to lean against a bench allowing them access.

Now I wonder what challenges next year will present.

www.telosrarebulbs.com

Telos Rare Bulbs

The busiest part of the shipping season is over.  Orders have ground to a halt, and I can turn my attention to more pressing needs, getting the greenhouses ready for winter.  This is still a very busy time of year, since all the bulbs that are in storage must be replanted, and seeds of the winter-growing species are sown this time of year.  My two young helpers just finished repotting the Lachenalias, and I will spend time sowing seeds today.  I posted on seed sowing before, and this posting can be found when you scroll down 'Categories'.

I have been working on my warm greenhouse, doing mostly housekeeping chores, and it is a pleasure to walk in there now, with all the dead leaves removed from the plants, the pots all weeded, rows organized and floors swept.  This greenhouse holds most of the South American species, including the members of the Family Amaryllidaceae.  There are some South American bulbs, like Leucocoryne, that grow on a Mediterranean cycle, and these are grown along with the South African species in my Mediterranean greenhouse.  When I say it is a warm greenhouse, it is not actually heated at all.  I have a large bench with heating mats for the species that need warm night-time temperatures, since our nights here are cold even in summer, but the rest of the greenhouse has to handle our temperatures here, and they seem to do fine.  I have this greenhouse tightly closed up in winter, which will keep it at least ten degrees F. above the ambient temperature at night, and on sunny days it can still get quite warm.  We do get frost here, but usually no more than a couple of degrees, and the low temperature at night will only last for an hour or two. 

The South African members of the Family Amaryllidacea (like Boophone, Brunsvigia, Cyrtanthus, etc.) are also in this greenhouse.  During the busy shipping season things can get rather chaotic in this greenhouse, since none of these bulbs are stored dry for shipping, but are freshly unpotted, roots washed and packed in damp material, and shipped intact.  Removing roots from a bulb that keeps permanent roots year round, like the Amaryllids, will set it back severely, so if the roots are kept intact and not allowed to dry out, and the bulb planted right away, it will hardly know anything has happened to it.  This is incredibly labor-intensive.  I have some bulbs in individual pots, but others are planted together, since they need depth to develop properly, and that means tipping a pot out, selecting a good bulb, and putting the others back.  I once packed a large order of all Amaryllid species which took the better part of two days to extract, clean and pack.  The recipient (in Denmark) planted them as soon as she received them, and they did well.  Many nursery owners would think this is insanely inefficient, but I simply don't know how to do it any other way if I want to grow a bulb properly, and send it bare root.  I have some of the small seedling bulbs in small pots called bands, but they will not increase in size once put into these pots, so their use is limited.

My helpers and I are also working on the Mediterranean greenhouse, repotting Gladiolus, Lachenalia and Moraea.  We have finished the Oxalis section, and the native bulbs, such as Calochortus, are yet to be done.  In despair this summer I said I was discontinuing native bulbs, but this was in reaction to my losing all my lilies, most Erythroniums and nearly all my Fritillarias due to our cold, wet spring.  I have reconsidered, especially since I was able to get some lily seed this summer, so I am not giving up yet.

www.telosrarebulbs.com

A New Year Dawns

This morning it actually stopped raining, our first non-rainy morning in many, many days.  The dawn sky was beautiful, with a sliver of moon floating in an almost clear sky.  The property is still flooded with pools of water everywhere, but the greenhouses are dry and the bulbs are flourishing.

The year was a good one here at Telos, with many exciting bulb events, like the first flowering of Paramongaia weberbauerii.  I have been growing rare and unusual bulbs from seed for almost twenty years now.  Learning about the bulbs and how to grow them (and where to get the seed) has been an exciting adventure, made much easier these days by the Internet.  At first it was an uphill stuggle (but then, I used to be a rock climber!), and a lot of trial and error - LOTS of error, and much wasted seed - but these days you can Google just about anything and come up with useful information.  I am happy, for although I have most of the information under my belt now, my customers may not, and the more information that is available about these wonderful treasures, the better it is for all concerned.

In looking back at the year that has passed, I feel very blessed to have the life I do.  I have work that I love, work that is constantly exciting and challenging, work that results in beauty, and in pleasure for other people also.  I am past the age of 'retirement', but hope I will never retire from growing bulbs.

The new additions to Telos have grown.  Take a look at Mamie (the grey and white one) and Lucy (the black and white one).  They have learned their jobs well, and I have had NO LOSSES TO MICE!!!!   I have to say that again - NO losses to mice.  Each year I have lost valuable bulbs, some that I have not been able to replace, to the depredations of mice.  Now, with no effort on my part, they are at bay.  The dogs have accepted the cats and even seem to like them, but terriers are not to be trusted with cats, so I never leave them alone together, but when I am working with the bulbs they are mostly unsupervised and do very well. 

The dogs won so many ribbons last year I have stopped counting, and Hannah is very close to getting her championship.  Along the way we have made many great friends, and even when we don't win we always have a wonderful time.  In September we took a trip to Oregon, first to an agility trial near Salem, then the following week to another in Bend, spending the five days in between hiking in the Deschutes National Forest.  It was absolute heaven being in the mountains for five whole days hiking the trails surrounded by spectacular scenery.  Those strange collars are GPS collars (not shock collars), since the little devils love to take off after squirrels, and I don't want to lose them.  Now I always know where they are, even if I lose sight of them.

Oxalis season is well under way, the earlier Oxalis starting to bloom in October, so here is a picture of one, O. pulchella, to end the year, with many more to come.

Happy New Year, and happy bulb growing in 2011.   

www.telosrarebulbs.com

The Morning Walkabout

After a long, cold, miserable spring, Mother Nature finally took pity on us, and the weather turned glorious for the Fourth of July weekend, with sunny days in the low 70F range.  The village of Ferndale, where I live, has many celebrations going on for the weekend, including a parade and a spectacular fireworks display, so the sunny weather was most welcome for the events.  Watching fireworks burst in a dense fog cloud, as can happen, is missing the point.

Without the morning fog, the dawn sky has been beautiful, the sun slowly rising above the mountains to the east to bathe the fields in a golden glow.  My morning begins before dawn, and I love to watch the sky slowly change color as the birds awaken.  When I moved to this property seven years ago, there was little birdsong, the four acre property, and the fields surrounding it, being almost completely bare of trees and shrubs.  My first two years here were completely consumed in getting the nursery up and running, but I have been planting what I hope will become a dense windbreak, and it is starting to fill in.  Now there are many more birds, since they have nesting places and shelter, and I hope this will get even better as time goes on.

Each morning I call the dogs for our morning walkabout, when we walk around the garden and the nursery area to see what we can see.  Just before this, I was in my tiny kitchen in the barn, when I heard my dogs barking outside in a very frenzied manner, quite different from their usual "someone is coming down the driveway" barking.  I went outside, and they had a hawk cornered in my little sitting area.  I thought the poor thing was injured, since it was panting and had its wings extended.  I quickly called the dogs inside, then quietly sat and watched at some distance.  It walked very cautiously past me, then took to flight, apparently none the worse for its encounter.

With the warmer weather, my small collection of Mexican bulbs are starting to bloom.  the stunningly beautiful purple Bessera elegans has opened its buds, as has the sweetly scented Milla biflora, with large waxy white flowers.

I only have a few of the Mexican Calochortus species.  Unlike those from the western USA, Mexican Calochortus grow in the summer, and are dormant in winter.  They are not as variable as the American ones, but have a charm of their own.   Here is C. marcellae to the left, and C. pringlei to the right.

I haven't taken the trouble to propagate my Mexican Calochortus species, so I don't have any available, but I usually have the different colors of Bessera, as well as Milla.  With only myself doing virtually all the work of the nursery, I have to make some difficult decisions, as far as which bulbs to propagate and which bulbs to keep just for my own enjoyment.  I have two large greenhouses, and can't put up more, for then I would need full time help, so greenhouse space is at a premium, and some bulbs will always be there just to please me.  I do get occasional requests from collectors asking "You don't happen to have .....?", and often I do have what they are seeking and can spare one or two bulbs.

Petronymphe decora has sent up buds, but will bloom a little later.  I feel very lucky to have this rare species in my collection, and usually have some bulbs to spare.

Harvesting bulbs continues.  I still have most of the California species to take out of their pots, since they bloom at the end of spring, and I am awaiting the ripening of their seeds.  I have carefully hand pollinated the Calochortus and some of the Brodiaeas, this year with good results.  It is a slow and tedious job, and sometimes I have still lost my seed and all the work I put into pollinating due to adverse weather conditions.

With summer here, my work increases considerably, and that will continue until the end of the year.  I am happy!  Although I have been called a workaholic by some friends, I take exception to that very pejorative term.  I LOVE my work.  It makes me happy just to walk into my greenhouses in the morning.  I feel blessed. 

www.telosrarebulbs.com  

A New Year Dawns

The year always ends at Telos with an overwhelming amount of work, racing against time to repot the bulbs and trying to fill those last minute orders.  Complicating matters were some health issues, not life threatening, but certainly incapacitating for a while, so blogging came to a screeching halt during that period.

With the New Year, things now settle down to that blessed time in the nursery when things start sprouting and blooming, and my main tasks are to keep pots watered and fertilized, while gradually repotting the Amaryllids, a task that has no real deadline, so it is relaxed and spread out over the next three months.  Many Oxalis are in bloom now, and I am very excited about my new benches, which improve drainage and air circulation and make work much easier.

While working in the Mediterranean greenhouse two days ago, I heard loud screaming bird cries and ran to the door to see two bald eagles locked together tumbling out of the sky, to fall in the pasture about fifteen feet away from me.  Those are big birds!  The combat/play continued, and they flew away flapping their huge wings and locking talons to tumble through the air again.  What a sight!

I have posted before on earthquakes in Ferndale, and yesterday we had a very serious 6.5 earthquake that caused some damage to the town.  I was in the kitchen of my main house about to bake a cake when the earthquake struck.  All those things they say about earthquakes, like getting under a doorway, or getting outside, or whatever else you are supposed to do, go completely out the window.  It is so overwhelming you just go on instinct, and all I could do was safeguard my dogs and try to stop my china cabinet, full of antique crystal and china, from toppling over, amid the sound of crashing furniture and breaking glass.  It seemed to go on forever with several huge jolts, then ending with wave like motion that gradually subsided.  My dogs were terrified, with Willie acting dazed and unresponsive, while Hannah was hiding trembling under the coffee table.  I have a tranquillizer for Willie, since he is terrified of fire works, so I had just got it refilled for New Year's, and I stuffed one down both dogs.  I am fond of antique china and glass, and have many antique dishes displayed around the house.  Amazingly, not a one was broken.  All of the breakages were of ordinary household dishes and some picture glass, plus a plant pedestal outside.  I have a large fountain in the herb garden.  It was full of water when the quake struck, but empty afterwards.  My neighbor Wayne came over right away to see if we were all right, and warned me that aftershocks could be as big or bigger than the one we had just experienced, so after sweeping up the debris I left everything down on the ground, and put some things down that hadn't fallen.  I didn't sleep much last night, still full of adrenalin and worrying about aftershocks.

Life goes on.  The nursery was unaffected by the earthquake, with only a few pots being shaken off the benches.  I will be happy when the next week has passed and with it the threat of major aftershocks.

www.telosrarebulbs.com

Can you ........

..... teach an old dog new tricks?  Well, here is Hannah with her new trick.  OK, she isn't an old dog, she will be five next month, and theoretically in her prime.  Those are cookies balanced on her paws, and she has learned that if she waits until I say 'get it' she gets both of them.  Willie, however, just eats them.  "Wait" he says.  "Phooey".

But here is a genuine old 'dog' with a new trick -- ME!  One of the advantages of living almost next door to the Fairgrounds, is that after the fair is over there are literally mountains of poopy straw and wood chips that they need to get rid of.  I like the wood chips from the stables occupied by the race horses best.  The straw blows around a bit in this windy environment, but the chips stay put and look very nice.  I can get as much as I want free, delivered to my house, and since the soil here is very dense and lacking in organic material, it is like solid gold to me.  I had eight big dump truck loads delivered, intending to use it on my field that is being converted to a wild garden. 

Well, that was a LOT of stuff, so Mark and I decided to rent a Bobcat, needed anyway to repair my driveway, and spread it all in one day.  That looked like so much fun, that I insisted that I wanted to do it, so he graciously showed me how to run the machine, and off I went.  It was GREAT!  Here is the area I am working on to put in a wild garden and create a wind break. 

 

I think at my advanced age I am learning the fascination men have for big machines.  What's next?  Guns??  The two young twenty-something men that help Mark were a bit astonished at the idea of me running the Bobcat, but, honestly, there was nothing to it.  Easier than driving a car.  I was a bit slow, so around mid-afternoon I handed it over to Mark, who finished the job.

Work on the greenhouses continues.  We have almost finished one, and will start on the next one when another pallet of greenhouse bench tops arrive.  The shipping of orders continues.  There is usually a flurry of orders this time of year, when people start thinking about planting bulbs, although the shipping season will start to wind down soon.  Seed sowing and propagating bulbs will start in earnest as soon as the greenhouse benches are finished.  This is actually the busiest time of year for me, since shipping bulbs, sowing seeds and the repotting of bulbs starts to overlap.  I like the change in pace, though, and I am excited about my new greenhouse benches.

www.telosrarebulbs.com

Greenhouse work

The seasons march on, and this time of year I am thinking constantly of what lies ahead:  seed sowing the Mediterranean species; reorganizing the greenhouses; repotting most of the bulbs and getting ready for winter in general.  Autumn is the busiest season as far as bulb care is concerned, since the Mediterranean climate bulbs must all be repotted before they start to grow around the end of October to the middle of November.  A few can wait a bit longer, and during the same time period seed must be sown of most species.  Some bulbs multiply, but others, like Calochortus, must be sown every fall, and it is a very big job. 

In preparation for the tasks ahead, I am completely reorganizing my Mediterreanean greenhouse and having benches made.  In the past I have had all the pots on the floor.  This was largely due to the expense involved of buying or making benches, but now I am happy to say that I am able to invest the needed money.  This is helped by a new product, a plastic bench top that is light weight, easy to clean and relatively inexpensive.  Before now greenhouse benches were made of metal, so they were very heavy, very expensive and would degrade over time.  The new bench tops are UV stable, and should last a long time.  Here above I am in the process of moving every single pot twice, fist off the floor and out of the way as each bench is brought in, then organizing them alphabetically on the benches (and still smiling!).  I won't trust anyone else to move them, since they must be kept striclty organized or I simply can't find things.  Even so, as I put Calochortus plummerae in place, I will inevitably stumble across a couple of pots of C. bruneaunis that I overlooked, necessitating moving them all again.  Arrrgh!

Mark and Shawn, seen here, have also put a new ventilation system in, and now the greenhouses are vented automatically, keeping the temperature well below 85F even on warm sunny days.  Both the new benches and the new ventilation system are intended to make my work easier and more efficient, and, hopefully, to reduce losses.  The problem I have had with the pots on the floor is inadequate drainage, with the bottom layer of potting medium not drying out completely in the bulbs' summer dormancy.  Summer dormant bulbs need to be kept completely dry during their dormancy, so any excess moisture can encourage rotting.  I am expecting that elevating the pots off the ground will improve things considerably with better drainage, better air circulation and easier access.

www.telosrarebulbs.com