Author: powertools4gardens

With Thanks to: https://awaytogarden.com/visiting-may-11-extras-to-fill-out-your-day/

LUCKY YOU in case you have already caught a ticket, because many of the distinctive courses my neighbors and I coordinated [read more…]

The post visiting will 11? ‘extras’ to fill out your daytime (and backyard!) Appeared first on A Way To Garden.

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With Thanks to: http://carletongarden.blogspot.com/2019/04/todays-harvest.html

Today, I had my very first harvest of the season. A pretty small head of a few sprouts, reddish lettuce, plus a couple of significant spinach leaves. Delicious.

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With Thanks to: https://www.gardenrant.com/2019/04/thanks-to-ny-botanic-garden-and-u-chicago-press.html

Here we neglect ’t use Google advertisements or pursue advertisers because we site to get its love, to not pay our mortgages. However, like any website, we DO have expenses – for hosting, site advancement and maintenance.

So do we appreciate our advertisers – such as the organizations promoting educational opportunities on GardenRant and books right now. And now we disrupt our usual range of comment, information, plant and individuals profiles and outright rants to get a brief reference of our advertisers .

Speaking of esteemed, a New York Botanic Garden Certificate is unquestionably that, and may be pursued within an accelerated basis by using their Summer Intensive Programs at Floral Design, Landscape Design or Gardening; intensive courses are also accessible Botanical Art & Illustration and Horticultural Therapy.

When I lived closer to NYC I’d sign up for the course in Landscape Design myself. (I’m loving the course in Landscape Architecture I’m auditing in the University of Maryland, but it’s instructing me how little I understand.)

Now you ’ll also see in our sidebar a brand new publication about oaks in Kew Gardens, being distributed in the U.S. from the University of Chicago Press Books. They’re a long-time pupil on GardenRant.

We re honored with these organizations’ support.

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With Thanks to: https://www.gardenrant.com/2019/03/yes-virginia-bluebells-also-grow-in-indiana.html

My always magnificent crop of Virginia Bluebells, geographically speaking got in the plant nursery school in West Virginia to Indiana. But as is often true from the plant world, geography, history and personal preference get somewhat tangled in the journey.

Yes, even the Virginia Bluebells title came at the Colony of Virginia from their 17th century discovery, but they are actually native from New York to Alabama and west to Kansas and Minnesota — also showing up from 18 species along the way.

If it’s a specific date you need, American Father Figure and Garden Guy Thomas Jefferson composed of the Monticello bluebells in his backyard publication about April 16,1766, coverage”a brightly colored, funnel-formed blossom in the lowlands in bloom.”

That a man with a present for words will so understate the beauty of my favorite native plant is nearly criminal. Come on Tom! Where is the fire in”bluish coloured and funnel-formed?”

I, for one, desperately for the Virginia bluebells coming every spring, stomping around in the fat layer of magnolia leaves that dropped on my patch.

It’s March Magic. Winter is history. As they grow, their leaves poke through the leaf decay in dark shades of purple but turn a nice green. The”funnel-formed blossoms,” and I’ll give Thomas Jefferson his because of this, stream from a wealthy pink to the celestial shade of baby blue, although that could vary according to the dirt from whence they emerge.

That color change is the result of changes in the pH of the cell sap, though, like hydrangeas, Virginia Bluebells rise maybe 14 inches over a love-starved picture and also increased in soils that are acid will turn into a deeper shade of blue.

Moving deeper into the plant history, blossom color change that is such is rather typical from the family. And bluebells whined using pulmonaria, which offers exactly the identical flow of pink and blue.

Hello Mertensia virginica!

Here a few smiles at the next garden club meeting.

Such designations have consistently seemed arbitrary to me — and that I need in. The afternoon — I live — or maybe may have to die for some ephemeral with blossoms and also hot green leaves is termed Hilltensia hoosierca.

Given its own colors pioneers to the New World also believed Virginia bluebells to be lungwort, which had been used to deal with lung diseases. It didn’t work over here. Dead men tell no stories.

Another early blue title was”oyster foliage,” but was apparently not a hit thing from the Colonial diet. Another name was”Mountain gloomy cowslip,” about as illustrative as Jefferson’s”funnel-formed” blossoms.

How do I love thee? Allow me to count the ways.

1. My initial in-your-face encounter with Virginia bluebells proved to be a creature spot spread out with its arms raised toward the sun, a near religious experience under a gigantic pine tree. It was a religious experience.

2. The leaves and blossoms buddy with all Bloodroot, crocus and poppies, offering a palette of white, blue, purple, yellow, pink and green.

3. Their leaves show up in precisely the identical period since the NCAA basketball championship, so if your team loses you have a fantastic excuse to go outside to the garden where nobody could see you, and shed tears.

4. Yes folks get paid to research all that stuff.

5. The very same people also report Ruby-Throated Hummingbirds may also sometimes stick their noses into”funnel-formed” Virginia bluebells, an event for which I would gladly pay $10 to sit and observe a bright Spring day in April and May.

6. Leaving little mess supporting, Virginia bluebells go off by summer, dropping just four seeds (the specialists call them”nutlets”) per blossom to disperse the species. These little nutlets — politically speaking and otherwise — are ovoid and flattened on one side, their surfaces minutely wrinkled.

7. Virginia bluebells can be bought as nutlets or in bare root divisions. My naked roots came in Sunshine Farm and Gardens in West Virginia where Forever Hippie Barry Glick has hauled forth in rather distant refuge for at least 40 years.

8. Virginia bluebells are not. They can die outside in four or five years to be substituted by store-bought nutlets, their nutlets or root divisions, but no matter their entry, they consistently leave us better.

More picture credits: jellyfish, Monticello photos. Other photographs by this author.

Yes, Virginia, bluebells also grow in Indiana originally appeared on GardenRant on March 25, 2019.

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With Thanks to: http://carletongarden.blogspot.com/2018/10/todays-garden-work.html

It was a warm, glowing and beautiful HALLOWEEN day! I was fortunate to do garden work daily. There are not so several of these excellent outdoor days . Here’s what I did:

– Finished my seed listing. (Last year I started a list of all the seed packets I’ve that includes the folder they are saved in and once I planted them. By moving through my seeds now I place lost ones back in correct folders and recognized seed packets that were consumed this year so I know exactly what to buy for next year.)

– From my home garden I awakened for overwintering in baskets at the garage 3 year artichoke crops harvested some carrot and bulb , then also dug 4 or 5 Belgian endive plants and place them out to heal underneath many layers of row cap.

– I photographed 3 kinds of mushrooms growing in my house garden. One on untreated pine increased bed timber, and 2 birch logs that border my flower bed. I’ll get these recognized by means of an expert. I THINK two are edible, a different possibly an oyster mushroom and one possibly a turkey tail. I have.

– I unpacked 4 or 5 of the 10 so micronutrients that I am gathering email order to refurbish the soil of my small orchard (3 apple trees, a cherry and a cherry ).

– And the job that out me, I awakened a bed of potatoes at my neighborhood garden. I recovered about 20 lbs of amazing russets from the mattress in soil that has been REALLY heavy. I was delighted to have a fantastic harvest and should not whine, but it had been lots of job!! We have had here and the dirt is heavy even though I dig sausage after a few of dry days. I’ve dug two beds up to now, one more to go, plenty of rain in the forecast…

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With Thanks to: https://www.gardenrant.com/2019/03/humming-a-love-song.html

As I write this in the end of March, millions of faces have been peering out their windows freshly stuffed feeders. Friends south of them have reported that their first sightings of goodness, and this year, what kind of human being would need to emphasise an hummingbird?

When a freak summer snowstorm was spitting flurries once I stepped out into the porch I remember an April morning several years back. I was horrified to find that a hummingbird hovering in the precise location of last summer’s feeders. It broke daily, When there is Guinness World Record for the speed of dissolving sugar water. Until I watched him drink my face had been pressed into the glass.

Me convinced that hummingbirds return to the feeders and bless people who meet our curiosity and ring the feisty critters, since it’s verified that occasionally they do. I don’t know if hummingbirds fantasy, but if so, is it of my deck around Whippoorwill Hill? I decide to believe.

There is discussion about sugar levels, although There’s absolutely no dispute love for hummingbirds. Most hummingbird enthusiasts depend on the normal 1 part sugar to 4 parts as the”top” recipe. But when I learned that our indigenous jewelweed (Impatiens capensis) has nectar quantified at an astounding 43% glucose solution, I set out to explore some of their other favourite flowers, also found that a number of the salvias that they regular have concentrations at the 30% and higher range.

I understood that hummingbirds were mostly insectivores. They’re insect eating birds as my friend put it. Sugar provides the necessary calories to keep their exceptionally high metabolic rates as they search.

I found studies which compared feeding frequencies on various solution concentrations. They revealed since they simply require a specific number of calories per hour that hummingbirds fed on solutions that were more powerful. After I read thatI was comfortable in creating my solutions part sugar to 2 parts water.
Why would I need my hummingbirds to come? Mama is being helped out by me.

She tend to her chores and can grab a fix that is metabolic. Of us don’t understand that man hummingbirds are fathers. All they do is furnish the semen. They don’t help construct nests. They feed the female while she incubates or do not help eggs, nor can they help nourish the young. They simply zoom about being at the claws and looking lively, while she’s scrapping to feed the young’uns. She has to harvest thousands of little pests and regurgitate them blended with nectar into the mouths of their babes fighting off starvation for himself. Damn right I’m giving a few of the stuff that is great to her.

There is no lessening of activity in my own feeders, so much as I can tell. Word has to be out that the feeders at Whippoorwill Hill are currently supplying virtual hummingbird crack. At summit late summer/early fall migration, even as the birds have been going down the continent, I’ll be operating every day, eight 48 ounce feeders which will require a refill. I buy as much sugar in the supermarket they think I am making moonshine.

Not coincidentally, this contrasts with the bloom time of jewelweed, a wildflower in our bottomlands. These blooms are adapted to pollination, by creating a little book for the large drive ahead and the hummingbirds benefit from the rich sugar content.

Naturally, I also plant a lot of those hummingbirds’ preferred flowers perennial forms, both annual and salvias. Luckily there are lots of that reunite for me here in Southern Tennessee, a Zone 7, one of them collections of Salvia greggii, microphylla and guaranitica. I have already bought five this spring to add to the collection. The plants that are blooming are not only nectar sources but bring those insects that are all-important. Also I like looking at pretty flowers too, so there’s that.

But back to the selfish, I am more than a bit touched by how many human beings supply for all these critters. Here’s the spring scenario seen from space. We would see millions of hummingbirds dispersing the Western continent, completely unaware of how many million people have been expectantly preparing , if we had vision. These hummingbirds have no idea people underlining and are writing SUGAR! On the grocery , or scrubbing their claws, or paying hummingbird plants at garden centres. They don’t know we love them. They do not care. They don’t thank us.

In a time when it seems easy to become mad with people, does that not make you smile? Keep lovers, peering and friends, they’re on the way.

Humming a love song. .

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With Thanks to: https://www.gardenrant.com/2019/04/brent-heath-knows-his-daffodils.html

I thought I knew how to grow daffodils – since that doesn’t? They’re perennial, critter-proof, drought-tolerant, and so on. Or so I believed until Brent Heath, co-owner of the beloved bulb firm Brent and Becky’s, disabused me of my assumptions from his recent discussion at Brookside Gardens outside DC.

Traveled the planet and having been in the bulb biz, Brent knows his stuff. Here are my take-aways out of Brent’s really informative talk.

(Incidentally, I met Brent if we kids vacationing with our families at Nags Head, NC. My sister turned into friends, or anything like that.)

• Daffodils aren’t great pollinator plants. It hadn ’ t occurred to me that that included pollinating insects although I understood that creatures don ’ t consume them.
• They’re not native to the Americas, rising in the wild only in Spain, Portugal, France and Italy. They were attracted here sewn. Bulbs could endure months that way, enabling immigrants whenever they got here, to grow just a small something from home.
• Daffodils want sun to keep prospering. Thus which ’so why some of mine harbor ’t produced flowers long-term. As Brent mentioned, folks proclaim, “Oh, but that my daffodils DO get sun if they’re blooming, until neighboring trees have leafed out! ” But that’s not enough; they want sun for the 8 weeks after they blossom – you know, the next year that period when you want to remove the foliage but understand it ’ ll reduce the blooms.
• Daffodils also need to get fedup, and Brent recommends great aged compost. I really don ’t believe I’ve ever done that but will now since Brent (who ISN’T selling me a fertilizer product) advised us .

• Daffodils are greatest chosen , not even cut . Brent says to snap them off as near the floor as you can.

• The 4th hottest daffodil is the Dutch Master, the 3rd is Ice Follies (which multiply very well), and that I didn’t catch numbers 1 and 2. Damn my own note-taking!
• Hydbridizing takes patience, like 5-7 decades of it to receive a single bloom on a new daffodil. Brent’s talk included images of varieties which are clearly show-quality and others not, and don’t ask me to remember which are which or why.

Above, ancient tulips and hyacinths were blooming that day at Brookside.

In the immortal words of Brent Heath: “Plant bulbs and harvest smiles. ”

Shot: stays of a Quinceañera celebration in the gardens before in the day.

Brent Heath Knows his Daffodils initially appeared on GardenRant on April 11, 2019.

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With Thanks to: https://awaytogarden.com/margaret-in-the-washington-post/

IT’S ALWAYS a treat to hear”The Washington Post” backyard columnist Adrian Higgins’s voice on the opposite end of the [read more…]

The post margaret in’that the washington post’ appeared initially on A Way To Garden.

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With Thanks to: https://awaytogarden.com/battling-mice-voles-never-mothballs/

THE SNOW MELTS, revealing the horror: voles and Mice have experienced it in coldframe, your backyard or greenhouse. Just as [read more…]

The article battling mice and voles (but not with mothballs) appeared initially on A Way To Garden.

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