First Good-Tasting Berries of the Season Strawberries, the aptly named variety Earliglow, are ripe, which means it’s time to start crawling for fruit. That’s one thing I don’t like about strawberries. Another thing I don’t like about strawberries is that, although they’re perennial plants, a bed needs replanting after about 5 years. By then, viruses, […]
As Good As It Gets You might think that writing about good weather would tempt the fates. I’ll thumb my nose at the fates and go ahead and write that this spring is the best spring, gardenwise, ever in all the decades since I’ve been gardening. The flowers have been more vibrant with color and, […]
Lee Reich’s 13TH (?) ANNUAL PLANT SALE (of mostly lesser grown but delectable fruits) Because of covid, the sale is now online, with scheduled pickups here at the farmden in New Paltz, NY. Limited quantities of plants are still available (September Sun female kiwiberry, various varieties of fig, Blue Sunset lowbush blueberry, and Pineapple Crush […]
To Haul or Not to Haul Hauling manure hardly seems to make sense these days, considering that lugging 500 pounds of horse manure gives plants about the same amount of food as a 50 pound bag of 10-10-10. And the latter for only about ten bucks! But whereas 10-10-10 supplies only food (and only three […]
Lee Reich’s 13TH (?) ANNUAL PLANT SALE (of mostly lesser grown but delectable fruits) Because of covid, the sale is now online, with scheduled pickups here at the farmden in New Paltz, NY. Note that there are limited quantities of al plants, each available to the first taker. So order soon. To see plant list, […]
I Start with the Easiest I spent an hour or so today working on my sculptures. Yes, they were out in the garden. No, they were not stone renderings of fish spouting water into a pond or of ethereal females sprinkling the ground with flower petals. These sculptures are quite large and, as you might […]
A Returning Beauty I have some of the nicest volunteers in my garden. Some of them have been people, many of them are plants, and one of my favorites – among the plants, that is – is columbine. Years ago, I planted some native columbines, those dainty plants whose orange and yellow flowers hover on […]
It’s spring, a time when a man’s thoughts turn to . . . flowers, of course. (At least this man’s thoughts, some of them, do.) Sure, I’ve been reveling in the colorful progression of blossoms beginning, this year, with cornelian cherry and hellebore on about the first day of spring, and moving on to forsythia, […]
A Little Bit of the Mediterranean The UPS guy arrived yesterday with a long, narrow cardboard box containing the latest addition to my menagerie, a menagerie of mostly Mediterranean plants. “Mostly” because not all of them have roots in the Mediterranean. But all of them thrive and are grown in Mediterranean climates of mild winters […]
Making the Best of It Eek! Mice (or rabbits)! Not the animals but the damage they have wrought. The bark on virtually all my pear grafts of last year has been nibbled off enough to kill the grafts. Once I calmed down, I realized that all was not lost. All the chewing was above ground […]
