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…
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…
Mother Nature has been playing with us these past weeks, but no matter how she laughs as she keeps us off balance spring is coming. Crocuses, daffodils and sky blue scillas are laughing right back. Forsythia bushes are sunbursts of blossom. Even some small trees are beginning to bloom. My neighbor Paul has a golden witch hazel in his garden. Hamamelis vernalis blooms early in the spring and is noted for that early bloom and twirly petaled flowers.…
It seemed a little early but on March 6th I started some seeds indoors. Now, three weeks later it seems like it might have been totally unnecessary. I have neighbors who tilled sections of their garden and have already planted a number of cold hardy plants: lettuces, spinach, snap peas, carrots and beets. Who can gauge the risks in times like these? I might have been too cautious in starting my seeds, but my neighbors may have been…
Yesterday my earliest daffodils began to bloom - just in time for temperatures to plunge from their unseasonable summer highs. Nothing is certain in a garden. How many times do we have to relearn this lesson? The following takes me back a couple of weeks - before we were all boldly planting seeds. Beginning tomorrow days will be brighter longer. The sun will not set until 6:46 pm. It will seem like spring has arrived – even though…
Ellen Sousa now lives in Spencer on a small farm with animals, veggies, and many native plants that have earned it certification as a Wildlife Habitat and Monarch Waystation. But it was not always so. As a child Sousa tramped the woods with her father and read Who Really Killed Cock Robin, an environmental mystery by Jean Craighead George. My daughter Betsy also read this book in sixth grade and she determined at that moment to become an…
Seven weeks ago I gave myself an early Christmas present – a bowl in a classic shape (actually a sort of plastic flower pot) and four succulent plants. I had been inspired by reading Succulent Container Gardens by Debra Lee Baldwin which I had reviewed in this column earlier in December. I am not terribly good at caring for houseplants except for the succulents: a jade tree, an enormous orchid cactus, and Christmas and Thanksgiving cactus I had…
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…
As I look out my window today the ground is a tapestry of beige, green and white. The meadow grasses have died back, but the lawn is a brilliant green because it has loved this long cool, but not frozen, autumn and there are still patches, large and small, of the snow that keeps tantalizing us. Winter may be coming, but it is shy this year, stepping out and then retreating. The winter garden can be a challenge…