You’re rummaging in the attic, in your greatgrandma’s steamer trunk, and you come upon a dusty, old packet of garden balsam seeds. An heirloom! This heirloom’s probably more valuable for the picture on the packet than for the seeds, which probably have lost their vitality. You could, though, if you wanted, get your hands on heirloom plants seeds or plants that would grow.
The classic gift for your sweetie on Valentine’s Day is, of course, chocolate.
Chocolate plant pods
But plain old chocolate won’t do, not even rich Theo or Equal Exchange chocolates (my two favorites). The gift is going to be a chocolate plant — this is about gardening, after all.
Plant a Hershey’s Kiss and it’ll never sprout to become a chocolate tree. Read more
(The following is adapted from my book THE PRUNING BOOK, available from the usual sources or directly from me, signed, on this website.)
How many of us have inherited neglected, overgrown, old apple trees with our property? Yes, such trees do have charm, their gnarled, elbowed branches seemingly ready to reach out to offer a hug. Their fruits, however, usually leave much to be desired. More often than not they’re too small, too high in the tree, and too pest-ridden. These problems are largely the result of unfettered growth, the tree growing so large and dense with branches that it has shaded itself into nonproductivity and disease-inducing dankness.
No need for despair: such a tree can be returned to its former glory by “renovation,” as corrective pruning of an old tree is called. Read more
Despite its sinister sound, a “germplasm collection” spells good things for farmers and gardeners alike. Think beyond the flu season and the word germ takes on a broader meaning: a small mass of living substance that can give rise to a whole organism or one of its parts. Think of wheat germ, that nutritious part of a wheat seed that contains the cells — the germ — that develop into a whole new wheat plant.
To us gardeners, a germplasm collection is a collection of plants or seeds. Forty years ago, I started amassing a collection of gooseberry varieties, A collection that swelled to almost fifty of them! Besides offering good eating, that group of plants was at the time one of the largest germplasm collections of gooseberries in the country.
Some of my gooseberry varieties
Winter is a good time to look at some of the finer details of trees and shrubs — their buds, for example. Buds!? Bo-o-o-oring, you say? Not really, if you take the time to appreciate details such as their shapes, colors, and textures.
Plum buds about to pop
Buds can do more than just help you wile away winter hours. They can disclose a plant’s identity as well as foretell for you what what’s in the offing for the upcoming growing season as far as flowers and fruits. Read more
As children, my friends and I were well acquainted with mountain ash trees. European Mountain Ash (Sorbus aucuparia) was ubiquitous to suburban home lots in the Northeast in the 1950’s, and the trees were readily recognized by their ferny leaves and clusters of flashy berries that also served as artillery.
European mountainash
Since that time, mountain ashes have fallen out of favor — and rightly so in many cases. Like our native white birch, European Mountain Ash is native to cool, moist habitats. When planted in sun-drenched backyards where summers are hot, sometimes droughty, they fall prey to borers and other ills. Those berries aren’t actually berries, but pome fruits like apples, to which mountain ashes are closely related and with which they share many of the same ills.
No reason to ignore the whole Sorbus genus, though Read more
I’m not suggesting that olive trees should elbow out spruces, firs, and other conifers that are our traditional Christmas trees. Still, an olive tree symbolizes peace and is a tree you actually would find growing in Jerusalem, so is an appropriate accompaniment to the holiday season.
Old olive tree in Spain
Even if you’ll never see strings of light bulbs corralling cut olive trees together on bare lots of land the way they do cut Christmas trees, you could Read more
(The following is from my book GROWING FIGS IN COLD CLIMATES)
I buried two fig plants a few days ago. No, not because they died. The reason was night temperatures occasionally dipping into the low ‘teens (13°F, to be exact, on December 4th), which is just about the limit for fig stem survival. If the stems die from cold, there’ll be no fig harvest from them them next summer.
Last summer’s figs
So what’s the connection with cold and burying the plants? The ground is a repository of heat; dig a few feet down Read more
“There’s many a slip ‘twixt the cup and the lip.” Likewise for chestnuts, in this case twixt the ripening of the nuts (in September and October and the lip. That is, if you want the highest quality nuts.
We can start right when the nuts begin to drop. They’ll do so still enclosed in their spiny burs or the burs will open to release the nuts. Don’t be disappointed with burs pretty much empty, perhaps containing a couple or more small, slivers of nuts; these are the result of inadequate pollination.
Those disappointing burs are among the first to drop. The real show yields burs bursting with two, even three fat, mahogany brown chestnuts. For the best quality nuts, I gather them daily, at the most every other day, before Read more
Of all species of chestnuts, none is finer than the American chestnut. This majestic tree towered to 100 feet high in America’s virgin forests and yielded a wood that was used in musical instruments, molding, fenceposts, barrel staves, even telephone poles. The nuts of American chestnut are deliciously sweet and flavorful. Or, so I have read and been told, having never tasted one myself.
But the sturdy chestnut had its Achille’s heel — chestnut blight. The disease, accidentally introduced from Asia, was first noted at New York’s Bronx Zoo in 1906. It spread 25 to 50 miles a year and within 50 years had left 7 million acres of Appalachian forests with dead or dying chestnut trees.
The American chestnut is not gone, though. Trees cling tenaciously to life. Read more
