Chill...brrrrr....

Winter chill

My husband and I finally got to some outdoor tasks yesterday, 12/16/09. I had been busy with end of semester grading (I teach at a university part time), hosting Thanksgiving, and making preparations for Christmas and had neglected some of my winter chores. Well, I was inspired by a chill that is coming to central VA and the mid-Atlantic states this weekend! I checked that the cold frame and row tunnels were OK, built a new cover for my lettuce pallet bed (bamboo sticks in the ground supporting lengths of garden hose from an old, broken hose, covered in plastic, water bottles inside to warm in the sun) and used two old plastic bins from an old fridge to act as cold frames for some small chard. I also picked some arugula that was unprotected, and pulled some carrots (I love buried treasures like these!). My husband very thoroughly wrapped up a potted Japanese maple that is too heavy to move indoors to our garage and is in a ceramic pot (see photo above). It might not look beautiful, but burlap does melt into the visual landscape better than the colorful, flowered sheets I sometimes use! He also began clearing out the tomato bed, which will rotate to root crops next season (which will be here sooner than we think). Over the winter break from school, we will tackle pruning our fruit trees, so stayed 'tuned" for that...
Happy gardening and Happy Christmas!

Wicked Plants: Book Review

Book review: “Wicked Plants: The Weed That Killed Lincoln’s Mother & Other Botanical Atrocities” by Amy Stewart, 2009, Algonquin Books of Chapel Hill (NC).

This is a cute book. It is a fun book. It was given to me by a lovely friend. It is not a book for the serious student of botany, but that is not its point: it is a good beach or by-the-fireside winter read for anyone, not just the botanically inclined. Amy Stewart has written on garden topics before and I enjoyed her book on the flower industry, “Flower Confidential: The Good, the Bad and the Beautiful in the Business of Flowers,” as it was interesting and enlightening (I have not smelled a commercial, hothouse flower since I read it!) This wicked book is a breezy trip through some poisonous, intoxicating and downright irritating plants, from aconite (sometimes mistaken for horseradish root with deadly consequences) to yew (which can be deadly, or can be used as a chemotherapy drug, Taxol, reminding us that the difference between a medicine and poison is sometimes not the substance, but the dose). Stewart has entries on individual groups of plants, but also interesting entries on arrow poisons, deadly houseplants, fatal fungi and psychedelic plants. Her lists are neither detailed nor exhaustive- for example, she only lists a few noxious weeds in that entry. She wrote about the most interesting, or gruesome, plants to entertain and titillate, not to act as a reference point, and she achieves that goal well.

The etchings and pen and ink illustrations are lovely, though do not serve as field identification pictures. I enjoyed the illustrations, being a beginning pen-and-ink botanical illustrator (not for profit, just for fun!) Overall, a good book to get from your local library or bookstore for a few hours of reading pleasure.

Happy garden reading!

Thanksgiving Salad

I wondered where this photo got to- this is the salad I made at Thanksgiving from garden ingredients- Yes, my nasturtiums were still producing flowers!
Happy gardening!

What was on your Thanksgiving table?

A great pleasure in my life is serving food from the garden to friends and family. On this year's Thanksgiving table were my home grown:
sweet potatoes
carrots
lettuce and arugula
Swiss chard and kale
Tomatoes-fresh (still ripening up) and dried-in the salad
Pumpkin-in pie, bread
Herbs (bay, basil, sage, chives)
Raspberries (frozen) in pie
Figs - in pumpkin bread
Pickled beets, pickles

We had too much food, so I have not yet made the Paw Paw cream pie (wild-gathered by a kind friend, not home grown). I will save that experiment for the Christmas holiday!

I did not have enough white potatoes, apples, or peaches to make deserts, so will have to plan accordingly next year!
Happy gardening!

Sweet (Qualified) Success

Sweet (qualified) success

I wrote a while back about my vole problem, how the voles were eating my sweet potatoes- I described digging them up, to find beautiful potatoes, completely eaten from underneath! This year I planted my garnet sweet potato slips in a trench that I had first lined with hardware cloth (fencing) to keep the voles out. I dug down a foot or more, lined the trench (sides too) with hardware cloth and back filled it, mounding the amended soil over the top to make a raised bed. The slips grew well and…voila! When I harvested them the weekend before Thanksgiving, I had intact sweet potatoes. It was not an unqualified success, because I didn’t get a lot of sweet potatoes, and they varied in size from pretty small to large, but this was my first experiment and I planted only in a small bed. I will definitely use this method again next year, in a larger area and be better about feeding the plants to increase harvest. We will eat the tubers pictured above at our Thanksgiving feast!

Happy gardening!

Catalog-A-Non

A few weeks ago, I discovered that I had been seduced and tricked by a garden catalog…again! It was not as bad as the year when I made three separate orders to respond to three separate bearded iris specials from the same grower, but I had the same symptoms: I blacked out, forgetting that I had ordered 100 daffodil bulbs (which is not a lot, per se, but I have over 1,000 already in the front yard and am running out of real estate); denial (I don’t really have a problem-see last parenthetical comment) and; obsessive thoughts and actions regarding plants (my family can tell you- take me to a music festival, and I comment on the eucalyptus or flower beds nearby; take me to Disney and all I see are the topiaries; take me to a fancy restaurant, and I talk about the potted herbs in the windows). So, I received 100 of Brent and Becky’s finest fragrant mix daffodil bulbs and have to scramble as to where to put them. Daff’s look best in big drifts, so I suspect we are going to lose another swathe of grass (we are very opinionated and hate grass)….but, instead of thinking myself out of another fix (and getting my husband to “enable” me by digging the trench) I need to go cold turkey. Cancel e-mail notifications of specials, take catalogs straight to recycling…. Is there a support group for this?

If in doubt, rip it out

If in doubt, rip it out (OK, not the best title…it should be “If it’s not working, do something about it”, but that’s too long)

One of the hardest things for me to do as a gardener is to get rid of an underperforming plant. I tend to let the plant piddle along, putting out a few leaves, flowers or fruit. I hope that something will make it “perk up,” all the while giving it water, fertilizer, compost. But I have learned that if a plant is underperforming it is:

1. Not a good plant for the condition it is in- soil, sun, moisture, competition in the root zone, neighboring plants that are bad for it.
2. Perhaps too fussy a plant, either for your conditions or just overall (like hybrid tea roses- I just will not grow them).
3. Maybe diseased? Some diseases plant vigor and sometimes I cannot figure out what they have!

I try not to let plants linger (though there is a dicentra, or bleeding heart, I have right now that is puny, while its neighbor just a few feet away- same plant, same cultivar, planted in the same way at the same time- is much more vigorous and send out loads of blooms in season. I know I need to pull it out, and put something else there). Plants that are small for their variety, spindly, yellowing, and look bad make that area of your garden look bad, too.

Sometimes transplanting will do the trick. I had a sorry looking Japanese maple (from the $1 bin at a botanical garden plant sale) that did poorly in one area, but exploded in growth and beauty when I moved it to a more desirable location. I recently read about a gardener who, though they live in the same area I do, cannot get her fig to overwinter- that is probably a simple location problem (the fig needs to be on the south side of the property, near the house for those few extra degrees of winter protection and shelter from the wind-it makes a difference).

Another example is strawberries. Heritage strawberries just do not like my garden, but Honeoye do. I pulled out the whole bed of Heritage, replanted with Honeoye and they produced very well.

So, if the plant has consistently underperformed and you have tried everything you can think of, asked advice and given it time, it is time to say good bye. (Competitive rose growers will often lay a garden spade at the foot for a poorly growing rose bush and leave it there for a few weeks as a warning to the plant to get growing!)

Happy Gardening!