By LORI FAYBIK, Courier correspondent
March 26, 2008 11:20 am
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ALBIA — “I love flowers! I have a pretty good garden. The most important thing is just to keep it as clean as possible and don’t forget to mulch,” says Ruth Belzer of Albia.
She says, “I do set large stones in my garden for the butterflies. I like to see the butterflies. Stones hold warmth from the sun overnight. The butterflies need that warmth to get their wings going in the mornings. I also like to keep a dampened sandy spot. The butterflies will sort of snorkel up that moisture.”
She plants Monardo and Bee Balm for the butterflies. She adds that they, along with hummingbirds, like tubular flowers.
“I have in the past had very beautiful gardens, but we have only been here for about five years,” Belzer says.
She lived in Kansas for about 11 years where she said gardening was much more difficult. In Iowa she says, “The soil here is so fertile and nice. In Kansas, it was really a job.”
While in Kansas, Belzer and her sister were featured in the Lawrence Journal World newspaper for their beautiful flower garden.
Belzer grew up in the Lovilia area and lived in Fremont and Ottumwa for a while before going to Kansas. She returned to Iowa five years ago, settling in Albia.
The best flower to grow, she says, is the small golden Stella de Oro’ Daylily. She says, “They are easy to grow and they multiply fast. They are a good beginning flower.”
Over the past few years, she has been able to get about 30 starts from the first little clump she started with.
“I have started rose bushes,” she says. “A lovely one to start is the knockout roses. It is a little shrub; the roses, they just bloom constantly.”
Her favorite flower, though, is the iris. “My mother thought so much of them.
“I talk to my flowers,” she says. “I do like to keep the dead flowers picked off, it makes them bloom better.”
One of the best fertilizers Belzer recommends is bone meal. She just digs down in the dirt a bit and adds some bone meal, making sure it doesn’t touch the roots of the plant.
“I do keep track of the stuff I buy in my flower book,” she says. “I have recorded everything I purchased and planted from 2004 to 2007, and I have a wish list for 2008.”
Belzer has a scrap book filled with pictures of her garden, including all the little details regarding what goes into it. She saves all the little packets or plant picks that contain the directions for her plants to refer back to at a later date if necessary. She purchases a good stock of perennials from a well known company that guarantees plants.
“Brecks is the one I really like,” she says of companies that sell flowers.
Belzer carefully maps out a diagram of where she has planted what. If something doesn’t come up the following year, she can contact the company and ask for replacements.
“If I see one of them isn’t coming up, I contact the company and they send me a new plant,” she says. “Once I called and told them one hadn’t come up and they sent me two new plants.”
She recently told the Courier, “I’m anxious to get started gardening this year, but it is still too wet.”
Belzer will start by cleaning up the flower beds, which are still filled with lots of little twigs from this winter’s ice storms. She prefers to clean up the flower beds in the spring. That way little birds can feed on the seeds from last year’s garden throughout the winter.
She has a plan to add to her many flower beds this year. She has laid full bags of mulch on top of the ground to kill the grass to prepare an area to receive new plants. She hopes to connect a smaller bed to the largest one with a little stream of flowers.
Belzer doesn’t just grow flowers. She also puts in vegetables. The challenge to a vegetable garden, she says, “is finding enough people to share all the produce with.
“One thing I can tell you, I won’t have my potatoes in by Good Friday this year. You are supposed to plant them by then, but Easter is too early this year and it just won’t be dry enough yet.
“It seems like every year my flower beds get bigger and my vegetable garden gets smaller,” Belzer says.
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