bluehorizonfarm.com Blog

Trumpet Creeper Vine (c)2009 Tammy Biondi

The first time I saw a trumpet creeper vine, I fell in love with it. The plant was loaded with its signature blossoms, exotic and colorful. Quite a contrast to the very urban environment in which it was growing, next to a housing project in a relatively gritty suburb of Washington DC.

To this day, trumpet creeper vine has a hold on me. Me and just about every one of my pasture’s fence posts! Here on the farm, trumpet creeper vine is a beautiful nuisance. We’re inundated by its vigorous vines and prolific flowers. We trip over the vines that snake through our pastures and spend hours upon hours cutting the vines off of fence posts, even though they seem to regrow in mere seconds.

The vines taunt us in our attempt to manage our pastures without herbicides. It would be so easy to just spray them and watch them melt away. . . But so far, we’ve resisted the siren song of the Roundup bottle.

Although this vine is very aggressive, with the potential to destroy trees, fence lines and sheds, a surprising number of people plant the vine as an ornamental in their home landscaping. Why? Trumpet creeper vine has quite a reputation as a hummingbird magnet. And, yes, I have noticed that it does attract hummingbirds, although they honestly seem to prefer the sugar water in my hummingbird feeders to the nectar of a trumpet creeper flower.

Earth Tones Dent Ornamental Corn

I have wanted to grow ornamental corn for years, but had just couldn’t talk myself into believing that the plants were worth the garden space they would occupy for most of the summer.

Enter a happy accident. See, we grow our sweet corn from transplants and we happened to seed a pack of Earth Tones dent corn into a “to-be-transplanted pack” at the same time we seeded our sweet corn. We do that every year, just in case I end up being able to justify the presence of ornamental corn in our garden. Every single year so far, we’ve ended up feeding the baby ornamental corn plants to the chickens because I declined to cede any sweet corn territory to the long-season, space-wasting ornamental corn.

Not so this year. When transplanting time rolled around, Dave found himself planting the corn in a huge hurry because of an impending storm and ended up planting row upon row of ornamental corn, thinking that it was sweet corn.

We didn’t notice until weeks later, when one variety of corn in our garden was twice as big as its brethren and the baby kernels forming of its ears tasted like wallpaper paste. Aha! Ornamental corn.

I was upset that our yield of sweet corn was going to be lacking this year, but looking back on the situation, I have no regrets.

The Earth Tones ornamental corn grew up to be absolutely gorgeous, and worth every square foot of garden space that it occupied.