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Autumn means different things to different people, but everyone has a list of fall gardening chores. In New England winter comes on faster every year, somehow, and I feel less prepared every year. Maybe it's as I learn more, the list of things I feel I absolutely have to do gets longer. Here, I humbly offer the wimpy chilly person's guide to fall gardening chores.
"Leaf Peeping!" my husband told me, "It's the major source of New England's travel industry economy from early October through mid-November. They come from all over the world!"
This was my first summer as a serious tomato grower. Well, okay, I had an EarthBox. I had heard all about getting stuck with too many tomatoes and seen the recipes for creative ways to use up extra tomatoes. I had tomato-stars in my eyes with pictures of roasted tomato sauce, salsa, and all the wonderful things you can do with tomatoes, as well as plans for sandwiches, and salads. My imagination knew no bounds when it came to the wonderful things I was going to do with my surplus.
Have you already gotten your first catalog of spring-blooming bulbs, to be planted in the fall? Are you drooling? It's hard not to. Take a minute to catch your breath, put away your credit card, and give some thought to your spring and summer bulb display. Planting bulbs is a traditional fall family activity in much of the world, but it pays to take a little time to plan before you dig.
Queen Anne's Lace, or Wild Carrot, or Bird's Nest, are all names for the same beautiful frilly white flower. If you live in the continental United States, this flower grows in your state! It was brought to North America by early European settlers as a medicinal herb. Is it a wildflower, a weed, a useful herb or a dangerous invader? There are certainly arguments to every side of the debate.
There are as many reasons to grow plants in containers as there are gardeners. You moved into an apartment - can you still have a garden? You've always dreamed of a whiskey barrel with pink geraniums spilling out onto the deck - but how? I will always remember the first time I saw trailing blue lobelia - in a container, in the Berkshires. It took me years to figure out what that beautiful plant with the tiny blue flowers was!
Is a CSA right for you? CSA, or Community Supported Agriculture, is an idea, no, a movement that is sweeping the nation's smaller or organic farms. Read on to find out how to participate in this new way of connecting with your food and the land.
In today's sluggish economy, sometimes it feels like the safest thing to do with your hard-earned money is to bury it in the garden. But while stock funds are wilting, your garden can be thriving if you give it adequate water and plenty of horse manure! Read on to find out about some plants you can incorporate to figuratively "be in the money."
When to prune your beautiful yellow forsythia (or other spring-flowering shrub)? It blooms reliably every spring, most years that is, well, it USED to bloom every spring. Now it's just not looking as peppy any more. Could it be time to prune it? Here's how to decide.
The 2009 herb of the year is (drum-roll, please) bay laurel or sweet bay! This woody, aromatic perennial tree native to the Mediterranean has many reasons to be celebrated, both for its historic significance and its usefulness today. But is California bay almost as good? Please, read on.
There were some lilacs which hadn't even opened yet, a few without even a hint of a bud, and lots - and lots and lots - in full bloom on the day we went. Tall, short, skinny, or fat, lilacs are all beautiful, and most of them are at the Arnold Arboretum in Boston.
My husband loves his lawn. Oh, he's not as bad as the guy next door, who has a tractor mower for his quarter acre lot, but there is a bit of competition on our street for whose lawn looks the most like a golf course. (We lose.) And my dearly beloved husband won't let me plant crocuses in the lawn! That ripening period when the flowers are gone and the foliage is tall and gangly and he is not allowed to mow is just too long for him. So I've been exploring ways to hide the fact that I am still planting more and more bulbs in our yard.
At the beginning of the twentieth century, well-to-do widow and art collector Isabella Stewart Gardner had run out of places to put her art, sculpture, and furniture, so she built herself a museum. The center of her museum was a glass-covered courtyard filled with tropical plants which bloomed all year. And every April, for her birthday, let me tell you what eccentric and beautiful Isabella Stewart Gardner did ...
The Secret Garden - what did it really look like? If you've read the book, you remember the bricked-up secret garden which came to life when tended by Mary Lennox. If you haven't, perhaps I can convince you to pick up a copy somewhere and read it! Although it's a children's book, it has captivated the hearts of gardeners for generations. Here are some photographs of what the adult in me thinks the flowers in Mary's Secret Garden might have looked like.
Is it hot chocolate? Is it hot cocoa, or just cocoa? What's the difference, anyway? When the Spanish added sugar instead of chili to the bitter hot drink they brought back from the New World, it created a sensation in the courts of Europe. Chocolate drinks were believed to have medicinal value in the 16th and 17th centuries, and it turns out, they just might actually be good for you after all! Who knew?
My darling husband got me a bouquet of red roses the other day! He ordered it through an online company three weeks ahead of time, just to be sure. It was supposed to arrive on the eleventh anniversary of the day we first met—what a sweetheart! Instead, I got a bouquet of red roses the day he ordered it, three weeks earlier than our anniversary. Er ... I guess we won't be using that particular company again!
We've all gotten them, whether or not we grow plants from seeds: mail order catalogs with pictures of bigger, tastier, vegetables with higher yields and prettier, brighter flowers, if only we use seeds from THIS company. How and when did this all start? Let's go back in time together.
Many of us put up one (or more) decorated and lighted trees, inside our homes and out in December. Lots of these trees have presents under them. Have you ever wondered why? Where, when and how did these curious customs originate?
In fact, many people are better off without wheat in their diet, and most of us would benefit by expanding our palates to include more grains. There are other kinds of nuts, seeds and grains to cook with besides all-purpose wheat flour. My journey began when my daughter was diagnosed with celiac disease, but it taught me about foods I never knew existed, and forced me to reexamine everything in my kitchen.
Transplanting a Zone 6 New England daughter into a zone 8 southwestern college. Will she survive the transplant shock? Will I? And what IS that cactus, anyway?
Wind chimes - constantly creating new music and new harmonies. If you've read about me below, you know I am a classically trained musician. Until I can afford weatherproof speakers or a resident string quartet, wind chimes are where my two passions coincide.
The weather in New England is never that sunny, dry, searing heat I remember from New Mexico. Still, when it gets hot back here, really hot, it reminds me of how hot and dry it is out there, which makes me think of my father and his surprisingly green thumb.
When I say a container garden, I don't mean a miniature garden in a dish, no, I mean a garden just for pots, or maybe a garden of containers, where the planters themselves are part of the show.
We each have our own secret addictions. This is my confession: I am addicted to blue pots. Plastic, clay, terra cotta, stoneware, even the styrofoam ones look pretty good to me.
A lot of people on Dave's Garden have butterfly gardens; there's even a forum specifically for people to discuss their love of butterflies. But we live within earshot of one of the big old cities in the Northeast. I never thought we would see a butterfly in OUR garden! Today, Earth Day 2008, seemed like the right day to tell you about it...
Famous for designing New York City's Central Park, Frederick Law Olmsted (1822 - 1902) was the first person ever to describe himself as a "landscape architect." In Boston, however, Olmsted will forever be remembered as the visionary designer of The Emerald Necklace, a system of parks and parkways that wind through and around the city of Boston. While Olmsted designed similar extensive park systems for other major cities, for us, it's The Emerald Necklace that makes Olmsted rank with Paul Revere and Henry Thoreau as a local hero.
Have you heard the children's song about the cat who always came back to poor Mr. Johnson, who lived all alone? He blows the cat up, he drowns it, he runs it over, but no matter how hard he tries to get rid of this cat, it always comes back. "It just wouldn't stay away -ay -ay -ay." Well, that's how I feel about my Coreopsis!
When the kids - and you, too - have been stuck inside for days, shake it up a little... have a picnic - inside! The very idea of a picnic indoors will confuse their little brains enough to give you a minute to think.
Frustrated gardeners have long forced bulbs into flowering early, tricking bulbs into thinking it was spring after a period of cold dormancy, or winter. Now that we have refrigerated trucks and interstate shipping and all the other conveniences of modern society, we also have forced bulbs available in supermarkets and chain stores all over the country. In particular, we often find tête-à-tête narcissus, in bud or blooming already, their cheery yellow flowers tempting us, quickening our heartbeats and lightening our steps.
I plant a tiny lilac tree, he mows it down. I plant a slightly larger lilac tree, and this time I mark it with an enormous metal stake that says "welcome to my garden". Well, golly, of course, he has to move the stake in order to mow that side of the yard, and so... well... he mows down the lilac tree again.
Now that you've found your way to Dave's Garden, can you find your way around Dave's Garden? Do you know about all the nooks and crannies here? And how about all those weird acronyms everyone seems to use - SASBE, DH, MIL, and JM? Let me be the first to welcome you and let me give you a brief tour of MY view of Dave's Garden.
My friend Doss, in California, wishes she could naturalize crocuses - she can't. It doesn't ever get cold enough. And she has to replant new pre-chilled tulips every year. I wish I could find truly cold-hardy gladiolus, or palm trees, or canna lilies that didn't need frost protection. (I planted those "frost-hardy" gladiolus one fall. They were beautiful the following spring. But they didn't come back. Neither did those exciting crocosmia!)
The first serious snowfall of the year in New England always brought my mother boiling up a batch of maple syrup, just as in Laura Ingalls Wilder's day. Luckily for us, we didn't have to start with the maple tree. We just needed the snow and the jug of maple syrup!
