Books, Tools and Equipment
The wassail bowl is still standing by, awaiting New Year’s and Twelfth Night duty. In spite of brutal temperatures, we’re still harvesting late fall greens (radicchio rules!) from their snug plastic tunnels. But the garden of 2010 has commenced; there are seed catalogs strewn all over the house, most with pens falling out of them. Vegetables dominate the lists, vegetables not seen on seed racks in stores, but there are also a few flowers
Tashkent marigold ( from Southern Exposure). The foliage has a sweet fragrance, the plants grow bushy with minimal pinching and the flowers absolutely glow.
Here’s my roundup of favorite sources:
Read More…
Just a little reminder it’s not going to be winter forever.
First, though, present time. Here’s my perennial shopping list ( with source links) of good gifts for gardeners.
Membership in The Garden Conservancy is on that list without further explanation and at this point none may be needed. But just for the record: after starting small and being exceedingly Northeast-centric, the Conservancy is now saving significant gardens all over the US and offering benefits almost everywhere. Just the ticket for garden-loving friends, regardless of skill level or actual possession of garden.
Read More…
The discussion about protecting the fig was resolved in favor of the trench method, so I went back and put in a few more details about how we actually did it. Just a few – right now the story is a report , not a recommendation.
- The bundled fig in its leaf-lined trench
The trunk is of course a bit springy and must be held down until the leaf pile is big enough to act as a weight. The holder here is Bill’s ever-handy Italian rototiller, still on site after being used to dig the trench.
I have a number of garden tools to which I am mightily attached, but none so precious as the Italian rototiller, my husband Bill, who has written this guest post about his favorite tool.
The Italian Rototiller
By Bill Bakaitis
It may not be what T. S. Elliot meant when he referred to April as being the cruelest month, but around here the breaking of spring ground also means breaking the sweet silence of winter. Motorcycles roar, dogs bark, the machinery of lawn maintenance springs into gear and out come the rototillers, churning and burning their way into the modern landscape. The ‘greening of exurbia’ is what they say. Consumer doublespeak is more like it.
The Grape Hoe, Mattock or Italian Rototiller, all oiled up and ready to go!
When I break ground I use Grandfather’s tool. Anglo types who hang out at the Agway probably call it a Mattock, and it is often listed in specialty garden supply outlets as an Italian Grape Hoe. I once heard it referred to disparagingly as an “Italian Rototiller” and in honor of my Calabrese Grandfather, that’s what I call it. Were he alive today he would chuckle and cherish the approbation. Leslie, of course, says it only works when used by an Italian (meaning me).
Why do I use and love it? Let me count the ways: Read More…
and pollen images like this
"seed of the Paulownia tree"
are just a microscopic part of The Kew Millenium Seed Bank Project, a major player in the worldwide effort to save endangered plant species.
The picture here was airily downloaded from a slide show of 18 gorgeous images published by The Guardian; and the news that it was up there came from Andrew Sullivan’s Daily Dish.
That’s “trellis” as in “utilitarian structure that holds up annual vines and comes down at the end of the season,” and the way we build them is with simple uprights and really a lot of untreated twine.
pole beans on sapling trellis, woods left and straight ahead
In Maine, we use saplings from the surrounding woods – they’re handy, they’re free, and because they’re nothing more than little trees they tie the riotous, colorful garden to its wild environment.
string and sapling trellis (please ignore oak posts in foreground)
This bean trellis was created by Kristi, who had evidently gotten bored with just running vertical lines. Beans would rather go up but will travel horizontally if encouraged. The spiderweb was completely covered about 2 weeks from this picture.
In New York, where there’s no convenient sapling source and the garden is if not formal at least orderly, we use 8 foot oak 2×2’s. Read More…
By Joe Eck and Wayne Winterrowd, illustrated by Bobbi Angell (with the accuracy, sensitivity and elegance she always brought – full disclosure – to our collaboration at the New York Times Garden Q&A.)
This is the first page of the first chapter; you’ll be seeing the cover all over the place if you haven’t seen it already.
When Joe Eck and Wayne Winterrowd decided to call their third book Our Life in Gardens, they probably didn’t mean “our” to include everyone who ever fell for a plant. But that’s the way they made me feel.
No matter that my gardens will never be a patch on theirs, that they have taken zone defiance beyond art into legerdemain and amassed a collection of rare plants that puts most public gardens to shame, they share discoveries, admit obsessions and air plenty of strong opinions as though their readers were their equals on a level playing field of horticultural passion. Read More…
In the old days ( like before about 2005), seed and nursery catalogs were glossy shopping magazines. They came unbidden in the mail just when you were sick to death of winter, bearing page after page of enticing close ups: brilliantly colored trumpets and daisies, clusters of nodding bells and panicles of jewel-drops, all guaranteed to make you forget that your garden was not the size of Versailles.
Cosmos bipinnatus 'Double Click'
Understandable. Closeup photos are the easiest to take, for one thing. Plus we know from the garden center in spring that nothing sells as well as eye candy. Add the fact that printing and postage are big expenses, and it’s no wonder the mail box wish books cut right to the chase.
But on the net, production costs are the same for one catalog or ten million; distribution is dirt cheap and space limitations have no meaning (let’s hear it for links!).
So why do we see mostly this:
Lupine 'Morello Cherry,'
and nothing else?
Read More…
This was a day of cold and high wind: trees and tall grasses swaying, the black mesh deer fence rippling in waves, a low roar waxing and waning outside the office window, which being old kept admitting the sort of drafts that make you think of Dickens. Snow coming tonight, with wind chills we will not discuss.
But just last Sunday it was above 60, the moving air a balmy breeze, the kind of day that says “come out and garden,” even though there’s frost below the mud and a lot of dream-over-catalogs-duty between here and the bloom of the harebell
Hensol Harebell, a favorite columbine
Yet if all the early pruning is done, if it’s too snowy to rake and the holiday evergreenery has already been laid protectively over the sleeping perennial beds, what exactly is there to do?
I don’t know about you, but what I did was tidy the (temporarily) pleasant to occupy garden shed.
In some ideal universe, that task has also been accomplished: all tools were cleaned and sharpened in fall. Every size pot was neatly stacked, Read More…
The peas are something I’ve taken for granted for a long time now, because classic Sugar Snaps never seem to fail. Good years and bad, those tall, late-bearing vines always come through with about 6 weeks of perfect snap peas: crisp, juicy and sweet. And twenty feet of double row pretty much guarantees enough. In good years, we give a lot away, and even in poor years like this one we still have plenty. 
How much is plenty? I never measured before, but we just had an opportunity to check it out - Read More…
