Poinsetteas



Did you get a poinsettia for Christmas?  I’ve never liked these Christmas flowers, at least not when they’re in a pot.  Seeing them in their natural environment is something else.  When Hank and I spent a vacation in Hawaii many years ago, I found myself gaping and gasping at the 10-foot high bushes sparkling with fire red blooms, despite  growing in nothing but black crusty lava.

We saw equally impressive poinsettias in Thailand, their blossoms (really bracts that surround the tiny flowers) thick and unruffled.  Comparing such magnificent displays to the pots for sale in supermarkets at Christmas time is as pathetic as pitting Yours Truly against Serena Williams on the tennis court.

Euphorbia (to commemorate Euphorbus, physician to Juba, king of Mauritania) pulcherrima (meaning very beautiful) is the botanical name for the poinsettia.  There are more than 600 other species in the Euphorbia family, their common denominator the milky white sap they contain.  This sap is poisonous and can blister the skin.

Dr. Joel Poinsett, the U.S. minister to Mexico back in the early 1800s, brought the first cuttings of the plant home to South Carolina.  For the next 130 years Americans enjoyed potted poinsettias at Christmas time, but they were very different from the plants we know today.  These early varieties needed the help of a skilled gardener to get them to last beyond New Year’s Day.

Even with plenty of TLC they quickly lost their foliage when they blossomed so they looked like skinny naked ladies in flowered hats. It wasn’t until 1963 that a marvelous mutation appeared, a poinsettia able to hang on to its leaves for months. Plant breeders imparted this genetic characteristic into other poinsettias, so nowadays we expect these decorative Christmas plants to look well all winter.

Poinsettias like to be in a spot that is free from drafts and gets sunlight for at least half the day.  They like cool nights (50 to 60 degrees) and warm days (70s). If you provide the above, you should have blossoms for months. provided you don’t give them anything nice to eat and allow their soil to dry out completely between waterings,

You must observe such a strict routine to get a poinsettia to set new buds for a second year of bloom that it is hardly worth doing, so I’m not going to describe it. If you really want to try it, look it up in a good garden book. 

The beautiful poinsettia with soft pink flowers  in my photograph belongs to my neighbor Jill, whose plants I water when she is away.  I’m glad to see it still happily blooming, since I definitely over-watered it. 

Garden Resolutions for 2012



A belated Happy New Year, Faithful Readers.  Winter is here.  There may not be snow such as we had in that photo I took back in October,  but there sure is lots of cold, down in the teens most days. Time to curl up by the fire with that pile of seed catalogs.

Have you decided which New Year’s resolutions you will try to keep in 2012? I read an article somewhere claiming that most folks break their resolutions before the New Year is a month old.  I fit right into that category, but this column is about gardening resolutions so, as my husband was fond of saying, “Do as I say, not as I do!”  Garden resolutions are a snap compared to deciding to give up chocolate or gin or whatever your favorite indulgence is.

 

The first suggestion I have is about all those seed catalogs.  "Don’t let your eyes get bigger than your stomach."  That expression is best applied to food, so let's say "Don't let your dreams become bigger than your garden.  It’s very easy to get carried away by your enthusiasm when you’re ordering. You can daydream about next summer’s garden, but when you’re finally ready to fill in the order blank, keep it to a manageable size.

It’s easy to forget the aches and pains and weeds of summer, as you study Burpee’s glossy pages and Park’s perfect pictures. If you’re young and fit and have plenty of time to garden you can indulge, but if, like me, you feel as if your joints need a shot of WD40 each morning, it’s wise to limit your choices.  The photo below of ten buckets of weeds is just to remind you of the weed problem we all faced last summer.

Try to include at least one new item in your order.  So often we gardeners slip into a rut, sticking to the tried and true we’ve always grown, so this year put a little adventure into your order. Try something different.  Have you ever grown parsnips? This lowly vegetable tastes totally different when harvested straight from the garden instead of from the supermarket.  Compare it to a bored overfed tiger behind bars at the zoo as opposed to the hungry beast rippling through the jungles of India.

Parsnips are a winter vegetable, their roots full of carbohydrates which like Brussell sprouts, don’t convert to sugar until cold weather, so you need to mulch the row in the fall and pull a few after there’s been a good frost or two, then harvest the rest in early spring before their tops begin to grow.

It’s taking me hours to decide what plants I want this year as I’m trying to follow Mrs. Eddison’s suggestion, replacing some undesirable perennials with easy-care shrubs. I’d like to get one or two hydrangeas, but being unfamiliar with all the new varieties I’m having trouble. Fine Gardening magazine had a wonderful article on these shrubs and I planned to use one of their photographs for today's column, but I couldn't find my copy.  The one below is from a book by Michael Dirr on nothing but hydrangeas.

I  can easily eliminate the hydrangeas that are too tall  or have lavender, purple or blue flowers, or bloom so tightly packed they look like tennis balls  but there must be 20 varieties with lacy panicles in soft pink or white. 

Bloom time also offers many choices - late spring to early fall, midsummer to late fall, and everything in between.  If any of you have recommendations, do send my an email.  If I ever make up my mind about  these hydrangeas, I still need to face choosing some hostas and some ornamental grasses for the perennial border.  And you know how many species of these plants there are.   

Oh  dear, I guess I only have time for one more Garden Resolution, but it's a one shot job and a very practical one.  Buy a can of orange spray paint and paint all your trowel handles bright orange so you can find them when they’ve been left out in the garden.

I own at least six trowels and yet I sometimes can't lay my hands on even one. Possibly you're the type of gardener who carefully puts away her tools, but I'm always leaving my trowels behind as I jump from one garden project to another.

Wait until there’s been a snowstorm, then go out and dig your trowels into the snow so you can spray their handles easily. And while you're at it,  you could spray other tools you use. Next summer you’ll be delighted to spot them quickly, even if you’ve dumped a trowel in the compost pile along with a pile of weeds by mistake.

These resolutions are pretty easy to accomplish.  You’ll notice that I didn’t suggest you resolve to weed the vegetable garden every three days from June until October or dead-head the flower bed every day.  I’ll end with one important resolution that we all should follow.  Enjoy your garden every day you’re in it, no matter what hoops Mother Nature makes you jump through.   Happy New Year!

Which Tree is That?



Are you taking the kids to Grandma’s over the holidays?  There’s nothing like a good car game to keep them happy on a long drive.  When I was little we tried to spot passing objects that started with the letters of the alphabet – Airplane, Beard, Cow.  If my Dad got to the Q he’d claim he’d seen a Quaker coming out of church.

When we were older Dad taught us to play cribbage using license plates from passing cards.  Letters on a plate counted as 10s, a zero was a flush, so 243M would add up as 15-2 and a run of 3 makes 5. If you’re not a cribbage player, forget it, but 233SR would win that round with 15-2,4,6,8 and a pair makes 10. 

Hank’s family played more educational games.  His favorite was “House Dates,” guessing the period when a house was built by its architecture.  I was hopeless at that, and when we traveled with our own kids we played a game called “Tree ID.”

Identifying roadside trees when you’re whipping by them at 55 miles an hour can be pretty tricky, but they’re far easier to label in winter than summer.  Leaf shapes are just a blur from a passing car, but when they’ve been shed, the tree’s skeleton is revealed, providing helpful clues.

It’s a bit like people. A man in uniform makes a certain impression, but strip him down to his BVDs and you get an entirely different picture.  Lest I appear sexist, I might add that a fat woman in a girdle and a slimming dress often manages to disguise what’s underneath.

Tree ID is a fun game even for children, but give beginners a break.  Let the kids use broad categories – fruit tree, conifer, maple.  When they say a tree which still has its leaves like the one pictured above is an oak, don’t ask “a pin oak? A black or white oak? ” Actually the one above is a red oak.  

You’d be surprised how many trees are so distinctive that once learned they’re easily identified.  A weeping willow’s pendulous branches or an avenue of Lombardy poplars, straight and tall as a column of soldiers, are unique.  How about the soft green needles of a white pine or the distinctive white bark of a paper birch?

Many trees have distinguishing bark. A very common tree found in New England has the very shaggy bark pictured below, so once you’ve learned it’s a shagbark hickory you’ll never have trouble identifying it.  Those ragged strips which curl out from the trunk in such an unkempt fashion are certainly shaggy.

Nothing else looks like the bark of a sycamore.  Its thick limbs are mottled with splotches of white, and if you’re lucky, a few “buttonballs” will be dangling from its branches. The popple and quaking aspen have conspicuously yellowish bark and usually die young.  Beech trees have extremely smooth bark of silvery gray, and hang onto their pale yellow leaves well into winter.

The winter silhouette of the black locust has such twisted, crooked limbs it belongs in one of Chas Adams’s spooky cartoons.  I saw these trees for the first time when we were house hunting and drove up Locust Hill Road on a bleak November day.  I thought they were really ugly, but when spring came I changed my mind.  A blizzard of blossoms filled the air with perfume and turned the road white as they dropped their petals.

Where a tree is growing can be another helpful clue in Tree ID.  At this time of year a small graceful tree with red berries in a front yard usually can be spotted as a dogwood. A row of large, heavy-limbed trees with rough, corrugated bark along a country road must surely be the sugar maples some farmer planted 100 years ago. Staghorn sumacs like to clutter up roadsides, their candelabras of velvety red seedpods still conspicuous as winter arrives.   

Gnarled, fat-trunked trees by a river, sprouting burls and bristling suckers are probably black willows.  Marshes usually contain swamp maples whose leaves turn a brilliant scarlet each fall.  Once you learn that the conifer whose green needles turn teddybear brown as winter arrives is a tamarack, you’ll never have trouble identifying it.  

A forest tree rarely resembles an open-grown tree of the same species, the same way a scrawny orange barn cat living on mice won’t look like his fluffy cousin living in the house and enjoying liver bits and cream.  A maple tree hemmed in by a crowd of white pines will be very different than one that has stretched out luxuriously in an open meadow.

Try playing Tree ID. Maybe next summer we’ll take a woodland walk and try identifying the trees by their leaves.   Have a Merry Christmas.

Mrs. Eddison's Other Suggestions



In case you haven’t read my last column, Mrs. Eddison is the gardener whose book “Gardening for a Lifetime” offers some great suggestions on how to simplify a large garden when it becomes just too much to manage.  Besides her most sensible advice, “Get a helper,” she has many other good ideas.

Use mulch.  We all know that a heavy mulch in the garden can save hours of weeding, helps retain moisture and provides nutrients for the soil as it decomposes.  Mrs. Eddison uses shredded leaves and claims they are by far the best mulch.  Shredded leaves? I liked that idea, but shredding leaves turns out to be a little complicated as you need something like a brush hog to do the job.

In the fall you rake the leaves into a pile, drive the raised brush hog over the pile and set it down on it.  Voila!  Shredded leaves.  I haven’t tried this yet, since I find dealing with the tractor’s brush hog difficult. Maybe a lawn mower would do the trick, but I wonder if once you’ve managed the shredding, are the leaves scattered all over and require another raking? I mulch my border with unshredded leaves.

If you have a perennial border like mine, it probably contains many plants that require constant work such as dead-heading, staking, or pruning.  Some plants like to sprawl into the territory of other perennials and need to be kept in their place. Others self-seed so readily that new ones pop up every year.  And there are some plants that stop looking attractive once they’ve finished blooming.

You may not want to give up your favorite delphiniums which always need staking or your handsome iris that wants constant dead-heading to look well, but if you’re trying to cut down on the upkeep of a garden, eliminating plants that cause extra work is one way to do it. 

There are many easy-care plants that make good substitutes for those that have some of the faults listed above.  For instance, the white, pink or maroon spires of the tidy perennial Astilbe look good all summer. The sedum Autumn Joy with its thick green leaves that become a rich burgundy each fall is another well-behaved perennial.   Hostas, which I’ve always considered rather dull when planted in a row, can be attractive used as a single plant intermingled with other perennials. There are dozens of varieties to choose from and all require little work by the gardener.  To replace tall plants, try some of the attractive ornamental grasses.

Small, slow-growing shrubs that may only need a little pruning offer another idea for the perennial bed.  When I read that suggestion I immediately was reminded of my quince bushes, blooming in the top photo.  I planted these prickly early bloomers years ago to compliment the daffodils that also bring color to the spring garden. 

Those quinces were just little well-rooted suckers I’d dug up from around a friend’s bush way back when I knew very little about their habits.  It was a big mistake.  The quince is designed to be a large shrub and needs pruning at least twice a summer to keep its shape, a very thorny job.  And what’s worse, all that pruning encourages endless new shoots to sprout up around the mother plant.

I loved the idea of replacing these difficult shrubs with some less troublesome species.  Potentillas immediately came to mind.  I have these low-growing shrubs on the bank below the pond. They bloom for almost the entire summer and I’ve never had to prune them.  Or one of my favorite shrubs, the variegated euonymus.  The one pictured below grew by leaps and bounds this summer, but so did everything in New England.  It’s at least 35 years old and I’ve never pruned it, except to take branches here and there to use in flower arrangements. 

So many different shrubs – hydrangeas, syringas, all the slow-growing evergreens such as laurels or cotoneasters.   I was so excited thinking about all these choices that last weekend I talked Piper, my only grandchild who likes gardening, into helping me tackle one of the quince bushes when she was here.  What an enormous job!  Cutting its branches down to stubs was a breeze, but the rest was agony.  It took close to 3 hours to uproot  and release that quince, clipping and lopping a zillion roots, which I know will send up a zillion suckers next spring.

And I still must face the other two quince bushes.  How ironic, when I think of the work involved to make my perennial border require less work!  

Too Old to Garden?



                                        

A few weeks ago when my friend Leslie and I were discussing the incredible amount of work our gardens had required this past summer, she suggested I read “Gardening for a Lifetime,” a book on “How to Garden Wiser as You Grow Older.”  The author, Sydney Eddison,  a lady I suspect is only a few years older than I am,  has enjoyed a life very similar to mine.  She has designed and created her own gardens,  gives lectures, writes books, and even became a widow in 2005, the same year I did. 

I was eager to learn about Mrs. Eddison’s ideas on how to cope when one no longer has the physical stamina to maintain a large garden.  I wasn’t surprised to find that hiring a variety of helpers was her first solution.  My kids have been telling me to do just that for the past five years. 

I  have a wonderful yard man who comes for an hour or so each week to do the “man jobs” I can’t do. He mows the steep banks around the pond, moves rocks too heavy for me to move, fixes machines that don’t work.   But I want to do all those other garden jobs. 

Unfortunately I’m in the same predicament as Mrs. Eddison, getting too cripped up to continue maintaining a landscape that I’ve spent more than 50 years creating. But I’ve gardened all these years for very different reasons than this erudite lady has.

I acquired all my garden knowledge through gardening, learning from my many mistakes.  I had no background or education in gardening, never took courses in horticulture, never went to nurseries to find new and different plants. I’ve never even bothered to learn the Latin names of the perennials in my gardens. As a result I am always uncomfortable talking to educated gardeners.

When I began to write gardening columns for the local newspapers it was only because I couldn’t find a publisher for the 3 “Great American Novels” I’d written. It always makes sense to write about what you’re familiar with, and by then I had a bushel basket of gardening experiences and was even giving my wildflower programs to garden clubs.   

When my readers ask gardening questions, I look up the answers in books if I’ve never dealt personally with the problems they encounter.   “I’m not a horticulturist, just an entertainer” has been my stock apology.   It still is. My first love is writing. And there’s the vast difference between this very knowledgeable gardener and myself. 

I have delighted in the challenge of turning an abandoned farm into a beautiful property.  I revel in caring for this landscape Hank and I created, getting my hands in the dirt, nestling little seedlings in their new home, pulling up all those ferocious weeds.  I love it when my grandchildren want to get out the photo albums and look back at the early years when Locust Hill didn’t even have a lawn, just burdocks and poison ivy and falling down fences.

My head is full of wonderful memories of how we struggling to tame this muddled tangle of vegetation, building retaining walls, fencing the sheep pastures, starting my first vegetable garden.  One of my oldest memories from Locust Hill occurred way back in 1965 when my new friend Bunny Foster brought me a dozen iris rhizomes. I didn’t even know what they were. 

Where to put them?  Those plants were the beginning of my perennial border, a flower bed that grew like Topsy.  My friend Janette brought me feverfew, Betsy gave me Monarda, Henny divided and gave me peony roots, my mother offered me lemon lilies. Eventually the border extended the entire length of sheep pasture fence, over 100 feet.

I love remembering the morning I went out to the compost pile with the morning’s coffee grounds and saw that one of our ewes had produced three lambs.  What a sight! 

Or the day I was lucky enough to have my camera when a total of 8 pintails splashed down into the pond, ducking and diving for twenty minutes before flapping back up into the blue sky.

What fun to recall the excitement as we prepared for the first wedding on Locust Hill; how I scalloped the perennial border’s boring straight edge and bought lupines and peonies and annuals so we’d have blooms in June; how our naughtiest dog, Rosta, stepped on Trum’s train as she and her Dad walked across the lawn toward the waiting groom.

 Oh, dear, I could easily spend another hour or two reminiscing about Locust Hill! 

Mrs. Eddison had many other good suggestions in her book besides hiring help, but I will save them (and I suspect a few more memories) for my next column.

Anatomy of a Carrot?



                                   
Snow in October, and no killing frost has got to be a record.  I didn’t wait for Jack to blacken my vegetable garden.  I pulled up the pepper plants, the tomato vines and my pathetic Brussels sprouts.  Everyone I’ve talked to who grew sprouts had the same problem I did - sprouts no bigger than peas.

The one vegetable I left in the garden was the carrots.  If you  mulch the carrot row heavily you can continue harvesting them well into December.  Wouldn’t it be nice if carrots made your hair curl and your eyes capable of seeing in the dark?  Unfortunately the vitamin A purported to bring about these delightful attributes is apparently not released unless carrots are cooked or juiced. I’m a rabbit food freak and eat few cooked carrots, and No juice. 

Last week a friend sent me an article claiming a sliced carrot looks like the human eye. “The pupil, iris and radiating lines look just like the human eye... And science now shows carrots greatly enhance blood flow to the function of the eyes.”

Since there was no one listed as the author of the article, I went on the Internet to see how authentic it might be.  When I googled “Food-Body Parts” I was directed to a site called “Truth or Fiction.”  The site said the article was “a very creative piece, but is very weak on substantiation.  We have not found any strong documentation correlating foods with the parts of the body that they resemble.”

OK, maybe it’s just a joke, but I found it really interesting and thought you might too, so here it is.

It's been said that God first separated the salt water from the fresh, made dry land, planted a garden, made animals and fish... All before making a human. He made and provided what we'd need before we were born. These are best & more powerful when eaten raw.

God left us a great clue as to what foods help what part of our body!
God's Pharmacy! Amazing!

A sliced Carrot looks like the human eye. The pupil, iris and radiating lines look just like the human eye... And YES, science now shows carrots greatly enhance blood flow to and function of the eyes.

A Tomato has four chambers and is red. The heart has four chambers and is red. All of the research shows tomatoes are loaded with lycopine and are indeed pure heart and blood food.  Grapes hang in a cluster that has the shape of the heart. Each grape looks like a blood cell and all of the research today shows grapes are also profound heart and blood vitalizing food.

A Walnut looks like a little brain, a left and right hemisphere, upper cerebrums and lower cerebellums. Even the wrinkles or folds on the nut are just like the neo-cortex. We now know walnuts help develop more than three (3) dozen neuron-transmitters for brain function.

Kidney Beans actually heal and help maintain kidney function and yes, they look exactly like the human kidneys. Celery, Bok Choy, Rhubarb and many more look just like bones. These foods specifically target bone strength. Bones are 23% sodium and these foods are 23% sodium. If you don't have enough sodium in your diet, the body pulls it from the bones, thus making them weak. These foods replenish the skeletal needs of the body.  

Avocados,  Eggplant and Pears target the health and function of the womb and cervix of the female - they look just like these organs. Today's research shows that when a woman eats one avocado a week, it balances hormones, sheds unwanted birth weight, and prevents cervical cancers. And how profound is this? It takes exactly nine (9) months to grow an avocado from blossom to ripened fruit. There are over 14,000 photolytic chemical constituents of nutrition in each one of these foods. Modern science has only studied and named about 141 of them.

Figs are full of seeds and hang in twos when they grow. Figs increase the mobility of male sperm and increase the numbers of Sperm as well to overcome male sterility. Sweet Potatoes look like the pancreas and actually balance the glycemic index of diabetics. Oranges, Grapefruits, and other Citrus fruits look just like the mammary glands of the female and actually assist the health of the breasts and the movement of lymph in and out of the breasts.

Onions look like the body's cells. Today's research shows onions help clear waste materials from all of the body cells. They even produce tears which wash the epithelial layers of the eyes. A working companion, Garlic, also helps eliminate waste materials and dangerous free radicals from the body.

Sorry, I don't have any photos of vegetable body parts.  True or False, you’ve got to admit the anatomy lesson was fun.  

The Easiest Fruit to Grow




 I’ve just come back from picking the last of my Fall Gold raspberries.  Are you familiar with these melt-in-your-mouth berries? They are so much sweeter than red raspberries. They are yellow, with a blush of pink when fully ripe, and taste like pure sugar.

Long before I discovered this scrumptious variety of raspberry, Hank and I put in a large bed of a red variety called Latham.  That bed was the inspiration for submitting a column to the local newspaper and started my writing career when it was accepted.   It began this way –

“Growing raspberries is about as tricky as growing a beard. I speak from second-hand experience, I hasten to add.  Beginning a beard or a raspberry bed can be tedious, but once established, both require little pruning and much pleasure.  I assume not having to scrape one’s face every morning must be as delightful as having fresh raspberries on one’s breakfast cereal.”

Raspberries are definitely one of the most rewarding fruits to grow.  Fruit trees - apples, peaches, plums, etc. - all require spraying to produce good fruit, an expensive proposition unless you do it yourself, which is a major job.  Grapes require fancy supports and several years before the vines produce their handsome clusters of grapes.   

Before we had a raspberry bed I picked wild blackberries to make my jam, a very thorny ordeal, and a very seedy jam.  Raspberries have neither problem.  Both their thorns and their seeds are inoffensive.  The plants don’t need to be sprayed and most varieties don’t require staking. 

Raspberry plants reproduce by sending out underground stolens to make new plants.  We made our second raspberry bed by using these healthy children that pop up each year, sometimes in undesirable places.  The year I bought a dozen Fall Gold plants I made the mistake of planting them in a newly prepared bed about six feet away from the beds of reds. 

The next spring many red children invaded my planting of Fall Gold and within a few years had overpowered them, taking  firm possession of their bed.  I needed to find a new home for the gold, far away from the reds.

I tied colored yarn around the stems of the Fall Gold so I’d be able to tell them from the interlopers, and in the spring transplanted them to their new home along the south side of Hank’s shop.  It wasn’t an ideal place, a quarter mile down the hill from the house, and had limited sunlight, but it was the best I could do.

Pruning your raspberries is done in the fall.  The plants are perennials, continuing to live for years and years, but their canes are biennials. In their first year all they do is grow.  In their second year they branch, put out flowers, produce fruit, and exhausted by all that heroic effort, they die.

Each fall when the new canes are still green, the old canes look and are dead. If you don’t remove them you will end up with a briar patch even Br’er Rabbit can’t get in. Of the five or six  new canes, you should choose the best two or three and remove the rest.  The weird photo below, a back to back double view,  shows the few little piles that I removed this fall, hardly an exhausting task.

Mulching to keep down the weeds is also done in the fall.  I used to mulch our beds with left over haybales, easy to spread and full of nutrients as they decompose.  They’re also full of hay seeds, however, and after twenty years the beds were a hopeless mess of grass.  Last year I redid one bed and mulched it with wood chips, free from the town dump.  It was such a major job that I eliminated the second bed, giving away many of the plants to friends.

Some raspberries produce fruit just once a summer, usually in July, but other varieties have berries from late July until frost and are called “everbearing.”  These varieties are pruned differently since the first year’s cane produces the fruit and at the end of the season can be cut as the following spring a new cane will grow up to replace it. 

My Fall Gold are supposedly the everbearing type, but they don’t behave that way. They only start offering me ripe berries in mid-September, probably because they get so little sunlight.    Unlike most red varieties their canes grow very tall and need staking, but because “Out of sight” is “Out of mind,” I never got around to pruning or staking mine until this year when I needed a good photo for this column. 

Raspberries get moldy very quickly after a rain and need to be picked as soon as possible.  My reds did fine as they are harvested in July, but there was just too much rain this fall and so most of those sweet yellow berries got too moldy to eat. 

I recommend this variety, however.  And I’ve just gone on the Internet and read about a Fall Gold BUSH that sounds much easier to maintain.  It’s everbearing, providing fruit from June until frost.