Cabbage. Such an ordinary vegetable. We don’t give it much thought. We shred it into a salad, dress it into coleslaw, or boil it up with corned beef, but there are many types of cabbage in the world, and many ways of serving it up. Think of corned beef and cabbage! I began thinking about cabbage this week when, while sorting through some old photographs, my husband and I found a few shots of the ai…
Is it too early to talk about new flowers for 2014? NO! By tomorrow afternoon Punxatawny Phil will have told us whether we can count on an early spring. I have heard a rumor that he may very well do so. Maybe. I already know that it is still light at 5:30 in the evening. Spring seems like a real possibility and it is time to pay serious attention to the plant catalogs piling up since before…
The last planting season of the year is late fall when gardeners are racing to get in all the crocus, daffodil, scilla, snowdrop and tulip bulbs in the ground so they can look forward to an early spring full of color. But fall is not the only bulb planting season. There is a whole array of bulbs that need to be planted in the spring to bloom gloriously and often exotically in the summer. Many summer blooming bulbs…
“What news? What news?” was often the cry when E. F. Benson’s delightfully pretentious Lucia met her neighbor Georgie coming across the Riseholm village green in “Queen Lucia,” the first of several books about the life in an English village before WWII. When I return from Saturday morning rounds in my own rural village my husband always wants to know what news I bring home. “What’s new?” is our inevitable query of neighbors at local gatherings. The desire…
I got my first 2011 catalog today! Totally Tomatoes offers 34 (count 'em) pages of tomato varieties - and then we begin on the peppers. Sixteen pages of peppers, from sweet to hot, big and small, round and curly, then on to a couple of pages of cukes and other veggies, plus an array of tomato growing and preserving equipment. Cook books, too. Have your gotten your first catalog yet?
Applejack was one of the first roses we planted at the End of the Road. It is the first rose to greet people as they come up to the Annual Rose Viewing, and the last to leave its image in their rear view mirrors. Applejack is one of Griffith Buck's hybrids. Buck attended Iowa State University after serving in WWII and went on to teach there, and hybridize roses that were hardy and disease resistant. Last summer I…
I'm starting to make up my list of Plants to Buy for the spring, and I got stopped right at the first page of the Bluestone Perennials catalog. A is for Achillea or yarrow. I already have "The Pearl" in my garden and I love it. It is pretty in the garden and useful in bouquets. I have another pink yarrow, but I don't know the name. When I first started gardening I was only familiar with the…
Between the concern about GMO seeds and a difficult economy, gardeners are more and more interested in seed saving. The Seed Savers Exchange has been around for years and is now celebrating 35 years of helping people find and continue growing heirloom, open pollinated seed for hundreds of vegetables and flowers Kent and Diane Ott Whealy founded the SSE and you needed to be a member to get seeds (and they were free) from the owner of the…