still, although there are only a couple left – both of them big gaudy Dutch hybrids. Then all will be quiet until the promising papilios bloom (or don’t) sometime in early to mid summer.
This is a stem of Benfica, reputedly the deepest, darkest red. It's much darker and redder than this picture suggests.
or this one either, for that matter.
Thus we arrive at the moment for talking about long-term amaryllis care. Questions have been coming in, so here’s the drill:
Yes, yes, I know: “for dummies” is just a convenient code that means “for non-experts, in non-technical language,” but if I live to be a million I’ll never understand what’s dumb about wanting that.
part of our Hudson Valley vegetable garden
In Kitchen and Garden has always been In Garden for Kitchen as much as anything else, so there’s a lot about growing vegetables tucked in among the posts about flowers and shrubs, preserves and pastries and architecture and wild mushrooms and coyotes and
where was I?
Giving pointers on food gardening, I think. Here are a few posts that may prove helpful as we teeter on the brink of the 2010 growing season:
It must be spring – after a string of posts from the greenhouses, our friend Eric over at Yale is moving outdoors again. But he’s still in highlight-the-underdog mode. Today’s pet plant is pretty much the Rodney Dangerfield of conifers.
Granted, Pinus rigida isn’t usually much to look at, but it is singularly resilient, and perhaps fittingly, it does approach genuine beauty just where it’s needed most: at the salty, wind-scoured seaside and on rocky slopes, where it can survive in crumbs of soil too scant for anything else.
One of Eric’s young pitch pines.“This one is only 5 years old but looking good,” he says.
Having just used “threat or menace,” albeit jokingly, I don’t suppose I can say the same about the “Real Food Challenge” (reported here) that’s currently sucking up so much internet ink. In fact, it’s probably unwise to give the thing any more PR by giving it an Eek.
But I can’t resist, because it’s such a classic example of the all-knowing self-righteous preaching that helps the processed food industry keep its stranglehold on the American diet.
Some are ok, some aren't. Can you guess which of these foods you're supposed to make yourself, or never heat - or not eat at all?
Left to right: Back row – Butter, smoked Spanish paprika, olive oil, hard cider, whole wheat flour, center – local cheese: Barat, from Sprout Creek Farm, and Shaker Blue, from Old Chatham Sheepherding Company, (home made cherry preserves, here for another reason), cocoa, thick cut rolled oats.
So, fellow food gardeners, have you started your celeriac yet? Surely the artichokes, leeks and onions are growing strongly by now, and you have the flats all set so as soon as you finish reading this you can rush off to plant the broccoli, kohlrabi and spring cabbage.
Uh huh. Maybe someday, but if you’re anything like me your supply of well-lit warm space won’t support that many plants, even if your supply of ambition is adequate to the task.
I’m lucky; we have a small greenhouse. But finding room in it for the tomatoes, peppers, basil and other necessities that will be soon be needing light is going to be hard enough without asking the cauliflower to move over
At least I hope it’s after the snow. Today has been warm right through and sounding like rain, every gutter running, every eve dripping as the compacted layers slowly sink.
After the 1st and 2nd snowfalls, before the 3rd and 4th. That’s a 12 foot ladder
Up until a bit more than a week ago, I was in a pro-snow mood. Seemed like everyone else in the Eastern half of the country was having piles and piles of white beauty, while we had ugly patches of bare brown ground and nothing to ski on.
Be careful what you wish for.
When all is finally revealed, this viburnum will be about half as tall as it used to be. Those three broken leaders were due for pruning but I’d have preferred to choose where to cut without quite so much help.
Every year about this time I get thinking it would be nice to have a citrus tree in our little greenhouse – a Meyer lemon, perhaps, or a kumquat. Not so much for the fruit, of which we would get not so much, but for the long season of powerfully fragrant blossoms. A mature plant can sweeten the air for months on end
The sweet orange in blossom over at Yale’s Marsh Gardens. Flowers are only 1 to 1.5 inches across
No way of knowing if it was the perfume that inspired Eric to choose his sweet orange as a Pet Plant, but I wouldn’t be surprised.
Spicy Messy Coconut Shrimp – Thai(ish) fast food from Maine
Good News! Maine shrimp (Pandalus borealis), is starting to get around. Delicious, affordable, wonder of wonders sustainable, the only thing that has ever been wrong with it is that you pretty much couldn’t get it unless you lived in coastal Maine – or ate in extremely expensive restaurants.
That’s changing. More and more high end fish markets are carrying Maine, aka pink, shrimp, and it’s getting a little easier for those far from the shrimp boats to miss a few of the middlemen. Port Clyde Fresh Catch, a fishermen’s marketing cooperative, is now selling in Brooklyn, New York and (go figure) Pawtucket, Rhode Island.
Gray Tree Frog (Hyla versicolor) *
The way to blog brilliantly has been being demonstrated for a couple of years now by Margaret Roach, over at A Way to Garden. You wouldn’t necessarily know it from looking at my efforts, but she has been an ongoing inspiration ever since she started.
As the upgrades here continue I keep thinking I’ll find the right time to say thank you – after I get the new link list up, say, or post the long planned shopping page. But how bogus is that? The time to say thank you is always right now, so Thank You, Margaret, thank you very much.
If you know her, you know why the gratitude picture is of a frog. If you don’t, that’s one more reason to trot over there and have a look.
* I’m saying it’s Hyla versicolor on account of the markings and because it was tiny, about an inch long, max. But it might be a small Green Tree Frog, H. cinerea, not so much because it’s green (the gray ones can also be green) as because it was right there in the garden on a hollyhock leaf instead of hiding where it couldn’t be seen.
I’m happy to tell readers of Bill’s Coyote Post (and everyone else in the area) about a great opportunity to learn more, right from the muzzles of the top experts:
“Wile E. Coyote In Your Backyard: What You Should Know About Canis latrans”
will be presented free and open to the public on Thursday, March 4 at 4:30 p.m., in the Student Lounge in Vanderlyn Hall, SUNY Ulster, Stone Ridge, NY, sponsored by the Catskill Institute for the Environment (CIE).
The panel will include Dr. Roland Kays, Curator of Mammals at the NYS Museum, who will speak on “New York’s Coyote/Coydog/Coywolf: What is it and how did it get here?;” Dan Bogan, Ph.D. candidate, Cornell University, discussing “Suburban coyote behavioral ecology: Implications for ecology and management;” and Robin Holevinski, Ph.D. candidate at SUNY College of Environmental Science and Forestry, who will address “Foraging Ecology and Population Status of Eastern Coyotes.”
For information and weather confirmation, call 845-687-5231.
