Category: Gardening

July 3, 2011 Aquaculture, Gardening, General Ag News and Notes Post a Comment

Waterlilies, hardy or tropical, can lend a touch of magic to ponds

If I bought a house that happened to have a swimming pool — not my favorite landscape element — I would hope that the feature would be geometric, at least. If it instead were kidney-shaped, I would fill it in with loads of sand and peat moss and turn it into a garden of the prettiest swamp flora, full of pitcher plants and Japanese and Louisiana irises.

If the pool were a much preferred circle, square or rectangle, I would make it uniformly 22 inches deep, grow lots of aquatic plants in containers, throw in a few small koi and spend the years watching them grow.

I have no intention of doing this, by the way, because I already have a pond. My garden would seem lifeless without it, however, I would offer this general advice about decorative ponds, besides the shape. Make them bigger than you think you need. Small ponds are harder to keep clean and algae-free, and the water temperature fluctuates too much for the good of flora, fauna and owner. Another hard-earned lesson: Set it up so that the pump and the filtration box sit out of the water. This will reduce maintenance further and keep you out of the pond.

No ornamental pond is complete without waterliles. Part of the magic of a waterlily is that its flower inhabits two realms. It is born in the submerged crown and journeys upward to the dry world, where it opens to the delight of the aerial circus of pollinators and to the thrill of the gardener looking for beauty in the heat of summer.

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June 27, 2011 Gardening, General Ag News and Notes, Ginger Root Post a Comment

Eat, grow, heal – Hawaii Features – Staradvertiser.com

For botanist Laura Shiels, herbs in the garden are not only a source of spice and flavor, but of healing.

Lemongrass adds zest to a soup but also helps relieve insomnia, while ginger is good for nausea. Chili peppers add spice but also stimulate circulation.

Basil can help relieve indigestion or nerves. Rosemary is said to enhance memory.

Shiels, a doctoral student in ethnobotany and former lecturer at the University of Hawaii, has been teaching workshops on how to grow and cultivate herbs for several years, with a focus on healing.

“Let food be your medicine,” says Shiels, who cultivates gardens everywhere she goes.

Many culinary herbs make aromatic compounds to protect themselves from being attacked by viruses and fungi, as well as to attract pollinators, she said. Those same compounds have antioxidant or antimicrobial properties.

So you can add flavor and health at the same time, she said, and address specific ailments with herbs.

Basil, for instance, popular in salads and the main ingredient for pesto, alleviates gas. Its leaves can be used for many dishes, while the flowers can be brewed into a tea, good for treating coughs.

Garlic is good for lowering blood pressure and relieving colds and flu.

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June 16, 2011 Gardening, General Ag News and Notes Post a Comment

Gardening as you age: How to go low maintenance without losing beauty

After three or four hours digging and weeding, a hot bath, a soft chair and a couple of aspirin have their appeal, but I like to think I’ve got a fair few years of full-bore gardening in front of me. And yet I do wonder what happens when you reach that point in life when the limbs are too feeble or arthritic for the work.

For many folks, not much will change. They will continue to view the space around the house as a necessary evil and get the mow-and-blow brigade to cut the grass, mulch the beds and shape the bushes. (Favorite cringe scene of the past year: mow-and-blower sculpting a gumdrop azalea with gas-powered hedge clippers.) But for active gardeners, who love to nurture plants and work the soil, the decision to scale back gardening also means scaling back the garden. This can be hard, to let go of beds that are full of memories as well as flowers.

Page Dickey, a garden designer and writer in North Salem, N.Y., has consciously dismantled some of the beloved elements of her 30-year-old, three-acre garden at her property, Duck Hill, now that she and her husband, Bosco Schell, are in their 70s.

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June 1, 2011 Gardening, General Ag News and Notes, Vegtables Post a Comment

Taming the unruly tomato vine

By Barbara Damrosch,
We’re all rooting for the tomatoes right now, hoping for fast growth, strong stems and branches laden with fruit. How easily we can forget what happens when tomatoes run amok.

It’s probably too late to warn you not to grow too many of them and not to plant them too closely. But without dampening your enthusiasm, let’s talk about support. How much you invest in that is up to you. The easiest thing is to do nothing and let the plants flop on the ground. This works with the determinate types, which stop growing after a few feet and set all their fruits at once. But the indeterminate vining ones must be trained upward before their heavy fruit brings them to their knees in a tangled, impenetrable mess.

Tomato cages, if they’re strong, work fine. I make mine out of concrete-reinforcing wire, which I buy in five-foot-wide sheets from a building supply store. This sturdy mesh has six-inch-square openings through which I can easily reach the tomatoes for picking.

I form it into cylinders 16 inches in diameter and set them over the young plants to guide their ascent, pinching out the suckers at the bottom. (A sucker is a little shoot that emerges in the angle made by the leaf branch and the main stem.) The lowest suckers emerge just above the first pair of leaves, the smooth-edged seed leaves. Left to grow, they would branch out rather than up and just get in the way. After that, there’s little to do except remove wayward branches and a few more suckers if growth is rampant.

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May 29, 2011 Gardening, General Ag News and Notes Post a Comment

Flower bandit filches Cleveland Park blooms

They’ve waged war against deer and battled hungry possums that snatch tomatoes just when they are at the peak of their flavor. But there’s one pest the Newark Street gardeners have been unable to thwart: a certain two-legged rat with a penchant for peonies.

For 10 years, gardeners in this Northwest Washington neighborhood believe the same man has been stealing spring blooms from their plots in the Newark Street Community Garden. Not just a few stems, mind you, but bunches — as many as 30 to 50 at a time.

“He does this every year, starting with the peonies,” said Marcia Stein, one of the flower thief’s victims, who lost a bunch of blooms this month. “Last year, he stole all of my peonies.”

Gardeners say the suspect has expensive taste. He ignores lesser flowers in favor of pricier blooms. (At Johnson’s Florist and Garden Center in Cleveland Park, peonies sell for $8.99 a stem.)

And when he steals them, he’s not gentle: He rips the blooms right out of the ground.

For years, the gardeners kept quiet, fearful that publicity would encourage more thefts.

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May 26, 2011 Gardening, General Ag News and Notes Post a Comment

The Chelsea Flower Show: New plants and the not-so-new

The Chelsea Flower Show is perhaps the world’s brightest stage on which to launch new plants. It’s great opportunity to tell gardeners about new plants, and blogs, websites, newspapers and magazines are full of the news. The Chelsea Plant of The Year award, launched last year, has ratcheted up the interest.

But some nurseries announce plants as new when they’ve been around for years. Others fail to mention really good new plants that they’re exhibiting and have to have the information coaxed out of them. And can a plant first publicised last summer really be “launched” at the show?

Hillier Nurseries have a very attractive new ruby-red leaved maple, Acer palmatum ‘Shaina’ (pictured above), a lovely plant, which they say is “Available exclusively through Hillier Garden Centres and online at www.hillier.co.uk in 2011”. But in fact it’s been available since the 1990s, the RHS themselves say it’s listed by 24 other nurseries and garden centres all over the country have it. Despite three or four attempts I have been unable to get hold of Hillier to ask why they’re promoting the plant in this way.
Clematis ‘Celebration’ Clematis ‘Celebration’. Photograph: Fred Godfrey/Sussex Plants

Clematis ‘Celebration’ is certainly a breakthrough clematis – the first ever large-flowered type with yellow foliage – and Thorncroft Clematis are lucky to have it.

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