I know I’ve said it before but it’s good to get out. Yesterday Gail, Julie (our education coordinator) and I went to the Perennial Plant Conference at UCONN in Storrs, CT and came back jazzed all over again about things like native plants and edible landscaping.

Rosalind Creasy has been advocating and demonstrating edible landscaping –beautifully – since at least the early 70’s and we have certainly been playing with the idea here for the last few years too. But now I’m all over the idea for my own garden – all over again. Truth be told, I haven’t been much into planting vegetables at home unless they’re exceptionally pretty. But I’m coming to realize that they’re almost all exceptionally pretty if they’re worked into the design in the right way. Not to mention the benefits of growing your own food. And she makes such a compelling case for replacing lawn (preaching to the choir) – I don’t even have kids but if I did maybe I’d already know they prefer a garden to a blank expanse of turf. Gardens are always more interesting. Plus I came home with her cookbook …

And Doug Tallamy who wrote Bringing Nature Home (a book I have mentioned being excited about before) made an even more compelling case for replacing sterile suburban wastelands (ie. lawn and other exotics). He of course makes the case for planting native species. Tallamy recommends “flipping the age-old landscaping paradigm on its head. Instead of designing where your flower beds will go in a sea of lawn, design where you need lawn for walking spaces and plant the rest of your property with native ornamentals.” And here’s why we should all do that:

As he puts it, “humanity’s life support systems are failing.” We have to remember that the ecosystem provides services such as the air we breathe, water management and purification, food, weather systems, carbon dioxide sequestration, waste recycling and so on, and we have to quit taking all of that for granted. If we lose biodiversity, we literally lose it all. 33,000 species of plants and animals are considered “imperiled” and unable to perform their function within the ecosystem. Not good.

Everything is connected (just like in Avatar) and “insects are key!”, says Tallamy. They convert the energy from plants into food for other animals. Did you know that 23% of a black bear’s diet is insects? (In my family we always joked about all the protein we were getting every time we accidentally swallowed a bug. Turns out to be true.) Trouble is, most insects are specialists who will only eat certain native plants. If you worry about planting things that will just become defoliated and ugly because of all the insects, he says that doesn’t actually happen – and has the data to support it. Something always comes along to eat the insects. That’s how it works – and why it works. Here are his lists of great natives listed in order of how many butterfly/moth species will be supported by them.

I could go on and on … but instead I’ll just recommend reading his book yourself if you haven’t already. And in the next few weeks, take a look around and make a note of what is leafing out. Asian species are generally ahead of the natives by a week or two. Do you need a few more natives in your yard? In my own garden I have decided to evict a few things including a favorite young styrax tree. For one thing I know it can escape cultivation because mine had originally planted itself where it didn’t belong. And for another, it supports a whopping zero native caterpillars. I’ll also be evicting more lawn for vegetables… You too?

Every year Gail and I take it upon ourselves to try a few new tools. We want to stay on the cutting edge, so to speak, of what’s handy, so to speak. We have not been offered any free trials, alas – we buy only what we think looks useful. So what follows are a couple of unsolicited reviews and previews of products that maybe you have considered trying too. (Deliberately linkless because this is currently a no-ad blog.)

The super slim lightweight hose from Gardeners Supply truly weighs next to nothing. I love that about it. What I don’t love, and what they don’t tell you, is that its tiny slimness doesn’t provide enough pressure to support a full size watering wand – we use it only with a smaller wonder waterer. It is also super kinktastic. Plus if you don’t take the time to wind the diabolical thing up exactly the way it wants to wind, it becomes a tripping snake monster. Is there no perfect hose?

Last year we purchased coir (rhymes with foyer) pots for our seedlings because they are made of coconut fiber, a renewable resource more sustainable than peat. We were also sold on them because they are supposed to break down faster than peat making it possible to actually plant them. Too good to be true? You bet. They do not break down quickly. We had a suspicion so not every plant was planted in the pot – only the ones whose roots were already tangled in the fibers. And those plants did not thrive probably because they were strangled by pots that could probably survive an apocalypse. On the upside, we will be reusing the sturdiest ones.

This year we’re trying cow pots but because they’re much more expensive, we only purchased enough for our sweet peas. Cow pots are made from composted cow manure – a genius use for a truly unlimited resource – and are also supposed to break down quickly and be plant-able. I’ll keep you posted. We also bought a soil block maker – if we can get our soil mix right, we’ll just go pot-less.

Last year we also purchased half a pallet of coir bricks for mixing our own potting soil and that we love especially because it’s re-wettable. (Peat is so not.)

I already know we’re going to like the tub trugs because I have one at home and I’m not sure what I carried everything-under-the-sun in before I owned it.

The ho-mi digger (Korean hand plow) is new to us but has been used by other gardeners for something like 5000 years. Anything that has stood that kind of test of time must be a pretty perfect tool.

Everybody raves about the Cobrahead weeder so we bought a few last year for our volunteers to try. They haven’t taken to it yet. But most of them are fiercely loyal to an old broken-down batch of Cape Cod weeders that aren’t being manufactured anymore. And I don’t use it because I carry a hori-hori – my favorite garden tool ever – in my back pocket.

Have you used any of these things? What do you think of them? Do you have any suggestions for other tools we should try?

I remember walking to school in the fall with a beach-comber’s lurch looking for the most beautiful leaf. When I found it, I memorized it and then kept looking for a more perfect one. I don’t remember ever making anything from my found leaves – some people probably like to press them or make wreaths – I just kept them as bookmarks until they faded to boring or disintegrated. Now that I have a digital camera I collect only pictures of leaves and I have to say it’s not nearly as gratifying and I end up with way too many to look at when just one perfect real one tucked in a book would do.

I also remember that the most strenuous garden chore I had as a kid was raking leaves and I thought that the whole point was to make a giant pile to jump into (preferably before the dog noticed it). It’s funny, the whole raking leaves issue. Why do we do it, really? This article from the Fine Gardening E-newsletter makes the claim that raking is actually unnecessary. The author, Terry Ettinger, recommends mowing the leaves into little bits and leaving them to break down on our lawns and in our gardens. I can think of two reasons not to do that. 1, I have had it with mowing by now and 2, the neighbors already give my garden the hairy eyeball for looking a little wild. I think tidiness is the main number-one reason we all collect leaves and I’m pretty sure Fred and Dan, now into their second or third pass with the blowers around the property, would agree. It’s bred in the bone. Gail and I also rake leaves out of the garden beds and our main reason for doing that is so that we can see beds as blank slates when we do our fall planting. Ettinger says, “observation shows that unraked leaves in planting beds don’t smother shade-tolerant perennials.” You know me – I’ll happily test that theory at home but here we’ll continue to mulch beds with shredded leaves instead which break down much faster than whole ones.

The great debate ends when all agree that collecting the leaves – not just one for a keepsake but as many as you can use in the garden – is what’s important. Whether they stay in bits on your lawn or in your garden beds, are added to the compost or shredded for mulch, we gardeners know that leaves are way too good of a soil amendment to let go of.

How do you feel about raking? And do you collect leaves too?

It’s a big day in the blogosphere. Not only is the fifteenth of every month Garden Bloggers Bloom Day but the fifteenth of October also happens to be Blog Action Day. Thousands of bloggers around the world are chiming in about climate change and by all accounts it’s a huge success (even though my post isn’t published yet) – which must mean we’re on our way to reversing the global warming trend.

My favorite bumpersticker (from a local wholesale nursery who prefer to remain incognito) says it all. “Increase Your Oxygen Footprint – Plant the Cosmos!!” Gardeners certainly don’t need to be told twice to plant plants. Check out this fascinating post over at Garden Rant for part one of the nitty-gritty science on your garden’s carbon footprint. All I’ll say (and I could say a lot but hope to spare you a sermon) is that I like to remember that it’s the small everyday decisions that bring change – and haven’t we already learned that the hard way. I know gardeners will keep planting. Keep composting. Keep buying locally (-and that includes patronizing your local nurseries who in turn patronize the local growers. We know that box store prices are much costlier than they appear). And think of all of the ways we can make our garden be more sustainable: We can plant native species – or simply the right plant in the right spot; replace lawns with garden beds; make compost; choose organic fertilizers – or our own compost tea; capture rain in barrels and cisterns; just say No to pesticides… What have I missed? – Please add to the list! All of the little decisions we make add up, you’d better believe it. Amen.

Now please open your hymnals to page 10-15-09 (where we haven’t had frost yet but we have managed to meet our mostly-moved-into-the-greenhouse-by-October-15th deadline!). As always, thanks go to Carol from May Dreams Gardens for hosting bloom day.

Mouse over for captions and click on for a larger view.

If you tell someone you found it in “Dirr” they’ll know you mean the Manual of Woody Landscape Plants: Their Identification, Ornamental Characteristics, Culture, Propagation and Uses (now in its 6th edition). But Michael A. Dirr, PhD has also written The Book on viburnums (Viburnums: Flowering Shrubs for Every Season), The Book on hydrangeas (Hydrangeas for American Gardens) co-written by his wife Bonnie, and several other coffee-table-worthy, destined-to-be-dogeared reference books. What makes his books worth consulting – and reading from cover to cover – is not just the breadth of information but that they’re thick with pithy opinions. I found out yesterday that Mike is just as entertaining and full of it (I mean knowledge) in person.

Mike’s slides were, unfortunately, a little tough to see due to the brilliance of a perfect day but the afternoon tree tour of the University of Blithewold (it felt like a campus yesterday) was a spectacular pleasure. I’m still trying to process it all. I’m sure I wasn’t the only one in the group of local industry professionals, savvy cognoscenti and at least one fellow blogger, straining to catch every second of his mile-a-minute professorial banter. Everyone looked as riveted, and by the end of the day, as overwhelmed as I felt. I’m so relieved that there’s not going to be a quiz – but I’ll try to recap just a little for you.

The event was co-sponsored by the New England chapter of the International Society of Arboriculture, and the topics – fitting for that group and ours – were noble trees and new introductions. Mike pointed out that you always know a noble tree when you see it – you don’t even have to know what it is, just that it has a venerable stature, grace, beauty and presence. It’s a squirrel highway and a landmark and Blithewold is blessedly full of them. It most certainly isn’t a Bradford pear (Pyrus calleryana) which has become not only the most ubiquitous street tree but has turned out to be invasive as well. And certainly not enough truly noble trees are being planted today for the benefit of future generations. Have you planted any? Which ones? Do you have a favorite noble tree? (Mine is a particular linden in a particular Middletown garden – even though – or because – I’ve nearly been knocked cold a couple of times by its enormous akimbo elbows.)

It is new introductions of trees and shrubs that keep the industry on its toes. Mike and Bonnie are on the constant look-out for unusual traits in trees and shrubs and have had a few “85 mph” drive-by finds introduced into commerce. (Keep your eyes peeled for a new redbud called ‘Bonnie’s Pink’.) We all want something new and different (we can’t help it) and with a trained eye any one of us could find the next winner, have it tested, propagated and introduced. The lesson I take from that is simply to pay more attention even to the old stand-by, tried-and-trues. How is it that I never in my life really noticed a hornbeam before yesterday? The professor in Mike brought out the student in me. I’m still interested all over again. And I’ve got a(helluva) lot to learn and a few of my own opinions to cultivate. How about you?

Pretty safe to say that it’s not going to be a great tomato year. If we’re very very lucky maybe we’ll get some honker waterlogged fruit with split skins but conditions are apparently favorable for something even less delicious. Late Blight is all over the news and typical of the media we have been primed for panic and widespread tomato mayhem. Truth be told, I am generally irritated by the culture of fear promoted by the press – it’s one of my pet peeves – but the more I read about Late Blight, the more I think “eeu”.

Phytophthora infestans (- can’t you just tell that this is something disgusting?) is the same disease that wiped out potatoes during the Great Famine in Ireland and could do (has done) the same in any monoculture of tomatoes or potatoes here if we don’t keep a keen eye out. The recommendation for anyone growing tomatoes is to check for infestation daily and bag up, throw out, Do Not Compost any plants that show any signs of the disease (for pictures and info, click here). But what really scares the daylights out of me is that we’ve collectively been advised to spray fungicides with clorothalonil – a skull & crossbones carcinogenic – as a preventive measure. Now, I can understand commercial growers doing this to protect their crops and livelihoods, but homeowners? Come on. We’re not growing a monoculture in our gardens – are we? How about we just enjoy something else this year? I for one will gladly pay a ransom especially for an organically grown, disease-free tomato if I have to and would be much happier and probably healthier if my neighbors upwind choose to do the same. And it seems to be a terrific Swiss chard, cabbage and lettuce year…

So far, Blithewold’s tomatoes are clean. The fungus, which overwinters on living tissue, must not have found any errant potato tubers left in the garden. And since we grow our own tomatoes from seed, we haven’t imported it either. But the weather isn’t on our side. Cool-ish days and nights (60-80°F) coupled with humidity and rain – we’ve had plenty of that – are ideal for spreading infection from garden to garden and as long as that continues we’ll have to keep our eyes peeled. (A stretch of stupidly hot weather, if we ever get the summer blaze we’re used to, will knock the disease out of contention.)

How are your tomatoes? Have you sprayed – or will you?

When I made my winter vacation request for last week I asked the universe for extra warm weather so that I could get a jump on spring.  It snowed instead.  But it really didn’t matter because I was lucky enough to be snowed in at the Philadelphia Flower show.  An Italian spring was in full mid-summer bloom there.  Now, I have to admit to you that, in general, I am not the biggest fan of these spring flower shows.  There’s something that doesn’t hit me quite right when I see delphiniums and daffodils blooming together – my family likened it to my aversion to bent spoons.  They think I’m weird.  (I know I am.)  But I have to say that the sheer florabundance of the show was truly overwhelming and like every one else I was drop jawed at the “Milan” display of horti-couture.  Shoes made from plants?  It’s as perfect a combination as chocolate and peanut butter.  And I would totally wear the twig dress!

My other favorite part of the show was the Horticourt where people – mostly ordinary every day people as opposed to professional growers – had entered their prized specimen plants in hopes of winning … well, a prize.  I can’t imagine being a judge for any of the classes and categories in the Horticourt – all of the plants were beautiful, healthy, perfectly groomed and eminently covet-able.  So of course I stopped through the Marketplace on the way out to … purchase plants (as if I need any more).  Maybe one day I’ll shoot for a blue ribbon at a flower show too.

The really interesting thing is that the Philadelphia Flower Show is produced by the Pennsylvania Horticulture Society and is a fundraiser for an amazing program called Philadelphia Green. According to their website, Philadelphia Green was started in 1974 and is  “the nation’s most comprehensive urban greening program”.  Jane Pepper, president of PHS, showed the group I was with some really inspiring slides of vacant land reclamation and beautification (the befores and afters were truly stunning), thriving community gardens, and their growing (pun intended) partnership with the Philadelphia Prison System – inmates sow seeds for community gardens in their greenhouses and a lot of their produce is distributed to local food pantries.  Coming into town on the train, I happened to notice what had to have been one of the Green’s community gardens in a neighborhood that looked like it might be on the wrong side of the tracks.  I’ll have to go back to get a glimpse of it under cultivation.  And I definitely want to go back.  I’d never been to Philadelphia or the flower show and they’re both high on my list now for do overs.

Did you make it to the show and what did you love about it?  – Or were you snowed in?

Our seed orders have started to come in!   I discovered though that I have to offer an official retraction of a snarky complaint in this post about Select Seeds‘ shipping charges.  Well, obviously, I read the wrong shipping chart and we sent in the right amount for plants, not seeds!  Duh.  It’s right there on the order form plain as day and the shipping charges for seeds are very modest and totally fair.  – As are their charges for shipping plants, I’m sure.  Along with our order, Select very nicely sent us check for the difference and they probably don’t even know that I was ever grumpy.  Mea culpa!

And just as soon as we turned in our seed orders, we turned to plant orders.  And we’re still in the thick of it.   Gail and I have gone so far as to make appointments with a couple of reps this week to hash out details.  We have a lot of ground to cover  (so to speak) this year so we’re excited to be able to have reason to try and make the order minimums with certain wholesalers and are looking into buying plugs as well.

Plugs, for those of you unfamiliar with them, are tiny starts that nurseries often buy in bulk in to grow on and sell when they reach a good size.  We have bought plugs in the past and planted them out in large areas that we wanted to fill in swathes – the area behind the Summer House is the best example.  Fred and Dan planted that a couple of years ago with plugs of ferns, tiarella, euphorbia and some grasses and those tiny plants have filled in quite nicely since.  It’s a great way for us to get a large quantity of something fairly inexpensively.  The only real drawback is the size.  The plugs are wee and it takes a couple of years at least for some of these plants to make a proper show.  The other issue we’re faced with is greenhouse space.  Depending on when the orders come in, we’ll have to make room for them in the greenhouse.  Perennials can usually go out early to harden off but we’re looking into getting plug annuals too.  Those would be delivered just as the greenhouse is filled to the gills with our own seedlings.  Gail is a sorceress when it comes to finding bench space but this might test even her magic.

We have also added to our bench space crunch by ordering dahlia cuttings rather than tubers which will need to be potted up and grown on in the greenhouse too.  We were seduced by the beautiful pictures of dahlia flowers and the friendliness of the folks at Corralitos Gardens in CA – plus they were recommended by someone we trust.  Have you ever bought dahlia cuttings rather than tubers?

The plugs and dahlia cuttings will be grand experiments for us – you know I’ll keep you posted on how it all goes.  What kinds of experiments (and magic) do you perform in your garden?

It’s time to dive into catalogs!  I’ve been staring at the growing stack of them on the potting shed table for nearly 2 weeks now, waiting for Gail to return from vacation, and resisting the urge to begin the browse.  (We shop as a team.)  But there are a couple of catalogs that I just can’t keep myself from flipping through and others that I’m inclined to recycle without a glance because of where my head is this year.  Over the summer I read Animal, Vegetable, Miracle: A Year of Food Life
by Barbara and Camille Kingsolver and Stephen L. Hopp; last month I read In Defense of Food: An Eater’s Manifesto by Michael Pollan and right now I’m in the middle of The Omnivore’s Dilemma: A Natural History of Four Meals, also by M. Pollan.  These three books have me thinking differently not only about food but about ordering seeds.  Call me naive, but this time last year I didn’t know that most of the seed companies we order from are either owned by Monsanto (the largest producer of genetically engineered seeds and the largest seed company in the world) or buy seeds from them.  I also didn’t know that

…in 1981 there were approximately 5,000 vegetable seed varieties available in U.S. catalogs. Today there are less than 500, a 90 percent reduction.

-from The gardening game By Jerri Cook Wisconsin

Gail and I will be shopping primarily for ornamentals – mostly flowers, some veggies (Super Volunteer Dick orders seeds for the vegetable bed) – and we’ll still order from our usual array of companies (including Johnny’s, Territorial, Stokes, Burpee, Thompson & Morgan, Seeds of Change, Jung, and Pinetree) because they do carry seeds for some of the plants we love to grow and I’m all for encouraging those sources to keep providing our favorites.  But I’m really looking forward to placing big orders (maybe larger than usual) with Seed Savers Exchange and Baker Creek Heirloom Seeds because that’s where my head is.  These companies (Seed Savers Exchange is a non-profit membership organization) sell open pollinated seeds even though (and because) it means we might save seed (we do!) and not have to buy the same thing from them again.  They sell heirloom varieties that our grandparents might have grown.  The cool thing is that, like me, more and more people are interested in these varieties and the selection grows every year.

Have you read any of the books I mentioned?  (Have they changed your life?)  If you’re in the area and have read Animal, Vegetable, Miracle – or want to, it happens to be the selection for the very first “Book Worms” Book Club meeting on February 23rd hosted by Blithewold and the Norman Bird Sanctuary.  Please join us!

Do you have favorite seed catalogs?  Do you make a point of ordering heirloom varieties?  Do you save seed?

Things are really looking up around here.  I have to say that I still have goosebumps and this weirdly giddy feeling that must be called “hope”.  Rhode Islanders, regardless of a devastatingly stinky economy (did you know that we now have the embarrassing distinction of having the highest unemployment rate in the country?), passed three expensive ballot measures that all look toward what I think must be a brighter future.  (Hope is our state’s motto, by the way and any gardener’s word to live by.)  So don’t let rough roads and bridges keep you from visiting Blithewold – they’ll be fixed and we have even allowed funding for the purchase and protection of open spaces!  And near and dear to my heart, Bristol voters have willingly increased their property taxes to pay for a new animal shelter (all three of my kids used to reside in the current shelter building which is like a festering sore.  Now these two scamps live in my aspidistra.)  It seems to me like a gardener’s mentality has taken hold in the general populace – we gardeners know that we have an active hand in making things grow and thrive and even when we’re at our most cynical, we’re optimistically planning for the future.

Things are looking up here at Blithewold too.  The roofers have arrived with scaffolding and slate and will begin the first phase of a project that will ensure that the house and archives will be protected from rain and snow for another 100 years at least.  The good news for me, selfishly, was the excuse for a panoramic photo op with side order of vertigo.

And there’s so much to look forward to next week when Margaret Roach, famous fellow blogger from A Way to Garden and former editor of Martha Stewart Magazine speaks to us at our annual Garden Design Luncheon.  Again, selfishly, I’m hoping for a photo op and a chance for some heart to heart girl talk about frogs.  It looks like registration for this not-to-be-missed event is filling up so pull up a chair while you still can.  (click here for more info)

Some of what is up must come down:  Nick the Willing shredded the majority of our first fall of leaves yesterday.  The pile pictured is the pathetic looking result of the 2 or so hours of shredding I did earlier in the week.  Nick’s pile is much more impressive and I think we’re well on our way to having enough.  Although, Gail always says “That’s it?  We need MORE!”  And of course she’s right.  Gail and I will use Nick’s leaf pile for mulching all of the Display Garden beds next year and if we’re on the ball, we’ll get some leaves down soon on the paths in the Cutting Garden.  We also spread a leaf and grass mix from the mowers all over Dick’s vegetable bed – he thought it did wonders for the soil last year and was easier to deal with than sowing and tilling winter rye.  In the Rock Garden I spread a thin blanket of pine needles which makes the garden look tucked in for the winter even though we traditionally don’t put that garden “to bed” by cutting things back.  We’ll have to keep an eye on the pH of the soil though since pine needles are especially acidic.

Do you use shredded leaves or pine needles as mulch or do you add your leaves to the compost?  (Don’t tell me you put them out with the trash!  -Some of my neighbors do that and it’s all I can do to not trash pick – I need MORE!  They already think I’m nuts.)