Page 4 – Lee Reich

WHERE’S HOME?

March 6, 2025/4 Comments/in Pests/by Lee Reich

Migration

“Ladybug, ladybug fly away home…” Whoops, she did! And she’s made my home, and perhaps your home, her home. With spring just around the corner, she’s awakening and coming indoors.

Ladybugs are such lovable creatures that we — or I, at least — can’t call them a pest even when they act like one. Just now they’re creeping on windows along with cluster flies, also benign creatures but “pests” not at all welcome in my home. Ladybugs do get even peskier indoors: I occasionally find them marching across a pillow just before I lay down my head or scuffling along the edge of a teacup just before I take a sip.

It’s not your imagination that the annual ladybug migration indoors has increased from years’ past. Read more

OLDIES BUT GOODIES

February 26, 2025/2 Comments/in Flowers, Fruit, Vegetables/by Lee Reich

Varieties and Aesthetics Past

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.

A WINTER FAIRYLAND

February 20, 2025/4 Comments/in Design, Soil/by Lee Reich

The Goodness It Brings

If we’re going to have cold temperatures, we might as well have snow. You might think that snow has nothing to do with gardening, that once a white blanket drops over the landscape, all garden activity and thoughts of gardening cease. Not so: Your gardening activity might cease and my gardening activity might cease, but a lot goes on gardenwise. Read more

WAYS WITH CHOCOLATE

February 12, 2025/4 Comments/in Fruit/by Lee Reich

The Horticultural Way

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

TO EACH HIS OR HER OWN

February 5, 2025/9 Comments/in Pruning/by Lee Reich

Full Disclosure: I Like It

You either like the look of a pollarded tree, or you don’t. A tree pruned by this technique surely doesn’t have a natural look. In winter, the pollarded tree is a clubbed head capping a clear trunk, or clubbed heads each capping a few short, thick side branches atop a clear trunk. In summer, a mass of vigorous shoots wildly burst forth from that club-like head or heads.

Pollarded catalpa

Pollarding has both an aesthetic and a practical side. Read more

RENOVATION: NOT A KITCHEN

January 29, 2025/1 Comment/in Fruit/by Lee Reich

(The following is adapted from my book THE PRUNING BOOK, available from the usual sources or directly from me, signed, on this website.)

Renovation Instead of Despair

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

GOOD GERMS

January 22, 2025/0 Comments/in Fruit, Vegetables/by Lee Reich

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.

My Collection Swells

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

HEY BUD

January 15, 2025/8 Comments/in Flowers, Fruit/by Lee Reich

Budding Interest

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

TINY TREES

January 8, 2025/3 Comments/in Houseplants/by Lee Reich

Background

I was admiring my bonsai and thinking what it was going to need in the coming months, so decided to share the process, the plant, its evolution, and needs with you.

My weeping fig

(Some of what follows is briefly excerpted from my book, The Pruning Book, available directly from me, signed, as well as the usual sources. My updated comments are in italics.)

Bonsai (pronounced BONE-sigh) is the growing of plants, usually woody plants, in shallow pots. The art began in China almost two thousand years ago, then was carried to Japan during the Kamakura period (1180-1333), where it was brought to a high state of perfection.

A bonsai planting portrays, in miniature, a natural theme — the rugged beauty of a gnarled pine on a windswept slope, the tranquility of a grove of larches, the joyousness of spring in the cascading branches of an old fruit tree bursting into bloom. Read more

CAT NIPPING, NOT SO GOOD

January 2, 2025/2 Comments/in Houseplants, Pests/by Lee Reich

A Nonsymbiotic Relationship

Cats like houseplants, but houseplants don’t particularly like cats. Or, at least, cats don’t do houseplants any good.

Cat at window

Take my ponytail palm, for example. My cat is an outdoor cat, but I know if she came indoors, what a grand time she’d have jabbing her claws playfully at the ends of the ponytail palm’s wispy leaves. She’d do the same for my orchid’s flower stalk, now weighed down with a row of delicate blooms. Either plant would emerge from such play worn and frayed.

There’s not much you can do once a plant catches your cat’s fancy, except Read more