Seed catalog shopping is a dangerous business. Even for us. Even with a greenhouse for early spring sowing and 5 good sized gardens to fill we have to be careful to not buy more than we can realistically find space for. And like most home gardeners who are not independently fabulously wealthy, we have a tight budget. So as Gail and I go through the catalogs we also mentally scan the gardens and every time we find something – or are lured by artful photography with a blaze across that shouts NEW! – that we weren’t looking for, we have to figure out exactly where it will fit in the garden. (And that will help justify creating room for the seedlings in the already packed to the gills greenhouse.)

The Rock Garden was short shrifted last year and the Rockettes might be pleased to know that we have been keeping our eyes peeled for diminutive annuals to spark and brighten the midsummer “holes”. The plant we’re most jazzed about so far for the Rock is a teeny Eschscholzia caespitosa (California poppy) called ‘Sundew‘ from Thompson & Morgan.

Last year was the first year the Rose Garden saw much annuals action – this year we’ll branch out there too. (We know there’s more to life than Zinnia ‘Profusion Orange’.) It’s always a challenge to find new things for the Cutting Garden – it’s got to be long-stemmed, prolific, clean, pretty in vase and out – but our list of favorites and good-for-cut worthies is getting longer by the year. Is anyone -besides Julie!- tired of seeing Asclepias physocarpus ‘Oscar’ aka ‘Hairy Balls’ yet? New changes in the Display Garden mean new room for experiment there too.

We like to justify impulse purchases by reminding ourselves that we really have an obligation to try new plants/varieties so we can tell/show people if it’s worth the hype. What do you think about that? Do you want to see new things at your favorite public garden that are possibly difficult to find or grow yourself? Garden bloggers, are you letting yourself budget for things you might not have tried before “going public”?

It’s a sunny, breezy 24 degrees F. outside and a sunny, fragrant, toasty-feeling 62 in the greenhouse. I’d rather be in the greenhouse than out of it right now. If you’re anything like me, in the middle of deep winter on the cusp of the age of aquarius you have a serious case or at least the onset of a serious case of cabin fever. It’s raw outside and it’s funky inside. For a gardener, I think the best cure is to surround yourself with plants.

As I see it there are a couple of options. For the unwilling to venture out, you could gather all of your plant babies together (or make the rounds) and spend some quality time grooming them. Have you started fertilizing yet? If you have, you might notice bugs on the succulent new growth. There’s nothing better than a little pest-icide on a winter’s day. Do you have a favorite method of control? In the greenhouse we duke it out with aphids, whitefly, mealy bug, scale and occasionally spidermite. We recently tried a Neem spray by Organica which cost $9 for a quart. For the difference in price between that and dish soap/insecticidal soap and no discernible difference in results, I have to say I prefer using soap. With soap I can spray with abandon! Neither Gail nor I love the smell of the Neem or the insectical soap, and I’m thinking of switching to my favorite lavender scented dish soap. Doesn’t lavender oil have insecticidal properties too or am I making that up? (Not that there’s much/any real lavender oil in the soap…) When I use any kind of soap, I dilute it so that there’s just the hint of a bubble in the spray and we don’t use it on the ferns or anything else with sensitive pores. We used to use horticultural oil (again, not on ferns, etc) but probably because I do have a tendency to spray with wanton abandon, many poor plants suffered under the onslaught and their leaves burned. It is best to spray -anything- on a cloudy day. Horticultural oil will kill scale but I actually prefer picking them off by hand and washing leaves and stems to control the sooty mold that grows on their sugary poo.

If you’ve already turned your own house into a greenhouse (anytime you pay attention to the plants in your house, you’re in a virtual greenhouse) and you’re ready for an outing – think about going to an actual greenhouse to indulge in a different climate. Not all greenhouses feel tropical but they are warmer than the outdoors and more humid than indoors – a welcome sigh in the middle of dry winter! More often than not there’s a scent or 12 to sip with your breath too. This teeny weeny little cluster of blooms is part of what’s scenting our greenhouse these days. It’s a Sweet Olive – Osmanthus fragrans and it’s delish.

The trip to the Smith College Botanic Garden is still on and there’s not much time left to sign up (the deadline for registration is February 6). Don’t miss this trip – sign up now and cure that cabin fever! Check out the Smith College Botanic Garden site if you need more motivation.

(click on images for a larger view and captions)

Like most people who have eyes and ears and minds that are open, I learn something new every day – but sometimes it’s good to get out and actually be “schooled”. Now that the gardens aren’t commandeering every moment of our time and every scrap of energy in our minds and bodies, we can give ourselves the chance to be taught by something/someone else outside of our daily realm. For Gail and me it’s a winter ritual to go to the RI Nursery and Landscape Assoc. (RINLA) Conference and Trade Show.

I attended the RINLA Conference yesterday and as usual came back with my mind humming and my world a little rattled. Sometimes it’s not just that I don’t already have access to the information that’s being shared but find by listening to someone else (usually an expert) speak about it, I am handed a new way to process or think about the information. For instance, during the panel discussion on invasives (what’s currently being done to limit/control invasive species in RI and MA), Dr. Sue Gordon from URI mentioned worms. She said that as a kid she remembers crashing around the forest in leaf litter that was up to her knees. Now-a-days forest leaf litter is only ever inches thick. Native worms in the U.S. were wiped out in the last ice age and what we’ve got now (we all know this) are European immigrants and we’ve been taught as gardeners to love and feed these lowly dirt munchers. Well. Perhaps too much of a good thing is not so good after all. Worms are not meant to be in our forests and leaf litter that breaks down too quickly is not good for forest ecology (see Teeming with Microbes by J. Lowenfels and W. Lewis). Native plants get stressed and opportunistic invasives get the strangle hold and the balance goes all out of whack. Dr. Gordon who also manages Kinney Azalea Gardens in South County said that she can’t keep a root ball around her nursery plants because the worms have made the soil so friable. Have you ever had worms in a potted plant? Because now that I think of it, it’s awfully hard to keep a wormy pot watered… Maybe – could it be that we shouldn’t go quite so crazy adding organic matter to our gardens – especially those of us in places that have been teetering on the edges of drought? I don’t mean to say that we should stop making compost or ammending the soil in our gardens but I do think we might have to keep an ever more vigilant eye out for all kinds of potential invasives in our local landscapes. And we’ll have to learn methods of moderation. (Doesn’t come down to “all things in moderation”?) And I think we should keep getting “schooled” by the experts. Have you learned or heard anything that rattled your world this winter? (For lists of Blithewold’s winter educational offerings click here and here.) At RINLA I learned more than I knew about using native plants too – stay tuned for that post later (when I’ve done some more reading on the subject!).