Dirt

My blog has moved!

2006-06-23T15:19:00.000-07:00

And I hope that everyone will take a minute to update their bookmarks, because I am finally making the inevitable move from Blogger to TypePad. I'm also rolling all three of my blogs (Dirt, Humboldt Hens, and Worms of Endearment) into one, and in addition to writing about the garden, the chickens, and the worms, I'll also be writing about the book tour and lots of other topics related to my new book, Flower Confidential. My new blog home is here:

http://blog.amystewart.com/

And last, but certainly not least, you'll find me over at GardenRant a few times a week. We're having a lot of fun, so come join us.

Welcome, San Francisco Chronicle Readers!

2006-06-17T10:15:00.000-07:00

If you're coming here to check out the blogs you read about in the San Francisco Chronicle, welcome. Settle in; have a look around.

I'm blogging regularly on a new group blog, GardenRant. You can find out more about the inspiration for this blog here.

And if you're interested in starting a garden blog of your own, you might want to read Don't Get Dirt in the Keyboard, and Other Blogging Tips for Gardeners.

Enjoy!

In Praise of Small Magazines

2006-06-16T12:07:00.000-07:00

When I saw Sign of the Shovel's post about her husband's new book, I realized that it was about time for me to employ a little crass commercialism in support of my own spouse's venture.

Scott has been the half-owner and editor of Fine Books & Collections for four years now. He started the magazine for the same reason most people start a magazine: The magazine he wanted to read didn't exist, so he decided to create it himself. Believe it or not, FB&C is the only true, full-color, glossy magazine in the US devoted to the world of rare books. There's probably a dozen magazines out there about dogs, but if you're interested in old books, or just about anything unusual and interesting on paper, FB&C is it.

Having watched the running of a magazine, day in and day out, for four years now (Scott runs the entire editorial division out of our house, working with a network of freelancers and designers by e-mail and phone), I can tell you that it's a labor of love. I also know that most people don't realize how much one individual subscription (especially one that renews every year!) means to a small or medium-sized magazine. It's not just the money; it's also the thought that someone out there cares enough about the subject to want it delivered to their house every month or two. I remember FB&C's first direct mail campaign, and how excited I was to go to the post office and see that someone in Anchorage, Alaska or Petosky, Michigan had sent in a check just because we'd sent them a brochure bragging about a magazine that, at that point, didn't even exist yet.

If you are a book lover, or if you know a book lover, or if you just want to buy a subscription for your local library, FB&C will happily take your 25 bucks. (I can almost guarantee you that your online subscription will soon be followed by a cry of, "Hey, Amy! One of your blog readers just subscribed!")

And if FB&C isn't for you, I hope that you'll stop and think about the great little or not-so-little magazines that you pick up from time to time but don't subscribe to. I bet their subscriptions cost less than a pizza and are much better for you.

There's something wonderful about magazines: the feel of the paper, the photographs, the great writing, the ease with which you can read them in the bathtub or on the bus...not to mention the heart and soul behind them.

No matter how much time I spend online, I'll always be a magazine junkie. I long ago stopped counting the number of magazines coming into this house every month. A stack of yet-to-be-read magazines on the nightstand is a little luxury that I couldn't live without. What about you?

Garden Rant Takes Over the World

2006-06-12T20:57:00.000-07:00

A few months ago, I started talking with Susan Harris of Takoma Gardener and Michele Owens of Sign of the Shovel about a modest little idea we had to stage a horticultural revolt. We were tired of what the mainstream gardening media has to offer--warmed-over garden tips, repurposed press releases about the ten thousandth new coleus on the market, dull little essays about the wonders of spring--and we were convinced that bloggers could overthrow the gardening establishment in the way that they are transforming coverage of politics and current affairs. (Witness the success of the YearlyKos convention. Not that I want to be the DailyKos of gardening. I'd much rather be the Gawker of gardening. But one thing at a time.)

Like all good revolutionaries, we began by writing a manifesto. You can read the whole thing on our site, but I'll touch on a few of my favorite points here:

--We are convinced that gardening MATTERS. Get us out of the Lifestyle section and as far away from home decorating as possible. We're talking about how we interact with the plant kingdom, not how to choose a throw pillow. This shit is important!

--We are flabbergasted at the idea of "no maintenance" gardens. If I have to read one more magazine article about Easy Container Gardens in 10 Minutes or Less, I may actually go bury MYSELF in the perennial border. Gardening is something you DO. It's not something you buy and arrange around the exterior of your home in between fluffing the aforementioned throw pillows.

--We are delighted by people with a passion for plants. Show some excitement! Have an opinion! Fall in love! Get mad! If you're bored, put your pen down and go outside. Just don't bore us, too.

Are you with me? All right, then. Follow me over to Garden Rant, where I'll be blogging a couple times a week. We've uploaded some of our previous posts from our own blogs to help set the tone, but it's all new stuff from here on. Some of my favorite new features include:

Ask Dr. Bleedingheart--horticultural advice for the lovelorn. Send in your melodramas today.
I Don't Have a Garden, But I Watch One On TV--reviews of garden television and Internet garden videos. (We'll cover podcasts and radio too, so if it's good, send it our way.)
Taking Your Gardening Dollar--product reviews, rip-offs, and vicarious horticultural shopping experiences.
You! We're looking for guest bloggers, so if you have something brilliant to say, we hope you'll consider saying it on Garden Rant first. Come rant with us!

Holy Bat Shit, Lady Hillingdon!

2006-06-11T18:14:00.000-07:00

Well folks, this is it. This is as good as it gets. The garden is at its absolute peak right now. There are some late summer salvias that are not in bloom yet, but apart from that, everything is out of control, including--in the background, against the fence--a yellow 'Lady Hillingdon' rose that has gone completely mad. She's normally a well-behaved, reserved old lady, but this year she just went wild. I attribute it to the bat guano pellets I fed her a few weeks ago.

I'm not much of a rose person, but 'Lady Hillingdon' was here when I moved in, and I'm learning how to get along with her. The canes are a beautiful burgundy, quite dramatic next to the creamy yellow blooms. Not much scent and they don't last long as a cut flower, but this is one of those lovely sprawly, shrubby roses that doesn't like to be cut back too much. Fortunately, that works out pretty well with my approach to pruning.

The Future of Heronswood

2006-06-11T11:27:00.000-07:00

Anne Raver, writing about Heronswood in the New York Times, has a bit more to say about the future of the gardens themselves.

"Mr. Ball said Heronswood's gardens-- 5 1/2 acres of the garden, as distinct from the business Burpee is moving, will not be depleted even as the best specimens are taken for propagation and testing. 'I would like to find some kind of buyer who would keep it open to the public,' Mr. Ball said. He pictures a 'high-end retirement community, with nice condos' built around the gardens on the 15-acre Heronswood property.

Mr. Hinkley agreed that the gardens should be preserved, but only if they have a purpose beyond nostalgia, such as serving as an educational resource. Otherwise, he said, 'I would much rather see the garden euthanized immediately than to see it decline over several years.' "

Agreed, Dan. High-end retirement community? Nice condos? I shudder to think what the landscaping contractor hired by the homeowners association would do to those gardens. If it must be sold and developed into condos, at least let the local plant geeks come and dig up the good stuff first.

Abruptly, an End Comes for a Garden Shangri-La - New York Times

The Opinionated Multitasker

2006-06-11T10:41:00.000-07:00

Thanks to the Houston Chronicle for choosing Dirt as its favorite opinionated garden blog, and to the Sacramento Bee for...uh...choosing Dirt as its favorite opinionated garden blog.

Green Space: Best Gardening Blogs (and what I've learned from them)

The SacBee says: "A fascinating and informative blog from Amy Stewart, a popular speaker and writer who lives in Eureka. You may have read or heard about her books, which include, "The Earth Moved: On the Remarkable Achievements of Earthworms" and "From the Ground Up: The Story of My First Garden." Both are exceptional books about gardening and nature.

Her blog is unabashedly opinionated and often on current events. Stewart, the consummate multitasker, also has posted links to her chicken blog and her worm blog."

Nursery Too Interesting, Catalog Too Smart, Must Be Closed Down

2006-06-01T10:30:00.000-07:00

If you haven't been to Heronswood Nursery in Kingston, WA, it's too damn late. The owner, Dan Hinkley, sold it to Burpee, and they have--yep, you guessed it--shut 'er down.

Brilliant plantsman Dan Hinkley, who continued to run the nursery after he sold it, was horrified to show up and learn that Burpee had shut it down with no notice. He told the Seattle Times: "The hardest thing for me to swallow right now is that this is what people feared would happen," he said. "It was my decision to sell to a large corporate nursery, and it was not a decision that was made lightly, but I made it, so ultimately I am the person to blame."

It's not clear what will happen next. There's talk of keeping the online business open, but relocating the plants to the East Coast. Burpee hopes to find a buyer who will appreciate, rather than pave over, the gorgeous display gardens filled with Hinkley's treasures from around the world. But given Burpee's matter-of-fact focus on profits, I wouldn't be surprised if paving over it turned out to be a fine option, too.

What galls me the most is Burpee's blatant East Coast-centric-ness about this deal. In a Kitsap Sun article, Burpee president George Ball bashes the plant selection for being too well-suited to the Pacific Northwest. "The vast collection of plants, while they were terrific for people in the Pacific Northwest, they weren't good for people in places like Iowa and Pennsylvania," said Ball.

Really? So, let me make sure I understand this. You buy a nursery located in Washington State that specializes in plants that do well on the West Coast, and then you're surprised that those plants won't grow in Pennsylvania.

He goes on to make this astonishing statement: "When we purchased this six years ago," he said, "we were anxious to make it a profitable company that would be fulfilling our ambition to serve a national audience of gardeners, which is predominantly on the East Coast."

Huh. A national audience...predominantly on the East Coast...Because California is...uh...the world's sixth largest economy, and the populations of California, Oregon, and Washington exceed those of New York, Pennsylvania, Connecticut, Massachusetts, and New Hampshire combined. Add to that our year-round growing climate, throw in--oh, I don't know--Canada--and I can see how you'd have a hard time selling us plants.

So instead, Ball is considering taking the plants "back to its Pennsylvania research and production facilities to work on adapting them to other climates less genial than the Pacific Northwest." Ah yes, just imagine the new, glorious, Burpeefied American landscape, populated with reliable year-round bloomers that are perfectly adapted to zones 1-11. I'll never again have the awful burden of traveling to another part of the country and coming across a plant I haven't seen before. Why, it's on page 11 of the Burpee catalog, and yes, it will do just fine in--where is that you live again? Well, no matter--it will grow there, too!

Ball goes on to take a more inclusive approach to insulting gardeners by insisting on dumbing down Hinkley's fine catalog. The Kitsap Sun reports that: "Both Hinkley and Ball indicated that there have been differences over Hersonswood's catalogue, revamped this year with only 250 plants offered and full of bright, colorful pictures like most standard offerings from giant retailers. Hinkley called it a dumbing down that talked down to Heronswood's core customer base. Ball said the old one read like a textbook."

That's right, folks. Burpee knows what you want. Bright, shiny catalog pages filled with ruby red tomatoes and happy little annuals that will grow in any climate. Good, because that's what you're getting.

I close with this sadly prophetic little snippet from Heronswood's February 2006 newsletter. If only George Ball would read his own textbook.

"We humans have an irresistible, sometimes inexplicable, compulsion to “enhance” whatever nature gives us, whether we’re breeding beefier livestock, more abundant crops, or larger flowers. In the garden, you need only survey the hybrid peonies, daylilies, and hostas available today—in a bewildering array of unlikely colors, outlandish sizes, and splashy patterns—to see how very different our altered ornamental plants can be from their wild ancestors. Of course, some of the more bizarre results of selective breeding also make it clear why many gardeners are eager to rediscover the simple elegance of original, unrefined species. "

Read on:

Seattle PI: World-famous Heronswood Nursery closes

Heronswood Nursery

More expletives from the blogosphere here, here, here, and here. Watch out, they're a little upset. Let Burpee know how you feel here.

Want to support Dan Hinkley in his new, post-nursery life? (He signed a non-compete clause, so there will be no new nursery for a few years.) Buy one of his books from a Pacific Northwest independent bookseller.

The Garden, Part Two

2006-05-31T12:35:00.000-07:00

The chickens are also making inroads into the side garden (and here's Bess in the path). I had intended for this to be an all-culinary garden, with artichokes, sage, apples, rosemary, edible flowers, other herbs, but inevitably, that definition got stretched, first to include other salvias that are related to culinary sage but not necessarily something you'd use to flavor your stuffing, and then to include anything that I felt like planting.

The best news about this garden is that the chickens have practically eliminated the snail population. Clematis, dahlias, and lilies have all sprung from the ground this spring after years of getting mowed down by snails.

Chicken-friendly plants

2006-05-30T19:12:00.000-07:00

Here's the back yard looking yummy, as it does this time of year. This is the north side of the house, which means that even though it's an open, unshaded space, the house tends to cast a long shadow most of the year. The back, around the chicken coop, is really the only place that gets full sun all day.

I'm moving plants around a lot to accommodate the chickens these days. I want low-growing plants so that I can look out the back window and see the chickens and the coop. There's no point growing food because the chickens would just eat it. So flowers it is, and creeping, crawling flowers work best because they're not bothered by the girls' scratching and digging. Hardy geraniums are doing well, as are yarrow and lady's mantle. Rose campion, calendula, cerinthe, borage, and love-in-a-mist are prolific self-sowers, so at least some of their seeds survive the scratching and pecking.

What else? A few low-growing salvia, some centranthus, maybe a few heurchera. Half is perpetually in damp shade (near the house), and half in full sun and whatever water I think to give it, which may not be much. It's kind of a jumble, but the chickens and I like it.

Cybergardening in the Sacramento Bee

2006-05-30T11:33:00.000-07:00

Thanks to the Sacramento Bee for this story on the digital gardening world. I'd like to second their nomination of Annie's Annuals as the best nursery website--it's useful as a reference source and as a place to find plants.

News - Dan Vierria: Online gardening is almost as good as the real thing - sacbee.com

Thanks for all your good garden blogging advice

2006-05-26T15:43:00.000-07:00

I updated the post (below), put a link on the sidebar, and I think it's done. Feel free to keep commenting, however.

Don't Get Dirt in the Keyboard, and Other Blogging Tips for Gardeners

2006-05-24T09:23:00.000-07:00

What is a blog?
A blog (short for "weblog") is a website that follows a very specific diary format, with the most recent post on top and everything else below it in chronological order. You don't need any special skills to make or post to a blog--it's as easy as writing an e-mail. People tend to blog on specific subjects, like politics or cooking or gardening, but some people just use a blog to keep an online diary of their everyday life.

How do I find gardening blogs?
Check out the list of links to gardening blogs on the right to get started. Most bloggers link to other blogs, so the easiest way to discover garden blogs is to read a few and follow the links. Garden Voices provides a good round-up of garden blogs, and you can find another great list here. You can also go to Technorati or Blogger Search to search for blogs that interest you.

Once you find garden blogs you like, you can subscribe to their syndication feeds and have them automatically downloaded to a reader, which may be easier than going from blog to blog every day. Here is some basic information on site feeds and readers to get you started.

Why keep a gardening blog?
Some people create a gardening blog as a way to keep track of what's going on in their garden. You can post photographs and plant lists, record your triumphs and failures, and look back over time to see what worked and what didn't.

Some people want to share their gardens with a few friends and family members (posting pictures online is a good alternative to e-mailing them out to everyone), or maybe even connect with other gardeners around the world.

Some people are looking for a way to reach a larger audience with their garden writing or photography. I probably fall into this group. I'm a garden writer, and my blog is an extension of the magazine and newspaper writing I do, and the books I write.

What makes a garden blog successful?
That depends on your definition of success. If you're just looking for a place to keep track of what's going on in your garden, all you have to do is post notes and pictures and you've succeeded! If you're trying to attract a readership, here are some ideas (and please check out the comments to this post for even more ideas):

Read other people's blogs and post comments. Blogging is an interactive sport.
Respond to what other people are writing about on their blogs (or in the news) by writing a post about it on your blog. Be sure to include a link to the blog or website that started it all. Blogging is also very democratic and generous; give credit to your sources!
Post as often as possible. The more you post, the more people will read your blog.
Keep your posts short. Break your prose up into short paragraphs.
Include lots of pictures--the best garden blogs are full of eye candy! And be sure to include the names of the plants whenever you can.
Tell us about your projects. Show us how you built your raised beds. Let us see how your tomato crop is coming along. Post a picture of the bug that's eating your echium and let us see if we can identify it. Show us what your garden looks like, month in and month out, even when the weather's awful and the flower beds look like crap. We've had enough of perfect magazine gardens--let's see some real gardens!
Include links. Make a blogroll of your fellow garden bloggers, link to your favorite seed catalogs, and point your readers to other interested resources on the web.
Even if you do figure out how to make your blog play music, please resist the urge. Most bloggers I've talked to hate going to a blog and having music blare out at them.
Loosen up! Blogging is, by nature, lively and opinionated. Informal. Off-the-cuff. Uncensored. Nobody wants to read a list of tips on how to prune roses. That information is available everywhere. Tell us something we don't already know! Don't get freaked out if someone disagrees with what you write--it's all in good fun. By all means, have a sense of humor!

How do I get started?

First, choose a blogging platform or service. I've had experience with Blogger, RadioUserLand, WordPress, MovableType, and TypePad. There are pros and cons to each, but here's my advice:

If you want a blog that's free and very easy to use, go with Blogger. It's owned by Google and those people know how to make user-friendly software. They also have great customer service--when I send off a question, I get a real answer, written by a real person, within 24 hours. You'll have a blog up and running in about five minutes, I swear. Many of the people who posted comments also liked WordPress, which is also free. I think it's a little complex for first-time users who don't want to learn any HTML or fancy tricks, but hey, why not try both?

A couple Blogger tips: First, as you're getting registered for the first time, don't spend a lot of time choosing a template. For some reason, there are many more template choices available once you're already up and running. So just pick any template to get started, then change it by clicking on the Template tab once you're set up. Also, take advantage of Google's other great blog tools that will make Blogger even easier to use, such as their Picasa photo software, their Blog This button on the Google Toolbar, and their tool for subscribing to other blogs, Google Reader. You don't have to have ads on your blog, but if you want to try to make a few bucks, Blogger includes a way to put Adsense ads on your site.

Downsides to Blogger: No way to categorize your posts by subject and have a list of those subjects in the sidebar. No easy way to build a list of links (sometimes called a Blogroll). Then again, what do you want for free? Try Blogrolling for your blogroll, and be sure to check out their BlogRollIt button for your toolbar. You'll need a little help with editing HTML to add something like Blogrolling to your blog, but it's pretty basic stuff.

If you want a blog with more flexibility, more tools, and more power, and you don't mind spending $5 per month, go with Typepad. It's still very easy to use, and you don't need to know any HTML, but you'll get categories, blogroll/lists, and other whiz-bang features that Blogger doesn't offer. They make it easy to set up your own domain name, and if you do want to tinker with the HTML a bit, just upgrade to the Pro version at $15/mo.

Once you're set up, trick out your browser toolbar with some of the buttons I mentioned above to make blogging quick and easy. Writing a blog post should not be a chore; it should be as quick and simple as writing an e-mail.

Try not to get dirt in the keyboard, and enjoy your cyber-botanic experience!

Earth Plugs

2006-05-21T21:41:00.000-07:00

So my mom gave me these sweet little Fiestaware-colored flower pots. Nice, huh? But what to do with them? They're almost too nice to go outside, and I don't really have any little houseplants I could put in them. What a dilemma!

Then I was at the nursery and I saw these Earth Plugs from Down to Earth. (Dude, if you have not been to their nursery in Eugene, you have totally got to go. Just trust me on this one.)

The idea with the Earth Plugs is that they are made of spongy composted tree bark and impregnated with beneficial microbes, so that you can just stick a cutting (or seed) in the little pre-cut hole and water. And they come in a nice ziploc bag, so if you don't need all 25 at once, you can save the rest for later.

So I thought--well, this is perfect! I've been wanting to take cuttings of some of my favorite salvias, but if I just have them sitting in pots outdoors, I'll forget to water them and they'll die. But if I were to cram, say, four of these plugs into each of my cute little pots, I could set them on my desk in front of a south-facing window, water them daily, obsess over them hourly, and maybe actually have some successful cuttings for once.

Brilliant! Thanks, Mom!

and for those of you keeping score, the salvia are: the fabulous hot pink/ magenta buchananii, the outrageous fuzzy red confertiflora, the 'Limelight' mexicana, and an officinalis--the regular culinary sage--with some kind of magical properties. This thing is easily four feet wide, blooms its ass off all summer, and just never wears out. I've never seen anything like it. I've bought more in the past, hoping to reproduce the look elsewhere in my garden, but no dice. It's just this one plant. So I'm making more.

You can get most of those salvias at Digging Dog, by the way. Go shopping! It's spring!

Sweet William, sweet Eleanor

2006-05-20T21:34:00.000-07:00

That's my hen Eleanor in the foreground, and the sweet William I planted last year in the background. Now, I know that this stuff is a biannual, but the plants I bought last year were so big that I thought surely they were in their second year and would bloom soon. That's reasonable, isn't it?

No, apparently not. I suspect that no matter how big or how mature a sweet William is when you buy it, it will not bloom until you have stood by, tapping your foot, looking at your watch, for a full year.

Why blog?

2006-05-19T09:52:00.000-07:00

A good discussion going on here and here about why people keep gardening blogs. It all got started when Gardening While Intoxicated (and by the way--love her, love her blog, love the whole intoxicated gardening concept) said that she finds that GardenWeb's reblog, Garden Voices, "contains a confusing and daunting amount of material, so I'm glad so many are able to sift through it. It’s mainly a lot of people showing off their gardens."

So the question is--what is a garden blog all about? Most people who have responded to these posts agree that what started out as a place to record the happenings in their garden evolved to something more--a bit of a showcase, a way to get to know other gardeners, a way to mouth off.

And the fact is that we gardeners do have quite a bit to say. Michael Pollan wrote this week on his NYT blog (I won't even bother going to get the link because you have to be a subscriber to read it, but if you're in TimesSelect you'll find it) that food writers aren't taken seriously. Well, he had a bit more to say about it than that, but you get the idea. If you write about food, he suggested, you're Not a Real Journalist.

To which I reply: HA! Are you kidding me? When Pollan moved from garden to food writing, he took a MAJOR step up the journalistic food chain. Look at any major newspaper in the US, and you'll see a big fat food section, a big fat travel section, and, in the case of the San Francisco Chronicle, a truly fine and fascinating WINE section once a week! These people are having fun, they're turning up interesting stories, they're spouting off opinions, they're getting outraged letters from readers, and they're doing serious journalism!

But where are the garden writers? We're in a little corner of what used to be called the women's section of the paper. Now it's the Home or Lifestyle section. Yep, that's us, right next to the advice columns and the little stories about how a scented candle can light up any room.

Sheesh. Get on a plane or put a bite of food in your mouth, and that's news. But go outside and put your hands in the dirt? Fluff.

Dude, Where's My Lawn?

2006-05-19T09:37:00.000-07:00

People, I said to rip our YOUR lawn, not your neighbor's lawn! Isn't anyone paying attention?

SignOnSanDiego.com > News > State -- Thief steal Adelanto homeowner's front yard:

"Witnesses told the homeowner they saw the thief taking the sod, plants and irrigation system to a residence on Tara Lane"

Certified Flowers

2006-05-18T09:39:00.000-07:00

Great posts in the comments section in response to my Times piece on socially and envirnmentally responsible flowers. I've heard from a few people in the industry who want me to remember that there are many farms doing the right thing, and many certification programs besides VeriFlora.

You'll see when my book comes out that I did write about farms that were doing a great job and certified by many international organizations. Many countries have their own eco-label program for flowers, and there are farms in Latin America, Africa, and elsewhere that are certified through more than one of these programs.

However, from a US consumer's standpoint, it's not very helpful to know about, for instance, the FLP program, which certifies flowers sold in Germany. We can't ask for flowers with the FLP label here. There might be flowers sold in the US that were grown on an FLP-certified farm, but a consumer has no way of knowing that when he or she is buying flowers.

VeriFlora is attempting to actually label flowers sold in the US, regardless of where they were grown, so that consumers can make a choice about "eco-friendly" flowers. The next step is for consumers to actually ask for and buy those flowers. That's what I'm hoping to encourage.

I hope that, in the long run, all of these certification programs can come together and agree on one standard. It would be much easier for consumers if there was just one standard that worked worldwide, instead of this hodgepodge of different standards that farms must try to meet for different markets.

I think that many of us want to do the right thing. We want to buy dolphin-safe tuna and fair trade coffee. Just make it easy for us, and we'll do it.

Satellite Dishes as Garden Art

2006-05-17T09:18:00.000-07:00

American in Bloom is an organization dedicated to gardening up the American landscape; they hold contests and give awards to cities that have done the best job. One of their judges, Evelyn Alemanni, wrote in their newsletter about the innovative use of satellite dishes in the garden. They work as fountains, planters, and surprisingly elegant gazebo roofs. Beats the hell out of using them to watch TV, eh?

Even Crack Addicts Have Mothers, and Other Hazards of Urban Gardening

2006-05-15T12:30:00.000-07:00

According to this Washington Post report, the plant thieves are out in droves on Mother's Day, looking for that perfect potted azalea for Mom. Urban gardeners are warned to wait until after Mother's Day to festoon their porches with hanging plants, and to consider something thorny, like a rose.

Or how about a plant stake with a sign that reads, "Didn't your mother teach you not to steal?"

Last-Minute Gifts -- at a Steal

Today's New York Times

2006-05-14T12:29:00.000-07:00

Check out my op-ed piece in today's New York Times. You'll be hearing more from me in the months to come about my new book, Flower Confidential, but this will give you a preview.

The garden industry blogs!

2006-05-11T18:15:00.000-07:00

Greenhouse Grower magazine is now hosting several blogs about the horticulture industry. Right on, y'all! Welcome to the blogosphere! I'm thrilled to hear growers talking. Your customers are talking too--are you listening?

Now, a few quick blog tips:

1. Allow comments. Come on, let's chat! It's sort of a basic blog concept that people will read your posts and comment on them. Well, that's OK--I'll just comment here.

2. Use hyperlinks to link to the websites you talk about, rather than spelling out the address on screen. See that little button with a picture of the world and a chain link? That's so you can insert a hyperlink. Linking to other sites and blogs is also a really great part of blogging. Just a tip.

3. Site feeds, blogroll...oh, never mind. This is really a great start.

What you guys are doing right is that you are TALKING about your business in a really interesting and uncensored way! Now, that's what blogs are all about, baby! From the Greenhouse Grower blog on the annual Pack Trials, (that's where they see all the new plants of the season) we learn about:

Gardening for Dummies at Wal-Mart.

That's right. You can get your very own Dummy plants at America's favorite big box retailer.

There is so much wrong with this, starting with the notion that anybody would get excited about gardening by buying a plant designed for Dummies, but will I let this news discourage me? Will I sit in the corner and rock back and forth all day? No. I'll read bravely on. First we learn that:

"This Wal-Mart is just six months old, has a supermarket and a place for family haircuts, along with McDonald’s. But the difference is you can now order your burgers in the checkout line at Wal-Mart and walk over and pick them up."

Oh, that dark little quiet corner is looking so attractive right now, but no, I must keep going. We learn that " I was disappointed to see the products displayed like the rest of plants in the store...Marigolds were in the plastic terracotta colored ones and impatiens were in the gray ones for shade. The garden center was tidy and well-maintained...Product was fresh. But I still feel Wal-Mart missed an opportunity to really differentiate with this exclusive program."

Well, I don't think Wal-Mart's missing much. Y'all keep selling dummy plants and Big Macs, and I'll go crawl under my desk.

And this about a new electric blue viola: "I will confess that when I saw ‘Blueberry Thrill,’ I screamed like a groupie because I was so taken by surprise. Kind of silly, but this is how female consumers react to cool plants. "

Yeah, those silly female customers! You're all silly girls! Try to contain yourselves, will you?

And a big HIGH FIVE to Laurie Scullin's Rants & Raves. Hey, anybody who wants to rant and rave about the horticulture industry is all right by me. Scullin weighs in on the debate over whether the industry is growing or shrinking (see, we talk about whether gardening is on the decline as an activity, and the industry talks about whether it's shrinking as a business) and he points out that most data comes from surveys, which could have all kinds of flaws, but draws this conclusion:

"All this makes my head hurt - and while I remain skeptical that it's as gloomy as some pundits suggest - we are all faced with a market at least in flux - and at worst shrinking a bunch. SO - I think the answer to this ponder is:

1) Look again at your product offering - do you have products and services that fit for today - not 1980’s - but 2006.

2) CAN you turn a shifting population into cash? - What product/service do you have for aging boomers? How about the growing Hispanic market with their different color pallet and holidays? What about the Gen X and Y kids and their different lifestyle needs?

3) Are we selling plants or decorator products (running debate with many) - and if we are selling decorator products are we staying up on those trends? "

Ah, those Latinos and their pallets. That's OK--the spell-checker can't do everything.

Anyway, I LOVE, LOVE, LOVE that growers and industry insiders are talking about this stuff online! And Laurie, if you want the opinion of this Gen-Xer--pleeeeze don't sell me a Decorator Product, and don't come near me with that Gardening for Dummies shit.

Sell me a plant, that fascinating, gorgeous, ever-changing, mysterious object of lust. Sell me dozens of them. I can't resist them. I'm ready to buy--what have you got for sale?

Gardening as a National Pasttime: The Kids Are All Right

2006-05-11T16:37:00.000-07:00

What does this Oriental poppy have to do with this week's debate over the life and death of gardening as our nation's favorite hobby?

Nothing. But it's pretty, and it's blooming in my garden right now.

Great comments from everybody on this issue. Two things worth discussing in more detail:

1. Do we need to undertake some kind of national campaign to get kids more interested in gardening? (This is where we haul out all the standard advice about planting a little garden in the schoolyard and making it part of their life science lessons, and also about planting radish seeds because at least they'll sprout quickly and keep the children interested, and don't forget about the trellis covered in bean vines that the little darlings can hide inside.)

To all that, I say: No. Forget it. Who cares? If a kid wants to play in the garden or plant a flower or dig a hole, she will. Gardening is, as many people pointed out in the comments, a sport for the settled and the patient. You need a little land of your own, and you also need to be able to think more than five minutes into the future. I didn't have either of those things until I was about 25. Some people don't get there until they're 35. So what?

2. If fewer people are gardening, is their housing situation to blame? The thinking goes that these non-gardeners either don't have a place with a yard, or if they do, it has been planted with that abomination known as a contractor's garden. Pile on the fill dirt, toss some Osmocote in a hole, plant a spindly little flowering cherry tree in the ground, stake it to within an inch of its life, and lay some sod around it. Then the homeowners association comes along and regulates it. Want to condemn some pansies to death by planting them in the terrible soil around that sapling? Not if it doesn't match the neighborhood color scheme, buddy.

I agree that brand new, plastic, planned communities with gardens planted by contractors and homeowners associations to regulate your every dig are horrible. I wish I could just say, "Well, a real gardener wouldn't live in one of those places. He would simply find someplace else to live, someplace more conducive to gardening." But we all know how impossible that can be, especially with the price of housing in hot markets like California.

So what do I think should be done? Well, nothing. I don't think that gardening is on the decline, and I'm not sure that fixing the problem would be top on my list of national priorities anyway. I would, however, like to propose a Horticultural Freedom Act that would prohibit any restrictions on what people can grow in their own gardens. Homeowners associations, go back to fighting over where people can park their cars or when they can fly a flag in front of their house. Leave us gardeners alone. Harumph.

More about the decline of gardening

2006-05-08T08:18:00.000-07:00

Oh, for crying out loud. Rocky Mountain News is on about it too. This story is also filled with vague, unsubstantiated claims.

It begins, believe it or not, with this earth-shattering observation: "Once upon a time, people worked in their gardens and yards..." and continues, "Unfortunately, the act of garden piddling is losing ground, so to speak, to our busier lifestyles..." without citing so much as a survey of a handful of first-name-only sources as proof. ("Jane, an accountant, said...")

The story goes on to claim that, "Current trends indicate" that we don't have time to garden anymore, and that "Specifically, careers, children, the Internet and a new generation spending less time outdoors than ever before are cited as the main reasons. "

Cited by whom? We'll never know. Because nothing to do with gardening is ever considered real news, it appears that no real editor took a look at this story before it ran. If they had, surely they would have required--what? Data? Sources? A point?

The story moves breathlessly onto a discussion of the "trends" brought about by this unheralded demographic shift. In just a few short paragraphs, the author manages to drag out every tired garden cliche I'd like to never hear about again, including:

Puchased gardens
Hired labor (this is often called 'do-it-for-me' as opposed to 'do-it-yourself')
Outdoor rooms, including kitchens, fire pits, seating areas and water features
Privacy
Instant gratification
Goof-proof plants
High impact
Low maintenance
Interesting foliage, flowers and color

and ends with this stunner: "All said, the drive for more bulletproof plants with a specific purpose benefits all of us, no matter what type of gardener. "

OK! Let me make sure I've got this.

1. People aren't gardening anymore

2. The result has been an alarming increase in the employment of professional gardeners, the purchase of "outdoor room"furniture and equipment, and a whole host of new plants bred to meet the demands of the market.

Yep, folks, it sounds like we've got a crisis on our hands.

Rocky Mountain News: Home & garden

Reports of Gardening's Death Greatly Exaggerated

2006-05-07T11:39:00.000-07:00

Nothing irritates me more than these stories about how gardening as a leisure activity is on its way out. In this week's San Francisco Chronicle, John Hershey writes:

"Are you aware of the impending demographic crisis facing our country? ...In a recent poll, the number of Americans who list gardening as one of their favorite leisure activities plunged from 15 percent in 1995 to 6 percent. "

This leads to all sorts of hand-wringing over the cause of this terrible decline and what on earth we might do about it. Hershey's not the only one talking about this; the gardening industry overall is quite worked up about it, with frequent articles in trade magazines agonizing over the problem. (Meanwhile, the American Nursery and Landscape Association reports on USDA statistics that show that sales of plants have grown steadily over the last two decades and are increasing by $500 million per year.)

But first, let's look at the poll numbers. Although Hershey does not cite the poll, I assume he is talking about the Harris Poll, which surveys Americans about their leisure activities once a year or so. The most recent data available comes from 2004, and it does point out that only 6% of Americans rank gardening as one of their top two or three pasttimes. But this is not a frightening plunge from 15% ten years ago, as Hershey reports. In fact, in 1995 only 9% of Americans ranked gardening in their top two or three activities, and then that number rose to 15% in 1999 before beginning to drop.

Hershey suggests several reasons for this decline, and a careful look at the numbers disproves all of them.

1. "People have less free time." Nope. According to the poll, Americans worked 51 hours a week in 1996, and 50 hours a week now.

2. "Fresh vegetables are now widely available in supermarkets." Huh? So in 1999, when 15% of Americans chose gardening as one of their favorite activities, they did so because they couldn't get fresh vegetables at the supermarket? Ah yes, the poor dirt farmers of 1999, having to grub for cabbages and carrots in their backyards.

3. And here he warms up to his real point: "The aging of the gardening population. As inconceivable as it sounds, it is possible some young people may actually think gardening is not cool." Again--the gardening population aged so much in five years that they are dropping like flies and no one is replacing them? Really? Let's remember that the oldest Baby Boomers are just turning 60 this year. I don't know about y'all, but my over-sixty mom is doing more gardening than I am right now. If anything, I'd expect to see an increase in gardening as Baby Boomers slip the bonds of their cubicles.

So what really explains the decrease in the percentage of Americans who list gardening as one of their favorite activites? (and remember, this does not mean that there is less gardening going on. It just means that, when asked, and without being provided a stock list of answers to choose from, only six percent thought to mention gardening.)

Well, there are three activities on the list that have jumped several percentage points since the poll began in 1995. Reading is up 7 percentage points. Spending time with family and kids is up 8 percentge points. And computer activities are up 5 points.

More to the point, however, is the fact that many activities are less popular than gardening, including:

Travel--4%

Golf--4%

Cooking--2% (Eating out also scores 2%)

Animals/pets/dogs--1%

But somehow, you don't see the travel, golf, cooking, or pet industries wringing their hands over the paltry two or four percent of Americans who would choose these activities over all others. In fact, I see vibrant, exciting, well-written and enthusiastically read sections in every major American newspaper devoted to travel and cooking. Marley & Me, a book about a man and his dog, remains, inexplicably, at the top of bestseller lists nationwide, and don't get me started on the number of magazines devoted to dogs (there are at least two devoted just to Manhattan dogs) and the number of elegant little pet stores and doggy bakeries springing up around the country.

As for golf? Well, those people seem to be doing just fine.

(Oh, and sex didn't even make the list, but the pornography industry seems to be getting by somehow. Perhaps those numbers are included in the "spending time with family" or "computer activities" categories. Drinking also didn't make the list, although I'd take a dry martini over "TV Watching" any day. In spite of the apparent lack of interest in drinking as a leisure activity, bars all over the country are not, in fact, dropping like flies.)

I didn't even get around to my main gripe about this story, which is the silly notion that "we" (whoever "we" are) need to Take Action to Get Our Youth Intersted in Gardening. More on that tomorrow.

Meanwhile, what are your two or three favorite leisure activies? Mine, in no particular order:

Gardening (which includes spending time with chickens)
Travel
Too close to call: Sex; drinking very cold cocktails with interesting people in dimly-lit bars; spending time in bookstores; art (viewing, buying, making); being very angry at the Bush administration; and the requisite books and films, of course.

Word to the young: Gardening is wicked enjoyable and way cool / Root cause of pastime's decline? Kids are just not interested

Cheering on a Kindred Spirit

2006-05-05T09:40:00.000-07:00

Uncle Tom's vegetable garden takes over the front yard! Go, go! Once, in Santa Cruz, I decided to stop worrying about all the tourists (those dreadful garden pests) picking flowers from my narrow strip of a front garden and to indulge them instead.

The garden sat up about five feet from the sidewalk, hemmed in by a concrete retaining wall, so the flowers were at eye level to people on the sidewalk and quite tempting. So I planted Sungold cherry tomatoes and let them cascade down the wall. They loved the heat, and the tourists were welcome to the fruit. It worked--they seemed to leave everything else alone.

I think there's something glorious about planting fruit and vegetables in the front yard for the world to see. Let the neighbors nibble a bit--if you re-imagine the front yard as a place to share the bounty that is otherwise confined to the back, it becomes a much more generous, convivial space.

Uncle Tom's Garden

More Truth in Gardening

2006-05-05T09:08:00.000-07:00

I love all these photos from Casa Decrepit, a blog about a Bay Area house renovation, showing the garden in all its glory with little labels pointing to what is there and what may someday be there.

Casa Decrepit: The Garden: An Overview and Notes

Susan Harris Totally Rocks

2006-05-04T12:42:00.000-07:00

You know her as Takoma Gardener. Now, if you're in the DC area, you can hire her as a garden consultant and coach. I understand about the need for a service like this: as the garden columnist for the local paper in my small town, I often get calls from people who would like me to come over to their garden and offer advice. They don't want me to do the work for them (well, maybe they do, but who can afford it?), and they don't want to hire a landscape architect who will draw up extensive plans--they just want some pointers and a nudge in the right direction. Well, that's precisely what happened to Susan, and it turned into a business. She's opinionated, experienced, and oh-so-stylish. Check it out here:

The Gardening Coach

American Green: The Quest for the Perfect Lawn

2006-05-04T11:49:00.000-07:00

Readers of this blog know that I’ve never been a fan of lawns, those expanses of green, fertilizer-and-herbicide-hungry plants mowed down to within and inch or two of their lives. It’s a monoculture, and a boring one at that. If you’re going to cover the earth in front of your home with just one plant, choose something interesting. Something that blooms or produces food. Perhaps native plants, which would surely be the most American lawn of all. Anything but one dull little blade of grass after another.

Ted Steinberg offers plenty of reasons to give up on lawns in his new book American Green: The Obsessive Quest for the Perfect Lawn, but unfortunately he’s short on alternatives. Steinberg, a 2006 Zucker Fellow in environmental studies at Yale and the author of two other books and numerous essays, takes on the lawn industry, the influence of golf greens on the suburban landscape, and much more. He’s an admitted lawn-lover himself, but he’s also ambivalent about his little patch of green.

Golf courses, he argues, created an expectation of a perfect, soft carpet of grass that no homeowner can reasonably maintain. Championship courses are mowed as short as an eighth of an inch, leading one sports announcer to proclaim that “they don’t mow them, they bikini wax them.” Mowing low creates a shallow, vulnerable root system and an unnatural demand for water, fertilizer, and pesticide. Steinberg quotes a biologist with New York’s Department of Environmental Conservation who said, “If you scraped a golf green and tested it, you’d have to cart it away to a hazardous waste facility.”

Homeowners tend to overfeed and overmedicate their lawns. Americans spray 90 million pounds of pesticides on their little piece of paradise every year, and the runoff of chemical lawn fertilizers into lakes, streams, and groundwater has become a serious problem in many communities. Steinberg spells it all out, but he doesn’t offer many alternatives.

“Nor is organic lawn care by itself the answer,” he writes, with no real explanation as to why that might be. He suggests that runoff of phosphorus into streams would happen regardless of the type of fertilizer used, which ignores the fact that organic fertilizers contain much lower concentrations of those nutrients. In fact, an organic lawn, maintained by setting the mower blade higher, leaving the grass clippings to decompose, raking in a thin layer of high-quality compost twice a year, and fertilizing with an organic lawn blend two to four times a year, would create a much safer lawn for the environment and for the people and pets who use it.

He’s not much happier with a native plant lawn, either. He says that it would take several years for “a meadow filled with native plants” to fill out enough to prevent runoff and absorb nutrients. (This in spite of the fact that native plants, properly selected, should require little or no extra water, fertilizer or pesticides because they are adapted to survive in their climate.) He also suggests that a native lawn would look too weedy in a suburban neighborhood and that many cities have lawn ordinances that would prevent a homeowner from planting a more natural landscape.

I can only assume that Steinberg is not a gardener. He seems to think that the only two possibilities for a front yard are a perfect, green, all-American lawn, or a weedy-looking meadow of native wildflowers. Now, it is true that a meadow, in the proper sense of the word, is more difficult to maintain than many people think, and that it does go through natural cycles of dormancy that might not please the neighbors. But has Steinberg never heard of a garden? It’s sort of a hobby among a few people in this country, in which people select plants—native or otherwise—that are pleasing to them and arrange them attractively in the landscape. What’s wrong with filling the front yard with perennials? Shrubs? Groundcovers? Ornamental grasses?

He does have fun with the lawn care industry, which proudly touts the environmental benefits of a lawn by pointing out that a 2500 square-foot lawn will produce enough oxygen for a family of four. It’s a silly assertion and Steinberg is right to call them on it.

First of all, it assumes that the lawn operates under ideal conditions year-round, that the oxygen is not needed to support the other life (bugs, microbes, and so forth) that live in and around the lawn, that no oxygen is consumed maintaining the lawn, and that the family of four is quite sedentary.

He also points out that if producing oxygen is the goal (and there does not appear to be a shortage of oxygen), large trees and shrubs would certainly do a better job, but he makes it sound as if this is a silly, impractical notion.

Ah well, you and I know better.

Something else American garden magazines lack...

2006-05-03T10:45:00.000-07:00

Hunky British gardeners! Where's the sizzle in garden magazines, anyway? Gardening is such a deliciously dirty and sweaty activity anyway, so come on--let's see some muscles and some curves! Show us your freckles! Peel me a grape! Between the overripe berries, the outdoor showers, the droning of the bees, the wisteria-covered arbor at sunset--are we really going to pretend that gardening is not an inherently lascivious activity?

Actually, in that spirit, I'm going to share a poem I wrote many years ago when I was quite a bit more focused on poetry than I am now:

Embarrassment of Riches

Harvesting asparagus: no job for a man.
You blush at the engorged purple heads that push
through the mulch and grow to a respected ten inches.
I take the shears and slice off twelve for the steamer.

The fastest growing vegetable, asparagus
so common that we eat it as a midnight snack.
“We’re out of recipes,” you laugh, eyes wide
at the latest crop, running out in your bare feet

to pick a lemon for the sauce. “Enough
with the vegetables,” the neighbors groan
endless sacks of ripe tomatoes at their doors,
driving with the windows up for fear someone will

force a zucchini in. Another shipment of seeds.
You and I plant frantic rows, circles, clumps.
There are twenty five flowering vines in the catalog
and we have to choose, fighting tendrils in our sleep

The things you find in your own backyard.
It’s a miracle we met at all, wrapped as we were
in a tangle of peas, blinded by an early show
of fire red sunflowers, six feet tall by March.

Why British Garden Magazines Are So Vastly Superior to Our Own

2006-05-01T20:06:00.000-07:00

At first, I didn't think the answer would be so simple. I thought I'd page through a few UK garden magazines and be left with a vague sense that their photographs were better, plants more unusual, writing more clever, and that they were just--well, hipper and smarter than us in the way that all things European tend to be. But in fact, when I picked up the May issue of the BBC Gardens Illustrated (not necessarily even the best UK garden magazine if you ask the locals, just the one I happened to be able to find at my bookstore), the answer was immediately obvious:

British garden magazines focus on people. American garden magazines focus on plants.

There you have it. Editors, I provide you this information free of charge. I can die happily now, having uttered one useful piece of information during my short and frantic time on this green planet.

Let's run through the contents of this month's issue, and you'll see what I mean:

A column by the late Christopher Lloyd--why don't America's great garden writers have steady gigs writing for American garden magazines? Pay their rent! Come on!
An announcement for a Gardens Illustrated "conversation" with the great designer Beth Chatto, quoted here as saying, "Plants are like people, you can't force them into a job." Really? Plants and people have something to do with each other? Are you sure?
Designer Dan Pearson on a plant I've never heard of, Paris polyphylla, in which he warns that it is late to emerge and "will often give you a worrying fortnight when the worst is, without fail, imagined."
Profiles of various people you might meet at the Chelsea Flower Show, including Cleve West, who is tired of the "garden room" trend. "I want to feel like I'm in a garden, not an extension of the house," he says. Cleve, you're one of us.
PLACES! As in, places created by people! Inhabited by people! This includes Marion Knight, owner of Goose Cottage, who is "refreshingly casual about plant names" (note to self: make future post about the many plants in my garden whose names I don't know) and a story about Charlie and the Chocolate Factory author Roald Dahl's garden, in which we learn that Dahl "would leave piles of prunings about the place" and competed with a local farmer to see who could grow the largest onions, except that Dahl cheated by buying seedings rather than starting from seed.
A story about a Begian nursery called Silene, which seems to be the Annie's Annuals of Europe
An interview with one of my favorite plant designers, Piet Oudolf, who dares to say, "I'm not a colour gardener. Colour can look after itself." IT CAN? and: "A plant is only worth growing if it looks good when it's dead." Yes, let's have a look at its corpse! I challenge American garden magazines to show us the dark side!
One serious plant profile, this one an 8 page spread on lilacs, in which the author, a plant collector for the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew, tells you more than you might ever want to know and then apologizes, writing, "I have named but a few species...[he named about half of all known species, plus cultivars] and I feel that I have cheated you of so many..."
And while there is much more I could cover in this oversized 124-page volume with surprisingly few ads, I end with the back page essay by novelist Frank Ronan (you mean someone other than a Garden Writer has something to say about gardens? Really?) about tulip blight. (he's probably talking about botrytis, for those of you taking notes) The virus was introduced to his garden when he--can you believe it--sent out invitations to a May party in November in the form of tulip bulbs (with different varieties timed to coincide with blooming times in different parts of the country), and the guests were instructed to bring their tulip, in bloom, to the party. Fabulous, and OMG, I am so stealing that idea as soon as I (a) make some friends and (b) get my house clean enough to invite them over--but anyway, the point is that the virus hitched a ride. Frank leaves us with this wild paragraph that would be entirely unprintable in an American garden magazine due to its vulgarity, erudition, and passion--and I, too, leave you with:

"The virus is a sneaky bitch, letting the whole plant rise and bud and fill you with expectation before sucking the life out of it. By the time this magazine is published I'll either be swaying giddily over T. 'Generaal de Wet' or retrieving his remains for immolation. Even if the early tulips come clean there will be tension still, because there is no certainty of being all-clear until the last parrot has uncurled its teeth. You wouldn't put up with it for anything but love."

The Last of the Manhattan Gardens

2006-05-01T11:22:00.000-07:00

This sweet little garden in Manhattan's Lower East Side seemed to require a lot of signs--although the most popular garden sign in New York, one that I saw placed above tiny, two-foot long strips of tulips or pansies that barely qualify as a garden, usually involved a warning about dogs. The most straightforward was, "Your Dog's Urine Stinks."

Reminds me of something my dad did once: he was outside watering the garden and a woman walked by with her dog. The dog stopped to pee on the violas he had planted along the sidewalk. The woman looked totally unconcerned, as if anyone would treasure her furry companion's contributions to the landscape.

Dad said, "Hey, we were going to eat those flowers!"

2006-05-01T09:29:00.000-07:00

Gardening in the Big Apple

2006-04-30T12:12:00.000-07:00

I'll say this about the island of Manhattan: all that concrete and steel makes you appreciate the smallest attempts at horticulture--whether it's a flowering plant in an urn on a stoop...

or the tulips in front of the New York Public Library...

or a pair of young trees in bloom. I've always believed that living in a tiny studio in Manhattan would be tolerable because the entire city is your kitchen, your dining room, and your living room. Why bother with art on the walls when you can go to the MOMA? And why cook when there are a hundred fantastic restaurants within a 10-minute walk?

By the same token, the entire city would have to serve as your garden--from Central Park to the flower stall on the corner. If I could just figure out where to keep a few chickens, I think I could be a gardener in Manhattan.

I Know Why the Caged Rose Sings

2006-04-29T09:38:00.000-07:00

More from my ongoing quest to figure out how people garden in Manhattan: a rose in a cage on the lower East side. I suppose that if the plant survives to adulthood, the cage will come off, and it will have only its thorns with which to defend itself.

And in response to a comment about where people go in Manhattan to buy dirt--they go here! A little shop around 8th Avenue and 60th sells bags of potting soil that you could put in a cart and haul home. I did find a true nursery in the East Village as well, but didn't get a picture of it. It was in a small building like this one that happened to have a parking lot next door--a rare sight in New York--and in the parking lot they had stacked bags of soil, rakes, shovels, containers, boards, etc. It can be done!

Too Much Pollen? Blame the Males

2006-04-28T09:05:00.000-07:00

Yesterday on All Things Considered, Robert Siegel interviewed author Tom Ogren about his book Allergy-Free Gardening and about the recent proliferation of male trees in the American landscape, which has caused a tremendous increase in seasonal allergies. I confess that I didn't place much stock in the notion of planting an allergy-free garden until I experienced a debilitating pollen allergy in Minnesota once. Visit his website for more information, and listen to the interview here:

NPR : Too Much Pollen? Blame the Males

Terra Nova perennials

2006-04-28T08:56:00.000-07:00

There's a great article in USA Today (did I just say that?) about Dan Heims of the wholesale Terra Nova Nurseries. He's the guy who's responsible for all the amazing heurcheras that have come on the market lately. Check this out:

"The bumper sticker over Heims' desk says it all: "So many species, so little time."

Every spring, Heims sends 18 of his newest prospects to garden writers, asking them to try them out and give him feedback.

"And, boy, do they," he says. "They say things like 'This was a D-O-G. Why did you send us this?' Or 'This is the coolest plant ever. We love it, love it, love it.' And, yes, they'll say it three times.""

Outspoken garden writers! That's what we like!

USATODAY.com - Meet a perennial winner

Horticulture and the City

2006-04-26T12:38:00.000-07:00

And now, Manhattan. I'm so fascinated with all the ways people find to garden in this city, and I couldn't stop taking pictures of courtyards, windowboxes, potted plants, rooftop gardens--anything and everything that people do to experience a little nature in Metropolis.

Here, the entrance to the Orchid Show at Rockefeller Center.

Plant Orphans

2006-04-22T21:30:00.000-07:00

For a while now I've been meaning to write something about plant orphans, those lost and abandoned plants that all gardeners take in and nurture back to health. It seemed like a good counterpoint to the flower theft stories (and more here) from earlier in the year.

But ironically, my own plant orphan story is inextricably tied to the flower theft issue. Last year, as I was walking home from lunch, I found a brilliant blue lobelia in the gutter a couple blocks from my house. It wasn’t in a pot, but the roots were wrapped around the soil in precisely the shape of an ordinary clay pot. I looked around and couldn’t see any garden nearby where this plant might belong. It seemed to have been abandoned. It was a rainy day; if I left it where it was, it would wash into the gutter. I picked it up and brought it home, and it’s blooming on my porch right now.

A few months later, the same thing happened. I found a pink and white fleabane in almost the same spot, its roots curved around the soil in the shape of a shallow, round planter. I’d been meaning to plant some fleabane between my lavender plants, so I brought it home and planted it.

Not long after, my neighbor called me over. “Forget flower theft!” she said. “What about flower pot theft?” Turns out she’d had several expensive stone urns stolen from her front porch. “They don’t even want the plants,” she said. “Look. They dumped the flowers and all the dirt out right here in my lawn and just took off with the pot.”

Sure enough, there were a bunch of pansies face-down in her yard. Their roots held the precise shape of the stolen pot. Suddenly I knew where my plant orphans had come from. They were stolen goods—or innocent bystanders to another, perhaps worse, crime.

But most of the plant orphan stories I’ve received from readers did not have such a sinister side to them. Connie Miller wrote to tell me that she gives away orphans, putting her unwanted plants up for adoption at the end of her driveway, where they usually find a new home within an hour. (She gave me her address, but I am not going to share it with you. You’ll have to find your own orphanages.)

I also heard from Jerry Davis, who has collected an astonishing array of orphans, including ornamental yucca and agave from his father’s house, and an Italian Stone Pine that the postal union gave him when his father died. He’s got chasteberry and monkey grass from the zoo where he used to work, and an unknown species of salvia that his father brought him from “somewhere in California.”

Tracy and Janet Sclar of Amity Heritage Roses in Hydesville contacted me to tell me about an orphaned rose that they have propagated and listed in their catalog. Here are the details: “Pure Mystery” (unknown) Hybrid Tea. Our name says it all. When we moved and were inundated with pots of plants either being given away, given to us, or bound for the moving truck, this was one of the 150 roses that got unpacked at our new home. We’ve checked with all the friends/helpers whom it could have come from, but no one claims it. It has fascinating coloration of grey and salmon in the pink blend flowers. There seems to be a hint of myrrh fragrance. 4 x 2 ft.” If you’d like to find out more about that rose or any of the others that Tracy and Janet grow, check them out on the web.

Several people wrote to tell me that they swap plants back and forth between their friends and family. One friend told me the story of a philodendron that has passed from friend to friend and been propagated several times along the way. Another woman told me that she gives plants to her daughter with the expectation that she will show some sign of the family green thumb; when the plants wilt and die, she takes them home, nurses them back to health, and returns them to her, full of hope. She writes, “Sometimes friends move away and give me plants to care for as they always will return at a later date to retrieve them. Most often they do not. I can no longer tell the difference between those and the ones I bought. It’s funny how adoptions lose their meaning over the course of a lifetime and become an integral part of the family, as if they belonged there all along.”

I couldn’t have said it better myself.

How Do You Compost?

2006-04-21T21:14:00.000-07:00

I’ve always been something of a compost bin addict. In my life I’ve had five bins, (not counting open compost piles) and there are a few more models I’d still like to try. The satisfaction that comes from turning over a pile of dead leaves and moldy fruit and discovering dark, damp, worm-infested muck underneath—well, if I have to explain it to you, you probably wouldn’t understand anyway.

When I talk to people about their compost piles (it’s a topic that comes up more often than you might think) I’m always surprised at the widely different approaches that gardeners use to get the same result. Composting is an inexact science, and what works for one gardener may not work for another. Also, I’ve learned that the state of a person’s compost pile can be a fairly reliable predictor of their personality. Some people love to turn a compost pile every day and check its vital signs (temperature, moisture content, pH), while others would rather pile everything in a messy heap in the corner and turn it over once a year to pull out whatever compost has accumulated at the base of the pile.

Fortunately, there’s a compost bin—and method—to match every temperament. For instance:

The Martha Stewart Method: The primary goal of this method is to make it clear to your neighbors that you are a far superior gardener than they could ever hope to be. To do this correctly, you’ll need plenty of space—it is assumed that you live on a large estate with some sort of service area in the back that can accommodate an enormous compost pile—and perfect yard waste. By “perfect,” I mean that you should always have about three parts carbon—dried leaves, hay, shredded newspaper—to one part nitrogen—grass clippings, manure, kitchen waste. Everything should be cut into small, tidy pieces, watered, and turned regularly. (Depending on the size of the pile, turning it may require some farm equipment. You do have a John Deere, don’t you?)

If it’s managed properly, your pile will soon begin to give off steam from the heat that is generated as your perfect yard waste decomposes. The goal is to create enough steam to make one of your neighbors call the fire department. This actually happened to Martha, and she was able to spend a very satisfactory afternoon out in the driveway explaining her compost system to her neighbors and the firefighters. Naturally, she took an opportunity to brag about it in the next issue of her magazine. While you can get excellent compost from this method, the bragging rights are what it’s really all about.

The Amy Stewart Method: Feed it all to the worms. It’s all about the worms. Keep some worms outside the back door for your kitchen scraps, and make sure your compost pile has plenty of worms wriggling around at the bottom of it. Keep the worms happy, and you can’t go wrong.

The Lasagna Method: A book called Lasagna Gardening by Patricia Lanza popularized this method, but it’s actually been around for quite a while. Some people call it “sheet composting,” but basically it’s a lazy person’s way to expand the garden without digging. The idea is that in the fall, you pick a spot where you’d like to build a new garden bed for spring. Chop down the weeds, lay down a thick, damp layer of newspaper or cardboard to smother any remaining weeds and grass, and start adding layers of whatever you’d put in a compost pile—grass clippings, dried leaves, manure, etc. You can make this pile over a foot tall—even two to three feet tall—because it will decompose and shrink within a few weeks. Top it with finished compost or a bagged soil amendment, and wait. By spring, the grass clippings and dried leaves will have composted, and you can plant right into the bed.

The Gearhead Method: This method involves using the maximum amount of gear in the creation of your compost. Start out with a chipper/shredder and chop everything into bits. Then load it into a compost tumbler, a metal drum that you turn daily to get finished compost in just a few weeks. Add some compost accelerator, check the temperature with a soil thermometer daily, and use your pH meter to monitor the acidity. When it’s all done, use a screen to sift out the larger chunks and sprinkle the remaining product around your garden like fairy dust. Total up-front cost for the Gearhead Method: around $500.

So tell me--how do you do it? How do you wish you did it, if only you had the right toys/space/strategy?

Snip It!

2006-04-20T21:03:00.000-07:00

The most dangerous moments in my garden come, not surprisingly, when I have a pair of pruning shears in my hand. What is surprising is the sheer stupidity of my attempts at self-inflicted injury: I grab a bunch of dead stalks with one hand, reach in to cut them down with the other, and somehow manage to nearly slice off one of the fingers on the hand that’s holding the plant. I usually attack a plant with some vigor, so it’s a wonder I’ve never succeeded in severing half an index finger. Fortunately, my pruning shears are usually pretty dull and rusty and they don’t pose much of a threat to anyone, including the shrubs I’m working on. These close calls did get me in the habit of wearing tough gloves in the garden—not to protect myself against thorns, but against my own tools.

Not long ago I discovered a nifty new gadget that might just save my digits and make smaller pruning jobs go much quicker. A blade and tool company called Techni Edge manufactures Snip-It, a gardening scissor that slides onto the thumb and forefinger. All it takes is a cutting motion, castanet-style, to slice leaves, stems, and thin branches.

What makes this little toy so injury-proof is the two-handed technique. You buy a pair of them—they’re only four bucks apiece—and strap one onto each hand, then go after your perennials with double the fervor. With so many fingers occupied, it’s far less likely that any of them will get in the way of the blade.

I spent the morning outside, whacking away at salvia, gaura, veronica, and all the other neglected perennials in my garden that were desperately in need of a haircut. The trick is to grab just one or two stalks at a time; anything more than that will jam up the works. I found that Snip-Its were able to handle anything up to about the diameter of a pencil. It makes fast work of deadheading and light pruning, but shearing back low-growing perennials like geranium and catmint was not worth the trouble: the plants were so dense and damp that Snip-It’s small blade was not as effective as a pair of pruning shears would be.

You may want a third pair for the kitchen as well, because you can use them to keep cut flowers fresh—just pull the stems out of the water every couple of days, snip off an inch, change the water, and put them back. Using knives and kitchen scissors can pinch off the stem before making a cut, which prevents the flower from taking up water the way it should. You’ll also find that Snip-Its are useful for snipping away at kitchen herbs and houseplants.

Perhaps the reason that I like this gadget so much is that it appeals to the cheapskate in me. I can’t stand to spend money on pots or statuary or tools when I could have spent the money on plants. So a four-dollar tool that actually works is a delight. I can let it rust and fall apart and it’s no big deal to pick up another one next time I’m at the nursery. But the way things are going, they’ll probably last forever: I’m so enamored of them that I wash them off after every use, pat them dry, and even use a silver martini pick to dig out any bark or leaves that might have gotten stuck in the groove the blade fits into. The pruning shears, meanwhile, get dumped into a bucket of tools, where they will sit, covered in mud and rusting, until I come up with another job the Snip-It can’t handle.

What's Bugging You?

2006-04-19T14:54:00.000-07:00

Pete Haggard didn’t take a vacation for ten years. Why? There was no one to watch the bugs.

Haggard, a Humboldt County, CA agricultural inspector, began photographing and cataloging northern California insects over a decade ago. The result is a new book from Timber Press, Insects of the Pacific Northwest, which he co-authored with his wife Judy, a wildlife biologist. Often, the only way to get the pictures he wanted was to raise them himself.

“For about ten years,” he said, “I’d go out on Saturday mornings and take pictures of the insects I found. But it’s hard to find them in their immature stages, so I’d look for the host plants and gather eggs, then bring them back and raise them in the house in five-gallon buckets.”

Maintaining an insect nursery is a complicated endeavor. “It’s not like a dog or a cat,” he said. “You can’t leave a hundred different insects with somebody and go away. They’re like babies; they have to be cleaned every day, they need fresh foliage, and you have to check them twice a day to see if they’ve hatched.” Moths and butterflies in particular are tricky; if they emerge, they need to be released or they will beat themselves against the glass. “You can’t get a good picture after even a day or two,” Pete said, “because they start losing scales that quickly.”

In fact, to make sure his little darlings stuck around long enough to pose for a picture, Pete would often put them in the fridge to cool them down and slow their metabolism. That way, when they got outside, they’d sit still for the camera. He was quick to assure me that this wasn’t a cruel practice. “Cold isn’t the same for insects as it is for humans,” he said. “It just slows down their metabolism. It isn’t necessarily torture.” (I asked Pete and Judy if they had a special fridge for the bugs, but no, they go in the regular fridge along with the milk and the vegetables. Larvae in film canisters would sometimes spend months in the crisper enjoying an artificial winter.)

All that hard work and lost refrigerator space paid off, and the result is a comprehensive and user-friendly guide to the most common insects in northern California, Oregon, Washington, and British Columbia. You’ll see a wide variety of beetles, flies, ants, bees, butterflies, grasshoppers, and some non-insects like spiders and snails.

The Haggards, who tend a one-acre garden of native plants and fruit trees in Fieldbrook, decided early on that the book should include information about the host plants that provide food and shelter to insect eggs and larvae. “People want to attract butterflies,” said Judy, “so they plant butterfly bush. You will get the adults, who like the nectar, but if you want to attract a suite of insects to your garden so they’ll really make it their home, you need the host plants where they can lay eggs.” The lovely garden tiger moth, for instance, feeds on plantain, lupine, and dandelion, three plants gardeners might not otherwise consider cultivating, and the gorgeous yellow western tiger swallowtail needs willow, poplar, sycamore, and alder to start a family.

The book makes fascinating reading for gardeners as well as hikers and wildlife enthusiasts. For instance, one common species of snail, the robust lancetooth snail, actually preys on other snails and should be considered a friend to gardeners. (I’d like to issue a formal apology to the four thousand or so robust lancetooth snails I have probably flung into traffic over the last several years. Why didn’t you say something?)

Another interesting insect gardeners should look out for is the glowworm beetle, which may be visible on damp nights thanks to its luminescent segments. The presence of these glowworms is a sign of a healthy, diverse insect population; Pete brags that his garden is teeming with them. The Tiemann’s glowworm seems to embody the notion that love conquers all; although the male is a small, skinny black beetle 14 mm in length and the female is large, segmented worm-like creature 65 mm in length, they still seem to—well, make it work. If you see them in your garden, cheer them on.

There’s drama as well as romance in this book. Another glowworm, the western banded glowworm, consumes millipedes by injecting them with a chemical that liquefies the millipede’s flesh, then eats the contents, one segment at a time, leaving a neat pile of disconnected rings at the end of the meal.

The Haggards hope that people who read their book will appreciate the enormous diversity in their local insect population. “People tell me they saw a show on the Discovery Channel about beetles of the Sahara or something like that,” Pete said, “and sometimes I think we know more about tropical insects than the ones here at home. We may not have butterflies the size of pigeons, but if you look through the book, there’s a lot of color and a lot of beauty.”

Clematis and Wisteria

2006-04-18T20:57:00.000-07:00

I can't get so much as a poppy to bloom in the chilly, wet weather we've had in the Pacific Northwest lately, but just a few miles up the road, a friend's clematis and wisteria are blooming their heads off. Is it possible that she just went out and bought these sturdy, woody vines last week and had them installed just in time for Easter?

No, I didn't think so...

Sex in (and after) the Garden

2006-04-18T10:08:00.000-07:00

In her New York Times piece, Joyce Wadler tells the tale of author William Alexander's attempt at pollinating his apple tree. She writes:

"After learning that apple trees would not bear fruit unless cross-pollinated with trees of another variety, he harvested blossoms from trees near his office, mashed the blossoms and spread the pollen on the tree. That evening, he writes, he made ardent love to his wife."

Alexander blogs about his new book, The $64 Tomato: How One Man Nearly Lost His Sanity, Spent a Fortune, and Endured an Existential Crisis in the Quest for the Perfect Garden, on his website. He writes:

"So my wife was quite startled to see her sex life (along with her name and age) discussed in the Home and Garden section of Thursday's New York Times. ... The day only got worse for my internist wife when a call slipped past her receptionist: "Congratulations, doctor! You're famous!" said the caller, who turned out to be salesman trying to peddle a framed copy of the article. ...Anyway, I soothed my wounded ego by telling my wife to get used to seeing her sex life in print: My next book is titled "The Hundred Dollar—" ah, never mind. I'm in enough trouble as it is. I'm going to go hide out in the potato patch till this blows over... "

Hey, it sells books!

The $64 Tomato

More Pretty Pictures, Still Not My Garden

2006-04-17T21:06:00.000-07:00

A gate to nowhere. The first time I walked through it, this garden's owner said, "Be sure and close the gate so the donkeys don't get out" (she actually does have two fabulous little donkeys) and I fell for it.

I have gates to somewhere that don't look nearly as good as this gate to nowhere! Apparently there are plans for a fence, someday...

Still Not My Garden

2006-04-16T20:41:00.000-07:00

How yummy is this? You need a big space for a big statue, and this one totally works.

Not My Garden

2006-04-16T20:27:00.000-07:00

You won't see any great examples of garden design in my own garden. It's small and overcrowded and tended by a reckless, careless gardener who operates entirely on impulse.

However, I do know people who design beautiful gardens for themselves. I spent the day taking photographs of one such garden during an annual Easter party. It's an enormous piece of property--I actually don't know where it begins and ends--that faces a lake and is fringed with redwood forest. Not a bad setup.

As you can imagine, a garden like this is all about the views. It's about focal points. I'll post pictures of some of my favorite views over the next few days.

We'll start with the patio. I can never bring myself to spend money on fancy glazed pots, but what a difference they make, especially this time of year when not much is blooming.

The Garden, Looking Pretty

2006-04-14T15:35:00.000-07:00

OK, enough ugly garden pictures. Here's the eye candy, or at least this is as much eye candy as I could muster. Artemesia, Spanish bluebells (which grow like weeds around here--I did not plant them), and hens.

Next, phlomis (aka Jerusalem sage) with the yellow flowers, centranthrus (Jupiter's beard) with the pink flowers, and orange-flowered calendula. And artichoke to the right. When this area fills out in summer, it's one of my favorite parts of the garden--nice variation in height and color, something always in bloom, and too densely-planted for a weed to so much as clear its throat.

And finally--lilac, bluebells, daffodils on my desk. Can you smell it? The fragrance filled my attic for a week.

My Garden: The Ugly Truth

2006-04-12T14:58:00.000-07:00

Sacramento Gardening took this idea of photographing the real garden, the way it really looks, even if the off-season, even with weeds, and ran with it. She actually went out and voluntarily photographed the ugliest parts of her garden.

OK, I'm up for it. Ugly Spot #1: between the chicken coop and the back gate. Gate just has chipped bark (and right now, a pile of sticks too fat to go through the electric chipper/shredder), and the coop is, well, the coop, and between those two things are weeds and some perennial Maximillian sunflowers that die back to the ground in winter. What to do? I'm thinking of hanging my upside-down tomatoes here this year since it's a south-facing fence that escapes the shadow of the house.

Next up--a no-man's land between the berries and the butterfly bush. It's cute when there are chickens scratching around, but otherwise it's weedy and useless. I guess the best idea would be to just extend the berries all the way over--they want to go there anyway. It's a little shady down by the ground, sunnier higher up, so the berries would do OK.

And last but not least--the trash cans! Of course! I refuse to build a cute little house for the trash cans, or even one of those "easy weekend project" trellises covered in vines. It's trash. We all have it. I don't care who knows it.

Garden Center Blog

2006-04-11T16:50:00.000-07:00

Check out the golden gecko blog--the blog of a garden center owner in Garden Valley, CA. I found him when he posted a comment about organic fertilizers on Sacramento Gardening--he said, in part: "“Authentic” companies are authentic for the very reason they are not found in chain stores. Just like Mc Donald’s or any other fast food place, you pay for convenience by accepting a product that is not as good as that special restaurant you have to make reservations for. Authentic means thinking ahead and not becoming desperate. Organic gardening is very forgivable if you don’t over do things. "

Yeah! Let's hear more from independent nursery owners! Any others out there blogging? I'm going on a search. A few more:

GreenScapes Gardens--here's a little gem: "We are in the business to sell plants but plants only grow and prosper when they are given the proper incentives to grow........GOOD SOIL."

the diary of a garden center employee--no posts lately (it looks like she got a job at Lowe's) but what's there is good reading. I love this: "Marin-cess: That is what we call those girls who come into the nursery with the huge, sparkly diamond rings on the fingers. They drive fancy cars and have uncontrolled kids. Usually we see them when they come to see Mark regarding their landscape design project. I see them also when I go to their house to prune the plants they now own but will obviously not be tending."

...and here's Campbell's Garden Center... this about a trade show: " I try not to jump into things too quickly. It's better for me to wait and see if the product really performs the way they claim - or not. There have been many products through the years that have made wonderful claims about what the plant was supposed to do. Most of it is "hype"."

And by the way, Sacramento Gardening has raised (or lowered) the bar by posting pictures of the WORST spots in her garden. You show me yours, I'll show you mine. I'm headed outside with the camera now!

Hot or Not?

2006-04-11T09:06:00.000-07:00

Takoma Gardener has a great round-up of gardening trends. Hot: Dwarf evergreens and colored foliage. Not: shade trees and ornamental grasses.

Now, I get it about gardening trends--sort of. If someone asks me what an unfamiliar flower is, I can say, "Oh, that's cerinthe, it's sort of a trendy little annual right now." In other words, gardeners in the know have gone a little crazy over it and everybody's planting it.

On the other hand, what's a gardener to do with the annual hot-or-not list? Reminds me of those irritating stories in fashion magazines about hairstyles. Don't tell me long hair is in this year if you told me short hair was in last year. What am I supposed to do--grow it out just in time for you to tell me that short hair is back?

So for instane, ornamental grasses are on the "not" list. Well, dang, I just got my ornamental grass thing going. I actually want them to live. For a while. In the ground. What am I supposed to do with an out-of-fashion flower--donate it to charity?

Takoma Gardener: What's Hot, What's Not

Couldn't we all, really?

2006-04-10T21:14:00.000-07:00

"Those paperwhites and other daffodils sure could use a drink -- a little whiskey, vodka gin or tequila could keep them from falling over. "

Gin has the opposite effect on me, but OK, I'm listening. A study at Cornell showed that sharing happy hour with the houseplants would stunt their growth. In the case of paperwhites, that means that they'll bloom on short, stocky stems instead of falling over.

What I really love about the story is this little tidbit: "Last year, Miller received a call from The New York Times about a reader who had written to the garden editor claiming that gin had prevented some paperwhite narcissi from growing too tall and floppy and asked if it was because of some "essential oil" in the gin. "

Of course! Some New Yorker just decided to, oh, I don't know--empty her Martini pitcher into the flower pot. Why not? It's the holidays, and Manhattan gets so festive that time of year. Drink up, girls!

The researchers, spoilsports that they are, used ethanol in their plant studies. Come on, the rest of us live in the real world. Would my tulips prefer a Cosmo or a dry Martini? You don't expect me to waste perfectly good booze figuring this out myself, do you?

Tipsy flowers don't tip over

Thanks to Mirabilis for digging this one up.

What a load of horseshit!

2006-04-10T10:09:00.000-07:00

ElizabethGardens is working on a complete overhaul of a 1/3 acre lot, starting with bringing in a glorious load of manure and compost to improve the soil. So one question is, how much to buy? There's a great shortcut to converting square feet into inches of mulch. Just multiply the square footage of your garden by the inches of coverage you want, and divide by 324. That'll tell you how many cubic yards you need.

Let's say this 1/3 acre lot--14,370 square feet--actually has 10,000 square feet of garden space. The rest, let's say, is taken up with house, outbuildings, driveway, patio, sidewalks, paths, etc.

So maybe you want 6 inches of mulch in the garden. 10,000 square feet x 6 = 60,000. Divide by 324, and you get 185 cubic yards. That's quite a load of manure!

(Here, by the way, are links to many great agricultural-related calculators. You can also easily calculate the amount of mulch, stone, etc. you'll need for a garden project here.)

Now the question is: what do to with all this mulch? Just lay it down on top of what's there (weeds, grass, whatever), or till it in, or use some kind of weed barrier?

There's no easy answer. Plastic weed barriers aren't great for the soil ecology, weeds will spring up anyway, and eventually you'll have exposed plastic somewhere. If you just smother weeds with mulch, they'll probably find their way to the surface eventually, although new weeds will creep in thanks to wind, bird droppings, etc. anyway. Finally, the mulch you bring in could contain weed seeds, too. (the only way to know for sure is to take a sample, water it, and wait.) Tilling can disrupt a healthy soil community and drive away earthworm populations.

What would I do, given the glorious possibility of a blank slate and a load of mulch? Prioritize. Choose a manageable-sized area and just focus on that in the first year. Maybe you're eager to get a vegetable garden in before summer; maybe you'd like to get the front yard done before the neighbors circulate a petition. Do that this year, and just keep the rest mowed or seed in a cover crop like vetch, fava, rye or clover that will improve the soil and choke back weeds while it waits its turn. (Check with your nursery for the best cover crop for your climate, and discuss with them whether you should let the crop go to seed or whack it back when it starts to bloom. It's not a big deal, for instance, if fava goes to seed, but some rye cover crops could be with you forever if you let them bloom.)

Then, with this smaller, manageable area, don't bother tilling. Just pile the stuff on top. For a weed barrier consider thick, overlapping layers of wet cardboard and newspaper, which will gradually turn into worm food. (use anything but glossy magazine inserts or coated color cardboard.)

For raised beds, if you're on a budget, consider straw bales. (I'm not sure what the situation is nationwide, but rice straw is weed-free and widely available in California.) I got this idea from Seattle Tilth--the idea is to just set a straw bale, still wrapped in its string, on the ground (or perhaps bury it slightly to get it to the height you want), hollow out the center, fill it with good potting soil and compost, and plant right into it. (You can use the straw you hollowed out of the bale as mulch in your paths, or compost it.)

For easy watering, thread drip irrigation lines through the bales, and water the entire bed, bales included, with weak compost tea from time to time to encourage healthy roots. At the end of the season, throw the whole thing in the compost pile or just spread it around on the ground, pile more compost on top, and let that be next year's garden. (Mind you, I have yet to try straw bale gardening myself, although I'm dying to. Has anyone else tried it?)

Last suggestion: Whatever you're going to plant, crowd plants together. Plant 3 or 5 or 7 of the same plant in a smaller area than the directions on the plant tag recommend. You'll crowd out weeds and get a better-looking garden faster. Then, next year, when you start on another section, you can pull out a few plants that are starting to get overcrowded and move them to your new beds.

What fun! I wish I had another blank slate. That vacant lot across the street sure is looking good...

elizabethgardens: What to do...what to do...

Miracle-Gro's Organic Choice

2006-04-09T08:22:00.000-07:00

Thanks to Sacramento Gardening for pointing out that Scotts now makes a line of Miracle-Gro organic products. Now, you might think that I'd jump on my high horse and rail against the corporate organic model, in which a smattering of organic products are wrapped around a giant, environmentally-unfriendly behemouth in the name of making a few extra bucks off do-gooder consumers.

Or you might think I'd complain, as many have, that when large corporations finally jump on the organic bandwagon, they drive small, dedicated producers (or farms, or cooperatives, or shops) out of business, even though those were the very people who created this market in the first place. Not to mention the fact that the "corporate organic" version of the product might satisfy only some minimal standards, might use cheap ingredients from dubious sources, or otherwise deliver an inferior product that causes customers new to organics to be disappointed and go back to the blue stuff.

But no. Believe it or not, I'm not going to take that stand. Getting what we ask for is not an occasion for complaints. It's a cause for celebration. Garden chemicals are a disaster for the environment and the people applying them. Americans spray90 million pounds of pesticides on their lawns and gardens every year, and fertilizer runoff is a serious problem for streams, lakes, and groundwater. It's astonishing to me that professional landscapers and contractors need training and a license to apply some of the same chemicals that any idiot (like me) could walk into a nursery and purchase for themselves, and use in whatever way they see fit with little understanding of the consequences.

So to Scotts I say: Yes! Organic products are a HUGE step forward, and now they'll be in major mainstream retailers, including all the big box stores, around the country where customers can make a choice. Great!

There is an interesting little footnote to this story, however. Scotts recently bought the Rod McLellan company, which owns Supersoil, Black Magic, and Whitney Farms. There was some speculation in the industry that Scotts intended all along to shut these companies down and replace their products with a Miracle-Gro brand. While Whitney Farms organic fertilizers are still available in stores, I wonder if this is in fact the next step. Whitney has always been sold in independent nurseries, where Scotts products are not always welcome with open arms. If Whitney goes, will independent nurseries stock Miracle-Gro's organic line, or will they turn to other companies like Dr. Earth or Fox Farm to fill the gap?

Stay tuned, folks. As for me? I'm glad Scotts is rolling out better, safer products, but I'll continue to support the little guys.

Miracle-Gro: Organic Choice Products

Spring Garden Tour

2006-04-08T10:27:00.000-07:00

I'd promised to post the same picture of the garden each month, whether it looked good or not. For April I decided to conduct a full tour of the garden. So in the spirit of showing more real gardens, even when they look like crap...

The front's coming along. Cerinthe is blooming. Rose campion about to start blooming. After that will be daisies, scabiosa, penstemon, coreopsis, and some salvia. But for now, I'm just glad everything's green and alive!

Now, inside the front gate, here's the side of the house--callas to the left, columbine to the right. Big angel's trumpet in the distance--it barely survives the winter each year but usually blooms in August. On the right, you can't see an ancient fuchsia and rhododendron that where here when I bought the house. Each year, I threaten them with execution if they don't perform, and so far they've managed to rally just before I come at them with the pruning shears.

Turn around and walk through the back gate--here's an aerial view from my attic. This has become the chicken yard. Berries on the left and right, coop in the back, and the middle is planted with low-growing, blooming plants that can handle chicken traffic--geranium, lady's mantle, catmint, yarrow, etc. Chipped wood paths. The chickens have managed to expand the width of all the paths by scattering the wood chips, so I'm working this spring on dividing the plants that are already there and planting them into the paths to combat the chicken activity.

Other side of the house--lots of culinary plants. Apple trees, artichokes, rosemary and other perennial herbs, as well as lots of salvia, some roses, butterfly bush, etc. This side really gets going in mid-summer and blooms through fall. The chickens have started working their way over here too--not sure yet what the impact of that will be.

And still, somehow, there are more blank spaces to fill! So I'm off to the nursery. I've got some prettier, more close-up and better composed pictures I'll post later--but once in a while, as Takoma Gardener says, you just want to see what the damn garden looks like.

Dreaming of Summer

2006-04-07T10:00:00.000-07:00

I found this going through last year's pictures. I look like a stooped-over old person here, but that's only because I'm bending down to talk to the chickens. But doesn't the garden look lovely? Just a few more months...

UPDATE: Oh, yeah, that's a good idea--say something about the plants! Icelandic poppies in front (and I pinched back the young buds so they didn't bloom until they were big & bushy--I was holding them back in hopes of using them in some arrangements at a wedding, but in the end I didn't have enough to make it worthwhile)

and behind that, some burgundy bachelor buttons, then against the chicken coop are some very sweet pink and yellow hollyhocks that just come back year after year...and in the upper left corner is this fabulous butterfly bush from White Flower Farm. I tell you, I haven't ordered many plants from them, but the ones I have ordered have just bloomed their heads off. Those folks are doing something right.

More garden photos coming tomorrow...

Plants We Love: Geum

2006-04-06T15:57:00.000-07:00

(Red geum pictured here with lilac centranthus, aka Jupiter's Beard.)

I’m always surprised at what flowers won’t grow in my garden. I have a great deal of trouble getting annual sunflowers to stick around, for instance. Either the snails mow them down or they just don’t get quite enough heat and sunlight to push them along. I say this with full knowledge that a neighbor just two blocks away has gorgeous sunflowers all summer. Maybe she has better soil, better protection from the wind, or better luck. I can’t explain it.

Any number of easy-to-grow plants fall into this category, and sometimes the list changes from year to year. Last year I couldn’t get cosmos to take off. I’ve had trouble with poppies. I’m embarrassed to tell you how much I’ve spent on bareroot clematis, only to have them wither away to nothing and disappear.

These mysterious failures have taught me one valuable lesson: when you find something that works, stick with it. Plant lots of it. Turn it into your signature look. I’ve done this with maximilian sunflower (Helianthus maximilianii), for instance. It’s a perennial cousin to the annual sunflower and it grows like a weed once established, blooming reliably every fall with bright yellow flowers that are smaller than most sunflowers but just as cheerful.

This year, I’ve decided to promote geum to more of a starring role. It’s proven itself to be loyal, hardworking, and reliable, so much so that I’ve been snapping it up every time I see it at the nursery and planting one in any empty space I have available. I didn’t love it at first, but once I realized that it was prepared to stand by me no matter what, I started to see the possibilities.

Geum is a perennial with low-growing foliage, which means that it will stay well-hidden when it’s not in bloom. It tolerates a little shade, but it likes the sun. It blooms in yellow, orange (including a tangerine/salmon orange) and red, so you can work it into almost any color scheme. The flowers, which are only a little under two inches across, rise on slender one to two foot stems and generally take the shape of a camellia or a wild rose in full bloom. There are single and double forms—the doubles tend to be more rose-like.

Most of the geums you’ll see in the nurseries around town are G. chiloense, a species native to Chile, but there are also varieties that come from Asia, Europe, and there’s even a species called prairie smoke (named for its feathery seed pods) that is native to the Midwest.

The flowers are a bit too small to make much of a statement massed together. This is an informal flower that works best when it’s just stuck in among something else. Because the stems are so slender, the flowers always look like they’re bobbing and swaying. Geum is never going to stand up straight or march in a line, but it will weave in among whatever’s planted next to it and fill in little gaps in the border. I planted a couple underneath a blue salvia last summer and the brilliant orange-red flowers popped up among the stiff blue spires of salvia and looked spectacular. The yellow ‘Lady Stratheden’ works well among a bunch of Shasta daisies, and the tangerine version pairs with creamy yellow roses and just about any pastel color.

They make good cut flowers, and whether you want them in a vase or not, you should keep cutting them anyway to get more blooms into the fall. The foliage can get a little scraggly and has a tendency to form a mound, but I just rake the dead stuff out and divide them in the fall when they get too bulky.

I see geum in nurseries around town throughout the year, but they’re not the sort of flower to burst into bloom and look gorgeous in the pot, so they tend to get overlooked. Keep an eye out for them in affordable six-packs and four-inch pots—even smaller, younger plants will probably bloom the first year, so there’s not much point in spending extra money for the one-gallon size. Besides, once you have them, you’ll be able to divide them and move them around every fall.

And unlike certain other plants I could mention, they will never, ever let you down.

Garden Blogs go Mainstream

2006-04-06T15:15:00.000-07:00

Durn, we've been found out!

Thanks to Sign of the Shovel for unearthing this one.

CNN.com - Take time to blog the roses - Apr 6, 2006

Welcome, Yahoo users!

2006-04-06T12:54:00.000-07:00

If you've come here from your customized Yahoo home page, welcome! For those of you who haven't yet learned the joys of a customized home page, to go Yahoo and click on "My Yahoo," or go to Google and click on "Personalized Home" in the upper right corner. From there you can choose all kinds of customized features, from local weather, to news sources, to your favorite blogger.

Then come back here to add Dirt to your customized Yahoo or Google home page. Just scroll down on this page and you'll see the buttons in the sidebar on the right. Click the button and you're done.

Now, back to our regularly scheduled garden...

Great Moments in Plant Photography

2006-04-06T09:12:00.000-07:00

This just makes me happy.

Flowering Plant Families, UH Botany

And we're off!

2006-04-05T21:37:00.000-07:00

Sign of the Shovel took the time to drive around New Jersey and photograph the most offensive, banal, and generally irritating gardens she could find. Yes! Somebody's got to stop these people!

Michele, please don't be swayed by suburban California gardens. If I see one more rockrose and agapanthus garden planted by a contractor, I'm going to run screaming for Mexico. Yes, there are some pretty plants, but there's also acres and acres of plastic-covered, bark-mulched, dull-shrubberied subdivisions. Why? Why?

She ends with gratitude for the garden she has, and I second that. Could you imagine living in a place (and there are bazillions of them in California) where your homeowners association would not ALLOW you to rip out the dreck the contractor planted and grow what you love?

Or even if you don't have an association and its by-laws there to dictate what you do with the overpriced postage stamp that is California real estate, imagine being contrained by your own worries about what the neighbors might think. What an awful way to garden--what an awful way to live! There's not a damn thing I can't bring home and stick smack dab in the front of my house. Now, if it's cool enough and not rooted firmly in the ground, somebody might walk off with it, but that's just another form of enthusiasm, right?

Sign of the Shovel: A Few Random Complaints, Plus A Giddy Hymn Of Praise

What's the Big Deal with Miracle-Gro?

2006-04-05T16:51:00.000-07:00

Sarah asked this question in the comments, and it's a good one. For me, a magazine published by a big company like Scotts is a little suspect. I mean, we're not talking about a group of passionated and dedicated gardeners who got together to share their love of horticulture with the world. I'd be equally nonplussed if, say, Home Depot decided to publish a garden magazine. It's just an advertisement delivery vehicle. (I know, the same is true of most magazines, but you get my drift.)

But what about the blue stuff itself? Well, as an entirely organic gardener, I don't use synthetic fertlizers like Miracle Gro or Osmocote. These chemical fertilizers are by-products of the petroleum industry, they're salt-based, and they're almost always overkill. Runoff of fertilizer chemicals in to streams and water supplies is a serious problem. You're also more likely to burn plants by using too much synthetic fertilizer, and you can even hurt the soil: there's nothing like high-nitrogen chemical lawn fertilizer to damage your earthworm population.

On the other hand, organic fertilizers like fish emulsion, bone meal, kelp meal, etc. are food for beneficial organisms that live in the soil and help feed plant roots. Worm castings, manure, and compost are full of beneficial microbes, as are many organic fertilizers that have species of good bacteria and fungi added. So when you add these organic products to the soil, you're not just feeding your plant, you're feeding the soil your plant lives in.

Organic fertilizers may work more slowly, but think of them as a complete meal. Synthetic fertlizers are a pill, and since they only contain a few major nutrients, it's not even like feeding your garden a multivitamin--it's more like feeding it vitamin C, D, and E and figuring that's enough.

So--no thanks, Scotts. No thanks, Miracle-Gro. If I need an arsenal of chemicals to keep my garden growing, I'll pass on the whole thing and read a good book instead.

Miracle-Gro Magazine

2006-04-04T10:05:00.000-07:00

This just in: Miracle Gro is going to give you gardening advice.

I've never been so frightened.

No Dirt, No Weeds, No Mess

2006-04-03T21:42:00.000-07:00

And best of all, no green thumb needed!

Folks, this is the year of the high-tech garden gadget. For just $149, you can grow herbs right in your kitchen using this self-contained little grow system. It's got a built-in light, "bio domes" that come pre-planted with the seeds of your choice, an aeroponic optimizing chamber (that's NASA-tested technology, people) where roots grow in nothing but air, water, and fertilizer, and best of all, a computer control panel that puts a Master Gardener right in your kitchen. (Could she make some dinner while she's in there?)

Plants grow five times faster than dirt, and the light raises automatically as the plant grows. There's a freaky little video demonstrating the concept here.

The unscripted, unpaid customer testimonials are my favorite, especially the ones where they call it "the unit," as in, "I just love the idea of having fresh herbs in the kitchen. That's why I was interested in getting the unit."

And consider this important benefit: "I really love the idea that I can grow a garden with very little effort, and also that it is small. It wasn’t overwhelming. That was the main thing," and "I used to envision having a small kitchen garden, but how do you do it? You have to have a lot of dirt and water it all the time. "

That's right, folks. A pot of dirt with a basil plant in it, sitting in a window sill--how do you do it? And if you do, well, we all know how overwhelming it's bound to get. Out of control, really. But now there's a handy gadget to take care of that for you.

What will they think of next? Machines that wash our clothes and sweep our floors? It's insanity!

Home Of The AeroGarden From AeroGrow International ::: 1-800-GROW NOW

Married in the House, Single in the Garden

2006-04-02T09:50:00.000-07:00

Sign of the Shovel has sparked a discussion of the relative merits of gardening with a spouse vs. gardening alone. She wonders briefly if she should have married a man like Eliot Coleman: "Eliot, are you the man I should have married? Someone who'd actually work the soil with me? Side by side, shovel to shovel? Think of the gardens I could make with a man like you! Alas, I suppose I knew what I was doing when I favored sex and conversation over any interest in gardening all those years ago."

Not me, girlfriend. I like to garden ALONE. I do not have the least bit of interest in sharing the garden with my beloved husband. I don't want to compromise, I don't want to share, I don't want to work together or cooperate. I want to do MY THING. Fortunately, that's just fine with him. He gets to make a request now and then (an apple tree, some raspberries), but that's as far as it goes.

Here's the problem with couples who garden together. You've all seen this, I'm sure: a couple strolling through the nursery on a Saturday morning, hand in hand. They look happy, relaxed. The week is behind them, and they can look forward to a peaceful weekend together. They have decided to spend their Saturday working in the garden.

Just then, one of them stops to sniff a climbing jasmine. (For the sake of gender neutrality, let's call her--or him--Kelly). With a dreamy expression, Kelly chooses the tallest, most fragrant vine and places it in the red wagon they've been towing behind them. The other (we'll call him--or her--Alex) looks puzzled. "Honey, where are we going to put that?"

The spell is broken, but Kelly tries to be patient. "Well, I thought maybe by the fence."

"The one at the back? Where the red thing is?"

"No, the other one, next to where the datura died last year."

"What's a datura?"

Kelly sighs, that long, exasperated sigh that Alex knows all too well. "Never mind. This wasn't a good idea. Let's just go." Kelly drops the handle of the red wagon and begins to walk to the car.

Alex follows, confused and forlorn. "Honey, wait. I just don't know what the plan is. I'm not in on the program."

Kelly stops, and looks up at the sky for a moment as if counting to ten. "There IS no plan, Alex. Why does there always have to be a plan with you? I just want to wander around and...oh, never mind."

And with that, Kelly and Alex head to the car. Their big gardening weekend? Over.

I observe these interactions every weekend as I wander through the nursery, blissfully alone. No, I have not forsaken love in the name of gardening solitude. It just so happens that my beloved had the wisdom to recognize, years ago, that our garden wasn't big enough for the both of us. I need a place where I can be alone, a place where I can do as I please. And so, as a gardener, I am single and I love it.

On my solitary wanderings through the nursery, I can linger over the creeping thyme as long as I want. I can stumble across a pair of scabiosa on the sale table and decide, on the spot and without consulting anyone, to plant a butterfly garden. On the way to the cash register, I might see a blood-red penstemon and change my mind, deciding that what I really need is a hummingbird garden. I can spend the rest of the afternoon putting away my butterfly plants and looking for hummingbird plants. No one starts to get bored and restless. No one begs to go home.

It is the gardening equivalent of eating crackers in bed. Ah, the pleasures of the single life.

Not everyone gardens alone, however. Some of us choose to garden with our mate. And so, unencumbered by any personal expertise or professional advice, I present the first-ever Gardening Quiz for Couples. Take this test with your sweetheart--if you dare.

1. At the nursery, you find your better half in the pest control section, eyeing the box of gopher poison with the little pictures of furry brown animals doubled over in pain. You:

a. Scream, "What kind of monster ARE you?" and run crying to the car
b. Sniff haughtily and say, "I hope for your sake that the rumors of a gopher coup are completely untrue. Revenge, as they say, will be sweet."
c. Suggest that, since your sweetie got to choose which parking space to park in, perhaps YOU should get to choose the method of gopher control.

2. After the third or fourth hour at the nursery, your loved one suggests that perhaps it's time to make some purchases and go home. You:

a. Roll your eyes and say, "Oh, GREAT. We just got here, and already you want to leave. Every time we do something that I want to do, you start complaining that you're bored!"
b. Send your beloved off in search of a double peach datura, ensuring at least another hour of solitude.
c. Answer cheerfully, "Great! Let's go home and tackle those weeds!"

3. You come home one day to find that your significant other has mowed your newly planted Wildflower Meadow down to a clean-shaven, 1-inch lawn. You:

a. Jump up and down in the rose garden shouting, "Let's cut THESE down too! Or-wait, those FRUIT TREES are looking a bit gangly! Where's the chainsaw? Let's make ALL our plants one inch high!"
b. Stick a tag on the lawn mower at your next garage sale, and when your better half isn't looking, sell it for the price of a pound of Spring Meadow Wildflower Seed.
c. Look out at the “lawn” and say brightly, “Ah, I see you noticed the problem with the Wildflower Meadow too. Not enough bachelor buttons, and too many poppies. Looks like you’ve got it all ready to replant.”

Scoring: Give yourself one point for every "a", 2 points for every "b", and 3 points for every "c" that you selected.

If your score totaled 3-4: Gardening may not be the best hobby for you and your loved one to share. Try looking for another activity you can do together, like fencing or kickboxing.

If your score totaled 5-7: There may be room for compromise in your gardening relationship. Remember that Laverne & Shirley episode where they got in a big fight and split their entire apartment down the middle with masking tape? Get out in the garden and give it a try.

If your score totaled 8-9: Congratulations! You have gained the upper hand in the gardening relationship. You and your beloved can enjoy many happy hours together in the garden and feel safe in the knowledge that, as long as you continue to hold your rightful place as Queen of the Garden, no one gets hurt.

Rose Apples

2006-04-01T12:51:00.000-08:00

At the risk of spoiling the fun...damn, I wish I could come up with an April Fool's entry like this one. Brilliant!

Reading Dirt: A New Twist on Edible Landscaping -- With a Little Help From Science

Annie's Annuals

2006-03-31T11:58:00.000-08:00

Finally sifting through the last of my garden show finds. From the Annie's Annuals booth, we have:

Limnanthes douglasii 'Meadow Foam'--low-growing wildflower, dense, spreading mat, self-sows. I'm hoping it'll be a good chicken plant. Quick--what's low-growing, spreading (or borderline invasive), flowering, and likes Pacific Northwest climates? Whatever it is, I need it for the chicken yard.

'Morello Cherry' lupin. They say these actually live on the West Coast, where we all drool over you East Coast people and your swaths of Russell hybrids. Hmph. We'll see. I only bought one. At $7.95, I can't take the heartbreak of losing a dozen.

Madia elegans densiflora--big, yellow, happy daisy-like thing that self-sows. California native. What's not to like? Did I mention it gets to be 3 feet tall? Yeah, baby!

Coreopsis gigantea 'Giant Sea Dahlia'--oh, man, this plant is a trip. Your basic coreopsis except that flowers bloom on this thick, succulent trunk. Annie describes it as "straight out of Dr. Seuss" and she's right. Silly and weird.

More grasses. Always more grasses. I decided to plant two or three as an experiment and ended up planting two or three a week. Where will it end? I like Chionochloa rubra 'New Zealand Snow Grass." Big, peachy-gold, elegant.

What they did not have at the show but I am lusting after (damn that print catalog!): Cosmos 'Apricot' if you can believe it...

and nasturtium 'Margaret Long,' named after the woman who discovered it in her Irish garden 100 years ago. Margaret, I could kiss you! (Well, not now. But 100 years ago I would have.)

The Terminte that Ate Houston, and Other Gardening Urban Legends

2006-03-30T12:48:00.000-08:00

The tall tale started, as all good tall tales do, in Texas. Homeowners in Houston circulated this warning on the Internet: “After the hurricane in New Orleans many trees were blown over. These trees were then turned into mulch and the state is trying to get rid of tons and tons of this mulch to any state or company who will come and haul it away. So it will be showing up in Home Depot and Lowes at dirt cheap prices with one huge problem; Formosan Termites will be the bonus in many of those bags.”

The warning had all the hallmarks of a great urban legend: A real catastrophic event (Katrina), combined with a plausible scenario (downed trees and construction debris getting shredded by the ton), result in an extremely icky consequence to unsuspecting suburban homeowners. Open a bag of mulch from the hardware store and hundreds of termites will come running out and head straight for your foundation! I can just imagine the headlines: Katrina Termites Devour Texas Neighborhood.

There’s just one problem, of course. It’s not true. Sometimes I just delete these kind of alarmist Internet warnings without a second thought, but often I’ll go to snopes.com or scambusters.org and find out the facts so that I can throw a wet blanket on the fears of the worried aunt or neighbor who sent it to me.

In this case, there are any number of reasons why homeowners don’t need to worry about termites in their mulch. A strict quarantine has been imposed in the areas affected by the hurricane. It’s unlikely that termites could survive the mulch experience—shredding, mixing, bagging, transporting. Finally, large chain stores like the ones listed above are most likely to monitor the supply chain for problems like this.

That’s not to say that all mulch is entirely sterile, or that it should be. After all, the reason gardeners use mulch is that it adds organic matter, including some microscopic living creatures, to the garden. In other words, we want mulch and compost to be “alive.” But if you’ve ever bought shredded yard waste or slash from a guy with a pickup truck and a chipper, you know that it can come with a few added bonuses in the form of weed seeds, plant disease, pesticide residue, and even, in the case of one Arcata gardener I know, the spores of a certain illegal and hallucinogenic mushroom. (“Really, officer! It was in the mulch!”) And this is what makes an urban legend so much fun. It’s theoretically possible.

That got me wondering about other garden-related urban legends. I found several that contain at least a grain of truth, and I bring them to you courtesy of the fine people at snopes.com.

Cocoa mulch can kill your pets: True. Well, sort of. Cocoa mulch is made from the shells of cocoa beans. It’s a lovely dark brown color, it helps smother weeds and hold garden soil in place, and it smells like chocolate. What’s not to like? A compound in chocolate called theobromine that is toxic to dogs, for one thing. Now, many dogs will simply avoid anything containing chocolate, and other dogs will eat a small amount that may make them sick but not kill them. Still, if you’ve got a dog who might munch on your landscape, try another kind of mulch. And if your dog does get sick from eating cocoa mulch, dash to the vet. The ASPCA’s website contains several recommendations for treating poisoned dogs, so it’s not a lost cause.

Exploding cactus spews baby tarantulas (or scorpions): False—mostly. There are many variations on this story about a man who brought back a cactus from Mexico, planted it in his garden, and enjoyed it for several months until one day when the cactus burst open and hundreds of tarantulas were flung around the garden. This story appears to be false, and in fact spiders are not known to lay eggs inside a plant. Even if they did, the plant would not explode when the eggs hatched. A scorpion might hang out under or in a cactus, but again, it would not burst apart and scatter hundreds of little garden terrorists. In fact, while any kind of insect might try to hitch a ride on any kind of plant, this is really not the sort of thing you should lose sleep over.

Man Threatens Violence to Get Police to Respond to Garden Theft: False, with some exceptions. I love this story because it contains all of the other elements of a good urban legend, and throws a garden thief into the mix. The story goes that a man noticed someone rummaging around his garden shed late at night. He called the police, but was told that all patrols were busy and he should lock his door. An officer would come when one was available.

He called back thirty seconds later and said, “Hello. I just called you a few seconds ago because there were people in my shed. Well, you don’t have to worry about them now because I’ve just shot them all.” Officers were on the scene in five minutes and they caught the burglars. One officer said, “I thought you said you’d shot them!”

The man replied, “I thought you said there was nobody available.”

Funny story. Not true. But after the tall tale circulated, a minister in Odessa decided to give it a try when he was frustrated at the lack of response to a reported break-in at his church. It didn’t go so well. The pastor was charged with filing a false report and has posted bail while he awaits trial.

Or at least, that’s the story I heard.

Seed Ballz

2006-03-28T20:20:00.000-08:00

Something else I'm trying out from the garden show: these little clay balls impregnated with seeds. Last year I picked a few up at the Seattle show and they did nothing for me, so when I saw the booth in San Francisco and said that I'd tried them and they didn't work out, the woman immediately pressed a replacement into my hands. I like that attitude!

The idea is that you just toss these around the garden--no digging--and water until the little guys are well-established. They have photos of beautiful bunches of flowers springing from these things. Maybe I didn't water enough last time. It's raining nonstop here now, so that shouldn't be a problem. Chives seemed like a particularly good use of this idea, since you want them to grow in clumps anyway.

Check them out here.

A New Toy from the Garden Show

2006-03-24T09:28:00.000-08:00

I've seen these upside-down tomato growing contraptions around for a couple years now, but somehow they just didn't capture my imagination. Growing tomatoes upside down? Why bother? Either grow them in the ground, the way they were meant to be grown, or not at all.

The problem is that for me, it's been "not at all." I live so close to the ocean that it's always cool and foggy. Even in the warmest summer months, temps rarely reach 75. It's just impossible to grow tomatoes in this kind of fog. Also, this area just seems naturally prone to all kinds of soil-borne diseases that affect tomatoes. Even if I nurse the plants along and get big green fruit, the whole plant turns black and wilts away before anything ripens. Heartbreaking, because I used to love growing tomatoes. Now I have to content myself with cabbage and potatoes--not nearly as much fun.

But last weekend at the San Francisco Garden Show, the people selling these Topsy Turvy hang-your-tomatoes-upside-down contraptions really had their sales pitch fine-tuned for people who garden in the fog. The advantages were easy to see:

1. No contact with the dirt means much less likelihood of soil-borne diseases.

2. Hanging the plant upside-down helps with air circulation, again cutting down on disease.

3. Easier to position the plant in a place where it will get full sun. Mine are going against a south-facing fence that is never in the shade.

4. Fill the bag with the absolute best potting soil money can buy. Add worm castings and really fabulous organic fertilizer. Then you continue to fertilize and add water from the top, which is actually the base of the root system, where the plants need it the most.

See? This is kind of cool, isn't it? I bought two.

Well, it's my last resort. I haven't planted tomatoes in a couple of years, figuring it was cheaper and less heartbreaking to just buy them at the farmers market. But here I go again. Now, what should I try? I'm thinking about cramming a Sungold and yellow pear together into one and growing a big fabulous Brandywine or Black Krim in the other.

I found the Topsy-Turvy planters for sale online at Gardeners Supply Company--follow this link and they'll give you 15% off.

More Highlights from the Garden Show

2006-03-23T15:24:00.000-08:00

Today's feature: a yard caddy that allows you to push a big ol' trash can around the garden with lots of attachments for tools and gear. Similar attachments for wheelbarrows, smaller trash cans, etc. The photo doesn't do it justice, but it's...well...large. Sort of a big, powerful, whip-the-garden-into-shape machine.

More Wonders from the Garden Show

2006-03-21T20:44:00.001-08:00

A fake lawn! Notice the sign in the background: "No Watering or Fertilizing Ever Again."

Well, yeah. 'Cause it's...uh...plastic.

Can't these people go live in apartments? Seriously, if the only thing you can think of to do with the land around your house is to cover it in plastic grass, let somebody else live there. Go enjoy the high-density urban lifestyle that we all wish we could embrace so as to preserve open space and farmland around our cities, but don't because we have to have that little piece of land around us.

But you--you with the plastic grass--you're perfectly cut out for city life! Walk to work. Choose from twenty different kinds of Chinese take-out. Attend poetry readings on Tuesday nights. Do yoga on a rooftop. Turn your nose up at the stifling, bland suburbs you once inhabited.

And when you're in the mood for grass, go to the park and sink your toes into the real thing.

Write an essay, win a flower shop

2006-03-21T20:44:00.000-08:00

Ever dreamed of becoming a florist? Now's your chance. Write a clever essay, mail in your entry fee, and you just might end up with a flower shop in Florida.

Are you a budding florist? Palm Beach Gardens shop is yours for $100 with write stuff: South Florida Sun-Sentinel

Tobacco in the Garden?

2006-03-20T19:03:00.000-08:00

Takoma Gardener is on a tear about Jerry Baker and his questionable gardening advice. Reminds me of a story I wrote years ago about buying tobacco in an attempt to follow his recipe. It ended up being more about the experience of buying a tobacco product and less about whether or not it's a good idea to spray one of Jerry's recipes around your garden (which, for me, was a naive and never-repeated experiment), but Susan pretty much takes the man apart, horticulturally speaking. Check it out.

MetroActive Features Buying Tobacco

Wonders from the San Francisco Garden Show

2006-03-20T18:45:00.000-08:00

I bring you this from the garden show: the Garden Auger, a sort of giant drill bit with a round blade at the end. Attach it to your drill, point it toward the ground, and watch the dirt fly. Clay gets busted up. Holes get dug. Weeds get chopped. Worms get pureed.

I gotta say, this one is really a guy thing. Cordless drills in the garden. What will they think of next? Well, tomorrow I'll show you.

The Evils of Pollen

2006-03-16T21:38:00.000-08:00

A couple years ago, I went to visit my cousin Colin in Minneapolis in early spring. As soon as I got into town, I developed all the symptoms of a horrible cold—sore throat, congestion, and headache. Nobody likes a sick houseguest, but I had no choice but to beg Colin to let me crawl into bed and spend my vacation doped up on cold medicine.

A few days later, feeling no better, I thought that I should at least go take a walk along the Mississippi River and see a little of the city. It was a warm, sunny day and all the trees were just beginning to come to life. Colin and I strolled along a trail next to the water, and after a few minutes, I noticed a light dusting of something on my shoulders. “What is this stuff?” I asked.

“Pollen,” she said.

I stopped and stared at her. “Pollen? I’m not sick,” I said. “I’m allergic!”

Sure enough, I had timed my visit to coincide with the glorious spring allergy season in Minneapolis. I’d never considered myself to be particularly prone to allergies, but this time I had met my match.

I’m not alone. About 50 million Americans are affected by hay fever every year. Tom Ogren, author of Allergy-Free Gardening and Safe Sex in the Garden, has a theory about why so many people suffer: gardeners and landscapers, in an attempt to be tidy, prefer to plant male trees and shrubs. The females drop fruit, leaving a mess all over the sidewalk or the lawn. But a male tree just produces nice little well-behaved flowers—that is, if your definition of “well-behaved” includes spewing plant sperm into the air for weeks on end.

It didn’t help that Dutch Elm Disease wiped out stately old American Elm trees across the country in the 1950s and 1960s. Those trees were perfect flowered, meaning that the trees’ flowers had both male and female parts, and were pollinated by insects, so they shed less pollen. When gardeners, landscapers, and civic groups replaced the diseased trees, they often chose the male varieties of various wind-pollinated trees. That means more pollen blowing around on beautiful spring weekends like the one I suffered through in Minneapolis.

Ogren told me a couple of interesting stories about pollen-producing plants last week. He once knew a family who had a huge male mulberry tree in their garden. One day, when their boy was playing down the street, the father decided to blast the tree with the hose to wash the pollen away. What they didn’t realize, Ogren said, was that when light, buoyant pollen grains get wet, “they suddenly start to germinate. Sometimes you can actually see this happen right before your eyes on a glass microscope slide if you add a drop of water. The outside of the pollen grain (the extine) is allergenic, but the inside (the entine) is much more allergenic, sometimes ten times as much so.” Both the husband and wife felt their throats close shut and had to lock themselves in the bathroom just to be able to breathe. The son spent the night at a friend’s house, and the parents actually spent the night in the bathroom.

Ogren also told me that he’d been at a party a few years ago, and a guy in his mid-twenties told him that allergies were all in people’s heads and that no pollen could make him sneeze. “There just happened to be a large male Deodar Cedar tree in the front yard of that house,” Ogren said, “and it was in full bloom. I told the guy that he was wrong and that enough pollen could make anyone sneeze. He offered to bet me five dollars that I couldn’t find any pollen that would make him sneeze in five minutes.”

He took the guy up on his bet and went outside to shake some pollen onto a piece of paper. “To my surprise,” Ogren said, “he took a crisp twenty dollar bill out of his wallet, rolled it up, and proceeded to snort all of the pollen up his nose!”

The guy didn’t sneeze. Ogren paid him his five bucks. But half an hour later, he found him in the kitchen, splashing water in his nose, sneezing uncontrollably. “I’m told he kept on sneezing for three days,” Ogren said.

Ogren’s two books address the many ways in which a plant can make a person miserable, and for both of them he uses a rating system he developed himself called OPALS (Ogren Plant-Allergy Scale). He rates plants based on the amount of pollen they produce, the duration of their pollen season, and other factors, with ten being the worst. The result is a very helpful set of guides for choosing plants that won’t exacerbate allergies. If anyone in your family is prone to allergies, just evaluating the shrubs and trees that grow near bedroom windows could make a huge difference.

A male date palm, for instance, carries an OPALS rating of nine, while a female is rates a healthy one. (Plant labels don’t identify the sex of a tree, something Ogren would like to change. Ask the staff at your nursery for help choosing a female tree if pollen is a concern.) Other popular plants with high OPALS ratings include fountain grass, male wax myrtles, and junipers. Many of the ornamental shrubs that people plant around their homes around here are low-pollen plants: fuchsia, rhododendron, princess flower, camellia, and salvia are all safe bets.

The bottom line is that your garden doesn’t have to make you miserable. Take charge of the situation. Make your plants behave. To find out more, check out Ogren’s books or visit him online.

(photo of feverfew pollen grain courtesy of Dr. Walter H. Lewis)

The End of the NY Flower District?

2006-03-15T16:39:00.000-08:00

Oh, I could cry!

"Eviction notices have just gone out to merchants along 28th Street, marking the final chapter in the long demise of the flower district. "

There are not a lot of flower districts and flower markets left in this country. Like any other kind of merchandise, all the old distribution channels are crumbling. Florists order directly from growers. Customers order directly from wholesalers. Everyone orders online. Who needs a flower district?

I do, damnit. It's a glorious, crazy, crowded, dirty and beautiful place. Guys propping up willow branches against the backs of their vans and spray-painting them gold. Women staggering under the load of five dozen roses wrapped in paper. Endless vases and tools. Paper flowers, plastic flowers, dried flowers. Roses from Ecuador, lilac from Holland, protea from Australia. Whatever you want, it's there on some rusted metal shelf in one of those grimy shops.

The NY Flower District has not found a new location for itself. Is it possible that it will just be scattered, disbanded? I fear so. A wholesaler gets just a few pennies per stem. Hard to make a profit and pay Manhattan rents on that.

via Manhattan User's Guide > Archives > Flower District R.I.P.

Galleria Carnivora

2006-03-13T20:25:00.000-08:00

Fabulous photos of carnivorous plants. Don't miss Dreams of Death on the Third Floor exhibits.

Galleria Carnivora

You know you're a hardcore gardening addict when...

2006-03-13T17:45:00.000-08:00

On a routine trip to the hardware store, it starts to hail. This does not stop you from running over to the garden center to pick up some bulbs and plants.

The hail also does not stop you from tossing a 3 cubic-foot bale of soil conditioner into the trunk, even though this requires you to actually wrap your arms around said frozen and wet bale and waltz it over to the trunk, while ice hits the back of your neck and slides down your miserable bare skin.

Because, hey, it was on sale. Besides, just because it's hailing now doesn't mean it won't magically clear up tomorrow and turn into perfect gardening weather. Right? Back me up here!

The Gate Repair

2006-03-13T17:42:00.000-08:00

Our gate blew over in a storm last week. This is the gate that keeps the chickens from wandering where they shouldn't go, so it's fairly important that it get back up quickly. We had a one-day break in the rain, so we went for it.

It may not be very pretty, and it's not even level, but by god, it took us all day, and that's what really counts.

Memo to self: Larger, more complex gate and fence is not going to make it through another season. Bite the bullet and call a fencing contractor this summer. We are not to be trusted with power tools without adult supervision.

Introducing the Insta-Garden

2006-03-12T15:40:00.000-08:00

The Park's Seed Company made the big mistake of sending me an e-mail about their new pre-planned "landscape collections." That's right, you can purchase your entire garden with just the click of a mouse. What a relief not to have to hassle with driving all the way to the nursery, choosing your own plants, and then hauling them home and deciding where they go! Today's busy homeowner doesn't have time for all that!

Park's has made it so easy by choosing a nice selection of utterly unmemorable plants that will complement any home and, for that matter, any gardener. (I have often felt that blandness is a much-underrated quality in a garden.) You'll get a couple of birch trees, some flowering cherries, a pair of Japanese maples, some daylilies, some hydrangeas, and even some ornamental grasses. It's "an ideal combination" that will provide "long-lasting color and multi-season interest."

Oh, but that's not all. You can also spend a thousand bucks on a shady landscape collection just bursting with hostas and astilbe, or, for twelve hundred, a Welcoming Driveway collection (to give you something to look at during that long trip down the driveway) that includes crepe myrtles, spirea, and 300 of something called Dwarf Mondo Grass. ("Honey, let's take a drive down the driveway today. The Dwarf Mondo Grass is supposed to be beautiful this time of year.")

There you have it, folks. Just stick those plants in the ground and you've got yourself a landscape.

Economy Landscape Collection

Mail-Order Plants

2006-03-10T17:33:00.000-08:00

I just love it when plants arrive in the mail. First, it's pure heaven to just be sitting at your desk, slaving away, and have the nice Fed Ex man ring the bell and hand you the box of plants you'd nearly forgotten you'd ordered.

And then it's such a wonder to open the box and find these tiny, shriveled little things wrapped in plastic and newspaper, shipped halfway across the country, but somehow, miraculously, still alive. These are not the big, overblown plants you'd find in a nursery, force-fed fertilizers so they'll bloom out of season or pushed to produce big, floppy leaves so the customer feels like she's getting something for her money.

In fact, I realized as I looked at these plants that there's no way a retail nursery could have gotten five or six bucks apiece for them. They don't look like anything. But you know--and I know--that what they do have is a strong, sturdy root system and a good upbringing. That's all I care about. I don't need flowers and foliage; I can take it from here and make all that happen myself.

Isn't it funny that nursery plants look so different from mail-order plants? Mail-order nurseries must have it made--they get to focus on growing healthy, interesting plants, not arranging merchandise to make customers swoon. The catalog does the selling for them, so the actual plants are not forced to do double duty as both sales force and--well--plants.

Wouldn't it be nice if nurseries had one or two examples of the plant in full bloom so you could get a good look at it, but then they sold you healthy young bareroots that didn't look like much but would save their show for your garden?

Which leads me to wonder what else retail nurseries could do for us. As long as we're railing against magazines, garden media in general, television, and so on, let's keep talking to the nursery industry.

I get a few magazines aimed at the nursery industry. (Most of these magazines are free to qualified subscribers; as a journalist/writer, they seem willing to send them to me.) Here are some random comments--more coming in future posts.

1. Please, please stop calling your products "plant material." Oh, what an awful term! It's like publishers who refer to books as "units" when their authors arent' listening. Don't even think it!

2. Don't spend so much time agonizing over how to appeal to "women customers." It's insulting and irritating. The assumption is that male customers are the norm, and you must do something different for women.

3. Same goes for Gen X customers. Nothing irritates me more than reading comments like, "Remember, this is the generation raised on video games and TV dinners. They have short attention spans and want you to do it for them." WHAT?

4. Don't talk about something like container gardening as a trend. That's not a trend. That's putting a plant in a pot. If that's the most interesting trend you can come up with, we're in serious trouble.

5. Likewise for organics. Organic gardening is not a trend, it's a very wise approach to gardening that relieves your customers of the dubious chore of pouring carcinogens on their plants. A recent industry article began by assuring nursery owners that "the term 'organic' itself is no longer reserved for hippies in Haight-Ashbury or a handful of people building some commune in the mountains of New York." Wow. In one sentence, they managed to insult not only organic gardeners, but their own readers, the nursery owners who they assume are so backwater that they associate the term "organic" with hippies in the Haight.

I could go on. And I will. But it's Friday night, and I have a date with my husband.

Oh, hail!

2006-03-10T10:03:00.001-08:00

You heard me--hail! and lots of it! It is gone just as quickly as it came, and now the sun is out and water is running down the street. This must come as quite a shock to the garden, which was under the impression that spring was around the corner. Snow levels are expected to drop all the way to sea level (we are 8 blocks from the harbor) and then rise slowly to 1000 feet, which is still quite a lot of snow for us.

I even dashed out and planted three of my new plants from High Country Gardens yesterday. Big mistake, I supposed. Oh well, they're from Santa Fe--they're used to cold, unpredictable winters.

Temp in the house when I woke up this morning: 41 degrees. We can't afford to run the heater all night long when we're snug under our comforter & electric bed warmer anyway. But I think 41 is an all-time indoor record for us.

2006-03-10T10:03:00.000-08:00

Big mistake, tulip.

2006-03-10T10:02:00.000-08:00

My tender little perennials are just LOVING this.

Be the Change You Want to See in the World

2006-03-04T14:40:00.000-08:00

We take a break from our regularly scheduled gardening to bring you this important announcement. I've resolved to make sure I donate at least 1% of my income to charity (that's 1% of gross--this is a moral imperative, not a tax form, and by the way, 1% of global income is what's needed to eliminate global poverty, according the UN), and I've found a couple easy ways to do it. Join me, will you?

Kiva is a new website that facilitates microloans between individuals like us in wealthy nations and entrepreneurs in poor countries. You choose a person or business, make the loan through PayPal or a credit card, and when the loan is paid back (with no interest), you can loan it out again.

I chose Maria Ramos in Honduras, who has asked for $825 for her shop that sells flowers and party favors. She's raised $600 and only needs $225 more. Wanna help put her over the top?

Local microloan/economic development agencies help find loan applicants and oversee the process. You can read success stories of loans that have been repaid here. I was in Ecuador a couple years ago and I really came to understand how a small amount of money can make a big difference. These stories prove that as well: a man in Uganda who made his living buying one cow and selling it at market, then repeating the process, used a microloan so that he could sell six cows at a time. Now, for the first time, all seven of his children have bedsheets. (After what I spent at High Country Gardens yesterday, how could I not be moved to give?)

Finally, if you'd rather give than loan, check out Global Giving, which also uses the power of the Internet to allow donors to contribute directly to small projects all over the world.

High Country Gardens

2006-03-04T11:17:00.000-08:00

Just placed an order for some irresistable plants from High Country Gardens in Santa Fe. I know that I shouldn't plant just one of something, but it's hard to convince me to buy three or four new, untried (to me) plants when I could just try one out, and if I like it, either order more or make some divisions.

So here's what I've got on the way:

Agastache 'Ava,' which they say grows to 4-5 feet tall and 2 feet wide. Who can resist? I love these minty, slowly-spreading agastaches for their glorious colors and the fact that the blooms last a long time and even look good when they're mostly dry--they're like yarrow in that sense, and the two look great together. Also got the reddish-orange Agastache x rupestris 'Orange Flare.'

Stachys inflata, a shrubby lamb's ear--native of Iran--that can take poor soil and drought. Low-growing, which is what I need in the part of the garden the chickens spend most of their time in. I'm hoping it can survive their scratching.

Salvia reptens, West Texas grass sage, a surprisingly grassy little salvia with brilliant blue flowers. Am hoping it will look good with my new ornamental grasses. Also got a yummy hot pink Salvia penstemonoides Beardtongue Red Sage, which was thought to be extinct but is making a comeback after being re-discovered in central Texas.

A yellow pinleaf penstemon, Penstemon pinifolius 'Mersea Yellow.' Who can resist a yellow penstemon? Also got a yellow-flowered Texas yucca, Hesperaloe parviflora 'Yellow,' for the same reason. Not sure how it will do without the Texas heat, but it would also look fabulous with my new grasses so we'll see.

Narrow-leaf foxglove Digitalis obscura. I'd like about a hundred of these, but I'll start with one.

Texas Bluebonnets

2006-03-02T12:40:00.000-08:00

We Texans look forward to the gorgeous displays of bluebonnets each spring; in fact, the standard family portrait you might see hanging in any Texan's home usually involves dressing the family up in starched white shirts and posing in a field of bluebonnets. Even though I haven't lived in my native state for about 15 years, I still think of those fields of wildflowers every spring.

Now the folks at Texas A&M are working on taming those wildflowers so they will work as a cut flower. According to this report: "Working out the problems inherent in the wildflower, which was necessary before any new varieties could be released, took seven years. Those problems included lengthening the flower, its life and its ability to hold blooms, and increasing the bloom's density and the flower's durability and greenhouse performance. " They drove all over the state to look for just the right breeding stock to create three shades of bluebonnets: blue, pink, and a near-white. The names? Texas Sapphire, Texas Ice, and Texas Sunset. Look for them soon at a florist near you.

(Texas Cooperative Extension photo by Janet Gregg)

Sexy Flowers

2006-03-01T12:50:00.000-08:00

Ah, UK journalists have all the fun. Consider this opening line:

"DAVID Walton’s roses are red, his violets are blue, a nun thought he ran a porn shop and two vicars did too."

As it turns out, this Amsterdam-trained florist "named his shop Sexy Flowers, an act that sparked concerns his blooms were really a cover for selling adult sex goods.

Two local vicars, a host of well-meaning members of the public and a nun all paid secret visits to the shop, believing that David may be a budding porn baron."

Ah, the life of a florist. Never a dull moment.

Salford Advertiser - New florist stems sex shop rumours

Worms? Of course!

2006-02-27T15:12:00.000-08:00

In response to an earlier post on bokashi, Juls writes this in the comments:

"What I need is a relatively low maintenance, low cost system that I can do indoors or at least in a garage (away from curious wildlife) and from which I can spread the results from directly onto the soil or mix in with planters. I live at high elevation (8,100) with plenty of sun but thin soils , so the more organic materials I can add to the soil the better....I wasn't too sure of the worms either ('vermicomposting') -- can they handle all the waste a family produces on a daily basis? Any other ideas?"

Worms are it, girlfriend. Very easy to care for, will live comfortably in a garage, and the richest organic matter ever will soon be yours. You can get started with a fancy stacking worm bin, which I have and love, or a simple plastic storage tub with a few modifications.

If you go to my worm blog Worms of Endearment, you'll see a link on the side to download a worm composting handout that pretty much tells you everything you need to know. Worms cna easily handle all a family's waste, with exception of meat and dairy scraps. They'll eat paper, too. If you produce a lot of "worm food" waste, just start with more worms--maybe 2 pounds instead of 1. Let me know if you've got any questions once you get into it. But yes, worms are absolutely a great way to have a clean, not at all smelly or icky composting operation indoors.

Garden Magazines

2006-02-26T11:21:00.000-08:00

The annual March gardening issue of Martha Stewart Living is a much-anticipated event in my house. It is, I believe, as close to a perfect gardening magazine as we have in the US, but more on that in a minute. First, if you have the magazine, turn to p. 147 and look at that perennial border at Digging Dog Nursery. Have you ever seen anything more delicious? Makes me want to just hand my credit card to them and say, "Send me everything. No, wait. Send me three of everything." Lordy.

OK, back to our magazine situation, which has been a topic of discussion here and abroad lately. I am still in mourning over the demise of White Flower Farm's glorious publication The Gardener, which tried to make a go of it without advertising and just couldn't stay afloat. I also love MaryJane's Farm, even though it only comes out when the farmgirls can find the time. Also, it's more of a magazine on rural life, but there's enough gardening to satisfy me. And of course, the UK's Country Living is great fun, as are many of the other UK magazines, although they're expensive and hard to find.

Which brings me to my point. Why doesn't Martha roll out a gardening magazine of her own? Imagine if they took the format of the March issue and just did that 12 times a year. Keep the recipes, the garden-themed crafts and decorating, and just pack it with gorgeous photos, interesting plants, cool gardens, etc. Editor Margaret Roach and garden guru Andrew Beckman have started a blog to go along with their new satellite radio show "Homegrown;" I sent them a note and told them this very thing.

What would your ideal gardening magazine contain? Here's my vote: (and a note to garden magazine editors--if you're out there, read the comments! Your readers are speaking!)

--It's got to be all organic. The chemical companies don't need any help peddling their poisons. Give us some research, some methods, some techniques.

--It should go beyond the basics. There are lots of resources for beginning gardeners to learn about "easy, no-fuss container plants" and other such drivel. Martha's great strength is that she's willing to be sophisticated, to show her readers a complicated recipe or a rare plant. Give us something we can work with--something we can reach for!

--At the same time, it shouldn't be snobby. Garden Design is well-done, but the whole thing feels out of my price range.

--Longer articles! I'm tired of short, bland articles that really just take up space in between the photographs. Come on, there are interesting, enlightened gardeners around the world with something to say--let's hear from them! Run book excerpts. Run four-part articles. Have interesting ideas. Be funny. Stir the pot.

--Find a better way to handle regional information. I appreciate magazines that include garden tips from different areas around the country, but the whole thing feels a little forced. Can't it be better integrated? For instance, an article on lilacs can include a sidebar about the Descanso hybrids bred for areas that don't get cold winters.

--Beautiful photos and illustrations, of course.

--Let's have a little farm life. Chickens, goats, bees, root cellars, barns, etc.

--Cooking? Decorating? Crafts? Collecting? Garden parties? Garden fashion? Sure, why not? I'm up for a little "garden lifestyle" stuff.

What do you think? What are garden magazines doing right, and what's still missing?

New paintings

2006-02-25T14:29:00.000-08:00

The lilies, alas, are not from my garden, and the pumpkins and zinnias are from last summer's farmers market--I started that one during a week of real January gloom, so it was fun to paint something from summer.

The Real Dirt on Farmer John

2006-02-23T19:48:00.000-08:00

I should be at our local Grange tonight watching this documentary with my fellow organic gardeners & farmers, but I'm still getting over a cold so I think I'll just Netflix it instead. It looks like a great film about an inspiring farmer, so if it's coming to a theater near you, check it out. It's won all kinds of film festival awards. Here's more info about the film:

Filmmaker Taggart Siegel has documented Farmer John’s efforts to redefine his farm for over twenty years, witnessing the colorful drama of John’s life. Beginning with home movies from the 1950s, Real Dirt paints a vivid picture of John’s rural American beginnings and the struggles he inherits along with the land. After the death of his father during the late 1960s, John turns his traditional farm into an experiment of art and culture. At the film’s close, the Peterson family farm is one of the largest Community Supported Agriculture (CSA) farms in the United States. Out of the ruins of single-crop agriculture, John creates an extended farm village where people and art can thrive alongside agriculture.

Real Dirt addresses the economic pressures faced by small farmers, conflicts between tradition and innovation, and the difficulties of nurturing a community through times of crisis and change. Farmer John’s story is the tale not merely of one farm, but of an entire rural culture threatened by mega-farms, monoculture, and modern market society. It is also a story of inspiration, demonstrating that
solutions exist to the problems of rural communities, and that they are luscious, rich, and filled with joy.

Name That Book

2006-02-21T16:31:00.000-08:00

Hey friends--I need some help choosing a title for my next book. It's just four or five little words--you wouldn't think it would be so hard, but my editor and I have been taxing our poor little brains for weeks now and we still haven't settled on the perfect title.

So now I've set up an online survey and I'd really appreciate it if you'd go take the survey and encourage your friends to do the same. You won't have to log in or provide any personal information.

Amy's Next Book: The Survey

If you have more ideas than what the survey can handle, feel free to post a comment or send me an e-mail.

By the way, I'd like to thank the author Po Bronson for the inspiration for this survey. He went through a similar process with the cover design for his last book, Why Do I Love These People?.

The Value of Things

2006-02-19T19:31:00.000-08:00

I'm always amazed, when I go to New York, at how much a flower can cost. I love going in to high-end flower shops like the Takashimaya store on Fifth Avenue and buying just a couple flowers to take to whoever I'm going to see--often my editor, my agent, somebody like that. When I was there in November, a single peony cost $25. I probably should have been appalled by that, but instead I found it kind of perversely thrilling. Imagine paying $25 for a single flower when you could buy the plant--maybe two of them--for the same price!

Callas are also extraordinarily expensive in Manhattan, but here in northern California they grow like weeds (in fact, I do have a few volunteers in my garden in addition to the ones I planted on purpose.) The longer the stem, the higher the price. One day, shortly after we returned from New York, Scott and I were out in the backyard and I grabbed a calla that was almost as tall as I was and yanked it out of the ground (they prefer to be snapped out of the ground rather than cut, by the way). I told Scott, "Look, I just pulled $35 out of the ground."

I went inside and put it in the one floor vase tall enough to support such a large stem, feeling quite decadent about it.

And now I have about a dozen of them, and as I trimmed their stems and found a vase for them, I thought, how much would this bunch go for in New York in February? A hundred dollars? Two hundred? And here they grow for free, with absolutely no care from me, from bulbs that a friend dug out of her garden when they got overcrowded. It's a crazy world.

Composting with Chickens

2006-02-17T19:50:00.000-08:00

My composting experience has changed completely since I got two things:

1. A chipper/shredder, and

2. Chickens.

The chipper/shredder turns all those branches and scraps into finely chopped mulch, and the chickens produce manure which, when scooped out of their coop along with the pine shavings I use for bedding, makes a lovely addition to the compost pile. So I layer this stuff in---the chipped garden waste, then the manure, then more chippings, and so forth--and it just turns into black gold in no time, helped along by the chickens themselves, who hop onto the pile, dig around for worms, and generally till up the whole thing.

Today I wheeled 7 or 8 loads of this stuff out to the front yard and spread it in the garden. There's a bit more still in the bottom of the pile; once it's all gone, I'll chip up the latest load of scraps, clean out the coop, and start all over again. Really, I've never had such a productive compost pile in my life.

You may wonder what I do with the incidental garden waste that doesn't get chipped--well, if it's fresh and green, I toss it into the girls' run so they have something to munch on when they're not free ranging. I have found this is a great way to get rid of the more invasive weeds I wouldn't want in the compost--the girls are welcome to them, and if any sprout, they won't last long in the run. Otherwise, I usually do keep sort of a separate pile of the bulkier garden trimmings and wait for it to dry out a bit, because the shredder can't handle wet stuff.

2006-02-17T19:48:00.000-08:00

The only hard part is keeping the chickens out of the compost pile while I'm scooping out the good stuff. They consider this to be their own little hotel minibar; they come here every day to help themselves to worms. (Sorry, worms, it's the cycle of life, you know?)

Piet Oudolf and New Wave Planting

2006-02-17T11:49:00.000-08:00

I’m going to take a moment and let you consider the idea of “new wave” gardening. Go ahead and make a joke about incorporating the spirit of Devo into your perennial border. There, that was fun, wasn’t it? OK, let’s move on.

Gardeners do love their fads. Cottage gardens, tropical gardens, and Mediterranean gardens have all come in and out of vogue over the years. It seems like every plant combination has been tried; one wonders how anyone could possibly come up with a new way to arrange the same plants. But I was inspired by the garden designs of Dutch nurseryman Piet Oudolf from the minute I picked up his book Timber Press.) Oudolf and a few other garden designers in Europe have created a new movement in gardening—what they call “New Wave”—and his books do a wonderful job of describing this new approach to garden design.

The guiding principle of his work is that structure, form, and texture should take precedence over color. Yeah, you heard me. Don’t plant a garden of purples and blues. Put shapes together, and then think about how colors fit into that.

Oudolf looks at the shape of a plant and classifies it accordingly. That doesn’t just mean looking at the shape of a flower—after all, the plant won’t be in bloom all year. A category of plants that form spires or spikes might include foxglove and salvia, but it might also include upright forms of grasses. Plants that create screens and curtains could include the airy meadow rue, but also tall, wispy grasses or even fennel or purple verbena, two plants that produce flowers on tall, thin stalks, giving the sense of height without blocking the view behind them. He takes the same approach with color, considering not just flowers that bloom in shades of red and burgundy, but grasses and foliage that provide those colors, too.

Second, he prefers perennials to shrubs and trees. He appreciates the fact that perennials change constantly, and that they are beautiful as they live and as they die. In fact, he considers the shape of a plant throughout the year, realizing that even as stalks become brittle and die in winter, they can still be part of a design.

These constant changes give a garden its mood. He writes that, “Some gardens, particularly those created by landscape architects, are like monuments: frozen…A garden that shows the cyclical nature of the gardening process is one that has emotion and mood.” To capture mood, he considers how light falls on plants, how wind and rain move plants around, and even how flower stalks look when they are laced with dew-covered spider webs or covered in frost.

Finally, he chooses plants that are hardy, appropriate to the climate, and that spread gently without being invasive. That approach allows plants to grow into each other, creating an almost shaggy, overgrown look that is both natural and abundant. These are not necessarily “no fuss” plants—they might require deadheading, dividing, mulching, and feeding—but the goal is to choose plants that can reach their full potential in the climate and soil you have, and that aren’t bothered by pests and disease. In Oudolf’s gardens, the plants must be able to stand up for themselves. Pull your socks up, plants! Solve your own problems. I like that approach.

Some of his favorites are ornamental grasses; cimifuga (also called black snakeroot), which produce tall spikes of flowers followed by small, sturdy berries; and some well-behaved varieties of persicaria or knotweed. While knotweed had earned a bad reputation as an invasive plant, the varieties he favors, including Persicaria amplexicaulis, will spread slowly without getting weedy. He’s also not necessarily opposed to a weed if it can fall into step and play nice with the other plants.

What I love most about Oudolf’s books is that his writing is so honest and opinionated. Most of the full-color, coffee table gardening books I buy are pure eye candy. I can’t claim to read them for the articles; it really is all about the pictures. But even when Oudolf is writing a straightforward directory of plants, his personality shows through. His entry on echinacea, or purple coneflower, begins, “It is extremely frustrating to have to admit that Echinacea is not reliable…They will not tolerate any competition from neighbouring plants: within two years they will have disappeared….we keep hoping, against our better judgment, that in the end we will be able to find the right spot for them, where they will be blessed with a long and happy life.”

Piet Oudolf’s newest book, Planting Design: Gardens in Time and Space, was just published by Timber Press. It’s dreamy. Check it out.

Man Escapes Prison to Bring Flowers to Wife

2006-02-16T09:06:00.000-08:00

Husbands everywhere, take note. You have no excuses. If a guy behind bars can figure out a way to bring flowers to his sweetheart, so can you.

The Daily Record - NEWS - VIOLET CRIME

The garden in February

2006-02-15T20:10:00.000-08:00

OK, I'm up for the challenge...I'll post the same photo every month and we'll just see what comes up.

The lavender hedge is not long for the world. Planted in winter 2000-2001, so now it's old and scraggly. I'll replace with ornamental grasses and something or other as soon as I figure that out.

Plants purchased at Seattle Garden Show (damn them for selling bareroots in plastic bags! I came home with a suitcase stuffed with plants and samples of compost--in other words, a garden with wheels and a handle. Scott could not believe how heavy it was.) Anyway, plants:

Two gas plants (Dictamnus alba, purple and white)--and has anyone ever actually lit one of these? Seriously, I need to know.

Voodoo Lily (Dracunculus vulgaris)--hey, it's research for a book

A blue ornamental grass whose name I've already forgotten

A little red burnet, not sure which one (Sanguisorba)

A little chartreuse anenome, who knows what that's called, but how cool is a chartreuse anenome (yeah, I know, Susan, I should save my plant tags and put them in a book, really I love this idea, but it's not in my nature, I guess.)

Just arrived from Digging Dog--and I only know the names because the packing slip is right here:

Aster cordifolius--they promise it's huge and over the top
Persicaria amplexicaulis 'Atrosanguinea'--Piet Oudolf got me all hot for these--more on him later
Veronicastrum verginicum 'Apollo'--like Veronica, only bigger and crazier.
Callicarpa dichotoma 'Early Amethyst'--purple beautyberry--for my alleyway planting of berry & flowering branch type plants.