Benefit plant sales are a traditional spring event. Gardeners can spruce up their gardens and benefit various community organizations. Which will you choose? Or will you choose them all? Have you thought about giving your mother a gift certificate (one way or another) so she can pick out some flowers herself? This Saturday, May5 the Greenfield Library will open its plant sale at 9:30 am on the front lawn. It will close by 12:30, unless everything is gone…
My daughter's Christmas present arrived today, Folksinger and Winter Sunset are Griffith Buck hardy rose hybrids, and Mrs. Anthony Waterer is a rugosa. Daughter Kate lives in Texas, where the Antique Rose Emporium also lives. It never ceases to amaze me that roses can be propogated in one climate, but still be hardy in climates like mine. The hardiness is in the genes. I have bought roses from the Antique Rose Emporium before. These container grown roses are…
I awoke to a delicious soft rain - and a beautiful May Basket. Pansies, grape hyacinths and chocolate. I wonder who is celebrating May Day with me.
In March we had May weather, and now we are having March weather. We gardeners know that the weather is always unpredictable but this year Mother Nature is really keeping us on our toes. I confess. I could not resist the lure; I direct-seeded greens in my Early Garden during that March heat wave. Then what? The soil was cool enough that my seeds, radishes and lettuces, did not germinate very quickly. By the time they did the…
April proved herself to be the cruelest month indeed this year alternating summer and winter temperatures. The past couple of nights we've had frost - and this after we had gotten quite used to balmy temperatures and tender zephyrs in mid-month. Now these lovely white daffodils might as well be snow cover - it is so cold. And windy. And dry. My Early Garden in front of the house is still adorned with row covers that blow and…
Water is everywhere around us. In streams, rivers and the oceans. We need water for everything, drinking, cleaning, agriculture, powering turbines. We cannot exist without water. In fact, we are water – about 60 percent water. Because it is so easy to turn on our taps and get all the clean, sweet water we need, we rarely think about water, how much we use, how we use it, what other people use it for, who doesn’t have safe…
I had not yet received the results of my soil test from UMass when my onion sets arrived from Dixondale Farms. I wanted to get them right in the ground, but I was worried about my soil pH. Dixondale says onions prefer a pH between 6.2 and 6.8. I feared my soil might be too acidic for optimum results so I tilled in another couple of handfuls of lime before I planted the onions. Two days later I…
Epimedium or, yin yang huo. Take your pick. This spring blooming ground cover: hardy, delicate, beautiful. For more Wordlessness this Wednesday click here.
After a dry winter and an extremely dry spring we finally have rain - two and a half inches in the last 24 hours. I've been reading away the rainy hours with Northeast Fruit and Vegetable Gardening by Charlie Nardozzi. It has been a perfect rain. Hours of rain have penetrated the thirsty earth without washing away newly dug and seeded beds. The seeds and seedlings I planted just before the rain are really happy. More rain is…
Soil is alive. It is more than sand, silt or clay particles. It is even more than rotted organic matter. It is full of bacteria and all kinds of fungi, good and bad. Soil is alive and it needs to be fed. Some people go to the garden center and buy bags of 5-10-5 fertilizer. The numbers stand for the ratio of nitrogen (N), phosphorous (P), and potassium or potash (K). This kind of fertilizer is soluble and…