PRETTY EDIBLES
Don’t Pigeonhole Them
Look around your vegetable garden: Aren’t some of these plants pretty enough to be grown as ornamentals, perhaps shoulder to shoulder with marigolds, delphinium, and others in a flower garden or at the feet of shrubbery?
Imagine, if you will, a twining vine with sprays of scarlet flowers poking out from lime green foliage. The plant, scarlet runner bean, is so attractive that you might consider the edible pods as merely incidental — until you taste their rich, meaty flavor. Some other pole beans are also ornamental. Purple Peacock and Purple Pod Pole are Read more
TRAINING SESSION
A Trunk-to-be
So you planted a tree — perhaps a few trees — this spring. The first years those trees are in the ground, while permanent limbs are developing, are going to be important to their future strength and beauty. Pruning is one way to direct development, and the best time for this is when trees are small. Small cuts made on small trees leave correspondingly small wounds.
Dawn redwood
For starters, help your young tree to develop a sturdy trunk. For most trees, Read more
FRUITFUL PURSUITS
Tolerance and Rules
People tend to be too tolerant of their fruit trees, accepting them even if they bear poor or no fruit. Perhaps it’s the snowball of blossoms in spring that makes a lack of edible fruit later in the season acceptable. Of course, if a tree is young and not yet of flowering age, the barren plant can be forgiven. But pinpointing the reason why your tree is barren is the first step to reaping both visual and gustatory pleasures.
Lack of cross-pollination, that is, pollen from a different variety of the same kind of fruit, could be the problem.
Apricot orchard in bloom
